Why is the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum presenting an exhibition of portraits by Robert Henri (1865–1929) that he completed while in Ireland? 

As stated in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s mission: “The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is dedicated to perpetuating the artistic legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe and to the study and interpretation of American Modernism (late nineteenth century to the present).” Therefore, we often present exhibitions by contemporaries of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) that shed light on her role and position in the history of American Modernism. 

When O’Keeffe attended the Art Students League in New York City from 1907 to 1908, Henri was teaching there. Although she never took his courses, she was aware of his approach to imagemaking, called imitative realism, which had been fundamental to the curriculum in art schools since their founding. Imitative realism involved transforming a two-dimensional surface into a painted illusion of a three-dimensional world filled with recognizable forms. This was also the approach of William Merritt Chase, another teacher at the Art Students League, whose courses O’Keeffe did take. O’Keeffe quickly mastered imitative realism and in 1908 won the League’s William Merritt Chase still-life prize. 

Henri was the leader of the Ashcan School of American painters—artists whose work was traditional in its reliance on imitative realism but innovative in its content. These painters were the first to make working-class people and ordinary events the subject of their work. Other Ashcan School artists included William Glackens (1870–1938), George Luks (1867–1933), Everett Shinn (1876–1953), and John French Sloan (1871–1951).

Like Henri and Chase, O’Keeffe was an excellent portrait artist—one of her lesser-known abilities as she seldom made portraits after her professional career began in 1916. A selection of portraits she completed before 1916 are included in the Robert Henri & Ireland exhibition. They relate specifically to the kind of imagery Henri produced throughout his career and especially during his two trips to Ireland (1913 and 1928), where he completed some of his most distinctive portraits.

O’Keeffe began to question the value of imitative realism after winning the Chase prize, and then abandoned artmaking until 1912, when she learned through one of her colleagues about the then-revolutionary ideas of American artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922), head of the art department at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dow had rejected imitative realism, believing that artists should make their own ideas and feelings the subject of their work. His approach appealed greatly to O’Keeffe and shaped all of her subsequent work. But not even his influence can explain O’Keeffe’s remarkable turn to abstraction in 1915, when she produced some of the most innovative work in American art of that period. Several examples of her early abstractions are included in the Robert Henri & Ireland exhibition as well.

At first, Henri and O’Keeffe approached imagemaking in a similar manner, but the work that launched O’Keeffe’s career in the 1910s was abstract and modernist, and anything but a furthering of the imitative realism to which Henri remained committed. Because abstraction informed all of O’Keeffe’s work, even when she painted recognizable forms, she became known as one of America’s leading modernist artists. Yet she never lost her ability to capture a likeness, and several of her portraits from the 1930s and ’40s have been included in this exhibition along with other examples from the 1910s through the ’60s in order to demonstrate the fundamental differences between the works of these two twentieth-century artists. 

A painting by Rebecca Salsbury (Strand) James has been given to the Museum: Peace, 1937, reverse painting on glass, 8 x 10 inches. O’Keeffe met and became friends with James in New York in the 1920s, when James was married to photographer Paul Strand. He was among the handful of artists supported by Alfred Stieglitz, America’s leading advocate of modern art, an internationally known photographer, and O’Keeffe’s husband and agent. O’Keeffe traveled by train with James to New Mexico when she first began painting there in 1929, and the two remained lifelong friends.

This marvelous example of James’s work was given to the Museum by Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Woods of Chicago and we are extremely grateful to them for this wonderful addition to our collection. We hope that others will join their efforts to expand our collection by making gifts to the Museum of works by O’Keeffe and her contemporaries. 

Symposium: Challenging 1945
July 14-16, 2011
http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/symposium.html

Recent scholarship has increasingly called into question the use of 1945 as a marker to separate pre-World War II developments in American art from those occurring later. This division has characterized art developments of the century in terms of rupture and division, often implying that the art made before 1945 is inferior to the art that came after. Yet many artists who began their careers in the early twentieth century lived well into its second half and produced outstanding work both before and after this dividing point. Moreover, not only did the work of many artists overlap this artificially imposed marker, their works borrowed from and reacted to earlier developments in American art. This is the subject of Challenging 1945: Exploring Continuities in American Art, 1890s to the Present, the symposium sponsored by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center July 14–16 in celebration of the Center’s 10-year anniversary. Over the course of two and a half days, distinguished artists and art historians will assess this period from the perspective of its continuities and interdependencies in order to further expand our understanding of its complex, nuanced, and pluralistic history.

American art historian William Agee will present the keynote address Thursday night at the Hilton Hotel, followed by a reception. The symposium sessions begin on Friday morning and run through Saturday morning, and each session will be followed by a question-and-answer period. Presenters include Whitney Chadwick, Huey Copeland, Thomas Crow, Erika Doss, Patricia Hills, Michael Leja, Michael Loble, Richard Meyer, Elizabeth Turner, Terry Smith, and Robert Storr. Saturday’s session includes a panel discussion with art historian and artist Jonathan Weinberg, and artists Robert Bechtle, Audrey Flack, and Barkley Hendricks.

During the symposium, works by Bechtle, Flack, and Hendricks will be on view at the Museum in the exhibition Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph, whose co-curators are myself and independent scholar and artist Jonathan Weinberg. Since the invention of photography in the late 1830s, tensions have existed between the art of painting and the art of photography and one has often been assessed as more valuable or more important than the other. Shared Intelligence expresses a different point of view: in bringing together photographs and paintings by artists for whom the two mediums were essential to their practices, it explores the fraught relationships between painting and photography in terms of how they nourish and invigorate each other to reveal both continuities and interdependencies.

The Shared Intelligence exhibition developed out of ideas that were presented at the July 2006 Research Center symposium Painting and Photography in American Art: Sources, Ideas, and Influences, 1890s to the Present. Several speaker presentations from that symposium have been published in the Shared Intelligence exhibition catalogue (along with essays by other prominent historians of art and photography). The exhibition catalogue was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center is the only museum-related research facility in the world devoted to the study of American Modernism (late-nineteenth century to the present). It is equally unique in that its mission parallels that of exhibitions organized or sponsored by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum: to shed new light on the history of American modern art as well as O’Keeffe’s contribution to it.

Every five years the Research Center sponsors a symposium in Santa Fe that considers an issue of overarching concern to historians of American art. It has also realized three symposia (in 2001, 2003, and 2005) on the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum website, all of which were subsequently pub­lished as books. Each online symposium was moderated by noted art historian Maurice Berger.

Every year the Research Center’s competitive scholarship program supports the work of six scholars and/or museum professionals whose projects explore subjects in American Modernism in the fields of art history, architecture and design, literature, music, and photography. We have wel­comed many dozens of individuals to the Research Center, some of whom have organized exhibi­tions at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Moreover, the Research Center sponsors public lectures, conferences, and publications, and houses a highly specialized research library and an extensive archival collection related to Georgia O’Keeffe and her contemporaries.