~GREGG HERTZLIEB~
GEORGIA
O’KEEFFE: RUST RED HILLS
While Rust Red Hills offers a
generally realistic view of the hills
near Abiquiu, it is O’Keeffe’s
invention, stylization, abstraction
that makes the painting especially
exciting to view and study.
The hills appear solid as an enduring
landscape feature
but also seem to writhe subtly, as if the rocks and
earth
themselves transform visually into muscles and sinew.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills from 1930 is one of
the Brauer Museum of Art’s most beloved paintings, a masterpiece by the
artist and a concrete example of the wisdom and prescience of the
museum’s founding director, Richard Brauer. Brauer purchased the
painting in 1962 for the museum’s permanent collection; at that time,
the price was modest because American art had not yet become desirable
for collectors and because viewers were still gaining an appreciation
for O’Keeffe’s contributions and creativity. Rust Red Hills now stands as a
monetarily and culturally valuable work, a true gem in the Brauer’s
collection that dramatically depicts a New Mexico landscape that
captured the artist’s imagination.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) endures as a key figure
in the history of art, the history and development of modern art in
particular. While Western art prior to the twentieth century
primarily was preoccupied with representational or realistic goals,
with artists striving to transcribe the scenes or subjects before them,
modern artists of the twentieth century (in part reacting to the
representational possibilities afforded by the camera and photography)
sought instead to present in their works interpretive views that
commented as much on the artists’ individual identities and states of
mind as they offered literal likenesses of the selected subjects.
For early modern artists, abstraction gave them opportunities to see
the world in new and fresh ways, sharing through their pieces their
attitudes about objects or scenes that prompted or inspired them, with
the actual vocabulary of painting or art making providing additional
vehicles for metaphor and commentary.
Early in her career, O’Keeffe explored the abstract
possibilities of various natural forms, using them perhaps as
commentaries on fundamental or primal states of being as well as
investigations of coloristic and gestural effects. She also
painted New York cityscapes of expressive color and stylization, with
such grand scenes speaking to the size of her ambition for her art and
impulse toward abstraction. O’Keeffe’s husband, the famed
photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), encouraged her
in her efforts, praising her innovation as he did other pioneering
modernists whom he championed and who were connected with his
influential Manhattan gallery, An American Place.
O’Keeffe’s marriage to Stieglitz faced significant
problems, however, leading O’Keeffe to travel in 1929 without Stieglitz
to New Mexico and the American Southwest. This setting fascinated
the artist, leading her to return every year before eventually settling
permanently in 1949 in the New Mexican village of Abiquiu.
O’Keeffe’s discovery of the American Southwest as a source of lasting
inspiration lies at the heart of a moving and inspiring story in art
that continues to captivate viewers of her pictures and readers of her
biography. Here is an example of someone who truly looked deeply
within and without before finding a place that enabled her to realize
herself.
Archival photographs of a 1931 O’Keeffe exhibition
installation at An American Place show Rust Red Hills hanging among other
fine pieces by the artist. The painting was not indicated as
having a title in this exhibition, although the artist did write the
title on the reverse side of the painting, on the stretcher bars.
Also on the reverse side, O’Keeffe wrote her initials and then enclosed
them with a star, indicating that this particular canvas was one of her
personal favorites. After Richard Brauer purchased the painting
from a New York gallery, he wanted to establish for certain that the
painting was indeed a product of O’Keeffe’s hand and so mailed to her
in Abiquiu a black and white photograph of it, asking her to indicate
whether she painted Rust Red Hills.
On the reverse side of the photograph, O’Keeffe wrote in cursive, “Yes,
this is my painting,” and sent the photograph back to the museum where
it sits today in the artist’s file. O’Keeffe’s few words on the
back of the photograph summon up images of the famously taciturn artist
taking just a moment from creating or seeing in her Southwestern
surroundings to acknowledge an old favorite before returning to work or
continuing to commune with the natural environment around her.
While Rust Red
Hills offers a generally realistic view of the hills near
Abiquiu, it is O’Keeffe’s invention, stylization, abstraction that
makes the painting especially exciting to view and study. The
hills appear solid as an enduring landscape feature but also seem to
writhe subtly, as if the rocks and earth themselves transform visually
into muscles and sinew. By showing the grooves and striations of
the hills and simultaneously generalizing the overall surface and
contours of this landscape scene, the artist is able to infuse a
representational painting with a narrative aspect. True, the
hills do look like O’Keeffe presents them, but they also in this
painting breathe with life and suggest an animating force, a nurturing
and nourishing entity that not only gives life to these hills but also
gives life to the earth itself. O’Keeffe may on one level have
sought to capture a likeness, but her years of refining a modernist
vision enabled her to convey a message more universal about the
strength and fecundity of a living landscape capable of revelations
with each passing season, each shift of daily light. Through the
intensely personal came a grand statement, and through the discovery of
an intensely personal geographical connection came a most potent
abstracted image that seemed to give sense and shape to all she had
done before, and that indicated fruitful future directions. The
generalized abstract compositions of her early career seemed remarkably
to foreshadow what O’Keeffe would find in the Southwest, and what she
did find in the Southwest were subjects that spoke simply, elegantly,
quietly to themes of decay and renewal, change and endurance, life and
death.
The Brauer Museum receives frequent requests from
museums nationally and internationally to borrow this painting.
It has been part of exhibitions in Ireland, Spain, Canada, and
throughout the American Southwest. Viewers delight in seeing this
modestly sized landscape in an earthy palette that demonstrates the
artist seeing a fond place with feeling, carefully capturing the
surface features but also letting the brush abbreviate, simplify until
firm hills give way to an earth that lives and gives life, that moves
in response to those people that think the planet is but a neutral
setting for their activities. O’Keeffe’s work in general seems to
captivate viewers because it shows them that things are more than they
seem, that the spiritual drily and dustily drifts through human
awareness to assert itself occasionally in passages of color, voids,
and rolling hills that seem engorged with blood.
Rust Red Hills
will soon return from an extended period away from the Brauer Museum,
where it traveled to New Mexico, Washington DC, and California.
When it returns, the Brauer staff will be working with a master framer
to frame the painting in a style more in keeping with the way the
artist framed her other paintings. Richard Brauer has endorsed
this change and continues to delight in the way this painting grows in
popularity and stands as a particularly noteworthy example of the
artist’s mature style. Brauer is to be congratulated on seeing
this landscape and understanding that O’Keeffe’s desire to reach the
essences of things led her to a place that rewarded all the sensitivity
she brought to it.
© by Gregg
Hertzlieb
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