Traipsing Through The Arts-All Serious 20th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Search For The Sublime-When The Desert Flower Bloomed-“Georgia O’Keeffe” (2009)-A Film Review

Traipsing Through The Arts-All Serious 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Search For The Sublime-When The Desert Flower Bloomed-“Georgia O’Keeffe” 

By Laura Perkins

Sometimes some things fall in your lap like manna from heaven. I had (or should I now say we have since my “ghost” advisor in what he calls the shadows Sam Lowell helps with the work) expected to present a piece on colorist Grady Lamont and his in your face explicitly self-proclaimed sexual nature of his art works. Then Sam’s old-time growing up in the working-class Acre section North Adamsville Si Lannon took up site manager Greg Green’s assignment reviewing a film about modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe, her art and her stormy relationship with modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz.  (See archives, May 20, 2019.) Of course, I almost flipped out when I heard of Si’s assignment from Sam. Naturally that review of that particular artist dovetailed very nicely with my (our) theory that all serious 20^th modern art is driven by sex and sensuality, what I call erotic undertones. That is the manna from heaven part since, in passing, Si acknowledged without reference to our theory unknown to him at the time the sexual nature of much of her work, especially her florid flower work.

The other part, the we have to do some work in this on-going series even with the manna from heaven, relates to Si’s mentioning in his introduction his up and down history with art and works of art. Si, Sam and I had a talk before we decided to use Si’s review as the main vehicle for putting O’Keeffe’s under the sign of our theory. We decided further to use Si’s youthful experiences and his “conversion” (like the Christian Saint Paul after seeing Christ do his thing) as a springboard to our own takes on O’Keeffe.

For what Si first experienced in the art world you can read his introduction below, but we would be remiss if we didn’t trace his conversion and its relationship to modern art. Naturally Si presents a funny, now funny, story about his first trip to a museum, the MFA in Boston which made him hate even the very word art. But that is not the whole story so I will fill you in. Si mentioned that his hatred, like many things, centered on a real person, his art teacher as it turned out for his junior and high school years Mr. Jones-Henry. Here is the back story. In the seventh grade Si actually had something like a positive attitude toward art, has a fairly good grade that year especially after doing a huge Paper Mache project involving creating a dinosaur kingdom which was exhibited in the showcase in front of the office at Snug Harbor Junior High where he went to school in North Adamsville.

You already know, or will know, what turned Si against art, against Mr. Jones-Henry. Si, in the summer between the eighth and ninth grade, moved with his family to the Acre section of North Adamsville. Strangely, that move represented a step up for his family since they had lived in the Adamsville Housing Authority, “the projects” into a small, very small single-family house when the family income grew beyond what the city’s means test allowed to stay in the projects. That summer, and this is important, is when Si and Sam met since Sam lived the next street over from where Si’s family had moved.

The importance of that friendship was not immediately obvious since Si had never expected that he would have to face Mr. Jones-Henry again after the eighth-grade MFA disaster or really his striking out in the teenage love game which I firmly believe he should have expected if not then, then later since we all have wounds, desired or not, without taking it out on art, or art teachers. In any case he did. He freaked out the first day of school when he saw Mr. Jones-Henry in the corridor across from his homeroom. He asked his homeroom teacher how Mr. Jones-Henry came to be an art teacher at the high school. It had something to do with a Miss Lewis retiring in the summer unexpectedly due to poor health and Mr. Jones-Henry having some seniority to bid on the job and his resume was far and above any other candidate.

Since the high school had a few art teachers Si figured he would not wind up with his nemesis. Wrong, totally wrong. When he got his class schedule the next day (the first day of school was a half day fluff day then so he didn’t know that day) he, and Sam as well, wound up in Mr. Jones-Henry’s class. He tried to get out of the class but that would have been impossible in those days when the classes were tracked by ability not a mix. Worse of all was the policy then of keeping the classes with the same art teacher for four years to benefit from continuity (which would have mixed results and is now frowned upon educationally from what I hear from my grandchildren). Nothing good could come out of that. Except his friendship with Sam, and almost from day one of high school Si’s entry into the world of Sam and his corner boys from junior high led by Frankie Riley with the “house intellectual” the late Pete Markin as his flak-catcher.                           

This is a good point to mention what Sam has already mentioned in the piece that we let him do giving his take on the art I have selected to buttress our sex and sensuality theory. Sam loved art, loved to draw and paint from an early age and being assigned to Mr. Jones-Henry’s class was his personal manna from heaven since by junior year he was essentially the “assistant” art teacher. In the end Mr. Jones-Henry would help Sam get into his alma mater Massachusetts School of Art on a necessary scholarship he was so determined to get for Sam. That Sam decided, or his mother decided, that was not the best road forward for him and his future didn’t take his longtime love of art away. In the short haul, in high school what that meant in practice was that Sam would actually literally do Si’s projects which got him pass the required art classes and allowed him to graduate.              

That is the negative Si art part which has been well-documented and spoken to without reference to Georgia O’Keeffe whom he was totally unaware of until a later point when he met Kathie who would become his first wife. After high school, after the Army, after Vietnam which caused more gnashing of teeth and disorientation among their, my generation that we will ever be able to explain Si was a mess, was all over the place as far as finding his place in the sun. Then one night he went to a bar in I think Kenmore Square in Boston and met Kathie who was a student at the Museum School affiliated with the MFA and she swept him off his feet. She was several years younger than he but was like a breath of fresh air after Vietnam, after drifting. He never mentioned his personal history with the subject of art that night, but he just let her go on and on about her dreams and about her influences. The dream part he got but he was totally ignorant of the artists she was talking about except the villain Renoir (among those artists mentioned Marc Chagall, Cezanne, Mark Rothko, and Georgia O’Keeffe whom he drew a blank on although later he would remember some girl he had been dating in college had a calendar of the latter’s flower works highlighting each month. It was on their second date after a few drinks at dinner that he mentioned that eighth grade incident at the MFA partially to see if that would disqualify him forever from being with Kathie for being a low-life about art. She laughed and asked, no, commanded him that if he wanted to see her again he would have to go to the MFA with her, meeting her there that next weekend.                       

Holding his nose and knowing that he was ready to do a lot to keep her company as latter marrying and staying with her for seven years before he, not she, went off the deep end over his Vietnam experience-again, testified to, that next Saturday he met her there just after it opened. As we can in retrospect have expected Si was thrilled with the museum, with the works of art and with Kathie’s patient explanation of what some of the works meant for the art world and for human culture. Even the dreaded Renoir bathing maiden painting drew his positive attention and gave him a whole new perspective on the use of color and space (Cezanne would be his go-to guy though on those two characteristics and still is). What Kathie really got excited about though was when she practically genuflected in front of the O’Keeffe paintings which caused her to swoon a little. Si flipped out not in the silly eighth-grade naïve way but after Kathie told him what she (via art critics if not the artist herself thought was represented by the swirls and crevices in the flower paintings and a few desert scenes as well) thought the paintings symbolized, the vaginal sexual blossoming part. For a couple more dates before they went to bed together (what Sam calls “getting under the silky sheets” which has its own charms as an expression) they would talk about the O’Keeffe works in what I considered when I heard that part of the story as some kind of “foreplay.” By the way after they did finally sleep together for the next date Si told Kathie she should meet him at the MFA to continue his education. And he has been on the “cure” ever since. What more can I add.

What more can I add indeed since I mentioned that I would give my own “take” on Ms. O’Keeffe’s work, its sensual aspect. Si and about a million others have already laid out the sexual implications of her flower explosions and like him are ready to leave it there. That is only a small part of the story, a very small part. O’Keeffe spent a fair among of time up at Stieglitz’s family estate near Lake George in upstate New York. There she did a large number of barn scenes in the modern flat style. What almost no critic and maybe none has noticed or at least mentioned in the public prints is the subtle triangular shapes which mesh with each other forming a quite provocative coupling, a sexual coupling, sexual congress if you like. That triangular shape the definitive symbol of the female pubic area and the silos of course the phallic symbols.             

If that was the only time, after all Ms. O’Keeffe was young and in love, or thought she was before the other shoe fell and the love-hate relationship between her and Stieglitz rivaled that of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in that part of the 20^th century then I would defer to the professional art cabal take on that part of her career. But that begs the question about those skyscrapers she was so fond of painting. Skyscrapers that it would not take a Freud or even Jung to figure out were related to modern, really ancient if you think about it, phallic representational art. I have noted the seeming ominous position of the clouds in some representing the female pubic area preparing “to be taken” or to “take” those obvious phallic symbols. In others the positions are reversed and the phallic symbols enter deep into the almost subterranean earth. A couple were so provocative I had to leave the viewing area for a bit to “cool off.” Here the modern art critic, art viewer could learn something about our times. The Greeks, maybe lesser so the Romans, were not afraid to put every kind of phallic symbol, romping penises in many cases both heterosexual and homosexual on their prized possession vases and pots. The modern sensibility is not nearly out-front and so takes the symbolism that Freud wrote so energetically of and Jung went crazy about, of the subconscious, the deep sexual urges in more guarded forms. Those ideas are still amazing true for artists even in the pornographic overkill Internet age.

This last example, the one that will shock many people and will sent so-called professional art critics and their hangers-on in the wide net art cabal into spasms of rage and hubris is Ms. O’Keeffe work out in New Mexico, out at the Ghost Ranch and other locales adjacent to the desert and nearby cliffs and mountains. If you only look at the brilliant colors she used, some very original tones since she was a pioneer desert artist then you will miss what became obvious to me proto-sexual relationship exhibited once again in that guarded form so typical of 20^th century art. It is amazing how many of the glorious mountain views have a female form which either are “on top” in the subtle sexual congress being depicted or are “wide open” to some very provocative cloud formations.

Agreed, a whole new look at Ms. O’Keeffe’s work which I might not have thought of except that at a recent, well maybe not so recent since it was a couple of years ago, exhibition of her work at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts there were an amazing number of photographs of her nude taken by Stieglitz while they were having their affair, married or separated. Now Georgia was no professional beauty like Sargent’s Madame X or Whistler’s The White Girl but she had a good figure and apparently an uninhibited persona in that regard which gave me a new look at her work. The professional art crowd, the uptight, grappling art cabal will howl in the winds over this but if I could take the heat from the sex police Puritan evangelicals who mercifully have flee from my view since I have started working on 20^th century art which they consider the work of the devil and me his servant then I can handle these cocktail hour buffs.