I don't mind saying that it's fun to wonder how many exhibitions the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum will be able to come up with before they have to start from scratch again. Being dedicated to one artist attaches some pretty serious strings to a museum's scope and, in the interest of keeping things fresh, those strings can be stretched mighty thin. After viewing the exhibition
Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol: Flowers of Distinction
, I'd have to say the threads are showing. Museum materials suggest that bringing together around 40 depictions of flowers by two
of the country's most celebrated artists "demonstrates how their paintings of the same subject, which represent very different moments in the history of American modernism, allowed them to both position and distinguish themselves within an age-old tradition of flower painting." Uh, what's that, now?
Aside from the dubious implication that these artists have anything to do with each other because of a shared and fervent jockeying for status in the cutthroat world of flower painting, the work is just plain tough to look at side by side. Were O'Keeffe and Warhol both malcontents and weirdos? Yes. Both insistent and determined to represent ways of perceiving and painting outside of the accepted norms? Yes. Did they both paint some flowers? Yes. Are there thousands of artists that could be paired under the same criteria? Absolutely. The comparison that really matters in the end, at least in terms of a museum's need to generate attendance figures, is fame. Now, so long as we all understand that ticket sales trump scholarship, let me just say that it's a real kick in the pants to have a bunch of Warhols in town.
This is a curious and rare body of work to represent Warhol and, from a paint-by-numbers sketch on through several simple, graphic representations of flowers and into a handful of significant flat-pop, silk-screened saturations, it is all arresting in its singular presence and it's marked contrast to O'Keeffe's work. Despite the fact that the work of the two artists, except for a few very cautious pairings, is kept separate-it should be side by side thematically, but that would no doubt be far too jarring-there is a trance-like spell to fall into when taken as a whole. It's possible to slip the sexualized readings from O'Keeffe and the factory ethos from Warhol long enough to concentrate on pure form and feel how both painters explode into the interior of their subject, seeing through the physical work and into a state of grace, peace and perfection that is behind the hand-worked canvas yet feeds the facility of each stroke and application, allows the color and line to be perfect, to be from a place beyond time or personality. From this place, a zone familiar to deeply successful artists, monks and racing car drivers, Warhol was able to perceive that his isolated and singular pop art view of the world was no more odd or focused than painting an outdoor scene and O'Keeffe spoke of how the harried, modern world never truly sees a flower, but she could just as well have said "soup can." So at the very edge of color and perception, at the place where an artist grapples with the fact that no one else sees the same, crystal-clear picture of the world, Warhol and O'Keeffe can almost rub noses.
But not any more than any other two determined painters, really. And from whatever point of compatibility that might have been shared across a good many decades and wildly different surroundings, O'Keeffe sought consistently to become more human while Warhol longed to be less so. I can accept that
Flowers of Distinction
implies some implicit contradictions in the artwork even in its title, but the distinction between these two artists is so tied to the subsequent evolution of visual culture, it's a shame there aren't more materials addressing the vastness of the space between the two rather than a sparsity of clues struggling to create a tenuous bridge across a narrows that really doesn't exist.
Flowers of Distinction
is on view at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (217 Johnson St., 946-1000) through Jan. 8, 2006.
