Can Georgia O'Keeffe's Work Be Considered "Ethnic Art"?

Ethnic art, as defined in this class, is representative of the culture in which an artist is born. Georgia O'Keeffe's work, although it does not speak for a particular ethnic heritage as established by bloodlines, does speak for the environment in which O'Keeffe was born and raised and the influences of her heritage. The hardships her family endured, the strength of her female role models, the simple farm life she enjoyed are all factors that contributed to her creative process.

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was born in a farmhouse in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on November 15, 1887. Hers "was a uniquely American heritage-three of her grandparents were immigrants, and the fourth was descended from one of the earliest colonists in the New World" and while the rest of the world was rapidly industrializing and the federal troops were still fighting the Indians near the turn of the twentieth century, Georgia's world "remained like farm life everywhere, suspended in a timeless ritual governed by the rhythms of nature." (Lisle, pp 3-4)

In many ways, Georgia O'Keeffe's heritage is typical of many European-Americans: The O'Keeffes "had emigrated to Wisconsin because of a business failure in the old country, George Totto had fled to America because of his belief in liberty...Totto's wife, Isabel's...roots, as deep as any in America, could be traced to a Dutchman who arrived in New York in 1637" (Lisle, p 5). The farm where Georgia was raised until the age of 12 was a merging of the Totto and O'Keeffe farms, each established during Wisconsin's earliest settlement period of the western frontier.

George Totto returned to Europe to recover property there after his exile, and died of heart failure twenty years later. Georgia's paternal grandfather died of tuberculosis when her father was still in school. (Robinson, pp 10-11) "Both her grandmothers-the deserted Grandmother Totto and the widowed Grandmother O'Keeffe-were strong matriarchs who had kept their large families together after the loss of their men…The two women, along with Georgia's mother, were part of that tradition of capable frontier women: They sewed the family clothes, preserved the food, decorated the home, nursed the sick, taught the young, and, in general, nourished life in all its forms. In time, Georgia herself would be called the expression of these women's creative spirit" (Lisle, p 10). "The women who surrounded Georgia in her early years were strong ones. She was taught, through example, that women were powerful and effective presences, that, single or married, they could live interesting lives. It was not only the women who delivered this message, but the life on the land. The life Georgia led was demanding, full of responsibility and commitment, and equally full of pleasure and gratification" (Robinson, pp 24-25).

It was this farm and the influence of these women that shaped Georgia O'Keeffe as a woman and an artist, but it was her father she patterned herself after the most:

"The country days of her childhood, beginning with daybreak and ending when darkness fell, left Georgia with a profound feeling for the companionship of nature and an acute sensitivity to its moods. At mealtimes she used to hear serious talk by her father and his farmhands about the life-or-death power of the weather. She learned to accept even the brutality of the melodrama around her, which she came to understand as the underside of the life force. Like other farm children, she found out about conception and birth at a young age, particularly since her mother went through childbirth at home five more times after Georgia was born. As a result, she grew up unashamed of her sensuality, even though she came of age in the Victorian era. (But) Georgia gravitated to her laughing Papa, who kept his pockets full of sweets and played Irish melodies on his fiddle. As a child, she thought him handsome, and she appropriated many of his tastes and habits, always saying that she liked him more than her aloof mother. She preferred his love of the land, for instance, to her mother's world of learning…Papa was a lapsed Catholic, but his bachelor brother, Uncle Bernard, used to pick up Georgia in his horse and buggy and take her to Mass at the stone Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Church in the village. She developed a childhood crush on the Catholic church, warming to parishioners-many of them immigrants, who continued to arrive in large numbers-who crowded into the pews and spoke with the same soft brogue as her grandmother O'Keeffe. She also liked the pools of colored light created by the high, narrow, arched stained-glass windows, the pictures of the saints, the pungent puffs of incense, the somber music, and the priests' colorful robes. Years later Georgia speculated that she might have overcome her intellectual reservations and converted to Catholicism if the church had gotten a firmer grip on her in childhood." (Lisle, pp 12-13)

According to Lisle, "the images, ambience, and ethics of Sun Prairie had fully formed (O'Keeffe). From time to time she spoke of herself as emerging from the soil of the American heartland like a growing plant, and she would always be uneasy in cities. She was also marked by the midwestern strain of Old World Catholicism and became celebrated for her lifelong habit of wearing devout convent-school black. Most important, she drew heavily on her observations in the natural paradise of her early farm life for much of her iconography as an artist. Another strong influence was the Middle West's democratic egalitarianism, which profoundly affected her as an artist. When she wondered at a critical point if she really had the 'right' to paint as she wished, she decided that yes, freedom of artistic expression was her birthright as much as freedom of speech. In later years, Georgia realized that the most dominant and wholesome aspect of her makeup emerged from her middle western background. 'The barn is a very healthy part of me,' she wrote several decades later to a collector about her painting of a red Wisconsin barn. '…It is my childhood-I seem to be one of the few people I know of to have no complaints against my first twelve years.' Believing that the prairies were the 'normal' part of the country, she found it impossible to talk about America to those who did not know them. Once she half-joked that the East was too European, the South too tropical, the West Coast too Asian, and the Southwest merely a 'playground.' When she moved to New York and her rural roots appeared remarkable to the urbanites, she never lost her belief in their normalcy and her feelings of blessedness at having been born a farmer's daughter in the American Midwest" (pp 22-24). And "it was the O'Keeffe barn that seemed right in the landscape. Capacious, serene, and beautifully proportioned, the big hay barn spread its solid red shape like a broody hen, awaiting the lumbering wagons with their sweet-smelling burden…it was the barn…that became a symbol of this life for Georgia, one to which she returned as a subject matter throughout her life. 'The barn is a very healthy part of me,' she wrote years later. 'There should be more of it. It is something that I know…it is my childhood'" (Robinson, p 19).

The influences of Georgia O'Keeffe's childhood are apparent in her paintings, even if a direct connection is not evident. For example, her memories of stained-glass windows are reflected in her New York, Night, painted in 1928-29; The Shelton with Sunspots (1926); New York with Moon (1925); and in many of her abstractions such as Gray Line with Black, Blue and Yellow (1923). The influence of the Catholic Church is felt in her paintings of Southwest architecture as well: Gate of Adobe Church (1929); Front of Ranchos Church (1930); Near Alcade, New Mexico (undated); Cebolla Church (1945); and outright declared in Cross with Red Heart (1932). Although they are paintings of a house rather than a barn, Spring (1923) and Little House with Flagpole (1925) embody the simplicity of the farm life as clearly as Lake George Barns (1926), while her series of door paintings seem also to recall her affinity with barns. The expanse of skyline seen on a Midwestern farm is reiterated in the West: Hills Before Taos (1930); Black Mesa, New Mexico (undated); and From the Faraway Nearby (1937) are just a few examples. Her unabashed sensuality is expressed throughout her paintings of flowers-no matter how much she may have argued that they are "only" paintings of flowers, the graceful symmetry and passionate colors of these paintings display subliminally the beauty of female genitalia. The love of nature instilled in her as a child is evident everywhere in her art, but most poignantly in her use of skeletal remains of animals as subject matter and in paintings such as Dead Cottonwood Tree, Abiquiu, New Mexico (1943) in which even Nature's dead is revered.

If culture is a set of responses to a particular environment and ethnic art is an expression of culture, then I conclude that Georgia O'Keeffe's work can indeed be considered "ethnic art." Roxana Robinson said, "The landscape of childhood is the one that remains in the soul. For Georgia, a real landscape would always be clean, untroubled, swept bare" (p 47). The landscape of Georgia O'Keeffe's childhood is one common to many European-American children of her era, one that is clearly expressed through her art to speak of and for her culture.

Sources:

Lisle, Laurie

Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe. 1980, Seaview Books, New York.

Robinson, Roxana

Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life. 1989, Harper & Row, New York.

Source of Paintings Cited:

Constantino, Maria

Georgia O'Keeffe. 1994, Brompton Books Corp, Greenwich, CT.