Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband Alfred Stieglitz were instrumental in supporting a group of artists, including O’Keeffe, who created imagery that is now considered integral to the history of an art movement called American Modernism. Revolutionary at the time (early 1900s), Stieglitz felt strongly that American artists had the potential of creating art that was equal in importance to that of their European counterparts.

Our Museum is dedicated to promoting her legacy, which includes not only her art, but also situating it within the context of American Modernism – whether in shows devoted exclusively to O’Keeffe, exclusively to her contemporaries or a combination of both. This is our mission. This is a directive that came straight from O’Keeffe while she was still alive, and we honor her wishes.

Because of the broad range of styles that make up what is known as "modern" art, the term modernism is essentially meaningless as a descriptive term.  It is like a sign with only an arrow pointing to the right, seen every day on a familiar road.  Everybody knows the direction it refers to, but because it has no caption, no one seems to know exactly what it means.

If the word modern is defined as "up-to-date" or "of the present"--specifically as related to the latest styles, methods, or ideas--then modernism, as it describes the arts, implies general trends seen in the works of artists who seek to break with the past and find new modes of expression.  Although "modernist" thinking can exist (and has existed) in any era, the term modernism is most often associated today with thinking that broke away from 19th-century academism and produced the astonishing advances by which the arts of the 20th century have been defined.

Thus, all that is sure is that modernism describes the attitude that generated most of the forward-looking art produced in the 20th century.  That attitude was generally one of reaction, but to make matters even more complicated, reaction in any given decade was not always against the same thing or sets of things.  Moreover, there was often a reaction against a reaction or a reaction within a reaction.  One of the most interesting reactions materialized in the 1970s as post-modernism, a term describing an aesthetic position that denies the validity of modernism at that same time that it seeks definition as a reaction to it.

The result is that the art of the twentieth century is among the most complex and diverse in the history of art.  Its complexity and diversity can be attributed to a number of things, of which perhaps the most important is the increasing speed with which information has been disseminated throughout the world with each new technological advance.  As a result, modernist developments in America are for the most part intimately tied to modernist developments in Europe.

Most of my colleagues concur that the complexities of what has developed in American art, architecture, literature, music and photography since the 1890s cannot be limited to a certain framework of several decades within the 20th century, such as the 1890s to 1940, which I would refer to as Early American Modernism. Nor can it be limited to what was produced by American artists before, say, the 1960s, because artists continue to look and respond to the art of earlier decades, thus shaping their imagery within this broader context. Indeed, art evolves as a continuum, and certainly post-modernism, and the many modernisms evolving from it, including those that are current in art being produced today, have defined themselves in relationship to, or as a reaction against, the art of earlier decades. 

We are still too close to what has gone on to set limits and boundaries on the meaning of American Modernism. As yet, there is no scholarly consensus about its meaning, and in sponsoring research that explores the broader conception of American Modernism, Research Center scholars are making important contributions to the dialogue and, thus, are enriching it. Moreover, Georgia O’Keeffe was active professionally as an artist from 1916 to 1984, and in 1970, when the Whitney Museum of American Art opened a retrospective exhibition of her work, she became the heroine of the feminist movement, thus positioning her in the limelight, which she had first enjoyed in the 1920s.  Whether or not artists working since then have liked or disliked her work, they acknowledge the fact that she established a place for women in an arena from which women had traditionally been excluded. The O'Keeffe Museum exhibition program seeks to situate O'Keeffe's achievement within the context of that of her contemporaries, and because of the significant role she played in creating a place for women in the art world, the program includes exhibitions of the work of men and women who are living artists of distinction.

Barbara Buhler Lynes
Curator, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Emily Fisher Landau Director, Research Center

Excerpt Published: Member News Summer 2007