IT’S ALL ABOUT… IMAGE A Portland exhibit combines photographs of and paintings by the artist Georgia O’Keefe

PORTLAND – In contemporary times, when a young starlet wants to control her image in a sea of paparazzi looking to pounce on the slightest hair out of place, she might invite a photographer into her home for a portrait. She has control over what clothes she wears, how her house is depicted, her hair, makeup, how she poses.

Painter Georgia O’Keeffe didn’t have to worry about tabloid magazines and 24-hour news cycles in her era. When she found herself with a public image problem in the 1920s, however, she did just what those starlets do today.

How that happened – and the way O’Keeffe took control of her own image, to the point where she is considered one of the most loved American artists – is the subject of a new exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art.

“Georgia O’Keeffe and the Camera: The Art of Identity,” which opened June 12, is believed to be the first comprehensive exhibit to document O’Keeffe’s work as it relates to the photographs taken of her by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, and other pioneering photographers including Ansel Adams and Todd Webb. The goal, according to a Portland Museum of Art curator, is to examine how O’Keeffe cultivated her public persona.

“Nobody’s looked as broadly as we have, looking at the whole span of her career and the difference between the photographers’ approaches,” said Susan Danly, the museum’s curator of graphics, photography and contemporary art. “There’s a really important story to tell beyond [the Stieglitz photographs] and that’s the point when she begins to take more control over her own career and her own destiny and shaping her own image. That’s sort of where we go with the show.”

The exhibition, which closes Sept. 7, will travel to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., where it will open Sept. 26.

The exhibition consists of 60 photographs along with 18 O’Keeffe works and several pieces of furniture from her two homes in New Mexico. O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Stieglitz lived in New York many of the years they were together, but spent a lot of time in the Southwest. She eventually moved there permanently after his death in 1946 and had homes in Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, an area that inspired her work for decades.

O’Keeffe grew to fame not only as a painter but also as a favorite subject of Stieglitz. His photographs of O’Keeffe often had sexual overtones, such as “Georgia O’Keeffe in Chemise,” a 1918 image of her with loose, somewhat disheveled hair and shoulders bare except for the straps of her slip. He also took and displayed nude photos of her, none of which is in the Portland exhibition.

Although O’Keeffe began to be well-known through Stieglitz’s photographs and her own work, it wasn’t necessarily the kind of attention she wanted. Critics assigned to her abstract images the same kind of sexual interpretation they did to Stieglitz’s photos.

O’Keeffe’s reaction, at least in terms of the photographs displayed in the Portland exhibition, was to shy away from the suggestive photos. She posed with more inhibition, dressed in simpler, starker clothing, and had a more severe look.

“In the beginning, I think, because it brought her work notoriety, she was willing to kind of put up with it,” Danly said. “When it got to be the only thing people wanted to say that her art was about, about sexuality, she began to step back from that and was not so keen on having herself exhibited. She just didn’t think that should drive the criticism of her work.”

As O’Keeffe continued to gain celebrity, her image became even more controlled. She worked with photographers with whom she felt comfortable, allowing them to document her home and studio. Everything was designed to craft the image of O’Keeffe as a celebrity and an icon.

She is mostly shown wearing black or white clothing. Sometimes she is depicted at work on a painting, or strolling through the landscape, or in a more direct portrait pose. O’Keeffe emphasized the starkness not only of her face, but of the landscape and architecture around her.

“It’s all part of the whole image she projects,” Danly said. “[It was] extremely rare, and we take it for granted today when pop stars and everybody else engineer their public persona to an infinitesimal degree. In her day not many people did that, and certainly not a woman.”

O’Keeffe appeared on magazine covers and was the subject of articles in such publications as Life Magazine, Time, The New Yorker, The National Observer, Vanity Fair, Vogue, McCall’s and House & Garden – all among the most important purveyors of popular culture in her day.

It was clear that O’Keeffe, who had posed nude as a young woman, was willing to again appear naked, so to speak, as an older woman. There is no hiding her lined, wrinkled face – but even those photographs were cultivated to project an image. Her wrinkles seem to stand out in Philippe Halsman’s 1948 portrait “Georgia O’Keeffe,” in which she poses in profile while wearing a white turban, aligning herself with classical portraiture.

Her white hair and lined face seem to be under the glare of the harsh sun in Arnold Newman’s 1968 photograph “Georgia O’Keeffe, Ghost Ranch,” which depicts her in profile near an animal skull and a blank canvas. Her face is as weathered as the skull.

“[She was] a woman who had no problem being photographed in old age, when every wrinkle was a sign of not only her physical longevity but the heights she had reached,” Danly said. “It was a hard fight for her, and I think that comes though in the seriousness of those photographs. Once in a while you’ll find an image of her smiling, but it’s very rare.”

That same progression in evident in the O’Keeffe paintings in the Portland exhibition. She started as an abstract artist, but when her painting was misinterpreted, she moved to more realistic work. Later in life, when her fame was established, she bent back toward abstraction.

Danly said she tried to pair up photographs that showed O’Keeffe’s work in her studio or pictures of piles of bones in her house next to the actual painting or something very similar. In a 1965 Todd Webb photograph of O’Keeffe’s studio in Ghost Ranch, a painting sits on an easel. Hanging next to that photograph in the Portland exhibition is the 1960 painting “Blue Black and Grey,” the same painting in the Webb image.

There are also images of her studio showing her collections of rocks and animal skulls, which are common motifs in works such as the 1931 “Horse’s Skull with White Rose,” included in the exhibition.

O’Keeffe’s transformation in the public’s consciousness may have had an unintended side effect. Because her paintings are so popular, Danly said, it’s difficult to put together comprehensive exhibitions of her work. She was able to convince the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe to participate, and Barbara Buhler Lynes from that museum was the co-curator along with Danly.

“We couldn’t have done this show without their support,” Danly said. “It is so difficult to get [her work] loaned. People just don’t want to give them up. They’re the most popular paintings in their museums.”

jbloch@bangordailynews.net

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