(soft music) - Welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. I'm Tyler Green. It's been almost two full months since the program led with art history. So this week I'm pleased to lead off with Georgia O'Keefe, my New York's, at the Art Institute of Chicago. My guest is with Annalisa K. Madsen, the co-curator of the exhibition, Sarah Kelly Oler. The exhibition spotlights O'Keefe's paintings of New York City, surrounding them with pictures she made of, say, Lake George and the Southwest. It's at the Art Institute of Chicago through September 22nd. Then it'll travel to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The exhibition catalog was published by the Art Institute, Amazon and Bookshop, offer it for about $40 to $45. On the second segment, Rebecca Madsen at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Remember we'll have images or links to images of works discussed on the show on the show page at manpodcast.com, as well as the Instagram handles of all our guests. If you enjoy the show, please remember to give it a five-star rating and a review wherever you listen. Thanks very much and please tell a friend. Sarah Kelly Oler, after the break. Drawing on a continued study of physics, science fiction, ancient mythologies, and modernist design, Virginia Herameo explores how abstraction can offer alternate ways of understanding our world. See the breadth of her work from the mid-1960s to today in her long overdue exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Plan your visit at MCAChicago.org. Support comes from Getty, presenting the world premiere production of Memnon, a one-of-a-kind theatrical event under the stars. The play tells the tale of a powerful Ethiopian king who journeys to the city of Troy to engage in battle during the Trojan's darkest hour. This epic story from the ancient Greek legend of the fall of Troy has been overlooked for over a millennium until now. Memnon comes to life with bold, vivid language, and gripping dramatic conflict. Co-produced with the classical theater of Harlem, a theater company that tells stories through the lens of the African diaspora, directed by Carl Cofield, written by Will Power, and choreographed by Tiffany Rae Fisher. Thursdays through Saturdays this September at the Getty Villa Museum in Los Angeles. Book your tickets now at Getty.edu. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we're back. Sarah Kelly Oler, welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. I'm pleased to be here with you this morning. Georgia O'Keefe lived in the Shelton Hotel in New York. It was on Lexington between 48 and 49, so a few blocks north of Grand Central Station. Most recently, it was a Marriott. These days, it's like some kind of student housing facility. So why was O'Keefe's on and off residence at the Shelton? Important to how she saw and presented New York City. I think it's hard to imagine at this point, but in 1924, which is the date that O'Keefe first moved into the Shelton for a brief month with her then partner and soon-to-be husband Alfred Stieglitz, nobody in the United States had the ability to live on high. The Shelton Hotel, when it was constructed, was the tallest residential building in New York, which means largely in the world at that moment. And it was really the first building that allowed people to live above the 11th floor because of zoning regulations that had changed back in 1916, but had taken several years to implement in the form of buildings. And so the Shelton emerges, and all of a sudden, O'Keefe and Stieglitz as well, had access to a height that was inconceivable otherwise, that was radically new, and also that would have been quite spellbinding in a city that is otherwise quite short. So it's the experience of moving into the Shelton that is so transformative for her because it's a new experience, and it causes her to look at architecture in an entirely different way. - Is she only looking out, or is she also looking up? - She is doing both, and she is definitely interested in the view from her window out towards the East River. So O'Keefe had a series of apartments in the Shelton Hotel. I believe, although we have not been able to locate the very first apartment, I believe her very first stay looked west towards St. Patrick's Cathedral, and she did an incredible drawing of the view towards St. Patrick's Cathedral in charcoal, and that work is a work that she described as being the view from the window that she lived at very briefly. So it would accord with the one-month stay that O'Keefe had at the Shelton in November of 1924. They were actually waiting for an apartment to be renovated, and so they weren't able to move into their planned apartment. That's why they moved into the Shelton in the first place. But after this first month's stay, they stayed largely on the upper floors and looking eastward, and so there's an entire incredible series of paintings and drawings that O'Keefe made looking east from the Shelton windows, either at the 28th floor level or at the 30th floor level, which was their preferred apartment. They loved Unit 2003. And so clearly, the view from the window is an important one. She created at least nine major works on the subject, but she also enjoyed walking New York City. She spent a lot of time walking around New York City and walking primarily in Midtown Manhattan and looking at the structures around her for inspiration. She was drawn to the spaces in between, so often she would notice something being constructed to block away. She talked about seeing the Shelton from a block away as it was being constructed through the gap of another demolished building. So she's drawn to these spaces in between and she's then painting buildings from the street level looking up at them. And so there's really two major formats for her work at this moment, the view from on high and the view from street level looking up. - We're gonna get into specifics of some of those paintings in a moment, but before we do, how does O'Keeffe's approach to painting New York in the '20s differ from precisionists such as Charles Sheila? - I think Sheila is a great example of an artist who, like O'Keeffe, is very interested in what you could call the modernist project of translating form three-dimensional form into two dimensions on a canvas. So he's interested in geometric structure, geometric form, and while the name precisionist, has often been applied to O'Keeffe, the reality is that she is a very different painter from someone like Sheila. Sheila really is working with straight lines, you know, a fine application of paint, minimal, factual to the paint. And there's not usually a sense of nature in Sheila's work in these early paintings of the 1920s. There is later, I know you're thinking of the artist who looks at nature in the Art Institute's collection. But really at this moment, you know, he is painting Church Street L, he is painting skyscrapers as these monolithic geometric forms that are about these and feature these very precise outlines on canvas. And O'Keeffe is certainly interested in some of these geometric lines, she's interested in the geometries of the city, but she brings in, first of all, a painterly quality that I think we don't always associate with O'Keeffe, but is very evident. There's a tactility to a lot of these paintings, but she's also always bringing in nature. And I think that that's an important differentiation between her and someone like Sheila, in that nature allows her to humanize the image in some ways. It becomes about her relationship to the building, to the built environment, but also to the natural world that she still sees as present in New York City. So whether it's the moon appearing over a building or clouds or even the way she deploys artificial light, there are ways that light and its presence and clouds and the moon and nature and its presence continue to remind you that O'Keeffe is there and having this experience, even if it's one that she then translates, you know, dramatically or somewhat elaborately onto canvas. She has fun with electric light in the city in the way that the Impressionists had fun with the smokestacks and industrial smoke and clouds, which is to say she treats it naturalistically as if it was just kind of part of a landscape and there was no differentiation between nature and industrial or semi-industrial. O'Keeffe famously said, "One can't paint New York "as it is, but rather as it is felt." And of course, I think Sheila did paint, as you just noted, New York with a directness that O'Keeffe felt was not for her. How or why did she take an opposite position? - Well, I think first of all, O'Keeffe's an artist who is always looking to express herself authentically. Like she wasn't looking to copy what other people were doing. She was looking for her own form of expression and that's true across her entire career. But certainly this is a moment where the city is often seen in terms of American progress. skyscrapers are seen in terms of an American nationalism that she was certainly conversant with all of these ideas. But that wasn't necessarily her goal at all. And that she, I think, felt that her way of contributing art across the board, whether it's New York or whether it's an abstraction, is to have it be representative of some sort of sensation. So New York as it is felt is because it is about her as the intermediary. And that's what made it special, made it unique to O'Keeffe. It wasn't that these other works were bad. They were simply not her. They didn't represent her perception, whereas she's trying to really represent her perception. - I mean, you know, one of the things that strikes me is really different about the way Sheila and O'Keeffe, and I found myself thinking of Sheila a lot in this show. One of the key differences for me about how they paint New York is O'Keeffe is painting depth and with that kind of brushy naturalism that you mentioned a moment ago. And Sheila is including when he's working off of photographs such as for the skyscrapers painting at the Phillips, which is based on a 1920 photograph now called New York Park Row Building, which is at the MFA Boston. Sheila is throwing stuff at the picture plane. I mean, they are cubisty paintings and O'Keeffe is embracing depth and volume and kind of an often a sense of New York's canyons or what is beginning to become New York's canyons. So yes, absolutely. - Well, and I think to add more to that, you know, she's embracing depth and volume, but she's also largely taking away. She's an artist who takes away a lot of what you see around you with New York rather than adds it all in. So she doesn't need to convey all of New York in one canvas. She doesn't need to convey the density. In fact, I think it's notable that a lot of her street level views are largely of single buildings. You do get buildings framing in-- - At the very edges of the canvas. - Yeah, at the edge of the canvas. So you have these sort of encroaching slivers of buildings at the tops of compositions for a number of these street level views. Interestingly, I don't know that those actually existed necessarily, but she might have been adding them in as a compositional device. And again, that it sort of creates the impression of the human on the street rather than the cubist tapestry of form that someone like Sheila is putting out. - You argue, I think right at the beginning of your catalog essay, that O'Keeffe's choice of subject, these New York City skyscrapers, was a rejection of gender stereotypes. How so? - This is certainly a moment where O'Keeffe's career is very much defined by the impressions that critics have of her as a woman artist. And certainly, O'Keeffe rejected the idea of being called a woman artist. She wanted to be considered a great artist. She didn't want to be considered a great woman artist. And so she was not interested in being aligned with stereotypes of gender that would constrain or pigeonhole her. And I think that's true across much of her career. But ultimately, what happens is that in, you know, as is well known, O'Keeffe sits for Stiglets in a series of photographs, some 300 photographs or so that he takes of her over several years of her body. And of sometimes full body images, sometimes her hands, sometimes her feet, sometimes her torso, sometimes her breasts, sometimes she's nude, sometimes she's lightly draped. And it's an incredible compilation of photographs that Stiglets then exhibited as the portrait of George O'Keeffe. And what ended up happening is that this, of course, tainted, we'll say, the critical view of her paintings itself. It really seems that critics could not distance what they were seeing her paintings from this idea that they had of her from the portrait that Stiglets had taken of O'Keeffe. And this was something that she disliked. She didn't like the sort of, you know, feminine rhetoric that surrounded a lot of her paintings. I think we're well familiar with the idea that, you know, O'Keeffe's flower paintings represent something sexual. And she rejected even those ideas. She said, you know, that's on the person interpreting the painting. But I think this all comes together where she then, in the middle of painting abstractions, of painting Lake George, of painting eggplants and flowers and corn, when she gets the excitement to paint New York City, it also is a subject that nobody correlates with femininity at this point. And I think that that's the deliberate choice that she makes to steer her own career in a different direction, one that was much harder for critics to frame within a sort of demeaning rhetoric of femininity or a sort of lesser rhetoric. And, you know, and I think this shows, this points to O'Keeffe as an artist who is determined to control these sorts of issues and try to take charge of her career in a way that she felt was, again, still authentic. She was really excited by these works, but at the same time had a very positive outcome for her. - Perhaps not only critics, right? Perhaps Alfred Stieglitz, too. So what was O'Keeffe's, I think, first skyscraper or urban New York City big building picture? Maybe better word, better bad phrase and how did Stieglitz respond to it? - So late in life, O'Keeffe told the story in her 1976, we'll say quasi-autobiography, about how she had painted her first New York painting, which was New York Street with Moon, which is a exemplary image of O'Keeffe's work in this urban sphere. We're looking up at the painting from the street level. We have the Moon, we have a street light, we have a new stoplight, which was a brand new innovation at that time, all juxtaposed against the fabric of the city. And she was clearly very proud of this painting. And so she recounted that she wanted to include it in Stieglitz's exhibition, Seven Americans, which he was organizing in March of 1925, to showcase the newest and sort of best works from the stable of artists that he was then moving towards. So O'Keeffe, but also Charles Demith and Marston Hartley and John Marin and so on. And it was clearly meant to represent their careers in full at this moment. And O'Keeffe showed some 30 paintings in this exhibition and wanted to include New York Street with Moon. And yet Stieglitz, or as she said it, the men. So we could say either Stieglitz, or we could say Stieglitz and the other men of the Stieglitz circle. But the men would not let her hang the painting, despite she said there being the perfect place for it. So she had every intention of that painting being in this exhibition. But she went on to say, and again, this is a retrospective look, 50 years later, but it's one that she repeated several times. So it clearly rankled in her later years. She said, "The men told me to leave New York to the men." And that infuriated O'Keeffe. She talked about how angry she was, that this was something that was seen in these gendered ways that excluded her. And this, I think, very much falls in line with Stieglitz's longstanding practice of looking for the great woman artist. I mean, that's exactly what he is alleged to have said, or reportedly said, in 1917 or so, when he sees O'Keeffe's first abstractions. He says, "Finally, a woman on paper." So he is interested in defining her career as a woman artist in a way that maybe she's not. And so when he then or the men then reject this idea that she's painting New York, it means that the exhibition that they had carefully planned to showcase the breadth of work suddenly lacked her latest subject matter. And so I think that's why she was so infuriated at it. But of course, she does get her comeuppance a year later when she finally exhibits the painting at Stieglitz's gallery. So he does agree to show this painting and at least one other New York at this moment in 1926. And it sells for a large sum of money within hours of the show opening. And again, in O'Keeffe's very dry recollection, she said, "Nobody ever questioned my painting New York after that." So the sale of the work certainly made the subject more palatable at that point. - And that wasn't a one-off, right? I mean, her views of New York moved quickly. And I don't know if it's fair to say they encouraged her, but they moved quickly and she was off and running. - Yeah, I mean, this is a moment where O'Keeffe is not the world famous artist that we know of now. This is before she's gone to the Southwest. This is the late 1920s where she has been thus far in her life, spending her time working as a teacher or frankly living in a fairly impoverished way if she wasn't working. And so her New York paintings a number of themselves for significant sums of money quickly out of exhibitions, out of their first exhibitions. And this is the moment where O'Keeffe said in 1927, that's the year she began earning money and was able to live as an artist off of her paintings. So it's not to say it's only her New York's are selling, but I certainly think the encouragement of having successful sales. Interestingly, largely to a number of women collectors and not exclusively, but they're going to other women along with flower paintings. So she's starting to sell works across the board, but I do think that's a validation that was surely beneficial for O'Keeffe. - Let's pivot towards some specific paintings and to do that, let's go back to the Shelton. O'Keeffe paints the Shelton in a number of different ways, many of which are represented in the exhibition and in the catalog. Sometimes her presentation of it is, I don't wanna say naturalistic because it's not, but representationally truthful, if you will. And sometimes it's not, it's abstracted. So what are her different modes of painting the Shelton and why do you think she plays around a bit, finds different ways of doing the thing? - So we know that O'Keeffe painted the Shelton at least four times because there is an exhibition that features at least four of them all the same time. But she exhibited other Shelton's during this period between 1926 and 1930 and so it's not clear whether or not those are always the same Shelton's or if they were indeed others. So I suspect there were others, but she also then destroyed all the two of them and a third one we know what it looks like. - There's an image of it in the catalog. - Right, so there's an image in the catalog, it's called the Shelton at night and she actually liked it enough to exhibit it before then destroying it. And which is an interesting concept right there. But the Shelton that we know of, the three that we can see do run the gamut of different forms of, I will say, representational experimentation and in that they are all representational, they are all something you can understand the subject of. The first one is the most, we'll say straightforward. I think I referred to it almost as portrait-like in the Shelton in that it's not exacting. This is not a photograph of the Shelton. She edits details out, she changes details to make it work better in her composition. But you start to see the same compositional structure of the building centered in the picture plane, fairly monumental with the slivers of building surrounding it at the top of the sides. And so that is, I would say the most, we can use the term naturalistic, we can use the sort of least sort of inventive of them and although still a lovely painting. But then you have the Shelton with sunspots, which is 180 degrees in the other direction. It is all about O'Keefe's interpretation of an experience that she recalled having. So again, there's always the grain of salt of any artist looking back at their careers. But she talked about coming out of the Shelton one morning and seeing the sun looking like it had taken a bite out of the side of the building. And so she paints this glow of the sun sort of peaking. You can sort of imagine those moments you have where you're in shadow and then all of a sudden you're blinded by the sun emerging from behind the structure. And so she captures that. But again, this is about her being on the street level experiencing this moment. She captures the steam also rising up from other buildings. It's clearly a sort of slightly chilly morning. And then she captures these sunspots that have been the subject of a lot of discussion about whether those relate to photography or not. And she's not using a photograph for her inspiration, but she's living with the foremost photographer of the era. She would have been conversant. So this is a painting that is about the translation of light in the city around built form and how it affects the built environment. And then the third painting that the one that has been destroyed that we know what it looks like is a painting of nighttime, the Shelton at night. And it's really about the proximity or the juxtaposition of the street light in front of the building with this wonderful swan curve to the top of the street light directly positioned in front of the Shelton and having the contrast of nighttime and then artificial elimination. And so I think when I think about these through together and indeed the other Shelton's that we don't know what they look like, this clearly suggests a subject that she was fascinated by. It also probably suggests a subject that challenged her to a certain degree that she really didn't feel like she succeeded with as much as she wanted to, hence the destruction of them. And O'Keefe destroyed works throughout her career. So that alone is not a complete indicator of anything here that's different from her later career. But it suggests a subject that she was seeing daily. This is her daily walk in and out, around the building every single day. And it gave her a great fodder for inspiration. It is not unlike her painting the patio door and abeque over and over again because it's what she sees daily. And it gives her this direct proximity and a direct vehicle for experimentation that I think is really important to her. And she painted works in series because she felt that she was always trying to paint until she had said what she wanted to say and said enough. And then she just stopped. And so I certainly think that's the case here as well. - The other tall building she was in awe of, fascinated by the opportunity to riff on, was a building known as the American radiator company building. It was a kind of a tray over the top, spectacle, well-described, well-photographed, or well-represented with photographs in the catalog. And O'Keefe particularly loved painting at night. Painting it at night. How did she, air quotes, use? It's similarly to and differently from the shelf. - So radiator building, which is in many ways, one of the most iconic of O'Keefe's skyscraper paintings for many reasons, is it's a painting at night. It is her experience of walking the city. So she talked about, in a very off-hand way, she would walk the city at night and so she saw the radiator building and it had to be painted. I mean, it was very sort of off the cuff the way she references this. But you're absolutely correct. This was a painting that was the sort of talk of the town in the mid 1920s because the architect, Raymond Hood, had designed it to have black cladding and a gilded crown that he then illuminated with a very elaborate illumination plan that would play searchlights across it so that it was constantly lit up. So, spectacle is the word. And in fact, newspaper records talk about how there was always a crowd watching the spectacle of the radiator building. And so, Keith is certainly using that idea of spectacle in this painting. She captures the sort of tapestry of illuminated windows in the building itself and then this spectral, she makes it sort of ghostly. The crown at the top doesn't look gilded. It looks white and pale and evanescent in a way that is fascinating. She also paints the spotlights so that you get a sense of play of light. But unlike most of the other buildings-- - Let me jump in for a second. The spotlights are kind of behind the building so they appear to be slightly coming toward the viewer and by so doing make the building stand out and push toward the picture playing all the more. So they're not spotlights looking up into the building but they are stop spotlights from behind the building. - Yes, yes, they are spotlights from behind that illuminate predominantly the crown. I mean, you know, this is also interestingly, I think a visual element that O'Keefe, we see in other O'Keefe paintings. So she's representing spotlights as she has represented other abstractions but something that I find fascinating to sort of transfer a visual language from one subject to another. But ultimately, radiator building is a painting that is unusual in that it's the only building she presents sort of from the front entirely. It's the only building that had enough space around it that she could get distance from it and look at it head on and straight up. So it's very monumental in that regard but she's not right at the base of the building. She's actually standing a block away on the other side of Bryant Park looking up at this building when she depicts it. And so I do think that it's a very different painting from the Shelton and that in that you get, in fact, the buildings on the sides of it. You get the other buildings on West 40th Street that were part of a dense curtain of buildings that she would have seen. And so in that regard, compositionally, it's quite unique to O'Keefe's other skyscraper building paintings, but it gives her an ability then to sort of make it seem even more monumental and yet somehow dense at the same time. - The painting also features one of the flat out weirdest passages in pre-war American painting and that is Alfred Stieglitz's name and neon lights hovering in the air around the 20th or 25th floor of the radiator building. Why do you think that's there? - So yes, this is, I think you're right, to say it is one of the weirdest passages of American painting. So on the left edge of the composition, and as you say, neon red, it says Alfred Stieglitz. And so it's actually not attached to the radiator building itself. It is attached to a building that somewhat gets compressed but was truly there, four doors down from the radiator building was the Scientific American Building. And they had a neon sign that said Scientific American glowing over Bryant Park at this moment. And so there's so much ink that has been stilled on the painting and why O'Keefe included Stieglitz's name in this building. Is it a portrait of Stieglitz in a coded way, which we certainly see, and Wanda Corn has talked about this a lot, we've seen other artists of the Stieglitz circle making these portrait images that are not portraits in a conventional sense. That is only one possibility. There's also interpretations about this painting that are seen through the lens of their marriage, which was a complicated marriage. This was a moment of tension with them. Is this somehow satirical? Is it poking fun at Stieglitz? Is it angry? Is it something complex in the way that relationships can be complex that she wanted to document? There's been discussion about how Stieglitz was highly adverse to commercialism. He always considered himself as the creator of a temple of art rather than a gallery that would deal with the mundane back and forth of money in a commercial art world. And so is this something that hoax-funded him by including him as this figure glowing in red over New York City in a way that he would have hated? Or is it something else entirely different? This is where O'Keefe has left us no record on why she painted Stieglitz into this building. And so speculation is all there can be, but the reality is that yes, this painting became intimately associated with Stieglitz as a result. And or is it just that she wanted that patch of red? I mean, you really could go from the most banal interpretation onwards. It also introduces the American tree galore into the painting in ways that may point to a certain nationalistic celebration that-- Right, and we certainly see that in paintings, certainly, you know, 1931s cow skull red, white and blue where she's emblazoning the canvas with the American colors, so. We've been talking for the last few minutes about her pictures from outside skyscrapers. As you noted earlier on, she made a number of works of the view of the East River from within the Shelton, looking out over the river and lots of buildings, mostly the tops of buildings and industrial smoke and steam and all that good stuff. What not only attracted her to that view, but why did it hold her interest again and again and again? So I think-- let me start with the second question. Why did it hold her interest? I think, again, like the Shelton itself, this is her daily view. So this is an artist who is taking inspiration and looking at this view on a daily basis. And the view is fixed. The view doesn't change, although they did change floors at some point, but largely the view is unchanged, which means that she can then change everything she wants aesthetically in the composition. She can capture different moments of seasonality. I think we don't always think of O'Keefe as a seasonal painter, and she's working primarily always in New York in the cold months, so winter, early spring, because that's when they are living in New York. They're otherwise in Lake George. And then after 1929, she's out in the Southwest in the summer. So New York is a cold weather place for her. But you see hints of spring in one composition. You see snow in other compositions. You see fog in the dense fog of the near foreground, but you have other compositions where it's a denser cloud atmosphere over queens, essentially. And it's those moments where she is again capturing New York as it is felt, and she's feeling it on different days. So I'm not going to say it's just convenient for her to paint the East River, but there is a certain element of the constant inspiration that it offered. And she, again, to go back to how radical this view was, she has an unimpeded view. Think about that now in New York. You cannot see from Lexington Avenue to the East River in most parts of Midtown, New York. She is up there on the 30th floor, and she is looking over a sea of three-story buildings, four-story buildings, all the way to the East River to then Queens Beyond. So it's also just a view that is something exciting to her. She's painting elevated views in Lake George, though. She's also interested in that sort of compositional idea elsewhere. But here it is with these incredible geometries of all of the buildings below that she can play with, along with aesthetic choices around atmosphere and season. These paintings, and there are a number of them in the show, and some of them are almost grisai, and one of them is red, white, and blue, reminded me-- so these are paintings that are from the mid-1920s to the late 1920s, pretty much. And they reminded me enormously of the Strand Sheeler film in Hatta from 1921. So many of the same references to the city and landscape and steam and smoke and hustle and bustle and movement on the river are in these O'Keefe paintings. And it's funny. I found myself, whether looking at them in the catalog or looking at them in the show, I kind of had to remind myself that nothing in the painting was moving. I know that sounds like I was probably drunk, but I swear to god I wasn't. There's just this tremendous sense of movement in a lot of these paintings that somebody's sitting in a room, 30 floors up, still managed to be impressed by. No, you're absolutely correct. I mean, everything from boats moving on the river, certainly there's famous scenes out of the Sheeler Strand film that capture boats on the river. She's also looking at steam and smoke constantly belching out of the factories in Queens. Queens was very much an industrial landscape at this point. And so that's a constantly changing feature that she would have been watching. And so, yes, you really do get a sense of O'Keefe as an artist in the window enjoying this view. She didn't have a separate studio at this time. The Shelton is her studio when she's in New York. And that sitting room, specifically, she was choosing a unit. And she starts these around 1926 or so. And she's, yes, painting them until about 1929 or so. She's choosing units that have a very direct east view, a little bit of a north view. And where she has this ability to sit in the window and look out at this world below. And so I think there's just an element of excitement there. We've been talking about New York, but there is a heck of a lot of non-New York painting in this exhibition. There are abstractions with no particular geographic reference. There are lots of pictures of the Southwest. There are pictures of flowers. There are pictures of Lake George. What is your argument regarding the relationship between O'Keefe's pictures of the city and these pictures of other things and other places? And then we'll get to some specifics in a moment. So we felt very strongly that this exhibition should look at her New York's, which really haven't been looked at in a large group thus far, and try to understand what she's doing with them as pictures. But we also wanted to understand how they fit into her broader career at this moment. Again, this moment of transition where she is making a name for herself. And in many ways, we took our cue from O'Keefe's own exhibitions from this moment, from 1926, 1927, 1930, et cetera, where she has not-- there's no point that O'Keefe in the 1920s says, let me have my gallery show at Stiglet's Sea, all the New York paintings. She doesn't ever highlight this as a group of paintings. She is instead always integrating her New York paintings with other subject matter. So that became something that we started thinking about a lot, that if you look at the checklist, it looks somewhat segregated by subject. But actually, if you look at some of the exhibition photos themselves, works are intermingled. And so this suggested to us an artist who wanted these works to be in conversation. So let me interrupt. You mean in O'Keefe's exhibitions, the works were intermingled. Not necessarily in yours. They are intermingled in ours. But yes, in O'Keefe's solo exhibitions at Stiglet's Gallery, of which there is some photographic record, but not always. But there are usually checklists extant. You will see a skyscraper painting next to a Lake George painting. Or in 1930, a show that she called 27 new paintings, New Mexico, New York, Lake George. You see a skyscraper next to a large rock that she has seen in the Southwest called After a Walk It Mables. So she herself doesn't isolate the New York paintings from her other types of subject matters. She also talks quite openly about how she's moving between abstraction and representation frequently in her career. I've started to think of it as a continuum of abstraction, where all of painting is inherently abstract. She's somebody who is equally comfortable on the representational side and equally comfortable on the abstract side and sort of constantly shifting fluidly between what are sometimes seen as completely divergent poles. I don't think they were for her. And so we really wanted to try to reinsert that idea back into thinking about O'Keefe. Scholarship often tends to isolate subject matter by artists such as O'Keefe. And we wanted to reintegrate that and also just give, frankly, visitors a chance to see it for themselves, a chance to see how there might be a similar visual language at play in a painting of a tree as in a painting of a skyscraper. That again, O'Keefe is working on this sort of working with his ability to move amongst all these subjects fluidly. So what might we see in common or in influence between, say, dead tree, bare lake, touse from 1929, a picture of a silvery ghostly former tree presented in front of some living trees and say the skyscraper picture is in New York? Well, I think this is where again, you know, and she has already shown from earlier on that she's interested in monumental forms that crowd the picture plane. You know, she pushes items. She pushes objects right up to the picture plane. She makes them massive in scale and large in scale. She did actually equate her flower paintings and wanted to make them big, like the big building. So scale for her is something she's always thinking about. And certainly this idea of dead tree, bare lake, touse, where this wonderful silvery tree, as you say, sort of twists its way upwards, it is isolated, not unlike, you know, the Shelton is. It has this sort of ghostly glow of the silvery. The form is very similar. So it's not that she wasn't seeing, you know, she was in the Southwest and she had eyes that have been looking at skyscrapers. She'd been looking at trees previous to that. It's all coming out of the same impulse. Flagpole from 1925 is, I think, I could be wrong. Please correct me if I am. Oh, Lake George painting, I guess I'm okay. What in that painting might include either information from New York or within Flagpole, something that will inform the paintings of New York to come over the next few years? I think it's the latter. So, Flagpole-- I was wondering about that, yeah. Yeah, you know, Flagpole is this wonderful depiction of the small shed at Lake George, which is actually a building that O'Keefe painted a number of times, including one in the Art Institute's collection called Spring. And it's the shed where Stiglet's had his darkroom. And so, you know, it's a lowly little structure. But first of all, O'Keefe is already interested in architecture. You know, we think of her barns. We think of these, you know, these rural architectures like this shed, but we don't think about New York. So I think there is just this way that O'Keefe, as somebody interested in architectural structure, is that's a common thread, a common through line throughout all of her career. That's interesting. But what you also see is, again, this Flagpole itself placed right up against the picture plane. So this structuring of form that I think she then continues to amplify in New York City. And of course, this insane orb that I always think of as a moon. Other people have suggested it's the sun. You know, I mean, it's this orb that takes up half of the picture plane and is very much about the effects of natural illumination that we'll see again in New York City. So in many, this is a painting that was in The Seven Americans Show. So this would have been a painting she would have wanted to see alongside New York Street with moon, but couldn't. And so I think it's those connections where, again, whether it's right before she starts painting New York, so much of the visual language is already in play. And that pieces of it start moving into other subject matter that in a really inventive and constantly innovating way. There is a wall in the exhibition of similar sized abstractions from mostly 1927, kind of blacks and whites are primary, but there are also some blues and some pinks in the occasional little bit of green. What is the relationship of these pictures to New York? And what is the relationship of these pictures to not New York City? So I think that O'Keefe as an abstract painter is-- abstraction is central to everything she's doing, as I was talking about before. She's always thinking about abstraction in various ways. And there is a singular painting that is a pure abstraction that she called New York Knight Madison Avenue. And it is a painting that is fundamentally about gray shapes, about a yellow line, about a circle. You know, with lines radiating out of it, that if we had not been given this title, we would not know that it is a New York painting. But O'Keefe very clearly gave it a New York title. And in fact, structurally, the composition is very much like a later representational painting called New York Knight that's at the Sheldon Museum, that has a very similar structuring of light in the city. And so ultimately, it was a way of thinking about O'Keefe as an abstract painter, where you sometimes know the referent. In this case, we're given this referent. You're often not given a referent. But yet, there are ways that she's thinking about color and form across all of these works, and that she's then exhibiting them frequently together, that shows the commonalities. Her abstraction was always based in something, you know, whether it be a sort of a sensation she had or something she actually saw visually, that she's drawing her abstraction from. But she didn't care if you knew it or not. She didn't care if you knew what the referent was. But it's interesting that in one point, she did care. And we got this little title. I found myself thinking of those mostly 26-ish abstractions in the context of Manhattan, the Smithsonian American Art Museum painting, which in the exhibition is 50 feet away. And I found myself thinking about them together, because they're really nothing alike. Manhattan is full of hard edges. And these 26-7 abstractions are not. They're full of shading and blends and suggestions of forms moving into and out of each other. And yet, you can see how Manhattan is related to those pictures. And you can see that Manhattan is by the same hand. You can see that similar ideas and perhaps the idea of movement and moving amidst buildings is informing both. Yeah, yeah, that was a fun moment in the show for me, or walking back and forth between those paintings. Because, of course, that is an actual commission, which is not the case of really anything else in the show. But Manhattan was a commission from the Museum of Modern Art. So right there, Manhattan features the most cubist forms that O'Keeffe will ever create, I think. And perhaps deliberately for a show that is going to be on at the Museum of Modern Art, which is the arbiter of all things modernist and cubist at this moment. And so she was asked to create a triptych on the subject of the city, essentially. And Sheila, by the way, your favorite artist, Sheila, has a triptych in it as well. And so this is the center panel. They had to complete a center panel, and they had to show the Machet for the rest of the design. And we know that it happened in a hurry. So there are ways that the painting is different. It's much flatter and less gradient color than you see in these earlier abstractions. And then, as you say, there are these tie-ins, because it's also an O'Keeffe. But for me, the painting is so interesting, because it also includes these southwestern flowers. I mean, imagine any other artist in this show bringing in flowers in this way. It seems unthinkable. I wanted to wrap up by asking about what might seem like the least connected to New York paintings in the show, and that is pictures made in New Mexico, one of Taos Pueblo that's in Indiana, and two paintings of Rancho's Church, the Catholic Church, just south of Taos in New Mexico. What relationship are you arguing those paintings have to New York City? I mean, certainly, there's sort of the broader question of how we see the Southwest in O'Keeffe's career at this time. Often, O'Keeffe is seen in a purely southwestern light. These earlier works in general, also her Lake George works in general, are less well known, compared to her southwestern paintings or her flower paintings, for example. And 1929 is often seen as a rupture, this sort of moment where this artist goes to the Southwest and becomes a great southwestern artist. But of course, O'Keeffe does not actually cut off New York, cut New York out of her life. So there's the very real fact that she continues to live in New York until 1949. And New York is the center of her art world, the center, increasingly the center of the art world. And it's very central to her. A painting like Taos Pueblo is not to say that there are always impeccable correlations between one subject and the other. She goes to the Southwest and is immediately fascinated by this different architecture. But the Taos Pueblo paintings, there's a small one in the show that is literally just a vertical element and a horizontal element of the building. Again, is an abstracted look at architecture where she is making, in this case, something a small detail of this building feel very monumental in size. But I don't want to imply that every single thing that she does in the Southwest is exactly a carryover. But to say that these works are then all coexisting for an artist who is taking on now another subject matter that is architecturally related. Sarah Kelly Older, thanks very much. Thank you. Great to be here. [MUSIC PLAYING] The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents Raquib Shaw, Ballads of East and West. In his luminous paintings, Shaw masterfully blends Eastern and Western influences, weaving together fable, history, and autobiography. His works unite Western art and history with Asian ornamental aesthetics and philosophical traditions. The artist paints with porcupine quills and fine needles to render precise details of delicate flowers or distant mountains. Opulent scenes adorned with jewels and semi-precious stones captivate viewers with iridescent shimmer. This exhibition is on view through September 2. Learn more at mfah.org/requib shaw. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents Surrealism and Us, Caribbean and African diasporic artists since 1940 on view March 10 through July 28. Organized by curator Maria, Elena Ortiz, Surrealism and Us is inspired by the history of Surrealism in the Caribbean with connections to notions of the Afro-Surreal in the United States. Representing a global perspective, this exhibition is the first intergenerational show dedicated to Caribbean and African diasporic art presented at the modern. Inspired by the essay 1943 Surrealism and Us by Suzanne Cesar, the presentation includes over 80 works from the 1940s to the present day in a wide range of media, such as painting, sculpture, drawing, video, and installation. Centered on the intersection of Caribbean aesthetics, Afro-Surrealism and Afro-Futurism, Surrealism and Us explores how the exhibited artists have interpreted a modernist movement. Artworks framed within a pre-existing history of black resistance and creativity illustrate how Caribbean and black artists reinterpreted the European avant-garde for their own purposes. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome back. Next up, Rebecca Manson. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is showing Rebecca Manson Barbecue, an immersive installation made from ceramics. Manson's work has been shown in group shows at institutions such as Ball Remarfa in Texas and the Center for Craft in Asheville, North Carolina. I hear that's a great town. And at Tribeca Park in New York. Manson was curated by Claire Milliken and will be on view at the modern through August 25. Do not miss the images on manpodcast.com. They're kind of amazing. Rebecca Manson, welcome to the Modern Art Notes podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. Your work in clay, very often, perhaps almost always, references nature. The work is full of plants and flowers. And certainly, at the modern leaves, lots and lots and lots of leaves, why were you interested in joining an interest in nature with ceramics? You know, I think they truly are conjoined interests. I think that my love for ceramics has really been always rooted in the nature of this material and how lifelike it is, the way that the material goes through all these different stages of transformation and life cycles. And it deals with water cycles as it dries out. And then it goes through these chemical changes in the kiln and comes out completely changed and transformed is very much-- it's just a beautiful thing that has always really reminded me of just always feels like a metaphor for life in some way. And so it feels like a living material. It feels like part of nature. It is part of nature. It comes from the earth. And yeah, so that relationship is just built in for me. That said, I didn't always make work about nature, but-- Well, before you made work that addresses nature-- because you have made work that addresses nature for quite a number of years now-- what were you making and then what motivated you to pivot toward nature as a subject? I cycled through a lot of different ideas, mostly-- I think the common thread with all the different work that I made leading up until this work was using the material as sort of guide in creating metaphor about-- really about life cycles, but in all these different ways. And really thinking about how the process can shine through in this result and depict a sort of emotion that talks about some life stage. But the work varied a lot. And then I think it took a while to really make the choice to make really figurative work. Figurative was depicting nature, but much more literal work, I guess. Representational, maybe. Representational work. Yes, thank you. Because I was working hard to think of people and I couldn't think of it, and then I realized, oh, representation. Although I do see-- the nature stuff started with the sunflowers, and those are portraits. I think of that work as emotional portraits of nature. But they're stand-ins for figures. The sunflowers are-- they started as being sort of coming from my relationship with my father and exploring these different dynamics where of life stages were one sunflower. Usually there was one sunflower that is grown and one that is smaller. And so sometimes the grown one is wilting, and the smaller one is just coming to rise. Sometimes they're both in a storm, and they're both blowing in the wind and trying to hold strong. It's sort of about parental relationship put under different circumstances. So I don't always explain it so straightforward, but that's really what it is, is trying to capture some emotional dynamic that is universal, that we all have these relationships, and that can be difficult things to just be forward about, but sort of explore them through nature, which is something that we all-- I think pretty much everyone loves nature in their own way. I think everyone can agree on that. And that makes it easier to talk about death or just difficult personal things. We see a flower wilting, and we just accept it, because we have to. There's a certain kind of distance there, but there's also just-- we know this about flowers. We know that leaves fall. We know they're going to come back. These day-to-day interactions we have with nature sort of train us to deal with grief and deal with mortality, and all sorts of emotional events, I think. So yeah, I'm trying to reconnect people with that in a way that is friendly. Let's talk a little bit about barbecue, the work at the modern. So we're going to have images on manpodcast.com, and people can see that it's an installation that you, as a viewer, can be surrounded by. But I think the first thing for listeners to understand before we can talk about anything else about it is how many different ceramic units out of which it is made? If that's a phrase that exists. It is-- the estimate is 55,000 leaves. The projection was 45, and I believe it landed about 55. So each leaf is its own ceramic object? Yes. Each one is individually sculpted and glazed and goes through so much individual handling in between loading and unloading. Each one is washed multiple times, prepped to become part of the sculpture, sorted by color. So each one is very much an individual. Each one is unique, and then most of them are adhered, so they become units. The entire installation is modular, and then there's a sprinkling of maybe a couple thousand leaves to customize it on site. But yeah, they are individual little objects that come together to create this installation. So why a barbecue? I first had this idea to do something with a barbecue in 2021, just after I got back from my first soul show in London with Josh Lilly. And I went to the Met, I was thinking about what to do next, and I went to see a show of Dutch golden era paintings. And I discovered Dutch comic paintings, which I didn't know existed, that contain many of the themes we love of memento mori and vanitas and a sort of drama and symbolism, life and death, but are just ridiculous and hilarious. And they're these domestic scenes of people just getting drunk and things going wrong and fish falling on the floor. And there's just this sort of chaos in this energy that I loved and it made me want to do something about a party. That was the first idea. And then I thought about a barbecue. And over a couple of years, I just kind of worked through some different renditions of how do you, you know, relating to that sort of moment of like glory and culture and thinking about where we're now and this sort of rise and fall and what this sort of 20-something rendition of that would feel like. And I landed on a barbecue as a sort of format for a gathering that spans across different cultures, brings people together, takes place in nature, deals with fire. I was really excited about that element. And so, yeah, I knew when I started talking to the modern that it was going to be a really immersive leafy installation. And then I went back to that idea and thought, okay, it's a really leafy barbecue and it's really flammable and just built it up from there. I adore those same Dutch paintings. They are like one of my favorite things ever. They were produced in the 17th century by seemingly the million. So many that the Reich's Museum has installed shows of them in the Amsterdam airport because they've just got so many. Why not just put them up behind plexi in the airport, right? And what's great fun about them is not only is everything you just described happening in them, but there's always stuff happening in the corners, like a guy is in a tavern, drunk and peeing in a corner. There's an old couple making out in the other corner. Dogs and cats are running around doing whatever dogs and cats do, stealing food and whatnot. And the more you look at those genre scenes, although I hate that phrase, the more you look at those scenes, the more stuff you see. You see cards being played. You see people eating and singing and playing music. There is across those paintings in seemingly every square inch, just a ludicrous amount of highly specific detail. Have you carried that detail into this installation? Absolutely. Yes, I mean, I think I'm really proud of this work. Like, the thing about it was that it's about three to four times larger than anything I've made. And each of those little steps, it requires so much. And that's on a technical level. And it's also on, you know, when you're dealing with a narrative and composition and color and all these really creative decisions. And I just wanted to be sure that nothing was lost in the ambition of the scale and that I was really maximizing the opportunity in making this large scale work to tell the deepest story that I could tell. And so that is told through the experience of weaving throughout these piles where you approach and there, you know, there are these different scenes that you get to experience. But it's also these different layers. Like, the wind is sort of carrying you through it. There's a sort of directionality to the components of the flowers that are sort of indicating where the wind is going. And then some more dramatic ones like hydrangea. That's really more violently blowing in the wind off of this pile. The wind sort of comes to a crescendo for the back of the room. And so it's circulating. So it's sort of guiding the viewer around into a cycle. Everything in this installation is moving in the cycle. And the wind is a reminder of time passing. And also gives it a feeling that it's alive. And, you know, because movement sort of signifies life. And wind is the conduit to movement. There's the color choice overall is really trying to depict sunset. And so that when you step back, it feels like the whole thing is sort of being under this golden hour lighting. And when you're in the back of the room, you're looking the other direction, giving you a moment to reflect on a different type of milestone in life perhaps. And then also as you circulate, the flowers are in different stages of their lives. So when you sort of enter, there's some little sprouts coming through the leaves. And as you start to circulate, it becomes just a pile of dead flower refuse and something that we see in Dutch still life painting, where you have flowers, for example, from different parts of the year within single arrangements. Yeah, exactly. And that contrast allows you to contemplate these different life stages. My favorite thing was, you know, with barbecue, dealing with food. And the question of like, you know, the chicken was my favorite. Not only are there flowers, there's all kinds of stuff. I don't know if embedded is the right word, but embedded across within the installation. And as I look through it, I thought to myself, oh, these are the same things you find in Dutch gold age painting. You find playing cards. You find hunks of meat. You find discarded bits of fish that the cat is delighted to have found. So as you sprinkled stuff across the barbecue, across the leaves, were you mindful that you were, you know, doubling and tripling down on kind of the 17th century stuff, only updating it for now? It's funny. Honestly, I had little moments where I checked in on myself with that. Oh, yeah, that's the origin story here. But not really, it wasn't the, I wasn't trying to drive that reference home. You know, I think it really happened organically. And, but yeah, that connection, it's kind of funny how that really, it's a really real connection. But, you know, if you look closely, like these stakes were bought at a shop and stop. And like, you might even find a little sticker on there, a little residual plastic that they wouldn't have had in the 17th century. They're grill marks, barbecue grill marks on the meat. Yeah, so then each of those food items, they're in different stages. So I was interested in overlapping these, this spectrum of life stages of flowers and leaves with the different food items. So the meat goes, the stakes go from rod cooked to partially consumed to just bone. My favorite one was the chicken. Jessica fabricated these chicken wings for me that are in different stages from just like goopy, raw, slimy chicken to marinating, cooked, consumed. She's just incredible. They're just, they're unbelievably realistic. But the thing about them that's really moving to me is just how disgusting they are. They aren't just realistic. They're something really emotional about that slimy, raw chicken, like it feels like skin. And that makes us think about our own bodies. But the thing about the chicken is that that's this part of nature that like, is it is chicken nature anymore? You know, like, this is, this is some factory farming. That's, I'm interested in the line between man made in nature. And so the chicken is this tiny detail in this giant installation. That's sort of a nod at that and what we're doing to nature. And the barbecue is a social event, but it's also, it's spilling, it's spilling embers into this abandoned dry leafy scene. There's a question of like, is this place just going to blow up any second now? So this is just me contemplating what my role is in this moment as an artist working with nature and having a voice around climate change. And I'm exploring that. I think that it's really about emotion and just connecting with nature and giving people a moment to outside of nature, but with nature in this fantasy way to just contemplate what that means to them. And I think when you're able to draw these relationships, learn from nature's lessons out of context, you really realize how important it is to preserve it. Two things come to mind. One, I'm now having trout for dinner tonight. So I was going to have chicken and I'm not anymore. And secondly, I probably should have made this clearer early on. But there is a tremendous amount of movement across the work. It's like though there is a whirlwind blowing and the modern's three quarter closed, one quarter open ellipse gallery, as if the wind is whipping around the walls. And that you've done not that before, but you've done this thing where the leaves are moving. I can't remember the exact title of the exact piece. But you've got, yeah, it's got her. Where leaves are moving up and around a storm gutter. There is this sense of natural activity that's quite in the midst of whatever we're seeing. More recent, well, I don't know about more recently, but recently you made a number of large so-called wings for a recent exhibition in London. What are those wings and what are they made of? And I don't mean what are they made of in terms of ceramic. But I mean, what are we meant to understand that the wings are made or descending from? That's a better-- I'm going to briefly address the movement thing and bring it back to the mosque for a second. Because actually, that's an amazing connection. So I do think the investigation of movement is probably a lifelong one for me. And it comes from the process. And it comes from one of the reasons I work specifically with porcelain is because of the movement that it undergoes throughout its processing, where it has this memory, it slumps, it droops in the kiln. And it just sets you up for a practice that's full of surprise. But it also, I think, brings a lot of emotion to the work and brings a lot of naturally begins to reference the body because it deals with its postures. And so it sort of comes from that. And then there's this sort of technical obsession with this material. It goes through so much movement. But then it's always so stagnant. In the end, then it's hardened, it's frozen, and it's just done. So just trying to bring back honor, that sort of idea of movement in the result. And just depicting movement in a static form is just a beautiful, formal challenge to undertake. It's just my favorite things. But then it also serves as a-- it's a metaphor for time and time passing by in a way to sort of create a sense of timing in a narrative installation where you're trying to-- you're really trying to create a time-based experience. So that's kind of a good foundation for that. So it's sort of the movement thing sort of is a great connector of these different levels that I'm thinking about my work on, from process to technique to narrative. Anyway, so yeah, that's a great connection to the wings, which really began through material as well. I long had this desire to just create ceramic work that could capture the draping of fabric. This just thing that's part of art history, that's so beautiful that just speaks to life, right? Like, draping fabric. Because it's such a, again, just a material that deals with movement throughout my encounter with it. And then when it's done, it just feels so static. So I just spent years trying to create work that capture that really just just sculpt essentially that's sort of draping. But then I realized that's not what I want. I want to create kinetic sculptures. I want to find a way to get ceramics to move. How can I do that? And after years of materials testing, I've found a combination of materials to work in with ceramics that allowed me to create these sculptures that you can really drape that will be different each time, that engage noise, and that when you handle them, you have to deal with their weight. And yeah, and so I was interested in moth wings in just looking at microscopic images of them. They're actually so furry. They're beautiful. They're so colorful. We think about moths as, I don't know, often pests or just-- I had a moth infestation in my closet. I was not into them. They were pests to me. And they're drabby. Like, everyone talks about the beauty of the butterfly. But guess what? If you really look up close at a moth, they're just-- they're glorious. So I just wanted to honor them and translate these microscopic images with some creative liberties and fantasy. And yeah, that's what the moth wings are. And I suppose I should point out that they are not moth sized. They're not. So the moth wings range in scale from 3 feet to 12 feet so far. So maybe Dr. Do Little Moths. Yeah, so if you look at-- I think that 8 foot by 12 foot moths, I think that's the scale that's required to see their beauty. But much like the leaf installations, I'm trying to set up an experience for people to look at something from far away and see an image and then come up close and see the whole world within it. And I think that that is how I look at nature. And that's how I create my sculptures. Rebecca Manson. Thanks very much. Thank you, Tyler. That's all for this week's show. The Modern Art Notes Podcast is edited by Wilson Butterworth. Special thanks to Steve Roden, who created the sound for the program. The Modern Art Notes Podcast is released under a Creative Commons license. please visit Modern Art Notes for more information.
