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
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” adviser 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. 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 20th 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). So 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 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 his 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 was 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
shaped 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 20th century than 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 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 20th
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 20th century art which they consider the work of the devil and me
his servant then I can handle these cocktail hour buffs.
***********
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 him 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). 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 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.)
[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 the 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 part 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.
********
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’Keeffe’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 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.
