Georgia O'Keeffe show at the Phillips is a must see

To appreciate art, you have to, at some level, connect with it.

Whether it's a painting or a sculpture or a photograph or an installation, you have to be able to feel it.

I was reminded again last week why I find the Phillips Collection near Dupont Circle perhaps the best place in the world to enjoy art. In this case, it was about connecting with Georgia O'Keeffe.

On a sunny afternoon, I stopped by to see the Georgia O'Keeffe Abstraction show that just opened. I walked up the stairs, glanced at Renoir's "The Luncheon of the Boating Party," took in a Van Gogh or two and ascended to the third floor to see the O'Keeffe show. I discovered that O'Keeffe — one of the greatest truly American artists of all-time, male or female — had a direct connection with Washington through Duncan Phillips, who founded the collection in 1921 in his mansion.

Phillips connected with O'Keeffe through Alfred Stieglitz, her patron, partner and collaborator. Stieglitz was a famed photographer and art dealer in New York in the 1920s. Phillips bought art from Stieglitz, and they were friends. When O'Keeffe came to Washington in February 1926 to give a speech at the National Women's Party Convention, she stopped by to meet Phillips. They immediately liked one another.

"The monument and capital were wonderful," O'Keeffe wrote in lilting longhand to Stieglitz. "I want to paint them. No one has done it. That soft, white shaft with its sharp triangle on the tip going way up into the blue past the clouds making you dizzy is wonderful."

Phillips bought three of O'Keeffe's paintings.

"They were the first of her works in a public collection," Elsa Smithgall, the show's curator, told me.

O'Keeffe's work is not hard to feel. Her earthy depictions of flowers and adobe houses and clouds in the Southwest are welcoming and iconic. But knowing that O'Keeffe had a direct connection to the gallery through Phillips helped me connect with the more ethereal abstract art in this show.

Anyone familiar with O'Keeffe will get a new appreciation for the breadth of her colors and shapes and the way her images flow from object to abstract.

"What's new about this show is seeing how she walked the tightrope between abstraction and representation," Smithgall said. "Both were constantly in play."

O'Keeffe used charcoal to make abstract images in 1916. In 1976, when she was losing her peripheral vision, she used pastel watercolors to make abstracts that look Japanese in their spareness and simplicity.

Smithgall has arranged O'Keeffe's work to make it the most accessible. The five images of her "Jack In the Pulpit" show the flower changing from a kind of orchid with electric currents flowing through neon green leaves to a petal with a slash of red to a single, smooth shaft.

Speaking of shafts, O'Keeffe finally painted the Washington Monument in 1970s.

E-mail Harry Jaffe at
hjaffe@washingtonexaminer.com

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