AFA 18th Anniversary

18th Anniversary 128 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com O’Keeffe Georgia Living Modern by Wanda M. Corn he genesis of my book and exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern unfolded over some twenty years. It derived from two experiences: first, my earlier scholarship on the artist and second, my lifelong curiosity about what might be learned from an artist’s material culture—her home, her studio, her furniture, and her clothing. Like many of my generation, I became aware of Georgia O’Keeffe’s (1887–1986) art in 1970 when I saw her first major New York museum retrospective at the Whitney Museum. In 1980, I interviewed O’Keeffe in her home in the fairly remote village of Abiquiu, New Mexico, a visit that gave me my first inkling that she was an artist not only in the studio but in the making of her homes and self-fashioning. Subsequently I learned that when O’Keeffe died in 1986, the closets in her two New Mexico homes were filled with garments. What light, I wondered, might this material shed on an already much-studied and famous artist? Some of her clothes were exquisitely handmade or professionally tailored; most were black and white, but in New Mexico she had introduced colors like blue and red into her wardrobe. I wasn’t free to pursue these questions until 2013 when, recently retired, I received a research fellowship at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to study the artist’s wardrobe. The research I undertook with Susan Ward, an historian of textiles and fashion, and Carolyn Kastner, curator at the O’Keeffe Museum, became the subject of a book and exhibition, titled Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, that opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 2017 and is currently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The exhibition, retitled Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style features sixty items from her wardrobe. These are the stars of the exhibition, but they are given context and deeper meaning by forty pieces of O’Keeffe’s art and seventy-three photographs depicting the artist, her home, and domestic life—evidence that O’Keeffe upheld the same aesthetic of simplicity and minimalism in her self-fashioning and homes as she did in her work. With the help of her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, she used her clothed body to build a public identity. After Stieglitz died, other photographers continued the task. She modeled for over forty photographers and consistently dressed for her portraits in the two colors she savored: black and white. Here is a sampling of the exhibition’s highlights, with texts drawn from captions that accompanied them. Rejecting the staid Victorian world into which she was born, O’Keeffe absorbed the progressive principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, which promoted the idea that everything a person made or chose to live with—art, clothing, home décor—should ref lect a unif ied and visually pleasing aesthetic. Even the smallest acts of daily life, she liked to say, should be done beautif ully, a philosophy reinforced by her study and appreciation for the arts and cultures of Japan and China. text continues on page 135