“Ice Cave” by Georgia O’Keeffe and a photograph of an ice cave.
yeah Georgia? that’s an ice cave ? that’s a god damn ice cave? that’s the only thing you intended to paint? that’s it? just an ice cave?
all of georgia okeefes art is like this dont act surprised
It Really Is.
Staff seeing this:
i hate to ruin everyone’s fun BUT you guys are so annoying. georgia o’keeffe very specifically stated how much she hated it when people, especially men, sexualized her art. male art critics pushed the interpretation of her artwork as sexual onto her and it upset her VERY deeply:
“When people read erotic symbols into my paintings they’re really talking about their own affairs,” O’Keeffe said. Still, the sexualized misconceptions of her work devastated her. “I almost wept,” she wrote of one review in 1921.
now, because of some immature dudes in the art community, her work has been sexualized forever, and her paintings are now sexual objects. so like…making pussy jokes about her artwork isn’t just annoying, it’s disrespectful to everything she worked for, and it’s like rubbing her legacy in her face.
also “all of her paintings are like that” is just plain wrong. she did a series of extreme close ups of flowers (which is where these paintings come from) but that was just one series of paintings
she also loved painting landscapes, and was particularly inspired by desert landscapes in new mexico:
she also painted bones, particularly skulls. like flowers, she was inspired by the abstract shapes that bones make:
her artwork is extremely cool and she deserves to have a legacy other than “flowers”
Also, part of the reason people were so quick to interpret her work as sexualized pieces instead of the cutting edge explorations of color and abstraction they really were, was because of her relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who helped launch her career.
For Stieglitz and much of the male avant garde, eroticism was what set their work apart as ~edgy and exciting, and so O’Keeffe kinda got pigeon-holed by association. It’s a real testament to how a lack of diversity in the art world stifles artists’ own voices in regard to their own damn work.
straight people watching brokeback mountain and going “heehee gay cowboys! so funny!” is literally evil. it’s a movie about how gay men are terrified to be together and a lot of them end up in unhappy and unfulfilling het marriages. a lot of gay men back in the day were cowboys with the express purpose of living their fucking lives. gay cowboys existed everywhere because being out there in the middle of fuck knows where surrounded my other men (often times their partners) and farm animals was better than being publicly out and murdered, especially if you were a man of color, since they pioneered cowboy culture.
