If that ain't a cunt, I don't know what is.

A what?! No, an ice cave! Philistine.

Frigid!

I just found myself at the Georgia O'Keefe museuum in her late-in-life home of New Mexico. She lived a really long (mid-90s) and interesting life, working up until the end. But one thing I found striking was her insistence that none of her paintings were sexual or sensual. Her husband/photographer took a bunch of photos of her in sensual poses before she became a name as an artist for herself, and she claims reviewers extrapolated from the sensual poses that the paintings were all sensual in nature. It bugged her a whole lot.

I felt a little guilty by it, not necessarily because she was bugged by it (I mean, look at some of those paintings, like your ice cave above), but because out of all her art, only a tiny percentage is paintings like the ice cave, yet the only thing I knew about her walking in was that she painted flowers to look like vaginas. I was wrong for the vast majority of what she did.

you felt guilty? The last thing one should never do when interpreting a work or the works of an artist is listen to that artist’s words. Artists are notoriously full of shit. Also, the significance of art, especially when it comes to the modernists, it best perceived by interpreting the context, and that context is best interpreted by understanding what influences lead to the work and later what works were influenced by the work.

For O’Keeffe, the former is the theories that were taught to her by Arthur Wesley Dow, and the later was perhaps the works of Helen Frankenthaler. What I mean by that is O’Keeffe’s work would not exist to us were it not for Dow’s theories of line, color, and the japanese concept of notan. Alternatively, Frankenthaler’s work would not exist to us as it is without the influence of the previous works of O’Keeffe and Pollack, Pollack’s work is informed by Kandinsky, others and a lesser extent by (or in contrast to) Thomas Hart Benton, and so on and so on.

I guess what I’m saying is, perhaps she painted lots of stuff that wasn’t yonic in nature, but the important stuff is that art that influenced future artists and visual modernism as a whole. Those works were sometimes desert flowers, sometimes manhattan cityscapes, sometimes animal skulls (after menopause, of course), sometimes desert caves, but almost all of these works were yonics, hoochies, front-butts or he-hes, whatever word you feel most comfortable using. Even if a larger body of her work was none of these things, none of those (except, perhaps her charcoals from her first 291 exhibition) works informed the greater context, and are thus less relevant, regardless of whether or not she was willing to admit she was painting her jelly-roll.

I always liked O'keefe's paintings untill I saw in person how stingy she was with her paint.

I'm with Sally on this -- that's not an ice cave, its a blue vagina.

mal, like you would know. *ZING!!!* ;)