Title:
Georgia O'Keefe Exhibit Presents the Familiar With
the Unfamiliar
Description: This is
a VOA Special English General News Report.
See text below
Text:
Georgia O'Keeffe is considered one of the great
American artists of the 20th century. O'Keeffe is
best known for her paintings of deserts and flowers.
Some of her works are at the Phillips Collection in
Washington. Elsa Smithgall works there.
ELSA SMITHGALL: "Most people really do associate
O'Keeffe with her sensuous flower paintings, with
the bleached bones of the desert of Southwest, of
the beautiful verdant landscapes in Lake George. And
yet in this exhibition we get to bring together
those works, the familiar, alongside some of the
really pure abstractions that O'Keeffe herself
didn't exhibit often in her own lifetime."
The show has these drawings from 1915.
ELSA SMITHGALL: "And they are just exquisite
gestural drawings, very organic in form, and no
recognizable reference to a known subject."
By the 1920's, critics described some of her
paintings as sexually suggestive. O'Keeffe rejected
those claims.
ELSA SMITHGALL: "Well, I think that the sexualized
reading of her work she fervently resisted in its
time when it really first surfaces in the twenties.
She really spoke out strongly against it and has
said that she was making a concerted effort to shift
her focus in her work towards more recognizable
subject matter as a way to try to steer the critics
towards another kind of reading of her work."
O'Keeffe began spending time in New Mexico in 1929.
Twenty years later, she moved there permanently.
ELSA SMITHGALL: "And it brings up a whole new body
of subject matter, a lot of the New Mexico
landscapes, but also those great, sun-bleached bones
that she'll hold up against the sky to frame the
view through the socket of a pelvis bone, for
example."
During this period, her paintings changed.
ELSA SMITHGALL: "You start to see her depicting
flowers increasingly large in format and
increasingly greater in magnification, and so you
start to see a major change in her scale, in her
viewpoint taking these unusual birds and bees-eye
perspectives."
By the late 1950's, O'Keefe's art changed once
again.
ELSA SMITHGALL: "This is not a work that you
probably would see on the wall and say 'Oh, yes, an
O'Keefe!' So there's that surprising aspect to them.
What's so exquisite about them is that she has, with
very spare compositions, created these exquisite
forms that are extremely expressive and that do
recall those earliest charcoal drawings in that
respect."
Georgia O'Keefe's later paintings excited a younger
generation of artists. And, her work continues to
interest art lovers around the world. I'm Steve
Ember.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
