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G.
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Driving through the Mojave Desert and the Kaibab National Forest at night, on my way to Santa Fe and
the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, I saw the Milky Way for the first time in many
years. A half-moon rose at ten-thirty, with much play of backlit clouds and
almost indiscernible black hills. I observed this drama for an hour or two,
steadily driving onward, thinking, like Stanley Kubrick at a tennis match, what
art could compare with this? As I drove up to the museum I wagered with myself
that O'Keeffe would have represented the visual situation I had experienced
(the hills like drypoint against faint masses of tiny
light, black light-bordered clouds tomahawking the blurry peach half-moon, then
dissipating), and I was not there five minutes when I saw she had, in an oil of
Lake George.
You can see her fully-formed art in paintings as early as 1916, and then the
simultaneous unfolding of a color art and an acquisition of visual materials.
Surveying her work in a very large assembly, you can assert that her tones are
sharp and bright, or shaped to a bright toning. You get the joke, when there is
one, among the metamorphoses of colors and tones reduplicated. Statuesque, tall delicatenesses, simple
forms, direct, matter-of-fact, plain and simple. Mighty orchestrations
of form, passions in purple, Cézanne blue shadows, intimate touches. All is
said of itself; Blake's Albion, pure, mighty forms, very glamorous painting.
Mighty dramatics, Degas' blue pastel.