[00:00.00]NARRATOR: Listen to part of a talk in an art history class.
[00:03.99] MALE PROFESSOR: So today we're going to continue our discussion of twentieth-century photography in the United States. [00:11.44]Last time, we were talking about Alfred Stieglitz, and we saw that one of his goals was to introduce Americans to European art… [00:20.84]Uh today we're going to look at another photographer from the early twentieth century—Uh yes, Jennifer.
[00:28.63] FEMALE STUDENT: Before we get to that, I had a question about Stieglitz …
[00:32.05] MALE PROFESSOR: Sure.
[00:32.78] FEMALE STUDENT: Well—Stieglitz was married to Georgia O'Keeffe, right?
[00:35.94] MALE PROFESSOR: That’s right, Stieglitz was married to her, promoted her work, and actually took some amazing portraits of her when they were married.
[00:43.62]Uh for anyone who's not familiar with this, we're talking about the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
[00:50.68] FEMALE STUDENT: OK—well—I was wondering, Georgia O'Keeffe—[00:54.07]y’know, I've heard her name so many times, and I've seen some of her work, [00:58.12]but she's not mentioned in any of our reading about photographers from that time.
[01:02.20] MALE PROFESSOR: Uh—well—O'Keeffe was really more of a painter …
[01:06.38] FEMALE STUDENT: I thought she was a photographer too. [01:08.57]I mean, I just saw one of her photographs, in a museum, the other day,[01:12.28]I think it was called “Red Leaves on White,” or something like that.
[01:16.67] MALE PROFESSOR: Oh—right … Yes, Large Dark Red Leaves on White is the complete title. [01:22.94]It’s a fairly well-known painting by O’Keeffe.
[01:26.70] FEMALE STUDENT: Oh, oh—OK—whoa, what was I thinking?! [01:30.98]I guess I should’ve had a closer look.
[01:32.09] MALE PROFESSOR: No, no, that's a really good observation. [01:35.90]I mean, chronologically, that would be impossible—[01:39.11]when she did that painting, color film hadn't even been invented yet—[01:43.39]neither had the right technology to blow pictures up that big, to show that much detail.
[01:48.98]But that painting, and some of her other paintings, do reveal the-the influence of photography … like, [01:59.22]she would “crop” her images—she, uh, she would make a “frame” around part of an image—say, just the very center—and then cut off certain parts—the parts outside that “frame”—to create the effect she wanted … the way a photographer does. [02:13.36]And those paintings are “close-ups”—like you might see today—of a person—or a flower—in a photograph.
[02:20.96] Now those techniques were certainly around, and being used by photographers then—[02:26.91]but just in photographs, which were smaller, not as big as what O'Keeffe was painting.[02:32.40]Also, O'Keeffe studied under an artist named Arthur Wesley Dow.[02:38.46]That’s Dow, D-O-W—who advocated focusing on simple, basic forms—[02:45.72]like the lines of a flower and its petals—and he wanted forms to be isolated from their original settings.
[02:53.19]He-he believed that by doing that, an artist could reveal an object's—its—its essence. Mmm … [03:00.27]Hm he’d do things like—like, have his students take a simple, ordinary form— like a leaf—and explore various ways of fitting all of it into a square—maybe bending it around to make the whole thing fit into the frame. Peter?
[03:18.66]MALE STUDENT: It sounds like maybe O’Keeffe borrowed most of her ideas—[03:22.14]the stuff we might think of as being hers—she just got them from other people… [03:26.39]she didn't really have a style of her own.
[03:29.01] MALE PROFESSOR: Well, virtually artists are influenced by other artists—by their predecessors … by their contemporaries—their teachers …
[03:37.73]Artists build on what other artists have done, but—if they're talented—they take it in some unique direction—to develop their own distinctive style.
[03:50.79] MALE PROFESSOR: O’Keeffe liked to create abstract interpretations of real objects— [03:56.96]in the painting Jennifer mentioned, Large Dark Red Leaves on White, in addition to exaggerating the size of the leaf, O'Keeffe juxtaposes it against a silver—or whitish—background, [04:10.91]so that's more of an abstract setting for it. And so on.
[04:16.08]Now O'Keeffe wasn't the first artist to create an abstract interpretation of a real object, but she used that approach to express her experience of the objects she was painting … [04:28.99]so she presented a vision that people hadn't seen before: [04:33.40]It’s unique. It’s compelling.
[04:36.43]She didn't expect other people to experience the object the way she did—[04:41.13]she knew they'd look at her painting and hang their own associations on it—which is true for artwork in general, I think; [04:48.78]that's just the way the human brain works—uh, [04:51.76]but at least they'd be taking a careful look at something they'd never really paid much attention to.
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