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The “finish” of Consciousness: Emily Dickinson and Georgia O'Keeffe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Susan L. Manning
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As early as 1946, Clement Greenburg was inclined to disregard Georgia O'Keeffe's significance on the grounds that her work “skipped essential stages” in the development of an abstract vocabulary. In his view, she simply got there too fast and too easily. She's famous, of course, for pictures that at first sight seem quite the opposite of abstract: challengingly labialike petals and priapic stamen, a whole painterly idiom of sexuality inscribed in representations of natural objects (Figure 1: Jack in-the-Pulpit, no. 4). As Ian McKay recently put it in Contemporary Art, O'Keeffe's early exhibitions were regarded by many contemporary critics “as the work of a pathologically sex-crazed woman who, lacking the wherewithal to control her urges, poured them out onto the canvas for public display.” The sexual interpretations that so intrigued New York Freudians of the 1920s, and now serve to validate the oeuvre in its entirety for her feminist critics, have since tended to be absorbed into formal critique with a certain charge of displaced sexual innuendo: her painterly surface is “thin,” her perspectives “flat and frontal,” her scale distorted or unfathomable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 22 , October 1997 , pp. 419 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

NOTES

Quotations from the poems of Emily Dickinson are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the trustees of Amherst College, from the The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Johnson, Thomas H. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), copyright © 1951Google Scholar, 1955, 1979, 1983, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Quotations from the letters are reprinted by permission of the publishers of The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Johnson, Thomas H. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), copyright © 1958Google Scholar, 1986, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The license to reproduce copyrighted works owned by the Georgia O'Keeffe Estate was issued on behalf the Estate by the Design and Artists Copyright Society.

1. Greenberg, Clement, Nation 162 (06 15, 1946)Google Scholar.

2. McKay, Ian, “Charting a New Geography,” Contemporary Art 1 (Spring 1993): 10–13Google Scholar, quote on p. 12.

3. Packer, William, “In the Right Place at the Right Time,” Financial Times, 04 20, 1993Google Scholar; and Willett, Ralph, “O'Keeffe After the Primal Urges,” Times Higher Education Supplement, 04 9, 1993Google Scholar.

4. Packer, , “In the Right Place,” 12Google Scholar; Feaver, William, “Flower of the Desert,” Observer, 04 11, 1993Google Scholar; Willett, “O'Keeffe”; Graham-Dixon, Andrew, Independent, 04 13, 1993Google Scholar; and Kent, Sarah, “Flower Power,” Time Out, 04 7–14, 1993Google Scholar.

5. Hilton, Tim, “Georgia on Her Mind,” Independent on Sunday, 04 18, 1993Google Scholar; and Feaver, “Flower.”

6. Johnson, Thomas H., ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, Poem 211. (Copyright 1929, 1935, by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; copyright © renewed 1957, 1963, by Mary L. Hampson. By permission of Little, Brown and Company). Subsequent quotations from Dickinson's poetry are from this edition and identified by poem number in the text.

7. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Self-Reliance” (1841), in The Complete Works of R. W. Emerson, Riverside edition, 11 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885–86), 2: 73Google Scholar.

8. Quoted by Matthiessen, F. O., The James Family: A Group Biography (1967; rept. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 593Google Scholar.

9. Quoted by Pollitzer, Anita, A Woman on Paper: Georgia O'Keeffe — The Letters and Memoir of a Legendary Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 195, 226Google Scholar.

10. See, for example, Dorment, Richard, “The Power of Innocence,” Daily Telegraph, 04 14, 1993Google Scholar.

11. Cowart, Jack and Hamilton, Juan, Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1987), 201Google Scholar.

12. Georgia O'Keeffe to Alfred Steiglitz, February 1, 1916, in Cowart, and Hamilton, , Art and Letters, 150Google Scholar.

13. Burkhardt, Frederick H. and others, eds., The Works of William James (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 9: 194Google Scholar.

14. Pope, Alexander, An Essay on Criticism (1717), 11. 318–19Google Scholar, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt, John, 1-vol. Twickenham edition (London: Methuen, 1963), 153CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Robertson, Joseph, Essay on Punctuation (London: J. Walter, 1785), 129Google Scholar.

16. Greenberg.

17. Quoted by Eisler, Benita, O'Keeffe and Steiglitz: An American Romance (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), 359 (my emphasis)Google Scholar.

18. “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way — things that I had no words for” (1923 Anderson Gallery Exhibition Announcement, quoted by Pollitzer, , Woman on Paper, 182Google Scholar).

19. Rosenfeld, Paul, Port of New York (1924; rept. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), 203Google Scholar.

20. Marsden Hartley wrote of O'Keeffe's approach to “the borderline between finity and infinity” (quoted in the catalogue to the 1993 exhibition by Eldredge, Charles C., Georgia O'Keeffe, American and Modern [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993], 209Google Scholar).

21. Johnson, Thomas H., ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1958), 3: 660Google Scholar. (Copyright 1929, 1935, by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; copyright © renewed 1957, 1963, by Mary L. Hampson. By permission of Little, Brown and Company.)

22. Pollitzer, , Woman on Paper, 147Google Scholar.

23. Juan Hamilton described his first impression of Georgia O'Keeffe's dwelling in New Mexico: “Inside there was a whiteness all around — white walls, white-stained floors and ceilings, simple white cotton curtains” (Hamilton, , “In O'Keeffe's World,” in Cowart, and Hamilton, , Art and Letters, 7Google Scholar). See also Dickinson, Emily, The Diary of Emily Dickinson, ed. Fuller, Jamie (San Francisco: Mercury, 1993), 116Google Scholar.

24. Armed with preconceptions gleaned from seeing her work in reproduction, several of the critics of the Hayward exhibition professed themselves disconcerted, or disappointed, by the size of the canvases themselves (see, for example, Graham-Dixon).

25. Herman Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” ch. 42 in Moby-Dick, introduction by Delbanco, Andrew (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1992), 212Google Scholar.

26. Eldredge, , Georgia O'Keeffe, 165Google Scholar.

27. Quoted by Pollitzer, , Woman on Paper, 208Google Scholar. It's worth noting how closely O'Keeffe here follows Gertrude Stein's stylistic experiments in rendering the “continuous present” quality of consciousness in prose.

28. Georgia O'Keeffe to Jean Toomer, January 10, 1934, in Cowart, and Hamilton, , Art and Letters, 217Google Scholar.

29. Emily Dickinson to Samuel Bowles, Jr., early August 1880, and to Holland, Sophie, 12 1881, Letters, 3:668, 719–20Google Scholar. It's important to separate our understanding of this tone and stance from any sense of natural insensitivity on Dickinson's part. It would appear that this kind of “consolation letter” was something she sought to develop in some circumstances as part of her emotionally detached artistic persona; there are also many examples of engaged and effortlessly moving consolation letters. See, for example, her note to Mrs. Samuel Bowles, probably written on the occasion of a stillborn child: “Don't cry, dear Mary. Let us do that for you, because you are too tired now. We don't know how dark it is, but if you are at sea, perhaps when we say that we are there, you won't be as afraid. / The waves are very big, but every one that covers you, covers us, too. / Dear Mary, you can't see us, but we are close at your side. May we comfort you?” (2: 361).

30. Melville, , Moby-Dick, 212Google Scholar.

31. Matthiessen, , James Family, 609–10Google Scholar.

32. Interview with Grant, Richard, Art section, Evening Standard, 04 1993. 33Google Scholar.

33. Johnson, Thomas H., ed., Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1971), 176Google Scholar.