Stepping out of the elevator on the second floor of the Phillips Collection, it took only a few steps before Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings captured my attention. Despite my position two galleries away, her artwork gripped me immediately as I hastened my pace into the exhibition space.
The conspicuous placement of Jack the Pulpit IV catches the eye of museumgoers once they reach the second floor landing and beckons them into the “O’Keeffe and Friends: Dialogues with Nature” exhibit.
From each corner of the gallery space, I felt the energy bursting from the center of her naturalistic subjects. The enchantment of O’Keeffe’s paintings stems equally from the subject matter as it does from the artist’s mastery with her materials. She paints nature as if she is peering through a magnifying glass. She does not recreate the broader beauty of a flower, but rather breaks the subject down to its essential form of a singular petal or leaf.
In Large Dark Red Leaves on White, O’Keeffe explores the subtle contours and veins of a leaf in a robust, colorful way, resulting in an expressive abstraction from the subject’s original form. The contrast between the deep red of the leaf and its stark white background catches the viewer’s eye and draws them in to interact with the leaf’s highlights and shadows in a unique conversation with this natural motif.
In these paintings, O’Keeffe does not take credit for the richness of her environment, rather she participates in a discovery process, seeking out the most dynamic shapes and hues. From a foot away, the viewer can appreciate the painstaking blending of oil paints of Jack in the Pulpit IV, the final result being a painting with remarkably smooth color transitions and an overall glossy sheen. O’Keeffe engages the deepest hues of the blue, black, green, white, and purple color palettes.
The petals of the Jack in the Pulpit flower create an organic border that starkly juxtaposes deep royal blue and sap green against black. The wisp of a white stigma in the center of the flower pulls the viewer’s gaze from the bottom of the painting up into the delicate folds of petals at the top.
The remarkable pieces, like Jack in the Pulpit IV and Large Dark Red Leaves on White, brilliantly overwhelm the space, to the misfortune of the other artists represented. The Phillips Collection labels the exhibition as “O’Keeffe and Friends: Dialogues with Nature,” when in reality the voices of the friends are drowned out by O’Keeffe’s conversation with her subjects.
The artists represented alongside O’Keeffe were her contemporaries. They painted similar subject matter, yet did not feel related or in conversation at all. O’Keeffe’s emphatic paintings cause the smaller, more agitating canvases of Arthur Dove and John Marin to feel out-of-place and overshadowed. The different techniques and more fractured styles with which they represent nature felt starkly in contrast, rather than complementary to O’Keefe’s dynamism, and leave the viewer yearning for more of her commanding responses to nature.
While other artists attempt to interpret or characterize their subject matter, O’Keeffe celebrates it. Her paintings echo and exalt the forms and colors she encounters in the natural world. As a result, O’Keeffe’s masterful works draw the viewer in to her elaborate conversations and open up that dialogue with nature for all to share.
The Phillips Collection
1600 21st St. N.W.
Tue.-Sun. 10 a.m.- 5 p.m.
phillipscollection.org
