Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Celebrating Ten Years 1997-2007. This exhibition was co-organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the High Museum of Art, curator, Kathleen Pyne, on view at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and travels to High Museum of Art and San Diego Museum of Art.


In the first two decades of the twentieth century, a number of extraordinary women developed individual artistic voices through their affiliation with Alfred Stieglitz and his Photo-Secession society, headquartered at his little Galleries at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York. Before his discovery and promotion of the work of Georgia O'Keeffe, Stieglitz included a number of women in the Photo-Secession and exhibited the works of even more over the long span of his gallery activity. He singled out a few for special attention, however, foregrounding the work of the photographers and painters Gertrude Käsebier, Pamela Colman Smith, Anne Brigman, Georgia Englehard, and Katharine Nash Rhoades. Their creativity in defining the woman modernist through their lives and their individual photographs and paintings is an essential but overlooked chapter in the history of modernism in New York. from their examples, Stieglitz fashioned the idea of the woman artist's vision a pure, innocent, and even childlike, as he would eventually characterize O'Keeffe's art.

The paintings and photographs of the women artists selected fro this exhibition explore the changing themes of femininity in modernism. They begin with a traditional garden world of mothers and children in the work of Käsebier, and then abruptly change to the drama of the new woman's struggle for freedom in the nude studies of Brigman. In Smith's watercolors and Rhoades's paintings, the artists experiment with mystical and abstract landscapes that resonate with the unconscious mind. In the works of O'Keeffe, nature is offered as a paradise, in a manner similar to the child's vision of the world.

After O'Keeffe's arrival in New York in 1918, Stieglitz's investment in O'Keeffe's iconic stature made certain that these women were eclipsed by her presence. For as a woman alone among men, O'Keeffe as icon had he greatest power to represent his modernist ideology. Also featured in this exhibition are many of Stieglitz's photographs of O'Keeffe, as the iconic, woman modernist who revealed woman's essential nature as a woman-child. The stories of Käebier, Smith, Brigman, Engelhard, and Rhoades, as related in the exhibition, reveal their contribution to the feminine role in modernism, as O'Keeffe, would inhabit it.