ABSTRACTION BLUE
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE, 1927
Alright, look at the line first. The thin white one running straight down the middle, top to bottom. Everything else in here is soft. Blues folding into greens, a little pink at the edges, curves wrapped inside curves. The whole painting is practically asleep. And then that one line, dead straight, sharp as a paper cut. The two halves don't even quite match, like the picture got split and put back together a hair off. Hold that thought. Everybody thinks they know the O'Keeffe story. Flowers, then the desert, then the cow skulls, then a million dorm posters. And somewhere late in the game, she goes abstract. It's backwards. In 1915 she's twenty-seven, teaching art in South Carolina, and she makes a set of charcoal drawings with nothing in them. No vase, no fruit, no lake at sunset. Just shapes. Practically nobody in America is making pictures like that yet. She mails them to a friend. The friend marches them over to Alfred Stieglitz, the man working the velvet rope of American modern art, and he hangs an unknown schoolteacher on a New York wall. Then it gets complicated. Stieglitz falls for her. And in 1921 he exhibits his photographs of her. Nude. After that, the critics never see paint again. Every curve is her body. Freud is the hot new import and suddenly every critic in town is a doctor. So she tries to wait them out with real things. Flowers. Sex, they say. Skyscrapers. Sex. The woman could have painted a filing cabinet. It was never a Georgia O'Keeffe problem. It's a you-people problem. So, 1927. Peak flower fame. And she paints this, something that refuses to be anything. Blue wrapped in blue wrapped around that pale glow. And straight through it, the cut. The softest painting in the room, split clean down the middle. She said she could say things with color and shape that she had no words for. This is one of them. Nothing to name. Nothing to misread. Just her, saying it.