the idea that her paintings were representations of female genitalia was started in the 1920s, and it was an idea first presented by male art critics. she spent most of her career trying to disprove these ideas. they’re outdated, boring, and frankly, sexist. so can we stop acting like it’s edgy or somehow feminist, ‘cause it’s not. male artists get to have their art seen through multifaceted lenses but female artists are often reduced to things like this.
wow i’m angry about this! every art history teacher i’ve ever had, even the women, talked about the ‘sensuality’ of her vagina flowers and straight up said that was like the point of them
I love O’Keefe’s paintings so much and I get irritated by this joke every time. What she did was so revolutionarily modern. It was about taking things that are small and easily overlooked and making them big an inescapable and forcing you to look at them in a different way. She didn’t just do this with flowers, she did this with dried bones and seashells and alligator pears. Putting you right up close to them so that you had to reconsider them entirely. I have a book of hers, wait – I’m gonna go find it and get some quotes.
“Well- I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flowers as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t.
“Then when I paint a red hill, because a red hill has no particular association for you like the flower has, you say it is too bad that I don’t always paint flowers.“
– Emphasis mine, (Exhibition catalogue, An American Place, 1939)
Also this has nothing to do with the discussion at hand I just love this other thing she wrote about her painting, “The Shanty.”
“I often walked through the pasture to the back road and as I walked down past the beautiful juniper bushes the Shanty looked very shabby. It had never been painted and the outside boards were scorched by the sun. The clean, clear colors were in my head, but one day as I looked at the brown burned wood of the Shanty I thought, ‘I can paint one of those dismal-colored paintings like the men. I think just for fun I will try – all low-toned and dreary with the tree beside the door.
“In my next show ‘The Shanty’ went up. The men seemed to approve of it. They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint. I don’t remember what critics said about it, but when Duncan Phillips saw it he bought it for the Phillips Collection. That was my only low-toned dismal-colored painting.”
This just cracks me up “I think I’ll paint something dreary like men do. Well, that worked out well but I’m never doing it again” what a fucking empress.
Anyway don’t dismiss Georgia O’Keefe as being all vagina flowers, I will fight you.
rennaissance painters: what is a baby? a small man?
every time i see this post it’s accompanied by a different horrifying painted man baby
In the Detroit Museum of Art there’s a neat room where they have paintings from the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries along with plaques explaining the transition in European art from “manbaby” to an actual, somewhat realistic child.
According to those plaques, society’s general feeling about children was that they were sinful, cruel, unchristian things which had to be taught how to act like their betters, the adults. Because of this, the people paying for portraits of their children generally requested that the children be given the appearance of an adult, so that they would be visually associated with being a kind and proper individual. As we progressed out of the Byzantine era people’s opinions changed and the innocence of youth was seen as a desirable thing, so the depiction of children shifted to make them appear more cherubic.
… Though the article covers a broader time period and therefore explains more about how the Medieval period caused society to think up something as weird as a “Manbaby” in the first place.
