Interactions Between Painting and Photography

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Shows Interactions Between Painting and Photography

Posted: 22 Oct 2011 08:07 PM PDT

Santa Fe, NM.- "Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph", a major exhibition that addresses the anxious, yet highly productive relationship between painting and photography in 20th-Century American art is on view at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum until September 11th. This exhibition of more than 75 paintings and photographs focuses on the work of American painters for whom the photograph has been essential, beginning with the acclaimed 19th century realist Thomas Eakins and continuing through to contemporary art, including such masters as Georgia O’Keeffe, Frederic Remington, Charles Sheeler, Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Chuck Close, David Hockney and Sherrie Levine. Major works by such ground-breaking photographers as Eadweard Muybridge, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Cindy Sherman and Margaret Bourke-White will also be included.

Shared Intelligence brings together approximately 75 photographs and paintings by artists for whom the two mediums were essential to their practices, such as Robert Bechtle, Chuck Close, Thomas Eakins, Sherrie Levine, Georgia O’Keeffe, Cindy Sherman, Charles Sheeler, Ben Shahn and Edward Steichen.  The exhibition pairs paintings and photographs to demonstrate specific relationships between the two media and how painters consistently turned to photography to invigorate aspects of their work. In the beginning of the 20th Century, photographers felt obligated to justify their use of the camera as a means of expression.  Today however, the question is no longer Can photography be the equal of painting? but rather Has the photograph supplanted painting’s position in the hierarchy of the art world? Certainly it is nearly impossible to imagine a contemporary artist whose work is untouched by the camera, if only as a means of reproduction.  And yet, the photograph’s role in modern art goes far beyond reproduction or even as a source of subject matter.

Photographic seeing, the way the lens freezes, flattens, enlarges and crops the world, conditions all visual representations.  Above all, there is no way of escaping the the camera’s service to the vast legal, scientific and economic systems of knowledge that categorize and regulate modern existence itself. The exhibition intends to refute the idea that painting from a photograph is some sort of failure of imagination or technique - rather the two mediums enrich each other.  Ultimately, the exhibition emphasizes the role of the artist as picture maker, rather than as either painter or photographer.  In opposition to modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg and John Szarkowski who have tried to establish the autonomy of painting and photography, a crucial theme of this exhibition is the way in which the two mediums have always intersected and spilled into each other.  Painting has used the camera repeatedly to reinvigorate itself, just as photography has been equally enriched by a dialogue with painting.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, opened to the public in July 1997, eleven years after the death of the artist from whom it takes its name. Welcoming more than 2,225,000 visitors from all over the world and being the most visited art museum in the state of New Mexico, it is the only museum in the world dedicated to an internationally known American woman artist. One of the most significant artists of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was devoted to creating imagery that expressed what she called “the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.” She was a leading member of the Stieglitz Circle artists, headed by Alfred Stieglitz, America’s first advocate of modern art in America.  These avant-garde artists began to flourish in New York in the 1910s. O’Keeffe’s images—instantly recognizable as her own —include abstractions, large-scale depictions of flowers, leaves, rocks, shells, bones and other natural forms, New York cityscapes and paintings of the unusual shapes and colors of architectural and landscape forms of northern New Mexico. The Museum’s collection of over 3,000 works comprises 1,149 O’Keeffe paintings, drawings, and sculptures that date from 1901 to 1984, the year failing eyesight forced O’Keeffe into retirement. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum is the largest single repository of O'Keeffe's work in the world. Throughout the year, visitors can see a changing selection of these works. In addition, the Museum presents special exhibitions that are either devoted entirely to O’Keeffe’s work or combine examples of her art with works by her American modernist contemporaries.  The Museum also organizes exhibitions of works by her contemporaries, as well as by living artists of distinction.

Over 140 artists other than O’Keeffe have been exhibited at the Museum, such as Arthur Dove, Sherrie Levine, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center opened in July 2001 as a component of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. As the only museum-related research facility in the world dedicated to the study of American Modernism (late nineteenth century – present), it sponsors research in the fields of art history, architectural history and design, literature, music and photography.  Its annual, competitive stipend program awards six stipends to qualified applicants who can spend three to twelve months at the Research Center, which makes its library, collections and unique archives accessible to researchers worldwide as well as to its in-house scholars. The Museum and its Research Center are both Pueblo Revival-style buildings located two blocks from the historic Santa Fe Plaza and were renovated in 1997 and 2001, respectively, by Gluckman Mayner Architects, New York. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/