The NCMA’s suprising exhibition The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art is arranged by subject and includes a section devoted, simply, to flowers. But public reception of O’Keeffe’s famous flowers was hardly simple: “When people read erotic symbols into my paintings,” O’Keeffe said, “they’re really talking about their own affairs.” Throughout her life the artist strongly resisted the popular but pat, sexual interpretations of her flowers as representing intimate contours of the female anatomy.
In several interviews she insisted she wanted her effusive, imposing paintings of flowers to stop busy urbanites in their tracks and force them to see the beauty in the natural world, close up, so they couldn’t escape it. She felt compelled to abstract elements of nature to better understand life.
“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.
—Georgia O’Keeffe
Loie Hollowell, a contemporary American artist featured in The Beyond, says that she is inspired by O’Keeffe’s “deep formal and spiritual investigation.” Hollowell confesses, nonetheless, to embracing the connection she sees between the arcs, curves, and crevices in nature and those in the female form. Some have called Hollowell’s work “body landscapes,” as she starts by abstracting elements of her own body. Though nonfigural, her work is sensual, very intimate. “I want the viewer to not have to deal with that content if they don’t want to,” says Hollowell. “These are about painting concerns … but the impetus is from something very personal. It still comes from my body.”
Hollowell’s work has been described, in part, as sharing O’Keeffe’s alleged interest in abstracting female genitalia. So, from O’Keeffe’s point of view, the misinterpretation lives on. Perhaps this is one of the more interesting things about artistic influence—it’s always beyond a legend’s control.
More unexpected, eye-opening juxtapostions await visitors in the galleries of The Beyond, open through January 20, 2019.