The legend of O’Keeffe is so monumental that her art sometimes seems secondary. With some artists – Picasso, for instance – the work lives up to the man; with others, such as Frida Kahlo (coincidentally a friend of O’Keeffe’s), not so much. There is, remarkably, not a single painting by O’Keeffe in a British public collection, which makes the retrospective of her work at Tate Modern, the largest ever held outside America, a unique opportunity to see just how much she deserves her hallowed reputation.
If O’Keeffe’s personality was all about control so, too, was her art. Born on a farm in Wisconsin, she was initially drawn to music but when she turned to painting she gave herself a thorough theoretical grounding before she ever touched a canvas. She studied in both Chicago and New York and learned about modernism from the painter and educator Arthur Wesley Dow. Believing she wouldn’t make it as an artist, she took a job as a commercial designer in Chicago. What changed things for her was when she sent some drawings to a friend who, without her knowledge, showed them to Stieglitz, who then, again without O’Keeffe’s knowledge, exhibited them at his 291 gallery in New York (where he had been the first person to show Cézanne’s work in America). “Finally,” he wrote, “a woman on paper.” A correspondence between the pair followed, then a meeting, then a solo show, and finally marriage.
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