Georgia O'Keeffe painting from her Lake George years on display in Glens Falls
The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls has a rich inventory of pieces from Paul Cezanne and Winslow Homer to 14th century terracotta pieces. They’ve lent out their painting, “Boy Holding a Blue Vase” by Pablo Picasso to the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.
In exchange, the Hyde has received the signature piece of their latest exhibition.
All on its own on a blank white wall in the Hoopes Gallery is a painting of a large fiery fall maple leaf by the modernist artist, Georgia O’Keeffe.
You might think of O’Keeffe’s close-up paintings of irises and poppies or her later work of a ram’s skull over the southwest desert landscape.
But, she had a long history in the Adirondacks. She married Alfred Steiglitz – an art collector in New York who had a family home on Lake George, where O’Keeffe spent her summers and autumns in early adulthood.
The large maple tree on the farm was a source of fascination for both of them. O’Keefe completed about 20 paintings of maple leaves.
Jonathan Canning, museum curator, talked with Monica Sandreczki and showed her the piece, "Pattern of Leaves," hung in its original simple silver frame.
JONATHAN CANNING: The dominant image is this deep red, sort of smoldering color of a maple leaf and its ripped. There's this deep tear in it, through which we see a streak of yellow, that helps to liven up the image. And the maple leaf is lying in a bed of other leaves in cool white and an olivey green color. So it provides a cool foil against which we see the various tones of this deep for red. And so it's against these cooler colors, we get the jagged outline of the maple leaf.
MONICA SANDRECZKI: Ever since I first saw the image of this maple leaf on the Hyde's website, I just haven't been able to get the crack and the leaf out of my mind. It just makes it this specific leaf.
CANNING: I keep trying to see, could you possibly have been trying to record the form of Lake George in the shape? Because it is that long, narrow Lake George, Lake Champlain type rip in the leaf. But no, I don't think we can go that far. But she did have a long and intimate and personal relationship with Lake George. And it's one that we tend to forget, because we really know Georgia O'Keeffe for her desert paintings in New Mexico.
Next door on this wall over here, we have a photograph of a O'Keeffe by Todd Webb, from 1976. And this is more the sort of image I think most people have this older lady with a weathered face and cowboy hat. And she's set against Canyon rock, and this is the lone, fiercely independent artist of the desert and southwest. But in fact, she really started to explore nature as a subject for her painting in her earlier years. And so that the period that she spent here in Lake George was really fundamental to her working out some of the key aspects of her style.
One of the reasons she downplayed Lake George in her later years is Steiglitz could not separate her art from her gender. She just rejected that.
"She was objecting to male dominance and male interpretations of her art, the male gaze, and I think she wanted us to consider more her modernism how she could take a natural form, somewhat reduce it and abstract it, simplify its imagery."
SANDRECZKI: I didn't realize that about her wanting to downplay her Lake George years because that's definitely what I've often heard and read about her pieces and was even going to ask because this piece doesn't quite have that same sort of sexual energy like we often ascribe to her floral pieces but you can tell it's still in that still sort of style.
CANNING: She was objecting to male dominance and male interpretations of her art, the male gaze, and I think she wanted us to consider more her modernism how she could take a natural form, somewhat reduce it and abstract it, simplify its imagery.
There's a whole centuries long tradition of the almost scientific, almost botanist's representation of natural forms. She's not doing that. I mean, look at the big white leaf behind it. I'm not even sure what that is. She's softened the forms. He's abstracted it. It looks more like fabric to me than a leaf form. She is taking the natural world and finding an abstracted modern beauty to it.
But she's also using techniques from photography. So these were things that she learned from Steiglitz who was a photographer. So we've got the close up, the focal point is right up against the picture plane here. The leaf form is sharp. And as I said, there's a softening of form and outline to the other leaves. So you can think of photographers playing with their depth of field. But she really chafed at just seeing it as a feminine art form and her as a "woman artist" limiting her in that way, as a "woman artist."
"She's using techniques from photography. We've got the focal point right up against the picture plane here. The leaf form is sharp; there's a softening of form and outline to the other leaves. You can think of photographers playing with their depth of field."
SANDRECZKI: When you look at this piece, what questions does it bring up for you? What feelings? Or your reactions to it or what it makes you wonder about?
CANNING: Actually, as part of the loan agreement, I need to come in and look at it every day and make sure it's still on the wall and it's safe. And so I stand in front of it, and I have a look.
"I get lost in the different shades of that red in the leaf. I sort of wander around the leaf, almost as if I'm out in the hills and the valleys and watching the way the sun moves and lights the hills and valleys."
So I try to work out where did her hand go? But then you start to see some of the swishes in the paint and how she must have just sort of dabbed and angled her brush. You don't see bold gestures of the arm sweeping and an arc and a thick paint line. You don't see any of that. But you do see sort of patches where she must have sort of come in and dabbed here, like right there, you've got this sort of silvery gray, the whole brush fits neatly into that sharp, jag.
Look at this wonderful undulating line in here.
SANDRECZKI: Less jagged and more just very curved.
CANNING: Yes, curve, counter curve, curve, counter curve. And it seems very 1920s, an art deco series of curve.
SANDRECZKI: Is there anything else that you think it's important that I ask or that you'd like to add?
CANNING: Come and be like me. Stand in front of it and get lost in the forms and the shape and the colors and let your eye just wander through the painting.
It's very easy when you visit a museum to quickly stand in front of the piece and let your eye sort of wander over it and then you spend a little more time reading the label and then you move on to the next.
"Coming back is a really good way to see art. Spending just a few minutes every so often in front of something you think you know, you'll discover you didn't know as well as you thought."
Coming back is a really good way to see art because I promise you, you will always see something new. You will notice something else in the painting. Spending just a few minutes every so often in front of something you think you know, you'll discover you didn't know as well as you thought.
