Aziz Art June 2016

Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley,
John Marin, Paul Strand, and
Edward Steichen. Strand's
photography, as well as that of
Stieglitz and his many
photographer friends, inspired
O'Keeffe's work. Also around this
time, O'Keeffe became sick during
the 1918 flu pandemic, like so
many others.Soon after 1918, she
began working primarily in oil, a
shift away from having worked
primarily in watercolor in the
earlier 1910s. By the mid-1920s,
O'Keeffe began making large-scale
paintings of natural forms at close
range, as if seen through a
magnifying lens. In 1924, she
painted her first large-scale flower
painting Petunia, No. 2, which was
first exhibited in 1925. She also
completed a significant body of
paintings of New York buildings,
such as City Night and New York—
Night (1926) and Radiator Bldg—
Night, New York (1927).
O'Keeffe turned to working more
representationally in the 1920s in
an effort to move her critics away
from Freudian interpretations. Her
earlier work had been mostly
abstract, but works such as Black
Iris III (1926) evoke a veiled
representation of female genitalia
while also accurately depicting the
center of an iris. O'Keeffe
consistently denied the validity of
Freudian interpretations of her art,
but fifty years after it had first been
interpreted in that way, many
prominent feminist artists assessed
her work similarly; Judy Chicago,
for example, gave O'Keeffe a
prominent place in her The Dinner
Party. Although 1970s feminists
celebrated O'Keeffe as the
originator of "female iconography",
O'Keeffe rejected their celebration
of her work and refused to
cooperate with any of their
projects.
In 1922, the New York Sun
published an article quoting
O'Keeffe: "It is only by selection, by
elimination, and by emphasis that
we get at the real meaning of
things. Inspired by Precisionism,
The Green Apple, completed in
1922, depicts her notion of simple,
meaningful life.
Beginning in 1923, Stieglitz
organized annual exhibitions of
O'Keeffe's work. By the mid-1920s,
O'Keeffe had become known as one
of the most important American
artists.