The Desert Flower Blooms-Joan Allen’s “Georgia O’Keeffe” (2009)-A
Film Review
DVD Review
By Si Lannon
Georgia O’Keeffe, starring Joan Allan, Jeremy Irons, 2009
[When I was a kid I hated art, art as it was presented in
art class where Mr. Jones-Henry held forth from freshman to senior in high
school. Worse unlike some of the other guys I hung around in high school like
Sam Lowell who loved art, was Mr. Jones-Henry’s star pupil I had not gone to
North Adamsville Junior High School and had Jones-Henry for seventh and eighth
grade at Snug Harbor Junior High before he transferred over to the high
school.* So maybe I double-hated art especially after the time he took the
whole eight grade class up to the famous Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The
idea was to grab some culture I guess in his eyes by viewing some masterpieces
they had there, especially a guy named Monet who did haystacks and churches
that Jones-Henry was crazy for (guy is what I would have called him or any
artist then).
[Funny how what goes around comes around on stuff. In a
recent conversation with fellow writer here Laura Perkins who is doing an
on-going series on 20th art she mentioned that on a visit to the MFA
she noticed that Monet, his hazy haystacks and churches and a few other bits, including
a huge painting of his sly and salacious wife in full symbolic Japanese geisha
girl regalia now have pride of place on the second floor. Jones-Henry, rest his
soul, would have been crazy to know that he had moved up in the art world since
when we went to the old building they were in some dark corner room with a
million other Impressionists. Monet has moved up in the pecking order although
I would say that Cezanne still has pride of place in my pecking order for
Impressionist-era artists. Laura said she was totally startled by the Monet geisha
girl wife painting since she had heard about it but never seen it in person and
wondered to me what kind of devilish sexual relationship they had, or she had,
although Laura couldn’t find any scandal around her name.]
The big reason that I hated art from that museum experience
on was that I was pretty naïve, naïve naturally if anybody is talking about
budding teenagers and sex. I was sweet on a girl from the neighborhood named
Laurie Kelly who I thought liked me (and actually did before the museum disaster)
and we were paired together to view the works of art. I had never seen a woman,
any woman naked so when we got to a painting by Renoir of a chubby woman
bathing outdoors I turned bright red, maybe crimson red. Laurie who was just beginning to bud out herself
started laughing at me, started pointing out how red in the face I was to other
students. After that she didn’t want anything to do with me according to my
friend Ben Lewis who knew her older sister who told him that I was “square,”
meaning social death in those days. After that horrible episode I hated
Jones-Henry with a passion and I went crazy trying to get out of art class when
he went over to the high school, No such luck and it is a good thing that Sam Lowell,
almost a fellow writer and long-time old corner boy friend, did a lot of my art
projects or I might still be in that class. (The villain of the piece Renoir by
the way who Sam and Laura in line with their theory recently claimed had a
fetish for painting nudes with womanly bodies and girlish faces and have
wondered out loud why the authorities didn’t catch on to his perversions. So
maybe in my naïve way I was on to something, although I would not stake my life
on it.)
[Mr. Jones-Henry was an Englishman in a heavily Irish school
where almost everybody had some Irish blood and some family bad blood against
the English for the 800 years of troubles, but nobody faulted him on that
score, no me as I have mentioned above with other hatreds stirring. We all
found it odd that he had that hyphenated name though and one day he explained
it along with his art heritage. He was from some branch of the Burne-Jones
family, I asked Sam recently, but he does not remember how that family tree
went. One forbear was Edward Burne-Jones of the second wave of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which had been started by the poet-artist Dante
Gabriel Rossetti back in the mid-19th century.
More importantly Jones-Henry’s family had come to America
due to his father’s work in Boston for some English firm and when it came time
for him to go to college he went to the famous Massachusetts School of Art.
From there he got jobs in North Adamsville. Why all of this was important was
that he encouraged Sam to go to his alma mater and had worked to get Sam, a
poor working-class family guy, a scholarship to the school. In the end Sam’s
mother talked him out of it on economic grounds that she didn’t want him to
become some starving artist in some cold-water garret.]
After high school and after the Army, after Vietnam which
changed a lot of ways I looked at stuff as it did to everybody from the old
corner boy neighborhood I took up with a young woman, Kathie, my first wife and
you should know that every corner boy from our corner wound up having at least
two wives and two divorces which tells you something although not necessarily
something good, who was an art student at the Museum School associated with
that MFA that I hated from eighth grade. She gradually nurtured my interest in
art, into going back to that tomb MFA since she got in free. When we got to
that Renoir which had broken my heart indirectly when I was a kid I told her
the story of the last time I had seen that painting. She laughed. The funny
thing was that having grown up, having seen the adult world and women this time
I looked at the masterly way he had painted and how he had used the space to
almost make it seem like some Garden of Eden that his nude was entwined in. All
taught to me by Kathie who would go on even after we were married to do her art
work and after we divorced she went I think to the Village in New York or maybe
San Francisco and then the Village and had a middling career (and two more
husbands) as a regional artist. Me, I would eventually devour art every chance
I got later on and hence this review which was assigned to me after I had told
Greg Green, the site manager my hoary childhood tale. Si Lannon]
*Sam Lowell who like I mentioned loved art
although turning down that scholarship opportunity as if to grab a second
chance at the brass ring is now helping “ghost” an on-going series entitled Traipsing Through The Arts by Laura
Perkins on self-selected works of art that interest her under the theory for 20th
century art, serious art anyway from what I understand, that it is driven hard
by sex and eroticism. I can understand how Sam, the old corner boy part of Sam
half of our time spent grabbing at straws for girls and dates and back seats of
hopped up cars, came by that theory but hearing prim and proper Laura was a
proponent came as a shock to me.
On the subject of Georgia O’Keeffe this pair should have a
field day with their exotic erotic theory of serious art. While they would be
hard pressed to get much sexual mileage out of the barns up in Lake George, the
hills and desert fauna and flora out in New Mexico or the skyscrapers in New
York (except Sam in a wild frantic moment might see them as some phallic totem
but he can figure that out for himself) when it comes to her famous series of
lush and symbolic flowers magnified many times larger than life and with a
sensual feel they may get some mileage. At least one art critic has noted that
almost vaginal depth and swirl that clearly suggests erotic possibilities
anyway.
********
Now nostalgia, heartache and hatreds out of the way the film
review:
No question from early on once that first wife Kathie
straightened out my head about art and art’s value as a cultural signpost I
loved to look at the great 20th century artist Georgia O’Keefe’s
works where possible including a visit to the Ghost Ranch out in New Mexico to
get a first-hand view of what was driving her-especially her use of color.
Hell, I even usually buy some kind of Georgia O’Keeffe calendar each year and
if that isn’t love what is. Speaking of love the film under review simply but
properly titled Georgia O’Keeffe (as
opposed to say O’Keeffe and her husband-lover and pioneer photography as art
organizer in New York City at various galleries Stieglitz or some variation on
that idea) has one of its important strands beside a look at what drove her to
her art was the seminal relationship for good or evil between her and Alfred
Stieglitz –her most serious promotor and a great creative force as a
photographer and exhibitor of modern art in his own right.
Almost from the first frame of the film we are entwined in
the obvious attraction that this pair, Alfred and Georgia had for each other sexually
as well as artistically (although they called each other Miss O’Keeffe and
Mister Stieglitz more often than one would think proper given that they were
married but maybe the formalities were more carefully observed then). That
attraction in the end would provide many emotional distraught moments for Ms.
O’Keeffe as her Alfred proved to be another of those rascals who couldn’t keep
away from the woman.
The relationship beyond Steiglitz’s overwhelming desire to
see Georgia take her place as a great artist of the 20th century was
a roller coaster ride from the beginning since Alfred was very much married,
although clearly unhappily. And also, via the great modern art promotor Mabel
Dodge, she of the much-mentioned 1913 New York City Armory show that brought
the European vanguard to the new shore heathens, we know that women fell in
love with him-and he responded for a while. That looked to be Georgia’s
fate-another protégé of the great creative force. At some moments in the film
it looked like she would never break from his spell (and whatever else he
thought of her as an artist he wanted her under that spell) and break out to be
her own artistic force creating some of the most primordially beautiful
paintings ever produced.
But break she did to signal a very important assertive
streak that was not apparent at the start. Of course the painful cause that
broke the camel’s back was Stieglitz’s infidelity with an heiress to the Sears
fortune. That and his unwillingness to have a child with her (allegedly to
avoid distracting her from her life-force art) tore her apart for a while-a
long while. Heading to the rough and ready West, heading to the sullen beauty
of New Mexico saved her sanity-and drove her art to another level. The great
question posed by the film and posed by O’Keeffe herself was how much her art
was driven by Stieglitz’s ambitions and her own. My guess is in the end it was
her own. See the film and figure that one out for yourself.
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