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Georgia O’Keeffe: A New Entrant in the French Love Affair with the American West

Georgia O’Keeffe : nouvelle venue dans l’histoire d’amour de la France avec l’Ouest américain
Lara Cox

Résumés

Cet essai replace la rétrospective consacrée à Georgia O'Keeffe, au Centre Pompidou de septembre à décembre 2021, dans l'histoire muséographique de l'Ouest américain en France. Il combine une analyse des pratiques curatoriales et des images passées et présentes des musées des beaux-arts et des arts premiers au cours des trois dernières décennies et demie - en particulier lorsque les musées ont cherché à s'emparer de l'Ouest américain à l'ère du multiculturalisme et de la diversité. La réception de l'événement Pompidou dans la presse française est également analysée. Il est suggéré que la rétrospective s'écarte des représentations (bien qu'ironiques) de l'Ouest peuplé de cavaliers blancs intrépides et d'Indiens hostiles qui ont jusqu'à présent dominé les musées des beaux-arts français. Cependant, l'article problématise également l'accent mis, tant dans l'exposition que dans la réception de la presse (de droite, de gauche et du centre), sur les influences masculines blanches américaines et européennes sur O'Keeffe, ce qui la place dans un moule d’« exception féminine » dans un monde de l'art dominé par les hommes. Cela revient également à répéter des pratiques scénographiques stériles liées à la représentation des Indiens d'Amérique dans des lieux qui se veulent révisionnistes : notamment le musée des arts premiers le plus connu de France, le musée du Quai Branly. C'est oublier les communautés de femmes artistes qui ont dialogué et échangé avec les Indiens d'Amérique dans l'Ouest américain, un héritage dans lequel l'œuvre d'O'Keeffe pourrait se situer et que les futures expositions françaises sur le Far West auraient tout intérêt à mettre en valeur.

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  • 1 Daniel Fabre, « Présentation : Catlin vu d’Europe », in Gradhiva, 3, 2006, 10 June 2009. URL : http (...)
  • 2 Emily Burns, Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France, Norman: University of Oklahoma P (...)
  • 3 Peinture de l’ouest, sculpture de l'est des États-Unis : Paris, Centre culturel américain, 6 mars-5 (...)
  • 4 Agathe Cabau , « La mythologie de l'Ouest dans l'art américain 1830-1940 », Sociétés & Représentati (...)

1In 1845, the “Indian Gallery” (musée indien) arrived at the Louvre in Paris during its tour of Europe, the brainchild of white American painter George Catlin (1796-1872) whose ambition (never fulfilled) it was to capture on canvas every Native American tribe. Though documentary in its intention, the musée indien combined live spectacle, over five hundred portraits, and one thousand artefacts that enthralled French museumgoers, who were fascinated by the new primitivist vision of the Other from the Americas laid before their eyes.1 The spectacularization of le Far West was further nourished when William F. Cody or “Buffalo Bill”, the rugged horseman and hunter, arrived with his “Wild West show”, an unofficial act of the Exposition Universelle of 1889 that won such acclaim that it has been misremembered as part of the fair’s official program.2 Building on these beginnings, white male artists and showmen have dominated fine arts exhibits on the American West in France, which have been a relatively regular occurrence since the mid-twentieth century—from the abstract artists Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson of Peinture de l’Ouest, Sculpture de l’Est (Painting of the West, Sculpture of the East) which took place at the American Cultural Center in Paris in 1958;3 to the itinerant Mythology of the West in American Art, 1830-1940 in Rennes, Rouen, and Marseille in 2008, which featured the painter most readily identified as the precursor of the Hollywood Western, Frederic Remington, and artists of his ilk (Charles Marion Russell, Charles Schreyvogel, and Newell Convers Wyeth).4

  • 5 Emily Burns and Gregory Mohr have explored French-Lakota friendships and alliances in the Expositio (...)
  • 6 Maureen Murphy, De L’Imaginaire au musée : les arts d’Afrique à Paris et à New York (1931 à nos jou (...)

2The story is a little different in France’s indigenous arts or “arts premiers” museums, but certain traps regarding representations of the American West have not been fully avoided. Since its opening in 2006, the Musée du Quai Branly has participated in a revisionist history of the American West, perhaps consolidating a history, constructed throughout the twentieth century, of the French as a terrain d’accueil for the Lakota Indians.5 Extending and enriching the Musée du Louvre’s “pavillon” initiative to accord so-called “primitivist” artefacts the status of art, the North American holdings in Quai Branly’s “Americas” collection as well as the 2014 temporary exhibit Indiens des Plaines have sought to restore a more complex vision of American Indian tribes in American West. Yet the Quai Branly’s approach has equally been problematized by art historian Maureen Murphy who has pointed out the fantasmatic and de-historicizing framing of tribal artefacts.6

  • 7 See: Gregory, Mohr, “The French Camargue-Western”, op cit.
  • 8 Cédric Enjalbert, « Georgia O’Keeffe. Georgia, on kiffe ! », PhiloMag, 23 September 2021. URL: http (...)

3Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of Texas and New Mexico on show at the Centre Georges Pompidou between September and December 2021 are a new entrant on the scene not simply because their creator, who lived for nearly a hundred years (1887-1986), is a rare womanly presence in the museographic history of the American West in France. Her vision differs radically from the virile men on steeds and the Othered American Indians that the French are accustomed to seeing in their fine arts museums and popular media (such as the Lucky Luke comics and the film genre of the American Western, which has been imported into French cinema by way of the so-called “Camargue Westerns”).7 The Pompidou exhibit has received overwhelmingly positive reviews; some headlines have made delighted use of the homonym “kiffe” (the French slang for “adore”) to declare their newfound love for “O’Keeffe”, the “clear-sighted cowgirl” (cette cow-girl sans oeillères).8 The O’Keeffe retrospective seems to herald the arrival of a woman’s version of le Far West in France. Yet it is exactly this quality of being a womanly exception that makes this exhibit both compelling and unnerving.

  • 9 Carolyn Kastner, “Life and Work of Georgia O’Keeffe”, C-Span. 9 January 2013. URL: https://www.c-sp (...)
  • 10 By “American West”, I refer not simply to the region of the US continent falling between the ninety (...)
  • 11 Susan Ressler, Women Artists of the American West, Jefferson: McFarland & Co, 2011; Phil Kovinick, (...)
  • 12 Emily C. Burns, and Agathe Cabau. “Call and Answer: Dialoguing the American West in France,” Transa (...)

4This essay will position the O’Keeffe retrospective in the museographic history of the American West in France, combining an analysis of curatorial practice, and past and present images from notable French fine arts and arts premiers exhibits in recent history—specifically, the last three and a half decades in which the museographic viewpoint has grappled (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) with the issues of diversity and domination in an age of multiculturalism—and the reception of the Pompidou event in the French press. It should be noted that O’Keeffe’s paintings, spanning over six decades period between 1908 and 1972, are irreducible to the theme of the American West. She is best known—overdetermined as curator of the O’Keeffe museum in New Mexico Carolyn Kastner suggests9—for her vividly colored close-ups of flowers from the urban East of the United States, which the Pompidou retrospective dedicates time and space to. If I insist on O’Keeffe’s alignment with the American West here,10 it is for two reasons: first to continue a contemporary trend in art historiography of the West, which has started to uncover the many unsung women artists of the West;11 second, to situate this exhibit in recent scholarship in transatlantic cultural history that has turned to French fascination for the frontier.12

A Woman’s Voice in the American West

  • 13 Readers can access many of the images discussed in this essay by taking the “virtual tour” proposed (...)
  • 14 This 1956 film, directed by John Ford (whose name has become synonymous with the cinematic genre of (...)

5The Pompidou exhibition enthrones Georgia O’Keeffe in a history of the American West as soon as visitors enter, calling her a “modern Calamity Jane” on the welcome panel. The scenography, by curator Didier Ottinger and architect-scenographer Jasmin Oezcebi, is also carefully crafted to align the artist with her beloved West. Pale gray hues of the floor and walls—quite different from the “white cube” found elsewhere in the Pompidou’s galleries—approximate the feel of three-dimensional replication of paintings like Soft Gray, Alcalde Hill (1929-1930), Grey Hill Forms (1936), Grey Hills (1941).13 The irregular dispersal of rectangular block pillars (where the paintings hang, and significant dates are indicated) creates narrow passes and panoramic openings like a Western desertscape with its canyons and rocky stacks. Door-like frames bisect the first space, a gallery-within-a-gallery, and seem to emulate O’Keeffe’s door of her final property near Abiquiu, which looked onto the New Mexico landscape (In the Patio III [1948]; Black Door with Red [1954]) (Fig. 1). Recalling the cult scene in the Hollywood Western The Searchers,14 these door-like frames do not open onto the Stetson-wearing John Wayne cutting a mysterious, silhouetted figure as he walks away into the auburn desertscape; rather looking back to the gallery entrance, the frames encase a slideshow of photographs of O’Keeffe, sometimes in a black Stetson-like hat, other times grasping her canvases—a feminized John Wayne, perhaps, who clutches not guns but her own art.

Fig 1: Left and Centre: Two in the Abiquiu door series. Right backwall: Winter Road I, 1963.

Fig 1: Left and Centre: Two in the Abiquiu door series. Right backwall: Winter Road I, 1963.

Dallas Museum of Art. Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986 [Photograph DMA_1415-63], photograph, 1988;(https://texashistory.unt.edu/​ark:/67531/​metapth534418/​m1/​1/​:accessed September 27, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Museum of Art.

6If the walls and floor connote geological formations, it is the landscape that is indubitably the headlining act of O’Keeffe’s American West. Her paintings are devoid of inhabitants, with no tumble weed or sense of eerie desertion awaiting a gunfight in sight. This would seem a visual translation of the artist’s desire to keep her discovery of the West on the quiet; as she states in the documentary at the end of the exhibit, she did not want to trumpet the virtues of the area too much for fear of having to share it with others. People-less reliefs run the gamut from her early watercolors of star-studded skies and crimson sunrises (Sunrise and Little Clouds No. II [1916], Evening Star No. VI [1917]), painted during her years as a teacher of art in Texas (1912-1918); to her minimalist Winter Road I (1963) (Fig. 1), composed of a black curlicue on a white background. The latter designates the view from her house in New Mexico, a state she discovered in 1929 and to which she would travel every year until setting up permanent residence there in the 1940s after the death of her longtime companion, the avant-garde photographer, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946).

  • 15 The definition of this age and its influence on the historiography of the American West is borrowed (...)
  • 16 My translation: À la découverte de l’ouest américain, National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heri (...)

7These deserted landscapes diverge from the previous representations in French fine art museum spaces, which set up the land as a stage for the white male hero. Though curators, just like filmmakers, have become more attentive to the theme of domination in the American West since the dawn of the age of “multiculturalism” in the 1990s,15 the itinerant Mythology of the West in American Art, 1830-1940 (the Musées des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, Rennes, and Marseille, 2007-2008) nonetheless built on the pre-multicultural age Discovery-bound in the American West16 (Grand Palais, 1987) by abundantly displaying frontiersmen on horseback, alone or in small groups in the paintings of Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell, Charles Schreyvogel, and Newell Convers Wyeth. The men stage their domination by phallic props (lassoes, guns) which whip animals (mules, cattle, bison, fellow humans) into submission as can be seen by Russell’s When Mules Wear Diamonds (1921) and Wyeth’s The Admirable Outlaw (1906) (both selected for display at the Grand Palais in 1987).

8In the current era, which is more cognizant than ever of gender and racial injustice following #metoo and #blacklivesmatter, even fine arts exhibits not especially dedicated to the American West have still been drawn to the intrepid white male hero of the frontier—albeit with a heavy dose of irony and critical reframing. For his inaugural exhibit (Ouverture, 2021) at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, France’s renowned art collector François Pinault restored to its former glory a mural marouflaged to the central rotunda of the host building, which was the nation’s former commodities stock exchange. The North America section of this mural, first painted by Évariste Vital Luminais between 1886 and 1889, features cowhands reining in cattle. These men manage to stay on their galloping horses despite the odds, implying the prowess of the frontier hero, a theme also prominent in Frederic Remington’s paintings (for instance, Galloping Horsemen, c. 1890).

  • 17 Douglas Irwin, Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy, Chicago: University of Chicago (...)

9Art historian Emily Burns demonstrates that the French, while fascinated with the West, were skeptical of the frontiersman’s untamed ruggedness and their brutal treatment of the American Indians during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—not unrelated, it must be added, to the country’s territorial losses on the American continent throughout the previous century and a half and the fraught trading relations between the two countries that crystallized at the end of the nineteenth century.17 As a continuation of this history, the organizers of Pinault’s Ouverture emphasized irony in its depiction of the West. Deft cowboys in the Évariste mural are brought into tension with a triptych display of the Marlboro Man in gallery three of the Bourse de Commerce. A part of the “Picture Generation” (so-called by Douglas Crimp in 1977), photographer Richard Prince highlights mediation and gimmickry through the prominent display of rips and tears of the magazines where the Marlboro Man (Fig. 2)—the fearless frontier hero and face of the eponymous cigarette company between 1954 and 1999—could be found.

Fig 2: Richard Prince, Cowboy.

Fig 2: Richard Prince, Cowboy.

In Richard Prince’s Marlboro Man series, visible are the rips and tears of magazines where this character may have been found. This provides a reflection on mediation.

Image taken by Thomas Hawk. CC BY-NC 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/​photos/​thomashawk/​50210323833 [accessed 27 September 2021] Image taken August 8, 2020.

10The ochre mountains in Richard Prince’s Untitled (1994),18 another work from the Marlboro Man series owned by Louis Vuitton in the neighboring foundation in the Bois de Boulogne (Paris) might resonate with similar hues in an O’Keeffe painting like Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico/Out Back of Marie’s II (1930) (Fig. 3). However, the folds of the mountains in O’Keeffe’s people-less painting do not set the stage for the cowboy as in Prince’s photograph. In the latter’s richly saturated colors (which can also be seen in some of French photographer Bernard Plossu’s work between 1967 and 1985 showcased at Les Recontres d’Arles photography festival in 2016),19 the image may set up an ironic gaze, a kind of dream in technicolor which viewers know to be fantasy. But as Claire Colebrook reminds us, irony relies on repetition of past traditions and discourses, and this “may be one more way for [the] subject of domination to sustain itself”.20 Thus, the representation in Prince’s Untitled of the cowboy emerging from the hills, his shirt blended with the topography’s earthy hues, may end up reproducing nineteenth-century century Lockean convictions about the white man’s “natural” right to the land. In any case, the Marlboro Man series seems one of the many objects embroiled in the rather virile battle between Louis Vuitton and François Pinault, who are archrival collectors vying to outdo one another on the Parisian contemporary art museum scene.21

Fig 3: Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico/Out Back of Marie’s II, 1930.

Fig 3: Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico/Out Back of Marie’s II, 1930.

Image taken by Trevor Huxham. Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Georgia O’Keeffe museum, Sante Fe, 2018. https://www.flickr.com/​photos/​ferrariguy90/​30299423637 [accessed 27 September 2021].

  • 22 François Brunet, « Avec les compliment de F.V. Hayden, Géologue des Etats-Unis », in Visions de l’O (...)
  • 23 Ibid.

11What is refreshing about O’Keeffe is that there is no trace of irony in her canvases. She brings white men’s sense of entitlement to the land into unambivalent question by simply banishing them from her paintings. O’Keeffe cultivates a sense of solemnity, a profound respect for the landscape and American Indian cultures, especially in her depictions of the Taos pueblo, which she began to work on in 1929 after discovering New Mexico. This is not the first time that French acolytes of the American West have seen the adobe architecture that typify Taos and New Mexico, but O’Keeffe’s vision differs from what has come before. In Visions de l’Ouest : Photographies de l’exploration américaine, 1860-1880, which took place in the Musée de Giverny (Claude Monet territory) in 2007, John K Hiller’s photograph Terraced Housing (Fig. 4) captured the adobe structures of another New Mexico town, Zuni, in sepia tones. As a companion to the white American explorers of the time, Hiller had the job of documenting the frontier territories (New Mexico didn’t gain statehood until 1912) in a way that would promote and legitimate westward expansion.22 Thus, in his long-shot image, emphasis is placed on Zuni’s magnificence and the town’s intricately interlocking block buildings, while the inhabitants are reduced to insignificance: an enigmatic figure, barely indistinguishable from a chimney stack, is perched above the top layer of roofs center-right. Such images reinforced what Visions curator François Brunet called the Indians’ “strange[ness]” in a tapestry putatively destined to be taken over by white men.23 In the Hiller image, the inhabitant interrupts the architecture as a spectral blemish.

Fig 4: John K Hillers (c. 1871-1907), Terraced Housing, Zuni.

Fig 4: John K Hillers (c. 1871-1907), Terraced Housing, Zuni.

Smithsonian Institute. Bureau of American Ethnology. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Terraced_houses,_Zuni_-_NARA_-_523794.jpg [accessed 27 September 2021].

  • 24 Brunet, op cit, p. 9.

12This is not to imply that the organizers of the 2007 exhibit Visions de l’Ouest did not alert its twenty-first visitors to the visual and discursive practices that perpetuated the Othering of America’s indigenous populations began by the likes of George Catlin and his “musée indien” back in 1846. As Brunet explains, many of the exhibit’s photographs came from public holdings in France, a symptom of the “curiosity of the French public” (la curiosité du public français) in the nineteenth century which gave a transnational boost to white American explorers’ missions westward across the continent.24 However, in the visual language of her people-less canvases, O’Keeffe avoids the objectification of America Indian cultures altogether. In her Taos Pueblo (1929), unlike Hiller’s high-angle, demiurgic perspective, she depicts the eponymous town from a position of looking up in admiration to the adobe structures. Smooth contours round out the building’s edges while the contiguity of pale gray-light brown colors below the skyline position the town as a bodily extension of the ground; the caption to this and Ranchos Church No. 1 (1929) urges us to see this by pointing out the “anatomical” detail of the paintings. Gone are Hiller’s reductions of the town’s inhabitants to uncanny specters; in the place of objectification are a dermatological dimension to the architecture and the implication that the Puebloans, who built Taos pueblo, are sutured to the land.

  • 25 Evelyn Schels (dir.), Georgia O’Keeffe – Une artiste au Far West. Arte TV, France, 2020. 53 min. ht (...)
  • 26 Clémentine Mercier, « La Griffe O’Keeffe », Libération, 25 September 2021.

13Details like this reflect the sentient qualities of O’Keeffe’s landscapes, which as the “Early Works” caption signals was shaped by sublime aesthetics of nineteenth-century artists like Albert Bierstadt, commonly credited as a forebear of the panoramic shots of the Hollywood Western. Mention of Bierstadt, the canyon-like scenography, and the documentary on French-German television channel Arte which names O’Keeffe as Une Artiste au Far West (A Female Artist in the Far West) successfully position her as disrupting the male artistic tradition of the American West known to the French public.25 The Arte documentary has been made as a complement to the exhibit, which came from Madrid (Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, April-August 2021) and traveled to Basel (Switzerland) (Fondation Beyeler, January-May 2022) after it finished at the Pompidou in December 2021. O’Keeffe’s art in Europe might be imagined as the wandering buckskinned Calamity Jane to whom the Pompidou retrospective compares her. With glowing reviews, O’Keeffe will go down in French museum historiography as not “knowing the unhappy fate of [this] female pioneer of the West” (sans connaître le sort misérable de la pionnière de la conquête de l'Ouest) (whose alcoholism finally got the better of her), as journalist for left-leaning Libération Clémentine Mercier opines.26 Yet the penchant for naming white men like Albert Bierstadt as precursors and influences is exactly what is troubling in the Pompidou exhibit.

In the Shadow of Men

14Visitors are privy to a long list of white men, American and European, in discovering O’Keeffe’s work in the Pompidou retrospective: Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Ansel Easton Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jackson Pollock. It is only Pollock and Kelly who are dubbed successors to O’Keeffe’s style, which in its later years saw the American West pared down to curved lines and colors miraculously rising out of a crisp white base (Road to the Ranch, 1964)—an underacknowledged precursor to American minimalism as the Paris exhibit reminds us.

  • 27 Alfred Stieglitz qtd. in Susan Landauer, “Searching for Selfhood: Women Artists of Northern Califor (...)

15A particularly significant place is accorded to Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe’s patron, companion, and one of the influences on her photographic style of painting close-ups of flowers. Stieglitz once said of the methods of women artists: “Woman feels the world differently than man feels it. The woman receives the world through her womb. That is the seat of her deepest feeling. Mind comes second”.27 With the narrow conduit at the exhibit entrance which leads to a square space, visitors might be forgiven for recalling the uterine analogy. The square is in fact a mockup of Gallery 291, established by Stieglitz in 1905 and which revealed the European modernists and School of Paris to American audiences for the first time. Flanking either side of this open square (bisected by the aforementioned door-like frames) are walls adorned with the works of Picasso, Cézanne, the American modernist painter Marsden Hartley, August Rodin, and Stieglitz. As visitors exit the simulacrum of 291 to go into the main gallery, they are met with the only works by O’Keeffe, a curious choice given that Stieglitz exhibited O’Keeffe prolifically in the real 291: on the right side, watercolors belonging to Nude Series VIII (1917); on the left, Special No. 9 (1915) and Black Lines (1916). O’Keeffe’s work is placed at the neck of this uterus-like agora populated only by male artists.

  • 28 Timeline, Georgia O’Keeffe 8 septembre – 6 décembre 2021, Centre Georges Pompidiou. Didier Ottinger (...)
  • 29 Ibid.

16There is no doubt that Stieglitz played a central role in promoting O’Keeffe to the limelight at a time when the artworld was still a hostile place for women, and it is important to recognize the role of 291, where a hundred works by the artist were unveiled to an American public under the title O’Keeffe, American in 1923.28 Yet, the mock 291 seems more of disguised jibe at Stieglitz for believing, as the timeline references, that in O’Keeffe he had found “America without that damned French flavor”.29 There seems to be a delicious irony enjoyed by the organizers in placing this quote on the exterior walls of the false 291, which illustrates the imprint of the School of Paris on O’Keeffe’s work. Rodin’s watercolors, for instance, of nude women are located adjacently to O’Keeffe’s Nude Series VIII (1917). Though a caption encourages us to take note of the “pure, spare and clear” watercolors that distinguish O’Keeffe’s blue and wine-colored nudes from Rodin, the juxtaposition nonetheless places O’Keeffe as an inheritor of Rodin.

  • 30 Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. Ch (...)
  • 31 Lucy Mazdon, Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema. London: BFI, 2000.
  • 32 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the (...)
  • 33 Drawing on Vanessa Schwartz’s work (see ftn 28), elsewhere I have explored how Hollywood harnessed (...)

17Franco-American cultural industry battles seem implicit in the creation of this faux 291—as one in the proverbial eye for the American fine arts and cinema on either side of the US continent. Hollywood has appropriated France’s belle époque artworks30 and its cinema31 for profit, and, according to art historian Serge Guilbaut, the New York fine arts scene “stole the idea of modern art” from the Parisian avant-garde.32 Against this common pattern of appropriation in divergent regions and settings, the Pompidou exhibit toys with the idea that it was France that inspired American twentieth-century fine arts modernism to which O’Keeffe and Stieglitz belonged. Considering the plethora of American western landscapes that come after in the O’Keeffe retrospective, we might even be tempted to reflect on the role that France had in forming the visual imaginary of the American West.33 In any case, nationally specific stakes seem involved in the Pompidou scenography. The mock 291 did not make its way into the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza where O’Keeffe’s collection, curated by Marta Ruiz del Árbol, had been on display before it came to Paris (between April and August 2021).

  • 34 Mercier, op cit.
  • 35 Philippe Dagen, « Exposition : Georgia O’Keeffe, au delà des modes », Le Monde, 9 September 2021. h (...)

18The spatial alignment of Rodin’s nudes with O’Keeffe’s would be innocuous for visitors’ reflection on O’Keeffe’s of the American West were it not for the fact that, throughout this exhibition, it is female biology that we are encouraged to think of when looking at her landscapes. The captions describe her work as “biomorphic” (a word commonly associated with European Surrealism) and “anatomical”. Mercier (in Libération) describes Black Hills with Cedar (1941-1942) as a “barely disguised reference” (une référence à peine cachée) to Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (1865) (Fig. 6), comparing the variegated pinks and grays of a mountain ridge straddling a green bush in O’Keeffe to the faceless woman’s thighs and sex in Courbet.34 Le Monde art critic Philippe Dagen similarly identifies “th[e] sexuated anthropomorphism [of her painted flowers] [which] takes hold of the landscape paintings” (cet anthropomorphisme sexué prend possession des paysages), opining that Black Place (1944) (Fig. 5) would better have been called Birth Place.35

Fig 5: Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Place I. Black Place I, 1944, oil on canvas, 26 in. x 30 1/8 in.

Fig 5: Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Place I. Black Place I, 1944, oil on canvas, 26 in. x 30 1/8 in.

Image taken by Wally Gobetz. Creative Commons Licence: https://www.flickr.com/​photos/​wallyg/​6991099201 [accessed 27 September 2021]. San Francisco - SoMa: SFMoMA - Image taken February 26, 2012.

Fig. 6: Comparisons were made between O’Keeffe’s sentient landscapes and Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, 1965. CC BY 3.0.

Fig. 6: Comparisons were made between O’Keeffe’s sentient landscapes and Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, 1965. CC BY 3.0.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Gustave_courbet,_l'origine_del_mondo,_1865_(cropped).JPG [accessed 27 September 2021]. Oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay. Image taken by Saliko.]

  • 36 Sandra D’Emilio and Sharyn Udall, “Inner Voices, Outward Forms: Women Painters in New Mexico”, in I (...)

19O’Keeffe always strenuously denied biologizing readings of her work. The retrospective mentions this when describing her famous painted close-ups of flowers in cityscapes which have often been read as a woman’s sex. It is a shame, however, that it does not extend the point to an analysis of her version of the American West. Sandra D’Emilio and Sharyn Udall, analyzing women painters in New Mexico, explain that O’Keeffe resisted the analogy of woman-as-American-desert, because she knew it would “subject her repeatedly to the label of ‘feminine’” at a time when women artists were struggling to make a name and living for themselves.36

  • 37 Timeline, op cit.
  • 38 Ibid.

20A term that leaps out at us in the timeline in the Paris retrospective is “psychoneurosis”, used to describe O’Keeffe’s bout of ill health that led her to discover New Mexico in 1929.37 The psychoanalytic rhetoric is a surprising, and pathologizing, incursion in a timeline dedicated to demonstrating O’Keeffe’s ingenuity and confidence in her art and methods (“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way”).38 The medicalizing term exudes a certain discursive violence because the details of the diagnosis are left underexplained. The Arte documentary does a better job of throwing light on the matter: Alfred Stieglitz caused O’Keeffe a significant amount of suffering in her life, particularly after photographer Dorothy Norman (1905-1997) entered the scene as Stieglitz’s (considerably younger) lover and O’Keeffe’s amorous and artistic rival.

  • 39 Ibid.

21It is important not to collapse O’Keeffe’s work into pop-psychoanalytic readings. The exhibit is respectful of the painter’s wishes that viewers concentrate on her art, not her private life: “Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest” (emphasis mine).39 But at least some knowledge of the checkered relationship O’Keeffe had with Stieglitz would have shed light on the artist’s enigmatic illness, and it would seem an urgent and relevant endeavor in our #metoo era (or in France, the #balancetonporc movement) which has dwelled on how cultural institutions enable male abuse of power. Perhaps in the spirit of #metoo, the Arte documentary decrypts and denounces the difficult position in which O’Keeffe was left by Stieglitz’s indiscretions. It explains that O’Keeffe saw in Stieglitz not simply a lover but also a potent patron, at least part of the reason why she remained with the photographer to his death in 1946. Through this narrative, the documentary invites emotional connection with O’Keeffe’s rediscovery of the American West (after her earlier years in Texas), contextualizing Stieglitz’s infidelity as the impetus the artist needed to travel further west to New Mexico in 1929. Taking distance from Stieglitz, she found peace of mind and the inspiration to recover through her painting of the surrounding landscapes.

  • 40 English-language Leaflet, Georgia O’Keeffe 8 septembre – 6 décembre 2021, op cit.

22Knowledge of these details in the Pompidou retrospective would have only encouraged spectators’ search for clues of the artist’s emotional reparation in her canvases, which are abundant. While the captions point us to a difference between the austere hues of her Eastern landscapes and the vibrant colors of the American West, we might also note the artist’s evolving brushwork. Storm Cloud, Lake George (1923) and The Barns, Lake George (1926) are marked by thick, long brushstrokes of grey, mauve, dark greens blended with blacks and somber pink. Of a layered, viscous quality, the long, linear brushwork implies haste—perhaps a sign of the artist’s indifference for the staid New England destination where she holidayed with Stieglitz in her early years. There is a lacquer-effect that reflects the light in this textured paintwork which gives the impression of slickness, a possible inauthentic showiness to Lake George, absent in the Western landscapes. By contrast, the wellbeing she found in New Mexico seems to emerge not simply from the rich reds, royal blues, emerald greens, and soft pale greys and pinks on the canvas but also in the shorter, less frenzied, sometimes daubed (Black Hills with Cedar [1941-1942]) brushstrokes. Unlike the lacquer of the East, these brushstrokes create the illusion of the paint’s assimilation to the canvas, making artistic sense of the artist’s feeling of harmony with the West (“for me it is the only place”).40

23Once we know about O’Keeffe’s tranquility away from Stieglitz, it is also hard not to remark the calm blue skies that proliferate in her New Mexico landscapes (My Front Yard, Summer, 1941; In the Patio III, 1948; Soft Gray, Alcalde Hill, 1929; Easter Sunrise, 1953), which distinguish her version of the American West from that of Albert Bierstadt (named as a precursor in the Pompidou exhibit) or those who have followed in his wake. Bierstadt applied the Romantics’ idea of the sublime to a depiction of the American West. His landscapes were wild and uncharted (for instance, Merced River, Yosemite Valley [1866] [Fig. 7]), and he set the land alight with the representations of the tempestuous elements coming from the ether. Bernard Plossu, who has exhibited widely in France (Western Colors, Arles photography festival, 2016; So Long, Vivre l’Ouest américain, 1970-1985, Frac Haute-Normandie, 2007), repeats this aesthetic in photography with dust clouds making the land disappear under the unholy weather—a metaphor for the untamable, age-old West, which in Plossu’s images is often obliged to reckon with the forces of modern living (straight roads reaching beyond the horizon; prefabricated houses on immense trucks; kitsch, neon signs of cowboy-themed restaurants are just some of the compositional elements of his photographs).

Fig 7: Albert Bierstadt, Merced River, Yosemite Valley, 1866. Oil on canvas. 36 x 50 in. (91.4 x 127 cm).

Fig 7: Albert Bierstadt, Merced River, Yosemite Valley, 1866. Oil on canvas. 36 x 50 in. (91.4 x 127 cm).

Gift of the sons of William Paton, 1909. Public Domain. https://www.metmuseum.org/​art/​collection/​search/​10150 [accessed 27 September 2021].

  • 41 English-language Leaflet, Georgia O’Keeffe 8 septembre – 6 décembre 2021, op cit.

24By contrast, against a placid sky, O’Keeffe’s land comes alive of its own free will. The emerald greens, ochres, blacks, mauves, navy and royal blued of the mountains in Black Mesa Landscape (1930) (Fig. 3) cannot possibly be the result of the unfazed, baby blue sky. Similarly, in Pelvis with the Distance (1943), a sun-bleached animal carcass looms large over royal blue mountains in the distance, giving off their own white luster separate from the azure atmosphere overhead. Although the ossified traces of a past animal may seem morbid, O’Keeffe insisted on their life-giving force. They and the unwavering celestial blues imply that the West’s natural elements “will always be there […] after all man’s destruction is finished”. O’Keeffe made the latter comment in 1943 at the height of World War II.41 Unlike Plossu’s images, O’Keeffe’s American West is a timeless place unperturbed by men’s destructive entry into and exit from the world.

  • 42 Judith Benhamou, « Les merveilles de Georgia O'Keeffe au Centre Pompidou », Les Échos, 17 September (...)
  • 43 Interactive Digital Publication to Georgia O’Keeffe temporary exhibit, Connecta Thyssen/Thyssen Dig (...)

25Reviewing the Pompidou retrospective, Judith Benhamou, writing for the economically liberal, right-leaning Les Échos, identifies the Dalí’s technique of dislocation, seen in the preternaturally large clockfaces against a landscape in The Persistence (1931), as foreshadowing the animal bones looming large over the mountains in Pelvis with the distance and the similarly themes Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills (1935) (Fig. 8).42 As the Madrid exhibit insisted “O’Keeffe always denied any links with surrealism”43 but the Paris sequel, curated by Didier Ottinger, leaves the links sufficiently ambivalent for Benhamou to draw out the inflection of Dalí. While we might expect to find readier references to Dalí in the latter’s homeland Spain, it is on the contrary the Madrid curator’s divergent professional experience that seems to emerge in comparing O’Keeffe’s presentation in Spain and France: Marta Ruiz del Árbol (in Madrid) has a background in presenting women artists on their own terms, curating retrospectives on the likes of Sonia Delauney (2017) and the women “pioneers” of the Russian avant-garde (2019). Didier Ottinger, on the other hand, has been a prolific exhibitor of Surrealist art and has focused on male artists, in particular Picasso. The male artistic bias in the Parisian curator’s career surely had at least some hand in the partial structuring of this exhibit around concepts such as Surrealist biomorphism, and European and Euro-American names like Albert Bierstadt, Alfred Stieglitz, Auguste Rodin, Ellsworth Kelly, and Paul Strand.

  • 44 Virginia Scharff, “Introduction: Women Envision the West, 1890-1945,” in Independent Spirits, op ci (...)
  • 45 Caption to Grey, Blue, and Black—Pink Circle, Georgia O’Keeffe 8 septembre – 6 décembre 2021, op ci (...)

26How different our associations might have been had we had been given fuller knowledge of the Taos artists’ community, established by patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, which surrounded O’Keeffe during her stays in New Mexico. This community was awash with other women: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Dorothy Brett among others.44 Tony Luhan (Mabel’s spouse and a Taos pueblo American Indian) was also a prominent presence who brought O’Keeffe to watch the rituals of the region’s Indigenous American communities. His role as mediator is briefly evoked in the caption to Grey, Blue, and Black—Pink Circle (1929), in which the Kachina cosmic forces of a Hopi dance are figured in rounded-out oblongs and swirls. There is a striking difference, however, between the time and energy that the Paris retrospective dedicates to listing the names of European influences and what feels like a rushed and elusive reference to largely nameless (and genderless) “colony of writers and artists” in Taos.45

Fig. 8: Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills (Ram's Head and White Hollyhock, New Mexico), 1935. Oil on canvas, 30 x 36 in.

Fig. 8: Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills (Ram's Head and White Hollyhock, New Mexico), 1935. Oil on canvas, 30 x 36 in.

Brooklyn Museum: Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/​opencollection/​objects/​2096

  • 46 Caption to Paul’s Kachina, 1931, Georgia O’Keeffe 8 septembre – 6 décembre 2021, op cit.
  • 47 Maureen Murphy, De L’Imaginaire au musée : les arts d’Afrique à Paris et à New York (1931 à nos jou (...)
  • 48 Caption to Les Katsinam, permanent collections of the Musée du Quai Branly, “Americas” section.

27As a further example, the final section of the Pompidou exhibit takes visitors into a blackened space, quite different from the pale grey of the previous parts, to present O’Keeffe’s interest in and paintings of Kachina dolls. This space does not draw attention to the Pueblo Indians (who remain nameless “Hopi and Zuñi” people) but rather the artist’s relationship to Euro-American artists Paul Strand and Jackson Pollock.46 The black walls have the effect of emphasizing the stark white cabinet of curiosities containing several, variously-sized, Kachina dolls offered to O’Keeffe by Strand. This seems to take a leaf out of the Musée du Quai Branly’s book, emulating the latter’s dimly lit galleries and its dual under- and overhead lighting on individual art objects. The light-dark contrast causes shadows and reflections of the objects to splay out in kaleidoscopic directions, in France’s best known arts premiers museum. Maureen Murphy has problematized this scenographic choice, suggesting that it paves the way for viewers’ comprehension of these objects as placed in an oneiric space of fantasy and myth, conjuring our mourning for “lost” tribal ways without taking the time or care to go into full historical detail of the circumstances by which these objects became traces of a “disappeared” culture (the root cause being white settler colonialism, its invasions and its ravages).47 The caption in the final Pompidou exhibit hints at the use of the American Indian artefacts as a means for white artists (O'Keeffe, Strand, Pollock, among others) to break free of Europe in search of an authentically “American”, indigenized, art, without giving visitors further clues to understanding this as an act of white appropriation or without elucidating the proper function of the Kachina dolls (the Quai Branly does, admittedly, do the latter, briefly: the dolls act as miniatures to instruct children of the arrival of Katsinam, intermediaries between the spiritual and earthly world, when they visit during summer and winter solstices).48

28Had the Pompidou retrospective sought out fuller details of the interactions between white American artists and American Indians, the enigmatic framing of the last section could have been avoided. After all, the Taos colony established by Mabel Dodge Luhan following her marriage to Puebloan Indian Tony Lujan was no historical exception, and the opportunities afforded to white women artists such as O’Keeffe were not unique to this place. Kate T Cory ventured to a different artists’ residence in Northern Arizona and subsequently spent seven years on a Hopi reservation in the region. Similar to O’Keeffe’s Pelvis with the Distance and Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hill’s, Cory’s painting Return of the Kachinas (1912-1935)49 represents a celestial motif of life beyond death, the ancestral spirits of the Puebloan people igniting the sky with a mystical dance. O’Keeffe’s abstract and people-less landscapes may be very different from Cory’s peopled, more naturalistic style of painting, which, despite elements that appear supernatural to the white gaze, were based on the photographs she took on the reservation and thus display an “ethnographi[c]” attention to detail.50 In different styles, both Cory and O’Keeffe nonetheless commonly play out a conviction in the continuation of life after death, a “unity of the different spheres of life” inherited from their contact with the American Indians.51 As O’Keeffe stated: “When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore, unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I’m gone.”52 It is a pity that the Pompidou exhibit did not expand on this remark, which was cited in the timeline of the artist at the beginning of the exhibit, to show affinities between women artists of the same generation who inscribed indigenous beliefs in their canvases.

  • 53 Margaux Brugvin, « Lumière, liberté, modernité : Georgia O’Keeffe, icône de la peinture américaine, (...)
  • 54 Scharff, op cit., p. 6.

29I am not suggesting that O’Keeffe (who painted in New Mexico) and Cory (in Arizona) are directly interlinked, but that the French fine art museum industry should in future years contemplate exhibiting this alternative genealogy to women’s art in the American West. With the inventory of European and white American male names, we are led to believe that O’Keeffe “represents an exception becoming the woman artist of her time” (elle représente une exception : elle devient la "femme artiste" de son époque) as Margaux Brugvin concludes, reviewing the Paris exhibit for right-leaning publication Madame Le Figaro.53 Indeed, as we have seen, whether on the left (Libération), right (Les Échos, Madame Le Figaro) or in the centre (Le Monde), critics have emphasized an understanding of the artist as a singularly successful feminist “outlaw” figure—recalling Clémentine Mercier’s description of O’Keeffe as a non-alcoholic Calamity Jane—who borrowed from male-pattern codes of Surrealism and its focus on the naked female body. That O’Keeffe has been the best-known woman painter of the American West to emerge in the twentieth century is beyond dispute. That she was alone in a men’s club is, however, misleading. As Virginia Scharff notes, the common interpretation of Georgia O’Keeffe as a “single-minded woman” and the lone exception “to follow the career path of the male ‘genius’” obscures a reality that involves the artist’s encounter with the communities of New Mexico.54

30The tendency to figure a women’s American West exclusively through the prism of Georgia O’Keeffe is not a problem limited to France. Exhibits on the communities of women artists in the American West are rare. Two important exceptions are Woman Artist in the American West, 1860-1960 at the Mackenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton (California), curated by Phil Kovinick back in 1976; and the 1996 exhibit Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945 at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, curated by Patricia Trenton. Academic scholarship also seems to be giving the exhibition world a run for its money in this respect (Julia Danneberg’s Women Artists of the West: Five Portraits in Creativity and Courage [2002]; Susan Ressler’s Women Artists of the American West [2003]). The Pompidou center has a long way to go before catching up with this changing trend. On the other hand, this particular museum would seem the perfect locale in future years to welcome a French counterpart to an exhibit like Independent Spirits. After all, it is known for having hosted the first major exhibit in Europe dedicated exclusively to women’s modern and contemporary art between 2009 and 2011. Curated by Camille Morineau, who described her discovery of gender studies after teaching in the United States, and founder of the women artists’ portal AWARE, Elles @ Pompidou might even have weighed in on the Pompidou’s choice to co-host the O’Keeffe collections during their tour of Europe. If the Pompidou is to continue its marketization as a space where gender imbalances in the artworld are redressed, an exhibit that gives a more comprehensive view of women artists of the American West would consolidate and enrich what the Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective of 2021 has initiated: an opportunity for visitors to see the American West differently from the museographic circulation of le Far West in France, which has consisted in representing an unforgiving land populated by white male horseman in the fine arts world and the somewhat enigmatic and fantasized figure of the Indian perpetuated by the Quai Branly project.

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Notes

1 Daniel Fabre, « Présentation : Catlin vu d’Europe », in Gradhiva, 3, 2006, 10 June 2009. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/89 [accessed 26 September 2021].

2 Emily Burns, Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018, p. 10.

3 Peinture de l’ouest, sculpture de l'est des États-Unis : Paris, Centre culturel américain, 6 mars-5 avril 1958, introduced by Richard E. Fuller, Paris: Centre culturel américain, 1958.

4 Agathe Cabau , « La mythologie de l'Ouest dans l'art américain 1830-1940 », Sociétés & Représentations, vol. 2, no. 26, 2008, p. 255-260. URL : https://www.cairn.info/revue-societes-et-representations-2008-2-page-255.htm [accessed 26 September 2021].

5 Emily Burns and Gregory Mohr have explored French-Lakota friendships and alliances in the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and the production of so-called “Camargue Westerns” (made in France) respectively. See: Emily Burns, Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France, op cit. Gregory, Mohr, “The French Camargue-Western.” Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western. Eds. Peter Schulz et al. Marburg: Schüren, 2012, p. 87-95.

6 Maureen Murphy, De L’Imaginaire au musée : les arts d’Afrique à Paris et à New York (1931 à nos jours), Paris : Presses du réel, 2020.

7 See: Gregory, Mohr, “The French Camargue-Western”, op cit.

8 Cédric Enjalbert, « Georgia O’Keeffe. Georgia, on kiffe ! », PhiloMag, 23 September 2021. URL: https://www.philomag.com/articles/georgia-okeeffe-georgia-kiffe [accessed 26 September 2021] ; « La Révélation : On kiffe, O’Keeffe », Aujourd’hui en France, 12 September 2021.

9 Carolyn Kastner, “Life and Work of Georgia O’Keeffe”, C-Span. 9 January 2013. URL: https://www.c-span.org/video/?310650-1/life-artwork-georgia-okeeffe [accessed 26 September 2021].

10 By “American West”, I refer not simply to the region of the US continent falling between the ninety-eight meridian, the forty-ninth parallel, the Pacific ocean, and the border with Mexico of which O’Keeffe’s beloved New Mexico is a prominent part; I also allude to the powerful visual mythology attached to the American West, consisting among other things of vast, tempestuous landscapes, and the fearless white male frontier hero. The artist privileged in this essay plays with and reconfigures both aspects of this mythology.

11 Susan Ressler, Women Artists of the American West, Jefferson: McFarland & Co, 2011; Phil Kovinick, Woman Artist in the American West, 1860-1960, Fullerton: Mackenthaler Cultural Center, 1976; Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, University of Texas Press, 2007; Julie Danneberg, Women Artists of the West: Five Portraits in Creativity and Courage, Fulcrum Publishing, 2002; Patricia Trenton (ed), Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945, Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 1995.

12 Emily C. Burns, and Agathe Cabau. “Call and Answer: Dialoguing the American West in France,” Transatlantica 2 (2017). URL: journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/10676 [accessed 2 September 2020]; Emily Burns, Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018; Lara Cox, “Admirable Alterity on the Frontier: French Women’s Agency in the Hollywood Western (1931-1980)”, Transatlantica 2020, 1 December 2020. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/15812 [accessed 26 September 2021]; Gregory MOHR. “The French Camargue-Western.” Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western. Peter Schulz et al. Marburg (eds), Schüren, 2012, p. 87-95.

13 Readers can access many of the images discussed in this essay by taking the “virtual tour” proposed by the Museo Nacional, Thyssen-Bornemisza, where the O’Keeffe retrospective was held just before it arrived in Paris: https://www.museothyssen.org/en/thyssenmultimedia/virtual-tours/immersive/georgia-okeeffe [accessed 27 September 2021].

14 This 1956 film, directed by John Ford (whose name has become synonymous with the cinematic genre of the Western itself), features John Wayne (the best-known star of the Western) as American civil war veteran Ethan Edwards. Together with his nephew, Edwards embarks on a journey to find his niece, Debbie Edwards played by Natalie Wood, who has been abducted by Comanche Indians. The famous shot, at the end of the film, crowns the moment when the abducted niece has been returned to the family and the plot is resolved with the door closing on John Wayne’s character who walks into the red-sand desertscape backdrop. A symbolic separation is orchestrated between the hearth and Western hero who, choosing the wilderness, is cast as incompatible with family or home life. Conjured in our minds when viewing O’Keeffe, the Pompidou suggests a feminine reappropriation of the frontiersman’ rejection of domesticity.

15 The definition of this age and its influence on the historiography of the American West is borrowed from Marianne Kac-Vergne, who has explored the increased representation of the “minorités traditionnellement oubliées” (347) by the Hollywood Western in films from the 1990s. See: Marianne Kac-Vergne, “Les westerns contemporains à l’épreuve de la diversité”. In Menegaldo and Lauric (eds), Les Westerns et les mythes de l’ouest : littérature et arts de l’image. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015, pp. 347-376 .

16 My translation: À la découverte de l’ouest américain, National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, Grand Palais, Paris, 23 octobre-8 novembre 1987, Paris : Société du Salon d'automne, 1987.

17 Douglas Irwin, Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017, p. 98, 258, 306.

18 URL to this image: https://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en/collection/artworks/untitled-cowboy [accessed 27 September 2021].

19 Bernard Plossu, Western Colors : tirages Fresson, les Rencontres d'Arles, Arles, 4 July to 25 September 2016, texte, Max Evans et Francis Hodgson, Paris : Textuel, DL 2016.

20 Claire Colebrook, Irony, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 154.

21 Renaud Lemozy, « Vuitton, Pinault : la guerre des fondations aura bien lieu », Gnitekram, https://gnitekram.fr/vuitton-pinault-la-guerre-des-fondations-aura-bien-lieu/ [accessed 26 September 2021].

22 François Brunet, « Avec les compliment de F.V. Hayden, Géologue des Etats-Unis », in Visions de l’Ouest : photographies de l’exploration américaine, 1860-1880, ed. by François Brunet and Bronwyn Griffith, Giverny: Musée d’Art Américain – Terra Foundation for American Art in Paris, 2007, p. 38.

23 Ibid.

24 Brunet, op cit, p. 9.

25 Evelyn Schels (dir.), Georgia O’Keeffe – Une artiste au Far West. Arte TV, France, 2020. 53 min. https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/100266-000-A/georgia-o-keeffe-une-artiste-au-far-west/ [accessed 27 September 2021].

26 Clémentine Mercier, « La Griffe O’Keeffe », Libération, 25 September 2021.

27 Alfred Stieglitz qtd. in Susan Landauer, “Searching for Selfhood: Women Artists of Northern California”, in Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, op cit., p. 25.

28 Timeline, Georgia O’Keeffe 8 septembre – 6 décembre 2021, Centre Georges Pompidiou. Didier Ottinger (curator), Anna Hiddleston-Galloni (assistant curator), Cathy Gicquel (chargée de production), Jasmin Oezcebi (architect-scenographer).

29 Ibid.

30 Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

31 Lucy Mazdon, Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema. London: BFI, 2000.

32 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020 [1983].

33 Drawing on Vanessa Schwartz’s work (see ftn 28), elsewhere I have explored how Hollywood harnessed the Parisian Belle Époque aesthetic to create a cycle of “Frenchness Westerns” in the 1950s featuring French women in leading roles on the Western frontier. See: Lara Cox, “Admirable Alterity on the Frontier: French Women’s Agency in the Hollywood Western (1931-1980)”. Transatlantica 1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.15812

34 Mercier, op cit.

35 Philippe Dagen, « Exposition : Georgia O’Keeffe, au delà des modes », Le Monde, 9 September 2021. https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2021/09/09/exposition-georgia-o-keeffe-au-dela-des-modes_6093958_3246.html [accessed 27 September 2021].

36 Sandra D’Emilio and Sharyn Udall, “Inner Voices, Outward Forms: Women Painters in New Mexico”, in Independent Spirits, op cit., p. 169.

37 Timeline, op cit.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 English-language Leaflet, Georgia O’Keeffe 8 septembre – 6 décembre 2021, op cit.

41 English-language Leaflet, Georgia O’Keeffe 8 septembre – 6 décembre 2021, op cit.

42 Judith Benhamou, « Les merveilles de Georgia O'Keeffe au Centre Pompidou », Les Échos, 17 September, 2021.

43 Interactive Digital Publication to Georgia O’Keeffe temporary exhibit, Connecta Thyssen/Thyssen Digital Publications, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2021, p. 37. https://www.museothyssen.org/en/conectathyssen/Thyssen-Digital-Publications/publication-georgia-okeeffe [accessed 27 September 2021].

44 Virginia Scharff, “Introduction: Women Envision the West, 1890-1945,” in Independent Spirits, op cit., p. 5.

45 Caption to Grey, Blue, and Black—Pink Circle, Georgia O’Keeffe 8 septembre – 6 décembre 2021, op cit.

46 Caption to Paul’s Kachina, 1931, Georgia O’Keeffe 8 septembre – 6 décembre 2021, op cit.

47 Maureen Murphy, De L’Imaginaire au musée : les arts d’Afrique à Paris et à New York (1931 à nos jours). Dijon: Presses du réel, 2020, p. 228.

48 Caption to Les Katsinam, permanent collections of the Musée du Quai Branly, “Americas” section.

49 An URL to this image: https://stagemommusings.wordpress.com/tag/kate-cory-art/ [accessed 27 September 2021].

50 Sarah Moore, “No Woman’s Land: Arizona Adventures”, in Independent Spirits, p.135.

51 Ibid., p. 135.

52 Timeline, op cit.

53 Margaux Brugvin, « Lumière, liberté, modernité : Georgia O’Keeffe, icône de la peinture américaine, s’expose à Paris, » Madame Le Figaro, 25 September 2021. https://madame.lefigaro.fr/celebrites/georgia-okeeffe-la-star-americaine-de-la-peinture-moderniste-210921-198241 [accessed 27 September 2017].

54 Scharff, op cit., p. 6.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig 1: Left and Centre: Two in the Abiquiu door series. Right backwall: Winter Road I, 1963.
Crédits Dallas Museum of Art. Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986 [Photograph DMA_1415-63], photograph, 1988;(https://texashistory.unt.edu/​ark:/67531/​metapth534418/​m1/​1/​:accessed September 27, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Museum of Art.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/docannexe/image/4432/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 84k
Titre Fig 2: Richard Prince, Cowboy.
Légende In Richard Prince’s Marlboro Man series, visible are the rips and tears of magazines where this character may have been found. This provides a reflection on mediation.
Crédits Image taken by Thomas Hawk. CC BY-NC 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/​photos/​thomashawk/​50210323833 [accessed 27 September 2021] Image taken August 8, 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/docannexe/image/4432/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,0M
Titre Fig 3: Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico/Out Back of Marie’s II, 1930.
Crédits Image taken by Trevor Huxham. Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Georgia O’Keeffe museum, Sante Fe, 2018. https://www.flickr.com/​photos/​ferrariguy90/​30299423637 [accessed 27 September 2021].
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/docannexe/image/4432/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 331k
Titre Fig 4: John K Hillers (c. 1871-1907), Terraced Housing, Zuni.
Crédits Smithsonian Institute. Bureau of American Ethnology. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Terraced_houses,_Zuni_-_NARA_-_523794.jpg [accessed 27 September 2021].
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/docannexe/image/4432/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 540k
Titre Fig 5: Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Place I. Black Place I, 1944, oil on canvas, 26 in. x 30 1/8 in.
Crédits Image taken by Wally Gobetz. Creative Commons Licence: https://www.flickr.com/​photos/​wallyg/​6991099201 [accessed 27 September 2021]. San Francisco - SoMa: SFMoMA - Image taken February 26, 2012.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/docannexe/image/4432/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 544k
Titre Fig. 6: Comparisons were made between O’Keeffe’s sentient landscapes and Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, 1965. CC BY 3.0.
Crédits https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Gustave_courbet,_l'origine_del_mondo,_1865_(cropped).JPG [accessed 27 September 2021]. Oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay. Image taken by Saliko.]
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/docannexe/image/4432/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 331k
Titre Fig 7: Albert Bierstadt, Merced River, Yosemite Valley, 1866. Oil on canvas. 36 x 50 in. (91.4 x 127 cm).
Crédits Gift of the sons of William Paton, 1909. Public Domain. https://www.metmuseum.org/​art/​collection/​search/​10150 [accessed 27 September 2021].
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/docannexe/image/4432/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 662k
Titre Fig. 8: Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills (Ram's Head and White Hollyhock, New Mexico), 1935. Oil on canvas, 30 x 36 in.
Crédits Brooklyn Museum: Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/​opencollection/​objects/​2096
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/docannexe/image/4432/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 176k
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Lara Cox, « Georgia O’Keeffe: A New Entrant in the French Love Affair with the American West »Revue d’histoire culturelle [En ligne], 6 | 2023, mis en ligne le 01 août 2023, consulté le 15 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/4432 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rhc.4432

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Lara Cox

Lara Cox is an ATER of English for the visual arts at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is interested in the material circulation of the American West between France and the US in film, art history, and French theory. / Lara Cox est ATER d'anglais pour les arts visuels à Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Elle s'intéresse à la circulation matérielle de l'Ouest américain entre la France et les États-Unis dans le cinéma, l'histoire de l'art et la French Theory.

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