IT isn’t all about sex: Sometimes a flower is just a flower. Georgia O’Keeffe never liked the narrow niche her work was pushed into, and a new exhibit bears her out.
“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction,” opening today at the Whitney, is the first big show of her work in about 25 years. Those who’ve dismissed her as some labia-centric calendar artist will be surprised to see just how sensuous she was: how her love for nature colored everything she did.
And while she’s best known for her desert bones and flowers — there probably isn’t a baby boomer around who didn’t own an O’Keeffe poster at some point — her long career (she died in 1986, at 98) began and ended with abstractions.
To prove it, a team of curators has come up with 125 works — oils, watercolors, charcoals and sculptures, some so fragile, they’re rarely put on display. Some of the earliest works suggest the scroll of a violin, the sinuous sweep of a wave. Later on, she painted eternity in a clamshell, and turned a desert sunset into a hot pink kiss.
Sometimes O’Keeffe plays with the same form over and over. In a series of four paintings from 1930, she basically deconstructs a jack-in-the-pulpit blossom — going past leaves and petals until she zeroes in on its core. Elsewhere, she distills a flower into a pastel haze, making it a tone poem of textures and colors, like her “Blue Flower” and “Red Canna,” the latter a riot of red, lavender and yellow petals.
Since no O’Keeffe show seems complete without photos of the artist herself, there’s a roomful of them here by Alfred Stieglitz, her much-older mentor, lover and husband. They were the John and Yoko of their day, with a spritz of Spitzer and Ashley, too, since Stieglitz’s nudes made O’Keeffe notorious before she was known. Here we see her hands, her breasts, the cleft between her buttocks. Her steamy letters to him are among the highlights of the catalog on sale in the gift shop.
But don’t go to “Georgia O’Keeffe” for the sex. See it for its sensuality, the rapture all around us.
“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction” runs through Jan. 17 at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, Madison Avenue at 75th Street.