Eyes on O'Keeffe
Portraits of the artist frame contrasting view of her reclusive image
Susan Danly, the curator of graphics, photography, and contemporary art at the Portland Museum of Art, knew she was onto something while she was putting together "Georgia O'Keeffe and the Camera: The Art of Identity," which opens at the museum June 12 and runs through Sept. 7.
O'Keeffe, after all, is not only a 20th-century American master and one of the most popular of all American artists. She had been married to one of the great figures in the history of photography, Alfred Stieglitz, who photographed her many times.
Danly really knew she was onto something when she got hungry at the San Francisco airport a year or two ago.
"I go for a sandwich," Danly said in a telephone interview earlier this month, "and all the sandwiches are named after famous women. And there's this big photo of O'Keeffe, by John Loengard, that's in our show. 'This is a sandwich whose face people know what goes along with it!' So of course I ordered the sandwich, and I'm thinking, 'Oh God, she'd hate this.' "
It's true that O'Keeffe would likely have disapproved of being placed between two slices of bread. But it's less clear how she would have felt about the name recognition her sandwich status signified. For all the austerity of her art and New Mexican lifestyle - the bare simplicity of the desert Southwest suited her in so many ways - O'Keeffe had a strong interest in how both she and her art were seen.
"I had known about the Stieglitz images," Danly said. "I had not fully considered her reaction to them, however, and how that affected her own relationship with other photographers. That was really a fun discovery. I don't want to claim that it's mine, independently. Numerous biographies have talked about these things. But looking at these photographs convinced me this was someone who really understood the power of photography and how to use it to her benefit."
The show consists of 18 O'Keeffe paintings and 60 photographs of her taken by several notable photographers. Danly laughingly agreed when it was suggested O'Keeffe's face might be seen, in retrospect, as a veritable Cooperstown of 20th-century photography.
Among photographers in the show are Stieglitz, Irving Penn, Arnold Newman, Eliot Porter, Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh, and Philippe Halsman. The most famous of all, Andy Warhol, is represented in the show by a silkscreen of O'Keeffe based on a Polaroid he took of her.
"As a consequence of that image," Danly said, "I dug out the interview he did with her for his magazine [Interview]. I couldn't imagine two personalities more unalike. That was kind of a fun little twist at the end. We think of him as the embodiment of the artist seeking fame in a crass and commercial way, where we think of her as being reclusive and not seeking fame - but she did."
So what exactly did that Georgia O'Keeffe sandwich consist of?
Danly recalled the ingredients with surprising ease. "It was turkey and ham, with cheese and lettuce and tomatoes and onions and mayo and mustard. It was one of those overfilled sandwiches, the contents just spilling out. It seemed so unlike O'Keeffe."
June 12-Sept. 7, Portland Museum of Art, 207-775-6148, portlandmuseum.org.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. 