Art and style of Georgia O'Keeffe

SALEM, Mass. — Even as a teenager, the modern artist Georgia O’Keeffe wanted to stand out, describing herself in her Virginia high school yearbook as “a girl who would be different in habit, style and dress.”

Over a seven-decade career, she fully realized this, which is abundantly clear in the exhibit “Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style” at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. It’s a refreshingly new presentation of the artist — the first to show the relationship between her paintings, clothing and photograph poses.

“She was a pioneer of modern art and worked deliberately to fashion her identity and image, said Peabody Essex Museum’s deputy director Lynda Hartigan. “She believed everything a person makes or wears should have a unified aesthetic.”

As described in the wall text, that aesthetic meant that “everything in one’s environment should be beautiful and unified in a harmonious style of simplicity and understatement.”

Organized by the Brooklyn Museum (where it broke attendance records), the exhibit chronologically presents 50 works of art, 50 garments largely created by O’Keeffe, and nearly 100 photographs mostly taken by her promoter and eventual husband, Alfred Stieglitz, but also by Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz and others. Videos show her walking with Stieglitz in New York City and living at her home in Santa Fe, where she moved in mid-career.

At the exhibit entrance, three items — the painting “In the Patio,” a black and white dress, and a portrait — are connected by a V-pattern. The V appears as three-stacked painted layers of white, black and blue, a V-neck in the dress, and O’Keeffe dressed in three layers of V-neck clothing. The V appealed to O’Keeffe as a frame for her long neck, as an abstract, simple shape, and as a reflection of nature, such as tree limbs and mountain canyons.

Known for her paintings of voluptuous flowers and stark animal bones, O’Keeffe, who died in 1986 at age 98, became a celebrity in the 1970s.

“She was an example of someone who broke away from urban life and lived in the wild on her own,” said co-curator Wanda Corn. “People became interested in not just her art, but her lifestyle.”

The exhibit highlights the way she treated her body like a “blank canvas” and the way she “looked like her paintings.” Carefully choosing outfits for her portraits, she is unsmiling, at times looking androgynous or meditative.

As the displays of dresses and kimonos reveal, she meticulously preserved her clothing, most of which comes from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. She favored the finest silks, cotton and wools and loose clothing like tunics, wraps and billowy sleeves.

“Like other radical women, O’Keeffe loved challenging and confounding society’s conventional sartorial codes, and Stieglitz enjoyed dramatizing her boldness and modernity,” explains the wall text.

Throughout her life, O’Keeffe often wore white and black clothing, with V-shaped neckline, flowing lines and little ornamentation. Outdoors, she wore a black cape and black hat. When she moved to New Mexico, she started to wear denim, associated with cowboys in the West before it became a popular material. And after her travels to India, Hong Kong and Japan, she wore wrapped dresses and kimonos.

Occasionally, her dress reflected the bold colors in her paintings. On view is a red and purple madras wrap dress inspired by India next to the painting “Stump in Red Hills.” At the center, a twisted elongated stump is set against fiery red hills that seem to fold together like fabric.

Inspired by forms in nature, O’Keeffe incorporated swirls and spirals into her paintings and dress. The spiral pattern on a kimono is similar to that in her painting “Green, Yellow and Orange,” which is an an aerial view of a riverbed. On view are her sculpture “Abstraction,” a large white spiral evoking an animal horn, and a portrait of her at age 97 posed next to a larger, black version of the sculpture.

An exhibit on O’Keeffe would disappoint if it lacked any flower or bone paintings. “Jack in the Pulpit No. 3,” is a dramatic image of a large purple flower pushing up between two deep green leaves against a blue sky. And “Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills” shows a skull with long curving horns suspended in a swirl of gray clouds above undulating rust-colored hills. Even in her painting “Brooklyn Bridge,” a floral image appears, where the bridge arches look like elongated petals.

In the rare color portrait “Georgia O’Keeffe with Painting in the Desert, N.M.,” photographer Tony Vaccaro captured O’Keeffe in her fullness. Standing in a loose black dress outdoors in the desert and facing “Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow,” her face in profile seems to be part of the bright yellow orb in the center of the painting – as though the artist and her work are one.

– jfeinberg@ledger.com

On Twitter: @JodyF_Ledger

If you go ...

What: "Georgia O'Keeffe: Art, Image, Style"

Where: Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, 161 Essex St., Salem, Mass.

When: Through April 1. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.

Admission: $20 adults, $18 seniors, $12 students, free for 16 and under.

Information: (978) 745-9500, pem.org