Lengthy work paints a fawning portrait of artist

Full Bloom

The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

W.W. Norton: 630 pp., $35

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Given the scale of attention, adulation, gossip and awards that were lavished upon Georgia O’Keeffe in the course of her very long career -- she died in 1986 at age 99 -- it was inevitable that a day would come when a gargantuan biography would be devoted to this artist who, in addition to producing a sizable oeuvre, enjoyed a personal history that is in some respects far more compelling than her work.

That day has arrived with the publication of Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s “Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe.� About this massive Life, one is tempted to echo Dr. Johnson’s resigned response to Milton’s “Paradise Lost�: No one could wish it to be longer than it is.

“Full Bloom� is, in fact, nearly as long as E.H. Gombrich’s classic textbook, “The Story of Art,� which surveys the entire history of Western art -- and, it may be worth noting, never mentions O’Keeffe.

In this respect, certainly, Drohojowska-Philp’s high estimate of her subject’s importance matches that of O’Keeffe herself and that of the circle of acolytes who, early on in her career, elevated the artist to the status of a cult.

Cult figures tend, alas, to flummox the authors who undertake to write their biographies. For the writers are put on notice by the faithful that nothing less than abject piety and unstinting praise will be deemed sufficient for the treatment of the idol.

In O’Keeffe’s case, with the imperious Alfred Stieglitz -- O’Keeffe’s husband, mentor, dealer and promoter -- presiding as the high priest of the cult, her circle of acolytes was never wanting in providing the expected obeisances.

Drohojowska-Philp has not only produced an exhaustive history of the adulation inspired by this cult but is herself a latter-day convert to it. She seems never to have entertained the shadow of a doubt that O’Keeffe was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

For those of us who think otherwise -- who believe, as I do, that O’Keeffe was a gifted but essentially secondary talent -- there is much in “Full Bloom� that is not only excessive but even comical.

Thus, painter Oscar Bluemner, a loyal member of the Stieglitz circle, blithely compared O’Keeffe’s floral paintings to the Immaculate Conception.

Male critics were indeed enchanted by the sexual imagery in O’Keeffe’s paintings, and the resulting praise was often fairly icky. Critic Paul Rosenfeld, another Stieglitz disciple, wrote of her work: “What men have always wanted to know, and women to hide, this girl sets forth. Essence of womanhood impregnates color and mass, giving proof of the truthfulness of a life.�

Even critics who remained independent of Stieglitz’s circle often sounded the same note.

As sober a critic as Lewis Mumford described the flower paintings as “one long, loud blast of sex, sex in youth, sex in adolescence, sex in maturity ... sex bulging, sex tumescent, sex deflated.� Murdock Pemberton, then the art critic of the New Yorker and not usually given to gushing, joined this male chorus, informing his readers that “[p]sychiatrists have been sending their patients up to see O’Keeffe’s canvases.... They limp to the shrine of Saint Georgia and they fly away on the wings of the libido.�

It is hardly a surprise, then, that O’Keeffe came in time to resent this insistent critical focus on female sexuality, though she herself did nothing to discourage the acclaim it brought her.

“She was tired of critics writing about her gender instead of her art,� writes Drohojowska-Philp, and this distaste undoubtedly accounts for the changes that occurred in O’Keeffe’s work in the 1920s, when she adopted a more impersonal subject and style in her paintings of the Manhattan cityscape.

These allied her art with the Precisionist pictures of Charles Sheeler, Niles Spencer and other American male painters of quasi-Cubist architectural subjects and paved the way for what many critics consider O’Keeffe’s best work: her outdoor paintings of Abiquiu, N.M., where she lived and worked in the final years of her life.

In Santa Fe, there is now a Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiu is also open to the public; Drohojowska-Philp reports that at the house “there is a one-year waiting list for reservations.�

If, for some of us critics, O’Keeffe remains a minor artist, there is no denying that she was otherwise a woman of extraordinary personal magnetism, and this is surely why the author of “Full Bloom� felt compelled to write at such excessive length.

Yet, for better or for worse, this book is likely to remain the definitive life of O’Keeffe for as long as the public continues to be fascinated by her story.

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Hilton Kramer is editor of the New Criterion and author of numerous books, including “The Age of the Avant-Garde� and “The Twilight of the Intellectuals.�