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| Summer Days, 1936 |
I know we're well into autumn now, but artist Georgia O'Keeffe was born on this day in 1887, and that's as good excuse as any for me to show you the above painting, one of several she did featuring an animal's skull, in this case one that's floating above a New Mexico landscape. O'Keeffe was already a well-regarded painter living in Manhattan when she went to New Mexico on vacation in 1929. She must have liked what she saw of the state, because she kept returning again and again, on longer and longer vacations, eventually moving there permanently in 1949. By the time she died in 1986 at the age of 98, probably no prominent figure was more prominently associated with the southwestern United States, save Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. However, whereas the coyote can survive everything from falling off a cliff to getting run over with a semi to having a stick of dynamite blow up in his face, O'Keeffe's subjects are...
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| Horse with Pink Rose, 1931 |
...much less permeable. Such as this unfortunate equine whose demise may have resulted from nothing more than natural non-ACME causes.
So just what was it with O'Keeffe and animal skulls anyway? Might as well ask what it was with Monet and water lilies, Hockney and swimming pools, Warhol and consumer products, or Lucien Freud and out-of-shape naked people. Some artists are just inspired, and if they do their jobs well, we buy into their inspirations, when we otherwise may not have given the matter much thought (or looked the other way.) As for where O'Keeffe found her inspiration, i.e., all those skulls, well, I'm told they can be found here and there in the desert, though she didn't necessary paint them in the desert. As the below photograph by hubby Alfred Stieglitz will attest, O'Keeffe sometimes...
...brought her work home with her.
I don't frequent deserts but I can see how skeletons would be present in them. Painting pictures of skulls may be seen as macabre but I've seen much worse. Now what was Piss Christ?
ReplyDeleteIs your Piss Christ question rhetorical, Andrew? For anyone to who doesn't know, in the late 1980s photographer Andres Serrano took a small plastic crucifix and submerged it into a glass jug of his own urine, and then got close enough to take a picture without the contours of the jug being seen. If you didn't know what all that reddish-yellowness surrounding the crucifix was, you might have thought it was sunlight, and the whole thing may have struck you as possibly...holy. Of course, the title of the work gives it away. It may be that Serrano wanted us to ponder the thin line between symbolic representations of the spiritual and quite literal representations of what's considered vulgar. Whatever Serrano was trying to do, though his photo won prizes, it also stirred up quite a bit of protest. Complicating matters, Serrano had received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, thus placing the photo on the taxpayer's dime, when there was already a great deal of controversy about an exhibit of photographer Rpbert Mapplethorpe homosexual-tinged works having also received an NEA grant. (Side note: I myself have been waiting in vain for this blog to receive an NEA grant. I'm not sure if I'm too controversial--or not controversial enough.)
DeleteSo what's become of Serrano? This past summer. he was among a group of artists that got to meet the Pope Francis. Chrisitan forgiveness, or did His Holiness actually get the artwork's meaning? We may have to wait for Judgement Day to know for sure.
Excellent final paragraph.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Mitchell. Seeing as you're an artist yourself, your comment is especially pleasing.
DeleteShe had a twin muse of death and life. What's more profound than that?
ReplyDeleteThe yin and the yang, Debra.
DeleteGood thing she didn't find a mastodon.
ReplyDeleteMike, had she found one, I have no doubt she would have painted it, but Alfred Stieglitz would have had to stand waaaaay back to get a photo.
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