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The NY review of Books vol. XXIV, #5, Mar. 31 1977

have increased to between 23 and 30 percent, and nuclear will have shot up to 14-20 percent. Hydroelectric will remain unchanged. In the first twenty-five years of the twenty-first century the Energy Research and Development Administration anticipates that solar energy may supply as much as 25 percent of the country's energy needs.

Since ERDA is by predilection weighted toward development of coal and nuclear power such estimates about the solar percentage are on the conservative side. Nonetheless the clear implication is that the inauguration of solar power on any widescale basis will be slow—unless there is a major redirection of US energy policy. So Far the ERDA solar program has no pursued any ambitious or imaginative path. Many of the bills introduced in the Congress have contented themselves with providing tax incentives rather than laying out a full policy under which solar energy can gradually and successfully be incorporated into an overall energy plan.  President Carter has promised a full energy program next month. We many hope that it will deal firmly with the tendencies toward concentration already visible in the solar industry; also that it will devise some plan to divert the enjoyment of solar power away from the rich toward the middle- and lower-income groups already so oppressed by the energy crisis.

O'Keeffe's Trail
Georgia O'Keeffe
by Georgia O'Keeffe.
Viking; 224pp., $75.00

Barbara Rose

Georgia O'Keeffe is on of America's most popular painters, yet very little of interest has been written about her. As if to fill this void, O'Keeffe has published a book about her work that suggests why so many writers who have made the long trek to Abiquiu, the remote village where she lives in New Mexico, have returned with empty notebooks and blank cassettes. As she declares with her by now familiar terseness, "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." Such resistance has bolstered the myth that O'Keeffe is an enigma; but it has also discouraged any serious study that would look deeply into O'Keeffe's art, since it is difficult to write art history without at least some sense of an artist's life.

O'Keeffe's text is ostensibly autobiographical, with notes on the literal sources of her familiar images of houses, barns, flowers, skyscrapers, bones, crosses, and rugged New Mexico cliffs, mesas, and mountains. She discusses the inspiration of specific paintings like the celebrated Jack-in-the-Pulpit series-a high school teacher had once insisted her class study a flower in detail-but her images remain as strange and ineffable as ever. After a while, readable and entertaining as her text is, we begin to suspect that O'Keeffe intends to remain as opaque as she was to the Time magazine interviewer who inquired recently about the meaning of her work. She replied, "If you don't get it, that's too bad."

Nevertheless, because of the poverty of the critical writing about her art, which tends to repeat what O'Keeffe herself has cared to say, her own commentary on her work is provocative. It establishes at least a few critical facts, such as when she came into contact with Kandinsky's ideas about a "new art" that should aspire to the condition of music, and how, beginning in 1914, these ideas inspired her to work abstractly, sometimes while listening to music and attempting to capture its mood in visual equivalents. As for her other sources, O'Keeffe does not give away any secrets, about either her life or her work. What she has chosen to exclude is as striking as what she included; the omissions in her text can be compared to the suppression of anecdotal detail in her broadly generalized, reductionist landscapes and still lifes.

For example, she describes her life without mentioning that she married Alfred Stieglitz; yet it seems likely that the association between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz had a strong influence not only on their work but on the entire development of modern American art. From the writings of Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and John Marin, as well as from Stieglitz's own notes, we see that there were certain shared attitudes toward modernism among the artists and photographers who exhibited at Stieglitz's gallery "291"; but the nature of this aesthetic and the way it emerged have hardly ben investigated. The contribution of O'Keeffe, who has not been as talkative as her colleagues (referred to in her text collectively as "the men"), may have been central. We need to know a lot more about this formative period in American cultural history, but for the time being O'Keeffe has kept sealed the extensive archives of documents pertaining to her life with Stieglitz. Because it breaks a long silence, the brief text accompanying this book of excellent reproductions of her paintings takes on a special significance.
 
What is most unexpected about O'Keeffe's book is that she writes so skillfully and wittily. What she writes tends to be directly connected with her paintings. Her prose is hardly spectacular, in fact it is deliberately modest and lacking in rhetorical conventions, but her style itself is often unintentionally revealing. One notices, for ex-ample, a certain affinity with the unornamented "American" English of Gertrude Stein, although O'Keeffe's writing is never as self-conscious as that of her expatriate contemporary.
 
It is virtually certain that O'Keeffe knew Stein's writing, since Stieglitz was Stein's first publisher. In a collection of reminiscences compiled by Dorothy Norman, Stieglitz recalled the extraordinary arrival of Miss Stein at "291" led by an aggressive bulldog. She handed Stieglitz a sheaf of manuscripts which she had been assured only he was crazy enough to publish. Stein tried to force the lot on him, but Stieglitz took only two essays -- one on Picasso, the other on Matisse -- which he published in a special issue of Camera Work in 1912. A year later, Stein's "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia" appeared in Camera Work. "The days are wonderful and the nights are wonderful and life is pleasant," she wrote, describing a visit with Mabel Dodge, who eventually invited Georgia O'Keeffe to join her in New Mexico in 1929.

Like Stein, O'Keeffe choose to restrict herself to simple declarative sentences, avoiding simile, metaphor, and symbol, the staples of literary allusion. I could not, for example, find the word "like" once in her text. Commas are rare. Typical of her lean prose, as sparse and direct as the clean, simple shapes in her paintings, is O'Keeffe's description of what was apparently her first encounter with Alfred Stieglitz in 1908, during a visit to "291" with a group of fellow students from the Art Students League:

It was a day with snow on everything. I remember brushing snow off a little tree by the railing as we walked up the steps of the brownstone at 291 Fifth Avenue, where Alfred Stieglitz had his gallery. The boys had heard that Stieglitz was a great talker and wanted to get him going. We went up in the little elevator and entered a small room. Stieglitz came out carrying some photographic equipment in his right hand and glared at us from behind his pince-nez glasses. Yes, we wanted to see the Rodin drawings.  

Although she disclaims their influence on her work, those drawing must have been a revelation to O'Keeffe, who at the time was studying classical figure painting with the conservative artist Kenyon Cox and academic still life with William Merritt Chase, who had introduction the "new" free brushwork of Chardin and Maner to the Art Students League. O'Keeffe recalls that the Rodin drawings were nothing but "curved lines and scratches with a few watercolor washes and didn't look like anything I had been taught about drawing." Although she was already quite sure she never wanted to paint figures (male nudes in anatomy class frightened her), she must have been impressed with the reductive economy of Rodin's ink, pencil, and watercolor studies.

O'Keeffe's rejection of metaphor and allusion in her writing has a parallel in the concrete imagery of paintings, which, when they are not entirely abstract, always depict familiar and recognizable subjects- even if these subjects are magnified or combined in odd ways. Following the procedure established by Matisse and Brancusi in the series of sculptures of the same subject which become increasingly abstract in each subsequent version, O'Keefe painted several series of works (the best known are probably the Jack-in-the-Pulpit and the Patio), in which the last of the series is completely abstract, whereas the first is relatively realistic. No matter how abstract the ultimate distillation of a form, however, her images, with the exception of some early drawings and watercolors done before 1920- and inspired by Kandinsky's theories of pure abstraction- are always initially based on things seen.

O'Keeffe's rejection of metaphor and allusion in her writing is a literary equivalent of her rejection of exotic symbolism in art. In place of allusion, O'Keeffe intensifies details in her descriptions much in the manner that