For Georgia O’Keeffe At Peabody-Essex  (2017) Just Because She Lighted The Firmament For Long While And Made Me Appreciate Luscious Desert Blooms And Such    

By Lenny Lynch

Defiant, independent, no lover of men, boys either as she put it fore-square in her late Victorian high school yearbook (making me wonder if she was not some preternatural Frida Kahlo taking her pleasures where she found them but the sever looks with that hard-press bun of a hairpiece done about six ways to severity make me think that she lived for her art and thought about sex through her fleshy vaginal lush flowers. And so she went to see William Merritt Chase the godfather of many of her generation. Went too a-skimming to that oasis of modernism and protest art politics the Art Student League in New York City then Mecca on the rise (ASL making me think that it was a popular front invention of those devious American-born Stalinists with their hands deep in the pie but no that institution stands on its own although when you look at the roster from Stuart Davis to Jackson Pollack and beyond makes you wonder-good wonder, the wonder of Scotty Fitzgerald’s lonesome Dutch sailors as they coursed  Long Island Sound and saw, hell, saw the fresh green breast of a new land. Pity later-okay.         

Hit the town running pushing into old Stieglitz’s workshop, what did he call it oh salon, he onto something about art once the camera took pretty pictures out of an artist’s hands (took praise be ugly pictures too picture old dusty Okies travelling, sideshow geeks, drag queens working too hard to be Miss Judy Garland, gay lovers in secluded closets before the Stonewall wash us clean, holy goofs and con men, things blowing up, things being blown up but mainly the human comedy to make one think that something somewhere went awry) and left the field shattered dumping those picture perfect pantries filled with precise foods, prefect flowers in season or out, and brilliant baskets of fruit, my god, millions of brilliant baskets of fruit, grapes gleaning pearl-like. No the times, like all times, required something more and Ms. O’Keeffe was showing just a glimmer of that understanding when she went to upstate New York and painted red, blue, green barns, and the like showing us a new pastoral.      

But forget all that. No, put it in the past once she headed Western, an Eastern girl born for the West just look at those later photographs of her like some wizen Earth Mother pioneer stock come a-blazing to tame the land to her brush. Make desert-forsaken whitened cracked cattle bones and sagebrush come alive in the new dispensation. Made that homestead Ghost Ranch (dude ranch so figure we are close to Professor Turner’s closing of the frontier Clark Gable will do the rest come The Misfits time) come alive with Western-strewn colors all siena brown, mojave yellow, death valley red. Did it with some style too, something to look at in big gallery art museum walls. Something to ponder about living for your art and be damned with the rest. Be damn with the men, boys too.