In the marketplace of attitudes, there are two principal attitudes concerning Georgia O’Keeffe that clamor for the credulity of the willing buyer. The first conjures her up as that famous, ageless beauty of the Stieglitz photographs, the embodiment of femininity and pioneer spirit, the great Earth Mother thundering out of New Mexico. Her massive, legendary personality, an archetypal force of nature, seems to reach out to us even from beyond the grave, to which she descended but two years ago, after a life that spanned almost one hundred years.
Another attitude that has gained currency, best enunciated by Clement Greenberg, takes a decidedly dimmer view. On this reading Miss O’Keeffe’s work is at best an unresolved compromise between Modernism and tradition, a lump in the leaven of the avant-garde. Her subversiveness consists in appropriating certain of Modernism’s hard-won formal convictions and placing them in the service of mildly vulgar crowd-pleasers. Whether or not Miss O’Keeffe sincerely wished to be as popular as she has become is not the issue: the fact is that she is liked and liked easily, and for this she will have to answer.
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