AFA 18th Anniversary

2018 Antiques & Fine Art 135 O’Keeffe considered kimonos intimate wear and did not wear them when modeling for photographers. She made one major exception late in life when she wore this kimono for Bruce Weber’s camera. The prominent fashion photographer made portraits of O’Keeffe on two different occasions. For his first visit in 1980, she posed as she had been doing for twenty years, in a black wrap dress, seated against bones and firewood at Ghost Ranch. For the second sitting in 1984, the ninety-seven-year-old artist came up with a hybrid outfit fusing male with female and East with West. She wore a heavy Japanese men’s padded winter robe and her well-worn vaquero hat, with something white to emphasize the V-neck, and her Alexander Calder pin to hold the front together. Framed within the calligraphic circles of her own abstract sculpture, O’Keeffe looks away, a dignified, seemingly genderless elder. This inwardness was truly there in O’Keeffe’s aging body. Macular degeneration made it impossible for her to read or make art, and she now lived for many hours of the day in her mind, sitting quietly with her eyes downcast, listening to music or caretakers reading to her. This is the last formal portrait anyone made of O’Keeffe. O’Keef fe appl ied t he se principle s to her l i fe st yle comprehensively. The elemental, abstracted forms and serial investigations that characterized her art were also evident in her clothing. Whether hand sewn by her, custom made, or bought off the rack, her garments and the way she styled them emphasized her preference for compact shapes, simple lines, organic silhouettes, and minimal ornamentation. The many photographic portraits made of O’Keeffe over the course of her life reveal how carefully she dressed and posed for the camera, and how the photographer’s gaze so often bore witness to the deliberate alliance between the artist’s attire, her art, and her homes. For O’Keeffe, photography played an essential role in shaping and promoting her public identity and helped establish her present-day status—enduring, but to her, unintentional—as an icon of feminism and fashion. Georgia O’Keef fe : Art, Image, Style is organized by the Brooklyn Museum with guest curator Wanda M. Corn. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 320-page catalog written by Wanda M. Corn. The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, is the third venue for this nationally touring exhibition, on view through April 1, 2018. For more information, visit www.pem.org or call 866.745.1876.  Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford University, retired from teaching in 2007 and continues to research and organize major museum exhibitions. She advocates for the significance, preservation, and interpretation of places where artists have lived, labored, and left material remains. text continued from page 128 Bruce Weber (b. 1946), Georgia O’Keeffe, Abiquiu, New Mexico, 1984. Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of Bruce Weber and Nan Bush Collection, NY. © Bruce Weber.