The Desert Flower Blooms-Joan Allen’s “Georgia O’Keeffe” (2009)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Si Lannon

Georgia O’Keeffe, starring Joan Allan, Jeremy Irons, 2009

[When I was a kid I hated art, art as it was presented in art class where Mr. Jones-Henry held forth from freshman to senior in high school. Worse unlike some of the other guys I hung around in high school like Sam Lowell who loved art, was Mr. Jones-Henry’s star pupil I had not gone to North Adamsville Junior High School and had him for seventh and eighth grade at Snug Harbor Junior High before he transferred over to the high school.* So maybe I double-hated art especially after the time he took the whole eight grade class up to the famous Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The idea was to grab some culture I guess in his eyes by viewing some masterpieces they had there, especially a guy named Monet who did haystacks and churches that Jones-Henry was crazy for (guy is what I would have called him or any artist then). 

The big reason that I hated art from that museum experience on was that I was pretty naïve, naïve naturally if anybody is talking about budding teenagers and sex. I was sweet on a girl from the neighborhood named Laurie Kelly who I thought liked me (and actually did before the museum disaster) and we were paired together to view the works of art. I had never seen a woman, any woman naked so when we got to a painting by Renoir of a chubby woman bathing outdoors I turned bright red, maybe crimson red.  Laurie who was just beginning to bud out herself started laughing at me, started pointing out how red in the face I was to other students. After that she didn’t want anything to do with me according to my friend Ben Lewis who knew her older sister who told him that I was “square,” meaning social death in those days. After that horrible episode I hated Jones-Henry with a passion and I went crazy trying to get out of art class when he went over to the high school, No such luck and it is a good thing that Sam did a lot of my art projects or I might still be in that class. (The villain of the piece Renoir by the way who Sam and Laura in line with their theory recently claimed had a fetish for painting nudes with womanly bodies and girlish faces and have wondered out loud why the authorities didn’t catch on to his perversions.)     

[Mr. Jones-Henry was an Englishman in a heavily Irish school where almost everybody had some Irish blood and some family bad blood against the English for the 800 years of troubles, but nobody faulted him on that score, no me as I have mentioned above with other hatreds stirring. We all found it odd that he had that hyphenated name though and one day he explained it along with his art heritage. He was from some branch of the Burne-Jones family, I asked Sam recently, but he does not remember how the family tree went. One forbear was Edward Burne-Jones of the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which had been started by the poet-artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti back in the mid-19^th century.

More importantly Jones-Henry’s family had come to America due to his father’s work in Boston for some English firm and when it came time for him to go to college he went to the famous Massachusetts School of Art. From there he got jobs in North Adamsville. Why all of this was important was that he encouraged Sam to go to his alma mater and had worked to get Sam, a poor working-class family guy, a scholarship to the school. In the end Sam’s mother talked him out of it on economic grounds that she didn’t want him to become some starving artist in some cold-water garret.]            

After high school and after the Army, after Vietnam which changed a lot of ways I looked at stuff as it did to everybody from the old corner boy neighborhood I took up with a young woman, Kathie, my first wife and you should know that every corner boy from our corner wound up having at least two wives and two divorces which tells you something although not necessarily something good, who was an art student at the Museum School associated with that MFA that I hated from eighth grade. She gradually nurtured my interest in art, into going back to that tomb MFA since she got in free. When we got to that Renoir which had broken my heart indirectly when I was a kid I told her the story of the last time I had seen that painting. She laughed. The funny thing was that having grown up, having seen the adult world and women this time I looked at the masterly way he had painted and how he had used the space to almost make it seem like some Garden of Eden that his nude was entwined in. All taught to me by Kathie who would go on even after we were married to do her art work and after we divorced she went I think to the Village in New York or maybe San Francisco and then the Village and had a middling career (and two more husbands) as a regional artist. Me, I would eventually devour art every chance I got later on and hence this review which was assigned to me after I had told Greg Green, the site manager my hoary childhood tale. Si Lannon]        

 *Sam Lowell who like I mentioned loved art although turning down that scholarship opportunity as if to grab a second chance at the brass ring is now helping “ghost” an on-going series entitled Traipsing Through The Arts by Laura Perkins on self-selected works of art that interest her under the theory for 20^th century art, serious art anyway from what I understand, that it is driven hard by sex and eroticism. I can understand how Sam, the old corner boy part of Sam half of our time spent grabbing at straws for girls and dates and back seats of hopped up cars, came by that theory but hearing prim and proper Laura was a proponent came as a shock to me.       

On the subject of Georgia O’Keeffe this part should have a field day with their exotic erotic theory of serious art. While they would be hard pressed to get much sexual mileage out of the barns up in Lake George, the hills and desert fauna and flora out in New Mexico or the skyscrapers in New York (except Sam in a wild frantic moment might see them as some phallic totem but he can figure that out for himself when it comes to her famous series of lush and symbolic flowers magnified many times larger than life and with a sensual feel they may get some mileage. At least one art critic has noted that almost vaginal depth and swirl that clearly suggests erotic possibilities anyway.

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No question from early on once that first wife Kathie straightened out my head about art and art’s value as a cultural signpost I loved to look at the great 20^th century artist Georgia O'Keeffe's works where possible including a visit to the Ghost Ranch out in New Mexico to get a first-hand view of what was driving her-especially her use of color. Hell, I even usually buy some kind of Georgia O’Keeffe calendar each year and if that isn’t love what is. Speaking of love the film under review simply but properly titled Georgia O’Keeffe (as opposed to say O’Keeffe and her husband-lover and pioneer photography as art organizer in New York City at various galleries Stieglitz or some variation on that idea) has one of its important strands beside a look at what drove her to her art was the seminal relationship for good or evil between her and Alfred Stieglitz –her most serious promoter and a great creative force as a photographer and exhibitor of modern art in his own right.     

Almost from the first frame of the film we are entwined in the obvious attraction that this pair, Alfred and Georgia had for each other sexually as well as artistically (although they called each other Miss O’Keeffe and Mister Stieglitz more often than one would think proper given that they were married but maybe the formalities were more carefully observed then). That attraction in the end would provide many emotional distraught moments for Ms. O’Keeffe as her Alfred proved to be another of those rascals who couldn’t keep away from the woman.

The relationship beyond Stieglitz's overwhelming desire to see Georgia take her place as a great artist of the 20^th century was a roller coaster ride from the beginning since Alfred was very much married, although clearly unhappily. And also, via the great modern art promoter Mabel Dodge we know that women fell in love with him-and he responded for a while. That looked to be Georgia’s fate-another protégé of the great creative force. At some moments in the film it looked like she would never break from his spell (and whatever else he thought of her as an artist he wanted her under that spell) and break out to be her own artistic force creating some of the most primordially beautiful paintings ever produced.        

But break she did to signal a very important assertive streak that was not apparent at the start. Of course the painful cause that broke the camel’s back was Stieglitz’s infidelity with an heiress to the Sears fortune. That and his unwillingness to have a child with her (allegedly to avoid distracting her from her life-force art) tore her apart for a while-a long while. Heading to the rough and ready West, heading to the sullen beauty of New Mexico saved her sanity-and drove her art to another level. The great question posed by the film and posed by O’Keeffe herself was how much her art was driven by Stieglitz’s ambitions and her own. My guess is in the end it was her own. See the film and figure that one out for yourself.