"I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could."
the nude is by alfred stieglitz, the great groundbreaking photographer who married o'keefe when he was quite old. personally, i've always considered steiglitz to be more important as an artist & as a champion of many other modern artists.
i've always found it hard to gender an artist & i can't really see much reason to do it. still, some of the greats seem to insist on foregrounding it. it's hard for me to see o'keefe's art being done by anyone other than a woman. it's true that mapplethorpe came along & "re-did" the flower motif but there's heavy irony in his pictures & he bleeds the color out of them. o'keefe is all about feminized colors(especially, the pastels)& space, both open & convoluted. o'keefe's flowers are anything but flowers or they are uber-flowers in their magnified complexity.
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