Lot Essay
RELATED WORKS
Closed Clam Shell, oil on canvas, 20 x 9in. (50.8 x 22.9cm.), Private collection
Open Clam Shell, oil on canvas, 20 x 9in. (50.8 x 22.9cm.), Private collection
Executed in 1926, Slightly Open Clam Shell exemplifies Georgia O'Keeffe's skill as an artist and offers rare insight into her personal life. The 1920s were a critical period in O'Keeffe's development. During this time she began her experimentation with magnifying images of flowers and leaves, and Slightly Open Clam Shell, drawn in a similar manner, is a study in both nature and abstraction, surface and content. The clam proved an easy study for abstraction through the manipulation of its scale and natural symmetry.
Whereas many Modernists such as Charles Sheeler, John Marin and Arthur Dove turned to the industrial sector for guidance and inspiration in subject matter, O'Keeffe embraced the natural world. "O'Keeffe's work, a counterresponse to technology, was soft, voluptuous and intimate. Full of rapturous colors and yielding surfaces, it furnishes a sense of astonishing discovery. . . Though the work is explicitly feminine, it is convincingly and triumphantly powerful, a combination that had not before existed."(R. Robinson, Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, New York, 1989, p. 278)
Slightly Open Clam Shell maintains an objective point-of-view that results in the real representation of a clam shell, but its monumental scale and manipulated perspective force the viewer also to evaluate the pastel as a rhythmic and organized pattern of lines--an abstraction akin to her earliest watercolors done as a student exploring line and form. The real energy and movement of the living organism is created by the abstract, compressed lines which dramatically counter the fluid, undisturbed surface of the outer shell. Power exudes from its formal, sterile construction, but its portrait-like presentation is deceivingly subjective, as the image has been subtly manipulated to reveal the mysterious perfection of nature.
O'Keeffe developed the plasticity of the clam shell with a masterful use of line and tone, an effect enhanced by the medium of pastel. Pastel, which had been used to great effect by American Impressionists, was attractive to American Modernists, including O'Keeffe. It was lauded for its accessibility, allowing for "spontaneity and freedom of method...directness and simplicity...brilliancy and delicate variety" (American Pastels in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989, p. 21) The soft, velvety quality of pastel reflects the feminine, tender characteristics of the clam shell, and the availability of wide ranges of color made it highly expressive. She relied on subtle gradations in color to define form and create sculptural depth. The artist discovered a great affinity for the medium, and she used pastels frequently for the following twenty years.
Slightly Open Clam Shell is a quintessentially modern image and engages in a dialogue with other arts that comprised the American avant-garde. The clam is well-anchored within its pictorial space; its edges cropped by the limits of the composition in a manner reminiscent of the photographs of O'Keeffe's husband Alfred Stieglitz and friend Paul Strand. The image is simplified and reduced--confrontational in its solidarity and adherence to a strictly vertical axis, invitational in its objectivity and frontal display. The viewer's eye is allowed to roam freely over the surface of the shell and probe into the living organism; its monumental scale and solitude heighten its expression while simultaneously creating a psychological distance between the viewer and the object. The muted tones of Slightly Open Clam Shell evoke the sensuality of the clam, and its smooth texture and fluid surface recall the physical properties of the shell but also highlight O'Keeffe's own virtuosity in pastel.
Slightly Open Clam Shell marks a transitional period in O'Keeffe's life. During this time she lived in New York but each year looked forward to a blissful summer on Lake George, escaping the heat of the city and rejuvenating her artistic inspiration. The summer of 1926 was unusually tense, as O'Keeffe was devastated by Stieglitz's indiscretions, and his overbearing and critical relatives sent her into seclusion. Avoiding this difficult predicament, she escaped for one month in York Beach, Maine, mending her soul and absorbing a new and different environment. In Maine she temporarily abandoned her flower series and turned to the quiet aesthetic of the ocean, synthesizing her impulses in a brief series of compositions depicting shells.
In addition to Slightly Open Clam Shell, two related works, Open Clam Shell (Private collection) and Closed Clam Shell (Private collection) may be considered a self-evaluation of O'Keeffe's own constitution. Her biographer Roxana Robinson provides insight to the artist's emotional state as visually expressed in her works, "Closed Clam Shell presents. . .denial, prohibition, and exclusion. . . containment, completion and wholeness--the closed and coupled self." (A Life, pp. 297-98) Undoubtedly, O'Keeffe was doing a little soul-searching, looking for explanations and gathering her own strength to overcome the hurt and rejection inflicted by Stieglitz's affairs. Almost as a therapeutic sequence, the shell series can be seen as various states of O'Keeffe's emotional being--she has turned inward, closed herself to external influences and evaluates her values and motivations. In Open Clam Shell, she then regains her composure and addresses the outer world with a renewed sense of self, although "at the heart of the interior is another opening, mysterious, dark, and opaque. . . The shells reveal a fascination with the idea of openness and closedness, accessibility and exclusion. The austerity of the palette, however--muted whites and grays--and the severity of the forms--restrained curves, long straight lines--suggest a reduction, controlled retreat. . ." (R. Robinson,A life,p. 298).
This work will be considered for inclusion in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work, a joint project of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation. Author: Barbara Buhler Lynes.
Closed Clam Shell, oil on canvas, 20 x 9in. (50.8 x 22.9cm.), Private collection
Open Clam Shell, oil on canvas, 20 x 9in. (50.8 x 22.9cm.), Private collection
Executed in 1926, Slightly Open Clam Shell exemplifies Georgia O'Keeffe's skill as an artist and offers rare insight into her personal life. The 1920s were a critical period in O'Keeffe's development. During this time she began her experimentation with magnifying images of flowers and leaves, and Slightly Open Clam Shell, drawn in a similar manner, is a study in both nature and abstraction, surface and content. The clam proved an easy study for abstraction through the manipulation of its scale and natural symmetry.
Whereas many Modernists such as Charles Sheeler, John Marin and Arthur Dove turned to the industrial sector for guidance and inspiration in subject matter, O'Keeffe embraced the natural world. "O'Keeffe's work, a counterresponse to technology, was soft, voluptuous and intimate. Full of rapturous colors and yielding surfaces, it furnishes a sense of astonishing discovery. . . Though the work is explicitly feminine, it is convincingly and triumphantly powerful, a combination that had not before existed."(R. Robinson, Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, New York, 1989, p. 278)
Slightly Open Clam Shell maintains an objective point-of-view that results in the real representation of a clam shell, but its monumental scale and manipulated perspective force the viewer also to evaluate the pastel as a rhythmic and organized pattern of lines--an abstraction akin to her earliest watercolors done as a student exploring line and form. The real energy and movement of the living organism is created by the abstract, compressed lines which dramatically counter the fluid, undisturbed surface of the outer shell. Power exudes from its formal, sterile construction, but its portrait-like presentation is deceivingly subjective, as the image has been subtly manipulated to reveal the mysterious perfection of nature.
O'Keeffe developed the plasticity of the clam shell with a masterful use of line and tone, an effect enhanced by the medium of pastel. Pastel, which had been used to great effect by American Impressionists, was attractive to American Modernists, including O'Keeffe. It was lauded for its accessibility, allowing for "spontaneity and freedom of method...directness and simplicity...brilliancy and delicate variety" (American Pastels in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989, p. 21) The soft, velvety quality of pastel reflects the feminine, tender characteristics of the clam shell, and the availability of wide ranges of color made it highly expressive. She relied on subtle gradations in color to define form and create sculptural depth. The artist discovered a great affinity for the medium, and she used pastels frequently for the following twenty years.
Slightly Open Clam Shell is a quintessentially modern image and engages in a dialogue with other arts that comprised the American avant-garde. The clam is well-anchored within its pictorial space; its edges cropped by the limits of the composition in a manner reminiscent of the photographs of O'Keeffe's husband Alfred Stieglitz and friend Paul Strand. The image is simplified and reduced--confrontational in its solidarity and adherence to a strictly vertical axis, invitational in its objectivity and frontal display. The viewer's eye is allowed to roam freely over the surface of the shell and probe into the living organism; its monumental scale and solitude heighten its expression while simultaneously creating a psychological distance between the viewer and the object. The muted tones of Slightly Open Clam Shell evoke the sensuality of the clam, and its smooth texture and fluid surface recall the physical properties of the shell but also highlight O'Keeffe's own virtuosity in pastel.
Slightly Open Clam Shell marks a transitional period in O'Keeffe's life. During this time she lived in New York but each year looked forward to a blissful summer on Lake George, escaping the heat of the city and rejuvenating her artistic inspiration. The summer of 1926 was unusually tense, as O'Keeffe was devastated by Stieglitz's indiscretions, and his overbearing and critical relatives sent her into seclusion. Avoiding this difficult predicament, she escaped for one month in York Beach, Maine, mending her soul and absorbing a new and different environment. In Maine she temporarily abandoned her flower series and turned to the quiet aesthetic of the ocean, synthesizing her impulses in a brief series of compositions depicting shells.
In addition to Slightly Open Clam Shell, two related works, Open Clam Shell (Private collection) and Closed Clam Shell (Private collection) may be considered a self-evaluation of O'Keeffe's own constitution. Her biographer Roxana Robinson provides insight to the artist's emotional state as visually expressed in her works, "Closed Clam Shell presents. . .denial, prohibition, and exclusion. . . containment, completion and wholeness--the closed and coupled self." (A Life, pp. 297-98) Undoubtedly, O'Keeffe was doing a little soul-searching, looking for explanations and gathering her own strength to overcome the hurt and rejection inflicted by Stieglitz's affairs. Almost as a therapeutic sequence, the shell series can be seen as various states of O'Keeffe's emotional being--she has turned inward, closed herself to external influences and evaluates her values and motivations. In Open Clam Shell, she then regains her composure and addresses the outer world with a renewed sense of self, although "at the heart of the interior is another opening, mysterious, dark, and opaque. . . The shells reveal a fascination with the idea of openness and closedness, accessibility and exclusion. The austerity of the palette, however--muted whites and grays--and the severity of the forms--restrained curves, long straight lines--suggest a reduction, controlled retreat. . ." (R. Robinson,A life,p. 298).
This work will be considered for inclusion in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work, a joint project of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation. Author: Barbara Buhler Lynes.