Traipsing Through The Arts-All Serious 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Search For The Sublime-When The Desert Flower Bloomed-“Georgia O’Keeffe” (2009)-A Film Review 

By Laura Perkins

Sometimes some things fall in your lap like manna from heaven. I had (or should I now say we have since my “ghost” adviser in what he calls the shadows Sam Lowell helps with the work) expected to present a piece on colorist Grady Lamont and his in your face explicitly self-proclaimed sexual nature of his art works. Then Sam’s old-time growing up in the working-class Acre section North Adamsville Si Lannon took up site manager Greg Green’s assignment reviewing a film about modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe, her art and her stormy relationship with modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz. Of course, I almost flipped out when I heard of Si’s assignment from Sam. Naturally that review of that particular artist dovetailed very nicely with my (our) theory that all serious 20^th modern art is driven by sex and sensuality, what I call erotic undertones. That is the manna from heaven part since, in passing, Si acknowledged without reference to our theory unknown to him at the time the sexual nature of much of her work, especially her florid flower work.

The other part, the we have to do some work in this on-going series even with the manna from heaven, relates to Si’s mentioning in his introduction his up and down history with art and works of art. Si, Sam and I had a talk before we decided to use Si’s review as the main vehicle for putting O’Keeffe’s under the sign of our theory. We decided further to use Si’s youthful experiences and his “conversion” (like the Christian Saint Paul after seeing Christ do his thing) as a springboard to our own takes on O’Keeffe.

For what Si first experienced in the art world you can read his introduction below, but we would be remiss if we didn’t trace his conversion and its relationship to modern art. Naturally Si presents a funny, now funny, story about his first trip to a museum, the MFA in Boston which made him hate even the very word art. But that is not the whole story so I will fill you in. Si mentioned that his hatred, like many things, centered on a real person, his art teacher as it turned out for his junior and high school years Mr. Jones-Henry. Here is the back story. In the seventh grade Si actually had something like a positive attitude toward art, has a fairly good grade that year especially after doing a huge Paper Mache project involving creating a dinosaur kingdom which was exhibited in the showcase in front of the office at Snug Harbor Junior High where he went to school in North Adamsville.

You already know, or will know, what turned Si against art, against Mr. Jones-Henry. Si, in the summer between the eighth and ninth grade, moved with his family to the Acre section of North Adamsville. Strangely, that move represented a step up for his family since they had lived in the Adamsville Housing Authority, “the projects” into a small, very small single-family house when the family income grew beyond what the city’s means test allowed to stay in the projects. That summer, and this is important, is when Si and Sam met since Sam lived the next street over from where Si’s family had moved.

The importance of that friendship was not immediately obvious since Si had never expected that he would have to face Mr. Jones-Henry again after the eighth-grade MFA disaster or really his striking out in the teenage love game which I firmly believe he should have expected if not then, then later since we all have wounds, desired or not, without taking it out on art, or art teachers. In any case he did. He freaked out the first day of school when he saw Mr. Jones-Henry in the corridor across from his homeroom. He asked his homeroom teacher how Mr. Jones-Henry came to be an art teacher at the high school. It had something to do with a Miss Lewis retiring in the summer unexpectedly due to poor health and Mr. Jones-Henry having some seniority to bid on the job and his resume was far and above any other candidate.

Since the high school had a few art teachers Si figured he would not wind up with his nemesis. Wrong, totally wrong. When he got his class schedule the next day (the first day of school was a half day fluff day then so he didn’t know that day) he, and Sam as well, wound up in Mr. Jones-Henry’s class. He tried to get out of the class but that would have been impossible in those days when the classes were tracked by ability not a mix. Worse of all was the policy then of keeping the classes with the same art teacher for four years to benefit from continuity (which would have mixed results and is now frowned upon). So nothing good could come out of that. Except his friendship with Sam, and almost from day one of high school Si’s entry into the world of Sam and his corner boys from junior high led by Frankie Riley with the “house intellectual” the late Pete Markin as his flak-catcher.                            

This is a good point to mention what Sam has already mentioned in the piece that we let him do giving his take on the art I have selected to buttress our sex and sensuality theory. Sam loved art, loved to draw and paint from an early age and being assigned to Mr. Jones-Henry’s class was his personal manna from heaven since by junior year he was essentially the “assistant” art teacher. In the end Mr. Jones-Henry would help Sam get into his alma mater Massachusetts School of Art on a necessary scholarship he was so determined to get Sam. That Sam decided, or his mother decided, that was not the best road forward for him and his future didn’t take his longtime love of art away. In the short haul, in high school what that meant in practice was that Sam would actually literally do Si’s projects which got him pass the required art classes and allowed him to graduate.               

That is the negative Si art part which has been well-documented and spoken to without reference to Georgia O’Keeffe whom he was totally unaware of until a later point when he met Kathie who would become his first wife. After high school, after the Army, after Vietnam which caused more gnashing of teeth and disorientation among their, my generation that we will ever be able to explain Si was a mess, was all over the place as far as finding his place in the sun. Then one night he went to a bar in I think Kenmore Square in Boston and met Kathie who was a student at the Museum School affiliated with the MFA and she swept him off his feet. She was several years younger than he but was like a breath of fresh air after Vietnam, after drifting. He never mentioned his personal history with the subject of art that night, but he just let her go on and on about his dreams and about her influences. The dream part he got but he was totally ignorant of the artists she was talking about except the villain Renoir (among those artists mentioned Marc Chagall, Cezanne, Mark Rothko, and Georgia O’Keeffe whom he drew a blank on although later he would remember some girl he was dating in college had a calendar of the latter’s flower works highlighting each month. It was on their second date after a few drinks at dinner that he mentioned that eighth grade incident at the MFA partially to see if that would disqualify him forever from being with Kathie for being a low-life about art. She laughed and asked, no, commanded him that if he wanted to see her again he would have to go to the MFA with her, meeting her there that next weekend.                        

Holding his nose and knowing that he was ready to do a lot to keep her company as latter marrying and staying with her for seven years before he, not she, went off the deep end over his Vietnam experience-again, testified to, that next Saturday he met her there just after it opened. As we can in retrospect have expected Si was thrilled with the museum, with the works of art and with Kathie’s patient explanation of what some of the works meant for the art world and for human culture. Even the dreaded Renoir bathing maiden painting drew his positive attention and gave him a whole new perspective on the use of color and space (Cezanne would be his go-to guy though on those two characteristics and still is). What Kathie really got excited about though was when she practically genuflected in front of the O’Keeffe paintings which caused her to swoon a little. Si flipped out not in the silly eighth-grade naïve way but after Kathie told him what she (via art critics if not the artist herself thought was represented by the swirls and crevices in the flower paintings and a few desert scenes as well) thought the paintings symbolized, the vaginal sexual blossoming part. For a couple more dates before they went to bed together (what Sam calls “getting under the silky sheets” which has its own charms as an expression) they would talk about the O’Keeffe works in what I considered when I heard that part of the story as some kind of “foreplay.” By the way after they did finally sleep together for the next date Si told Kathie she should meet him at the MFA to continue his education. And he has been on the “cure” ever since. What more can I add.

What more can I add indeed since I mentioned that I would give my own “take” on Ms. O’Keeffe’s work, its sensual aspect. Si and about a million others have already laid out the sexual implications of her flower explosions and like him are ready to leave it there. That is only a small part of the story, a very small part. O’Keeffe spent a fair among of time up at Stieglitz’s family estate near Lake George in upstate New York. There she did a large number of barn scenes in the modern flat style. What almost no critic and maybe none has noticed or at least mentioned in the public prints is the subtle triangular shaped which mesh with each other forming a quite provocative coupling, a sexual coupling, sexual congress if you like. That triangular shape the definitive symbol of the female pubic area and the silos of course the phallic symbols.              

If that was the only time, after all Ms. O’Keeffe was young and in love, or thought she was before the other shoe fell and the love-hate relationship between her and Stieglitz rivaled that of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in that part of the 20^th century than I would defer to the professional art cabal take on that part of her career. But that begs the question about those skyscrapers she was so fond of painting. Skyscrapers that it would not take a Freud or even Jung to figure out were related to modern, really ancient if you think about it, phallic representational art. I have noted the seeming ominous position of the clouds in some representing the female pubic area preparing “to be taken” or to “take” those obvious phallic symbols. In others the positions are reversed and the phallic symbols enter deep into the almost subterranean earth. A couple were so provocative I had to leave the viewing area for a bit to “cool off.” Here the modern art critic, art viewer could learn something about our times. The Greeks, maybe lesser so the Romans, were not afraid to put every kind of phallic symbol, romping penises in many cases both heterosexual and homosexual on their prized possession vases and pots. The modern sensibility is not nearly out-front and so takes the symbolism that Freud wrote so energetically of and Jung went crazy about, of the subconscious, the deep sexual urges in more guarded forms. Those ideas are still amazing true for artists even in the pornographic overkill Internet age.

This last example, the one that will shock many people and will sent so-called professional art critics and their hangers-on in spasms of rage and hubris is Ms. O’Keeffe work out in New Mexico, out at the Ghost Ranch and other locales adjacent to the desert and nearby cliffs and mountains. If you only look at the brilliant colors she used, some very original tones since she was a pioneer desert artist then you will miss what became obvious to me proto-sexual relationship exhibited once again in that guarded form so typical of 20^th century art. It is amazing how many of the glorious mountain views have a female form which either are “on top” in the subtle sexual congress being depicted or are “wide open” to some very provocative cloud formations.

Agreed, a whole new look at Ms. O’Keeffe’s work which I might not have thought of except that at a recent, well maybe not so recent since it was a couple of years ago, exhibition of her work at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts there were an amazing number of photographs of her nude taken by Stieglitz while they were having their affair, married or separated. Now Georgia was no professional beauty like Sargent’s Madame X or Whistler’s The White Girl but she had a good figure and apparently an uninhibited persona in that regard which gave me a new look at her work. The professional art crowd, the uptight, grappling art cabal will howl in the winds over this but if I could take the heat from the sex police Puritan evangelicals who mercifully have flee from my view since I have started working on 20^th century art which they consider the work of the devil and me his servant then I can handle these cocktail hour buffs.

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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 promotor 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 Steiglitz’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 promotor 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.