Abstract Thoughts: “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction” at the Phillips Collection

"I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at,” Georgia O’Keeffe once said of her abstract works, “not copy it." Famous for her images of flowers, shells, animal bones, and other recognizable objects, O’Keeffe also ventured into the world of abstraction, often pushing the envelope of representation beyond the identifiable but still remaining tethered, however distantly, to the real world. Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction at the Phillips Collection explores just how undervalued O’Keeffe still is today as a groundbreaking figure in American abstract art. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Abstract Thoughts."

[Image: Georgia O’Keeffe, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918. Oil on canvas, 35 x 29 1/8 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Emily Fisher Landau in honor of Tom Armstrong, 91.90 (CR 258). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins]



[Many thanks to the Phillips Collection for providing me with the image above and for a review copy of the catalogue to the exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, which runs through May 9, 2010.]

How I Met Your Mother

I can’t think of any artist who suffered as much in his life as Arshile Gorky. Fleeing the ethnic cleansing of Armenians by Turkish troops, he watched his mother starve to death in 1919 surrounded by fellow refugees. Upon coming to America, he shed his birth name of Vosdanig Adoian and remade himself as Arshile Gorky, taking the same last name as his hero, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who had supported the Armenia cause. After years of success as an artist, the stretch from 1946 through 1948 became a sheer hell—a studio fire, rectal cancer, his wife’s infidelity, a car accident resulting in a broken neck and paralyzed painting arm—ceased only by his suicide. The Tate Modern’s exhibition Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective brings the pain, of course, but also the triumph of a man who never left truly left his mother country while bringing modernism to his new one. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How I Met Your Mother."

[Image: Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, 1926-36, 152.4 x 127 cm. Oil on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, USA). © Arshile Gorky Estate.]



[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to and to the Tate Modern for the image above from the exhibition, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, running until May 9, 2010.]

Mother of Invention

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the origin of big, bad, brawny Jackson Pollock’s drip and splatter paintings was a wifely homemaker, mother, and grandmother from Brooklyn? And wouldn’t it be true? Gary Snyder Fine Art in New York City presents the work of Janet Sobel, whose early 1940s drip paintings inspired Pollock to explore the possibilities of that style and essentially found the Abstract Expressionist school. Rather than rise likewise into fame and fortune, Sobel moved with her husband and family to Plainfield, New Jersey, and enduring obscurity. Gary Snyder brings Sobel back to the big city and the big stage she deserves. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Mother of Invention."

[Image: Janet Sobel, Untitled (JS-032), c. 1944, oil on caning]



[Many thanks to Gary Snyder Fine Art for providing me with the image above and press materials for Janet Sobel at Gary Snyder Project Space: Drip Paintings and Selected Works on Paper, running now through February 27, 2010.]

Target Practice

The American art scene lost one of the great, yet forgotten artists of the twentieth century last Tuesday with the passing of Kenneth Noland at 85 years of age. One of the Color Field painters, the abstract art movement christened by influential critic Clement Greenberg as the true successor to the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Noland enjoyed his greatest success in the late 1950s and early 1960s, only to become collateral damage when Greenberg tumbled from the apex of the critical world and he and the rest of the Color Field painters became targets, too. (Noland's ") Please venture over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Target Practice."