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The genesis of modern American art

Though name recognition eluded most of them - Georgia O'Keeffe is an exception - early 20th century artists turned away from European ideals and instead created their own.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published September 29, 2005

[Image courtesy of the Tampa Museum of Art.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Ends of Barns, 1922, oil on canvas.

	Georgia O’Keeffe, Deer’s Skull with Pedernal, 1936, oil on canvas.
	Georgia O’Keeffe, Calla Lily on Grey, 1928, oil on canvas.
	Arthur Garfield Dove, Sun on the Lake, 1938, oil on canvas.

TAMPA - Though artistic trailblazers are first to venture into new territory, they often do not produce the best examples of their genre. They're creating as they go, leaving the refinement of new forms to a following generation that, with perspective, does it deeper and better.

That's probably the reason most people will not be familiar with many of the artists in "Georgia O'Keeffe and Her Time," opening Saturday at the Tampa Museum of Art.

O'Keeffe is the marquee name that hopefully will draw viewers to see 10 of her paintings along with 34 by 15 other artists. It's a rich exhibition about a seminal time in American art, beginning in the early part of the 20th century, when painters, sculptors and photographers were trying to find a vernacular of their own rather than emulating Europeans.

The show makes pretty clear why O'Keeffe floated to the top and stayed there while others hovered just below and some sank to obscurity, known now only to students of that era. She was an original, a Midwesterner who received excellent training but lacked any great foundation in the traditions of European art. And European art, especially French art, dominated the scene for well into the 1900s. We had no heritage from which to draw, while across the pond, the impressionists had made waves by turning their backs on several centuries of painting and sculpture, the Dada movement and surrealism were gaining momentum and cubism was on the horizon.

But ideas were percolating on our side of the Atlantic. Most of the artists in this exhibition were familiar with the great French and Spanish painters, and one part of the exhibition is devoted to their influence. Charles Sheeler, better known for later paintings that look like flattened, stylized photographs of industrial scenes, has a lovely still life of tulips that owes a debt to Cezanne, as does Niles Spencer's arrangement of objects on a red table. The Hill, an early work by Marsden Hartley, vibrates with the short, brisk brush strokes of post-impressionists such as Andre Derain.

Alfred Stieglitz is not part of the show, but his presence lingers throughout. He was one of the catalytic forces that set American art on an original course. Many of the artists here received their most important exposure and validation from him early in their careers.

Stieglitz was the American-born son of German Jews who was educated in Europe. He was one of the first photographers to see that medium's potential as an art form rather than a documentary tool. In his legendary Manhattan gallery, 291, he displayed his own work and that of other avant-garde photographers and published an influential journal, Camera Work. He also gathered a stable of painters that included O'Keeffe.

She was 30, he 54 when they met in 1915. An account, perhaps apocryphal, has Stieglitz exclaiming, when he first saw some of her drawings, "Finally, a woman on paper." At that point, her abstract watercolors had more promise than merit, but Stieglitz, who had already championed older artists such as Hartley and Arthur Dove, saw a raw talent he would nurture for the rest of his life. Stieglitz also was in love with her and she eventually with him. They married in 1924, after he divorced his first wife. They remained married until his death in 1946, though he became smitten with another, younger woman and they lived apart for much of the time.

Her earliest work here is 1922's Ends of Barns, painted during a visit to the Stieglitz summer home on Lake George, N.Y. In it can be seen the unique way she was beginning to combine realism with abstraction. One of her florals is included, Calla Lily on Grey. It's more straightforward than the dramatic enlarged blooms in which O'Keeffe mastered spatial distortions that she would use in many of her Southwest paintings.

Those are the real doozies in the show. In both Deer's Skull with Pedernal and Red Tree, Yellow Sky, she conveys the vastness of the landscape with a near/far perspective of objects painted up close while sky, mountains and desert stretch into the distance.

Patio with Black Door and In the Patio No. IV are two examples of her famous patio and door series, created in the late 1940s and early 1950s, part of her later works that were virtually unknown to the larger public until a 1970 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It was her fifth retrospective and the first major show of O'Keeffe's work since 1946's exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. It was a huge success, traveling to several other prestigious museums, and cemented her reputation as a leading modern artist, without the irksome "woman" modifier that had tagged her for decades. In Patio with Black Door especially, O'Keeffe created a serene reductive color plane that is both something identifiable and solid as well as a meditative abstraction that seems almost spiritual.

Easy to see why many of the paintings by other artists recede before hers. Dove holds his own very well with his versions of abstract landscapes, and he was an artist O'Keeffe admired more than most. Hartley, another fine modernist, is underrepresented with only the early landscape and a 1942 portrait of Abraham Lincoln that leans toward abstract expressionism with the president's eyes black holes of grief, his hair a matted cap and the stark white of his shirt muted with gray.

Stuart Davis, during his time considered one of the greatest American modernists, prefigures pop art with his colorful Medium Still Life from 1953, an interlocking puzzle of abstract shapes. Note how far he came from a derivative street scene, Gloucester Street, from 1916.

The exhibition's weaknesses are a function of the collection's provenance. It is part of a large group of American modernist art assembled over decades by collector William Lane and, like most private collections, reflects the individual's tastes and prejudices. It is arranged mostly by themes: Nature, Industrialization, Still Life, European Influences and so on. That would probably work better in a museum with more defined galleries instead of Tampa Museum's big-room flow punctuated by several walls. I found myself trotting back and forth a lot to reference the artists' work scattered about.

But "Georgia O'Keeffe and her Time" makes important points about how American art began its ascension to such prominence beginning in the late 1950s; it stood on these artists' shoulders. Seldom does our area get such a concentrated look at their work, and a gratifying one at that.

Having it at the Tampa Museum is especially gratifying. Recent news has been about its troubled efforts to build a new facility, spats between museum board members and the mayor, and poor attendance. (For much of the summer, admission was by donation, a reflection of low numbers, but paid admission is back in place now.) Besides this fine special exhibition, the museum has "From Myth to Life: Images of Women from the Classical World," a gem of a show. Complaints about lack of quality viewing experiences should quiet down, at least for now.

- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

"Georgia O'Keeffe and Her Time: Modern Masters from the Lane Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston" is at the Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N Ashley Drive, Saturday through Jan. 8. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $8 adults, $6 seniors, $3 students and free for children younger than 6. 813 274-8130 or www.tampamuseum.com

"First Wave: La Vie Boheme" with dancing, hors d'oeuvres, desserts and drinks celebrates the exhibit's opening at 8 p.m. Friday at the museum. $50 at the door. (813) 274-8534 or (813) 274-8294.

[Last modified September 28, 2005, 10:06:07]