{"id":11011,"date":"2015-10-02T12:11:02","date_gmt":"2015-10-02T16:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=11011"},"modified":"2017-03-02T09:42:58","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T14:42:58","slug":"georgia-okeeffe-maine-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/georgia-okeeffe-maine-artist\/","title":{"rendered":"Georgia O’Keeffe, Maine Artist"},"content":{"rendered":"

October 2015 | View this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Georgia O’Keeffe’s extraordinary York Beach paintings spanning 1922-1928 are part of her tumultuous love affair with life.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

By Colin W. Sargent<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"OCT15-Georgia-O'keeffe\"The sense of \u201cMade in Maine\u201d shapeshifts in front of our eyes. But Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, a Maine painter?<\/span><\/p>\n

All you have to do is look at her 1928 painting Wave<\/em>, Night <\/em>to feel it. Between 1920 and 1928, O\u2019Keeffe vacationed at a seaside guest house on Long Sands Beach in York for inspiration. It was here, in Maine, during torrid separations from her lover\/mentor Alfred Stieglitz, that she not only painted Wave, Night<\/em> but also first experienced the breakthrough that led her to paint sea shells, with their curves and involutions, distances and intimacies. <\/span><\/p>\n

Vividly, her letters from York Beach to Stieglitz appear in the book My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O\u2019Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One<\/em>, 1915-1933 (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). They\u2019re deeply personal and take us straight to her creative essence. As Herv\u00e9 Fornieri (yes, the French performer) writes in his Amazon review of the collection, \u201cThe two most amazing letters in this book demonstrate the almost supernatural synchronicity between these two lovers and artists. The letters were written by O\u2019Keeffe and Stieglitz on the same day, September 25, 1923, while she was visiting York Beach, Maine, and he was staying at their summer home at Lake George, New York, two hundred miles away. Unbeknownst to the other, of course, each had been utterly entranced by the same moonlit night\u2013but O\u2019Keeffe saw a colorful painting, and Stieglitz saw a black-and-white photograph.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cO\u2019Keeffe: \u2018Last evening\u2013walking on the beach at sunset I saw a pink moon\u2013nearly full\u2013grow out of the gray over the green sea\u2013till it made a pink streak on the water\u2013very faint\u2013that told you where the ocean began and the soft gray blur of space was ended\u2013And the moon grew hotter and hotter\u2013and the path on the water brighter and brighter till it burned so that I didn\u2019t want to look anymore\u2026\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStieglitz: \u2018It was a marvelous night. A white moonlight night. I never saw any night quite like it\u2013none more beautiful\u2013For a long while before going to bed I stood at your window looking lakeward\u2013looking at the white silences\u2013the white night so silent. Nothing stirred. Even the moon full & round seemed not to wish to disturb the stillness\u2013it seemed to be moving slowly upwards as if on tiptoes moving through a house of stillness at night when all inmates were fast asleep. All was so still\u2013& the whiteness so lovely\u2013The hills were not hills\u2013they were something bathed in an untouchable spirit of light\u2013the line produced where this spirit met the sky spirit was of rarest subtle beauty\u2013Really I never saw anything quite so beautiful\u2013I looked & looked & knew I was awake\u2026\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1927 she went alone to York Beach,\u201d Roxana Robinson, author of Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, A Life, <\/em>shares.<\/em> \u201cIt was a difficult time for her, as Stieglitz was deep in a relationship with Dorothy Norman. This was painful for O\u2019Keeffe, and she left. Stieglitz went to find her there, the only time he ever visited the place.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

His race to Maine was made easier because he was acquainted with Bennet and Marnie Schauffler [and Bennet\u2019s parents, Charles and Florence Schauffler], who ran the guest house where O\u2019Keeffe was staying, in today\u2019s geography near the Anchorage Inn and the Sea Latch. Robinson describes the view from the house as follows: \u201cFor Georgia, the trip to Maine was a revelation. Standing at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, she felt again the bliss of a wide flat horizon, the sense of boundlessness and solitude that she had valued in Texas. The house was set with a cranberry bog between it and the ocean, with a boardwalk leading to the wide, clean beach. The house pleased Georgia: nearly empty, spare and plain, with good, old rugs on the floors. Her own room looked out onto the ocean and the dawn. It held a big bed and a fireplace, stacked with birch logs. Georgia spent her days walking on the long, windy, empty beach, scavenging for odd bits that she brought back, set in platters of water, and painted. In the evening she watched for the lighthouse to begin its quiet, comforting rhythm across the nighttime sky and the wide, darkening beach, the deep black water.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Because O\u2019Keeffe describes the lighthouse as far away on the horizon in one of her letters; it can only be Boon Island light. Considering the elastic curves of her art, it\u2019s hard not to think of her stopping by the Goldenrod luncheonette\u2013already decades old\u2013watching spellbound as the taffy was\u00a0 <\/span>stretched in the windows, and shyly walking in to buy candy kisses.<\/span><\/p>\n

In all, there were \u201cfour York Beach pictures,\u201d according to Robinson. During this extraordinary period of psychic recovery and self-interrogation, she gathered herself to stun the art world. \u201cFrom Georgia\u2019s four weeks in Maine the haunting shell series was produced\u2026 [Her] ruminations on the theme of the shell range from the highly representational to the purely abstract. Most powerful are the clamshells, open and closed: small works, monumental images. In these, the clamshell\u2019s seam is centered in the narrow perpendicular space. The sense of monumentality is achieved by the space given to the shell within the rectangle: the smooth enigmatic curves dominate, filling it entirely except for the corners\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is possible to argue the vulval nature of these images\u2013they are, it is true, interior chambers lined with soft and intimate surfaces. More central to their meaning, however, seems to be their essential qualities of openness and closedness. The cool inevitability of a closed shell, the quiet suspense of a barely opened one, are qualities far more compelling than a purely sexual interpretation would permit\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Other shell images bring to mind the inner ear, where you can almost hear these paintings. \u201cWhether or not the series was meant to parallel O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s swift and absolute removal from Alfred\u2013her insistent solitude and distance\u2013the quiet shells made a potent statement,\u201d Robinson says. \u201cNuminous, serene, and dignified, they are compelling and mysterious images, enormously powerful, which resonate with a sense of privacy, intimacy, and inner strength. If she was becoming increasingly aware of the threat posed by Alfred\u2019s presence in her life, she was beginning to perceive her own strengths in response to that threat.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When we contacted Robinson about Night, A Wave<\/em>, she ventured its value at \u201cseveral million\u201d and commented, \u201cThe painting is extraordinary. I have stood in front of it for a long time; you tend to get lost in it. The effect is mesmerizing, as you lose your understanding of placement. I don\u2019t know another painting like it. In it O\u2019Keeffe manipulates space and perception in a way that is profoundly sophisticated but also deeply moving, intellectually challenging and emotionally engaging. She interrogates the understanding of perception here, eliminating the ideas of foreground and distance without losing a sense of position. It is remarkably powerful in its combination of mystery and command. I\u2019m not sure that it was a turning point; it was part of what she explored all her life\u2013the sense of human relationship to the larger landscape, the balancing of man and nature, the sense of cosmic distance and deep velvety presence. It\u2019s one of her most powerful works.<\/span><\/p>\n

Georgia O\u2019Keeffe didn\u2019t just paint sea shells by the sea shore, she took great risks at York Beach and made its psychic geography her own. Georgia O\u2019Keeffe a Mainer? Finestkind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

October 2015
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