Long before the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation officially folded its assets into Santa Fe's Georgia O'Keeffe Museum this past spring, the benefits were bubbling to the surface. The obvious boon to the museum was enough artwork to quintuple its collection, including many of the devastating watercolors that-I don't care what anyone says-are O'Keeffe's best, even if not most important, works.
But the museum now also controls the artist's Abiquiu home and studio and, more intriguing, all the letters and documents that the foundation had housed there. Because the O'Keeffe Foundation was not an organization born of good will but, rather, from court order in the wake of tremendous conflict and animosity surrounding the O'Keeffe estate at the time of her death, it largely confined its duties to maintaining the Abiquiu property, loaning paintings and waiting for an appropriate institution to appear that could assume its duties when its 20-year lifespan (again, court-ordered) came to an end.
The foundation did very little in terms of researching or allowing access to its less obvious assets, such as O'Keeffe's copious letters. Once it became clear that the O'Keeffe Museum was the heir apparent, the two organizations began working together to understand the scope of what was involved and arranging for the influx of new materials to arrive at the museum's already significant Research Center. It was somewhere in this process that noted O'Keeffe scholar Sarah Whitaker Peters, author of
Becoming O'Keeffe: The Early Years
, discovered and tracked down the correspondence between O'Keeffe and art conservator Caroline Keck. This, in turn, led to the O'Keeffe Museum (217 Johnson St., 946-1017) presenting
Georgia O'Keeffe: Color and Conservation
(through Sept. 10), the current exhibition curated by Peters and René Paul Barilleaux.
Keck was a pioneer in the field of conservation, not only interested in championing the practice in a responsible way in museums and private collections, but in developing new varnishes and techniques for safeguarding paintings, understanding that such efforts had to go beyond mere surface protection. Paintings had always been slathered with shellac or varnish for defense, at the cost of yellowing, cloudiness and vulnerability to future manipulation. Keck understood that it wasn't just the physical object that needed conservation, it was also the artist's original intent and vision. One can imagine how much these ideas appealed to the controlling O'Keeffe when the two women met during O'Keeffe's 1946 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Keck and O'Keeffe developed a lasting relationship, working together, though sometimes disagreeing, for the remainder of O'Keeffe's life in order to develop appropriate varnishes to conserve O'Keeffe's work. The minutiae of this relationship, as well as the history of conservation revealed in
Color and Conservation
, will be titillating for many of the more technically inclined visitors to the exhibition, but what's most exciting is the small push it gives toward viewing O'Keeffe's paintings in a different light.
Among other techniques for portraying depth and contrast, O'Keeffe used matte and glossy blocks of color side by side, a fine point of craft that would be lost with the thick application of a uniform varnish. Keck's innovations allowed for O'Keeffe's paintings to be protected, and for their subtle transitions to be preserved. It's not important to be interested in the how of it, though-looking at the collected works in the show with the mind focused on the idea that each one contains something so delicate and essential that it took two bright women and a bevy of chemistry experiments and aerosol sprayers to figure out how to preserve it, is a tiny but wonderful epiphany, an almost accidental orgasm of an art show. Works were chosen and borrowed for the exhibition based on their mention in letters between Keck and O'Keeffe, so it's possible to tour the museum armed with the catalog and get specific about the challenges and concerns many of the paintings represented. But it's equally delightful to faze your eyes in and out of different depths of focus, the way you must if you want to see the hidden Jesus or find that annoying cartoon guy wearing the striped hat among the crowds.
There is no blending of colors in O'Keeffe's paintings, just smears, swipes and wedges of close and contrasting hue side by side. Staring at each of these, as a friend recently described, "situations" between different elements is to sink into painting with the same expectant pleasure one feels when dropping into a hot, salted bath-two warring temperatures resolve into a single, sumptuous simmer. There is illusionistic triumph and respect for O'Keeffe (and Keck), when stepping back from active deconstruction of each painting into its disparate colors and sheens results not in a camouflage-like, interference pattern of unrelated splotches, but the incredible cohesive grace of a Bella Donna blossom or a dark dune.
The extent of O'Keeffe and Keck's relationship, as well as O'Keeffe's fervor for conservation (she sometimes paid for the restoration and treatment of works that had already been sold to private collectors), was unknown prior to the research Peters and Barilleaux carried out in creating
Color and Conservation
. It is exciting on some level to see such active, if specific, scholarship alive and well and resulting in such quick display for the public. But it's even more exciting for me to be lured past O'Keeffe's watercolors, which confound me in their beauty, and toward a new kind of appreciation for her more well-known landscapes and flowers which, prior to this exhibition, just plain confounded me.
