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WASHINGTON: Georgia O’Keeffe’s view of an adobe church against the vast southwestern US sky. Frida Kahlo’s searing self-portraits in traditional Mexican garb. Emily Carr’s depictions of the dark and lonely totem poles of Canada’s Pacific Northwest.
The work of these artists, whose individual styles are well known, are on display together for the first time and reflect a shared vision. As contemporaries who knew each other’s work only peripherally, Carr of Canada (1871-1945), O’Keeffe of the United States (1887-1986) and Kahlo of Mexico (1907-1954) came to signify the Americas by celebrating its native peoples.
Their work also provides a narrative journey through their own turbulent lives.
“It was such a conscious effort on their part to produce something that hadn’t been stated before about those places, and especially about their attachment to them,” said Sharyn Udall, an art historian in Santa Fe, New Mexico and curator of the exhibit “Places of Their Own.”
“Places of Their Own,” now at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, includes more than 60 paintings from 22 public and private collections across North America. The exhibit highlights how the artists lived at a transitional time in the 19th and 20th centuries, when ideas of culture, nationality, sexuality and spirituality were changing.
The exhibit focuses on how the women shared a common interest in painting the experience of their nation. Together, they represent some of their country’s most celebrated artists of the 20th century.
NORTH-SOUTH AXIS: O’Keeffe, who billed herself as an American original, never travelled abroad to study, like many artists at her time. She said she could claim she was untainted by “that damned French influence.”
O’Keeffe believed she could capture the authentic American experience. In her sensual paintings of the American Southwest, she was concerned with how to express the openness and expansiveness of the sky.
MYTHOLOGY OF SELF: Unlike O’Keeffe, whose paintings were often abstract and guarded, Frida Kahlo’s work was painfully personal and reflected the great struggles of her life.
Kahlo began painting after a streetcar accident in Mexico City that almost killed her. She endured many spinal operations and a lengthy convalescence.
Many of her paintings alluded to he ongoing and fruitless attempts to have children with her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Fertility and motherhood were the dominant themes of much of her work.
Kahlo and Rivera were both defined by their close identification with Mexico. In Kahlo’s painting, “My Nurse,” she portrays a modern Mexico trying to define itself.
Both Kahlo and Rivera were intensely political people who reflected a period in Mexican history when the country was deciding whether it would continue to reflect European influences, or look toward its own indigenous culture. They chose indigenous Mexico.
A PIONEERING SPIRIT: Like O’Keeffe, Canadian Emily Carr focused her work on the landscape and the indigenous peoples of the region.
Carr identified herself strongly as Canadian and a westerner from British Columbia. She described the “dignity and intensity” of the great wooden birds.
“Places of Their Own” traces the women’s development of their personal mythologies and suggests the connection between their biographies and their work.—Reuters
