Skip to main content

O'Keefe and Kahlo

Katie and I went yesterday to see two art exhibitions by prominent 20th century woman artists: Georgia O'Keeffe (at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts) and Frida Kahlo (at the Walker Art Center). We went to both exhibits with Beth Z. and Heather M. and then returned home for pizza and discussion.

The O'Keeffe exhibit was my favorite of the two. I was especially fond of the "pelvis series" paintings in the collection, which typically depict a blue sky framed by a cow pelvis in the foreground. My favorite O'Keeffe painting from yesterday was Pelvis IV (1944):




O'Keeffe meant to contrast the eternity of the blue sky (with moon in this instance of the series) with the ephemeral nature of life on earth. O'Keeffe may have had World War II on her mind as she painted, but the sobering contrast is just as relevant today as we destroy our planet with greenhouse gases.

At first glance, the abstraction in the piece is subtle. She provides enough shading to make clear the pelvis is a physical object, yet the contrast between background and foreground is not quite realistic. Standing in front of the painting, the blue sky that starts in the background at the initial viewing flips to become an abstract splotch of blue in the middle of a white background. This is emphasized by the painting's texture, sadly not visible in the picture. While the sky and the shading in the pelvis are brushed in, O'Keeffe used a palette knife to spread the white paint thickly around the edges of the canvas. This enhances the confusion between foreground and background and gives the piece its wonderful and subtle abstract contrast.

Frida Kahlo stands in rather stark contrast to O'Keeffe's subtle abstract paintings. Kahlo's surrealist paintings are shocking and evocative. Although famous for her self-portraits (90% of the paintings in the exhibit were this), my favorite painting was a commission, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939):



The painting depicts the suicide of Ms. Hale, a member of high society in New York who became despondent and leaped to her death. It was commissioned by the socialite's mother (who was so horrified upon seeing the painting that she threatened to destroy it). It is rather graphic, depicting both the horror of the fall and the bloody denouement. Very chilling and quite powerful. So powerful, in fact, that the frame could not adequately contain the painting, serving instead as a continuation of the canvas.

Comments

  1. MT9:56 AM

    Thanks for posting these -- I had been wanting to get to those exhibits and now feel like I got a taste of them from my office! Best, Liz

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can You Cross Your Toes?

Katie and I had a heated discussion the night before last. We were sitting on the couch watching Jon Stewart when she noticed a large, apparently cancerous growth sticking out of the bottom of my foot. She asked what the big lump in my sock was. "That's my toe," I responded, nonplussed. I had crossed my first and second toes, causing a lump to protrude from the bottom of my sock. Katie was quite alarmed. "You can cross your toes?" "Sure, can't you? Everyone can cross their toes!" "Of course I can't cross my toes. Who can cross their toes?" And I confirmed that Katie could not, in fact, cross her toes. Even manipulating her toes with my fingers, I could not get her toes to stay crossed. She just has very short toes. That led, of course, into a discussion of who was the freak. Were my long, crossable toes abnormal, or were her stubby, uncrossable phalanges the outliers? In case you're confused, here are some pictures. First, of my v...
36 comments
Read more

Max the Model

Katie sometimes talks to Max about all the things he can grow up to be. "Will you grow up to be a scientist like Daddy, or a lawyer like Mommy?" she will query. In recent days, though, we think Max might aspire to be a model. He LOVES the camera. Point it in his direction, and he is mesmerized by the big lens, giving it a big smile. He will sit for long series of photographs, changing his expressions constantly so we'll be sure to get a good one. This is Katie's recent favorite series (mostly because she thinks he looks so cute in the outfit): This is my favorite series, based purely on the dynamic range of emotions that Max is capable of. I am especially fond of the last picture. So cute!
9 comments
Read more

A Little Night Music

I've been in Boston this week at a scientific conference. I've spent nearly all of my time at the conference, but was able to get away a couple of times to see friends. One night off I went out for pizza with Ekrem and Leanne (and their adorable kids). We went to Stone Hearth Pizza , whose head chef is the brother of Bob, one of my labmates in Minneapolis. (He wasn't at the restaurant the night we went, sadly.) Ekrem and Leanne are moving to their new house in a week, and I helped them out by consuming the remainder of a bottle of scotch that they keep at their house for me. I felt very proud of myself for accomplishing this noble task. Last night I went to see Andrea perform in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music , one of my favorite musicals. Beforehand, I had dinner with fraternity friends Jan, Jeannie, David, Emily, and Ian. Dinner conversation was wonderful in that MIT-nerdy way that I greatly miss sometimes. At the end of the meal, for example, my fortune coo...
3 comments
Read more