Artwork Title: Georgia O’Keeffe, Abiquiu, New Mexico

Georgia O’Keeffe, Abiquiu, New Mexico, 1984

Bruce Weber

O’Keeffe considered kimonos intimate wear and did not wear them when modeling for photographers. She made one major exception late in life when she wore this kimono for Bruce Weber’s camera. The prominent fashion photographer made portraits of O’Keeffe on two different occasions. For his first visit in 1980, she posed as she had been doing for twenty years, in a black wrap dress, seated against bones and firewood at Ghost Ranch. For the second sitting in 1984, the ninety-seven-year-old artist came up with a hybrid outfit fusing male with female and East with West. She wore a heavy Japanese men’s padded winter robe and her well-worn vaquero hat, with something white to emphasize the V-neck, and her Alexander Calder pin to hold the front together. Framed within the calligraphic circles of her own abstract sculpture, O’Keeffe looks away, a dignified, seemingly genderless elder. This inwardness was truly there in O’Keeffe’s aging body. Macular degeneration made it impossible for her to read or make art, and she now lived for many hours of the day in her mind, sitting quietly with her eyes downcast, listening to music or caretakers reading to her. This is the last formal portrait anyone made of O’Keeffe. [https://www.incollect.com/articles/georgia-o-keeffe-living-modern] For this formal portrait, the last anyone would make of her, the 97-year-old artist came up with a hybrid outfit fusing male with female and East with West. She put on a heavy, Japanese men’s padded winter robe and topped it off with her well-worn vaquero hat. She added something white to emphasize the V-neck and her silver Alexander Calder pin to hold the front together. Weber framed her within the calligraphic circles of her own abstract sculpture that echo the spiral letter O of her OK pin. In this costume, O’Keeffe looks away, a dignified, seemingly genderless elder. ...In Abstraction, O’Keeffe treated three-dimensional forms as drawn lines, changing in width and thickness and enclosing rounded spaces that vary in diameter and size. The voids are as visually active as the lines that define them. This 1946 sculpture began as a small tabletop piece molded in clay. Beginning in 1979, several editions of the sculpture were made in various sizes and materials such as white-lacquered bronze and cast aluminum. O’Keeffe posed for Bruce Weber in front of a scaled-up version of Abstraction in this photograph. (https://designlifenetwork.com/georgia-okeeffe-living-modern-virtual-tour/)
14 x 11 in
Uploaded on Feb 14, 2018 by Suzan Hamer

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