Forget, if you can, what you think about Georgia O'Keeffe. Remember that American art in the 1950s was more than abstract expressionism. And consider that, in New Mexico, has its own identities and stories.
With his book Georgia O'Keeffe: late workRandall C. Griffin contributes to more than 150 monographs and biographies that have been written on the famous artist, fixing his less known post-war career. The book is distinguished by focusing on the works that O'Keeffe created from the mid -1940s to the early 1980s (she died in 1986 at the age of 98) through the objectives of biography, gender, class, race and modernity, compared to New York School.
Although I have always been skeptical about the attraction of O'Keeffe, my interest in the book was bitten by the readings of the artist's work along the class and the race. Griffin, professor of art history at the Southern Methodist University, shows that O'Keeffe was determined to create a place of his own place in the village of Abiquiú, established as geometric patio paintings by Tewa Pueblo, and interprets his series of more than 20 geometric patio paintings as an opposition as “negotiation of identity”.
The most reducing in the series is “my last door” (1952-1954), with its non-natural palette of black, white and gray. The door remains inaccessible and the insurmountable walls. The primary and secondary research of Griffin – including a consideration of the points of view of the villagers of the two walls of the Court of O'Keeffe and in them as the staff of the Chamber – inform his story of the whiteness at work in these paintings, which he can be “considered in part as acts of erasure and possession”. This reading is supported by O'Keeffe's own assertion: “This wall with a door was something that I should have.”
Griffin's footnote provides useful information, such as those of Napoleón Garcia, a member of the Genzaro ABIQUIú community who worked and extinguished for O'Keeffe for years. He notably noted that she was “indifferent to the fate of the poor”, which Griffin describes as “the most overwhelming story of her”. However, it also includes counterpoints, such as accounts on the substantial donations of the community for a primary school, a gymnasium and residential water for the cleaning and consumption of alcohol.
In the chapters that follow, Griffin addresses the road paintings of O'Keeffe and to other views of the large image windows which she installed in her house, like “Winter Road I” (1963). He details how his paintings of rivers and canyons reveal influences from his international trips and alludes to his environmental concerns, and suggests that his clouds and his paintings of heaven have been informed by Zen Buddhism and his own mortality and loss. In the latest chapter, the loss of O'Keeffe of his central vision due to macular degeneration led him deeper into formal abstraction – tactile pots, bronze sculptures, rock paintings – and, finally, to hire studio assistants to do his paintings. His fascination to paint the Washington monument several times in a series generally called A day with Juan (1976-1977) is always lost for me, although Griffin Humanizes in a convincing way the artist and his conceptual and formal activities in his evaluation.
I am in no way an expert on O'Keeffe. Some of the same things that attracted her to create a life to the New Mexico, however, also attracted me: light, space, earth. But after reading Georgia O'Keeffe: late workI am convinced that the voids of his work say a lot.
Georgia O'Keeffe: The Late Work (2025)written by Randall C. Griffin and published by Yale University Pressis available online and via independent booksellers.
