CLEVELAND, OH.- Georgia OKeeffe: Living Modern offers a unique look into the fascinating connections among the paintings, personal style, and public persona of one of Americas most celebrated artists. Throughout her 65-year career, OKeeffe defied convention and forged a fiercely independent identity that was integral to her art. Showcasing approximately 140 objects, including paintings, drawings, and sculptures alongside her garments (many shown for the first time) and photographic portraits of her, the exhibition reveals OKeeffes determination to be strikingly modern in both her art and her life. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, Georgia OKeeffe: Living Modern is on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Gallery from November 23, 2018 to March 3, 2019.
Georgia OKeeffe is a beloved icon of 20th-century American art, said William Griswold, director of the
Cleveland Museum of Art. The exhibition offers an intriguing look at how OKeeffe shaped the worlds perception of her identity, artistic values, and style.
Rejecting the restrained Victorian world into which she was born, OKeeffe absorbed the progressive principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, which promoted the idea that everything a person made or lived with should reflect a unified, visually pleasing aesthetic.
Throughout the exhibition, we discover an artist who drew no boundaries between the art she made and the life she lived, said Mark Cole, curator of American painting and sculpture. Elegant simplicity is a hallmark of OKeeffes streamlined style, manifesting itself through every object in Living Modern.
Georgia OKeeffe: Living Modern is organized in sections that chart a chronology of OKeeffes career. One large section is devoted to her early decades as a young artist in New York, specifically the 1920s and 30s. At this time OKeeffe honed a restrained palette of black and white, and a plain, relatively unornamented style that dominated much of her art and wardrobe.
The exhibitions next section is devoted to OKeeffes mature career in New Mexico, where her art and clothing changed in response to the surrounding colors of the American Southwest. She began wearing blue jeans, which she proclaimed to be Americas national costume, and coupled them with long-sleeved cotton mens-styled shirts. At this time, she routinely introduced color into her clothing, mostly blue, occasionally redthe palette of her wardrobe mirroring her New Mexico canvases.
Another section of the exhibition addresses OKeeffes appreciation of Asian cultures. She professed an interest in Chinese and Japanese painting as early as the 1920s and amassed an extensive library of books devoted to both. In 1959 she was finally able to travel to Asia, where she augmented what would become a collection of nearly two dozen kimonos, some of which she wore for bed and bath.
The final section explores the significant role photography played in establishing OKeeffes late-career celebrity. Some 50 photographers asked her to pose over her lifetime, solidifying her status as a pioneer of modernism and promoting her as an iconic artist with style. For the camera, OKeeffe dressed in impeccably tailored black suits by designers such as Balenciaga, embodying a toughness, austerity, and individualism befitting someone who had lived life on her own terms.