Rarely has an exhibition so deserved this easy epithet of an event. Georgia O’Keeffe is in majesty at the Center Pompidou, and the visit to the museum provokes a shock, an incredulous ecstasy. Neophytes did not know it, this confession is confusing, but simple to make – it must be said that everything (misogyny, chauvinism, lack of culture) conspires to have it, for so long, hidden from the eyes of the French. In this sense, like all major exhibitions, the one devoted to the artist is a repair. There is therefore, in the history of American and world painting, such an endearing and decisive figure.
Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Georgia O’Keeffe is supposed to be the great painter of flowers – like Géricault with the horses. Pompidou’s exhibition presents, deliberately or not, a much more diverse work, where erotic pistils and psychedelic petals occupy only a relatively small portion. The rooms are open, cubes where you can move freely: it feels like the patio of this New Mexico ruin that O’Keeffe loved, the first place in the world where she felt at home. And, whether or not because of this unhindered stroll, what is striking are the changes in the painter’s style: from the first nudes, violent and cubist, to the final landscapes lacquered in red and gold, passing through views. of New York or haloed trees in magical shapes. Sometimes abstract and sometimes hyperrealist, O’Keeffe, like Picasso, of whom she is more or less the contemporary, and undoubtedly the equal in resonance, in intelligence, in genius, to say the word, goes from metamorphosis to metamorphosis. But, unlike Picasso, O’Keeffe does not turn from one period to another; all these styles coexist simultaneously. It varies the manners not according to the times, but the places which surround it: undulations with immodest evocations in New Mexico, coruscant volutes near Lake George; and it is this geo-morphosis rather than a chrono-morphosis that makes it so special – imagine Picasso cubist with the left hand, and neo-baroque with the right hand, at the same time, in the same workshop!
And, like Picasso, it is the ogresque character of his work: injecting the luxuriance of Gauguin into a bouquet; du Douanier Rousseau in a canyon; Matisse, of course, in these large sarabandes of orchids and other tulips, in this round softness of shapes; some Kandinsky, Chirico or Magritte to paint a totem; swallowing the emerging art of photography to shift perspective, framing like a lens with his painterly eyes; not only ogresque, but above all prophetic, because inventing, with his abstract landscapes, a sumptuous and cryptic poetry, Rothko before Rothko; painting barns in their pale banality before Hopper; unknowingly fomenting surrealism with its white bones suspended in the sky of the Far West. Georgia O’Keeffe thus feeds the hearth of an uninterrupted fire for a century, near which all American art, and even world art, seems to have been forged, warmed, galvanized.
We come out ourselves warmed up of the exhibition, shrouded in a strange serenity – in this work dedicated to pagan gods, death is always represented, sublimated, evoked sideways; the dramas of the twentiethe century pass through it like discreet ghosts. The result of a hermeticism to the misfortunes of the times? Yes and no, because the own dramas of O’Keeffe’s life are only sketched out, almost in passing, almost reluctantly: nervous breakdowns … emancipation through art that one imagines formidably difficult for a woman born at the end of the day. of the XIXe century… fundamental and faithful connection with the photographer and gallery owner Stieglitz, his Pygmalion, but which, beyond the erotic abundance and the creative cohabitation, must have concealed, also its share of sad setbacks… As if O’Keeffe had known how to foment, for erase pain, an orphic world, overwhelming with beauty – she draws, for example, from a depressive episode which overwhelms her and which earned her a quasi-coma, a fascinating picture, a black curve in the hollow of which a white marble pierces, which suddenly seems, at the same time the roundness of an arm seen by a half-awake lover, the magnetic center of a universe about to be born, or the ultimate opening towards the light of a reluctant condemned man …
What charms, finally, with her, is her mischievous certainty, her cunning (“If I had painted them to scale”, she says in substance of her flowers taken in blow-up, “nobody would have them. looked at. So I had the idea of doing a close-up ”). Let the world order, the perspective on a valley change, rather than its desires – sovereign and imperious, mischievous and cunning, she contents herself with a cavalier view of a small church in New Mexico and draws a leader from it. work (“Everyone came to paint this church… I said to myself: why bother painting it all?”), and only trust his instinct, buying the ruin of New Mexico, not for the sake of it. dazzling charm of its red volumes, its cactus languor, but for a door, a simple black rectangle, of which it makes, painting after painting, placed on a scarlet background, the sesame of a stolen sky.
“At that time, everyone was talking about the great American novel, or the great American film… so I added a blue banner to the left of my painting, and a red banner to the right: I had the great American painting”. His customary irony only makes him tell half-lies. In a sense, with a decisive impact on world painting, O’Keeffe has the universal nationality of a soul recording the oscillations of nature, its hills, its streams, its sandy steppes in the colors of rust; on the other hand, with an almost gentle force, entirely shrouded in a mental landscape where the cities are immense, illuminated like candle holders, the lakes bordered by dark tender pines, and the deserts strewn with crosses of missionaries, with sepulchres. of lime, horns of salt and craters of sulfur, she is from America where everything is great, indeed, spaces, dreams, sorrows – of an America in the image of its flag, a sky constellated and blue, infinite, where spirits are reincarnated. A repair, a rediscovery, therefore, that this exhibition, for this woman, who, at the end of her life, looks like an Indian with a parchment face, a recluse cowgirl feigning destitution, a fascinating shaman, illustrates during her lifetime. , but who seems to suspect that she has eternity on her side.
