20 – From Music – Special (1915), and its invitation to consider another 19 of them. So are her ‘specials’ (1915–19), the title she gave to the works that stood out to her in this productive era. Each, however, depicts the same thick base line at the bottom of the paper (say, the base of an abstract sailboat), from which grow the same two branches: erect on the right, zigzag on the left. This strange trio are stubborn about their difference, the black of the charcoal having nothing in common with the pooling watercolour’s blue. The best justification for the curatorial focus appears at the entrance, in a trio of works on paper from 1916: First Drawing of the Blue Lines in charcoal Black Lines in watercolour and Blue Lines X in watercolour and pencil on paper.
Courtesy: © 2022 The Museum of Modern Art / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York But in the place of Stieglitz’s false image of the turn-of-the-century New Woman, boldly reconciling abstraction with the sensual, we meet an equally fictional, peculiarly innocent girl. That’s my guess, at least – that the show’s curators want to unburden the artist of her critical baggage. ‘To See Takes Time’ avoids this critical hang-up by neither referencing her reception nor including any of her more lurid stamens. In place of her vision, critics, with a new passion for sloppy Freudianism, saw cunts in the callas: ‘Well – I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t.’ If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.’ O’Keeffe had been trying, by way of enlargement and by dignifying her own attention, not to represent the flower, but to coerce the viewer to participate in the time she spent considering it. Courtesy: © 2023 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New Yorkīut what? In her original artist’s statement, titled ‘About Myself’, O’Keeffe recommended not seriality, but stopping to smell the roses: ‘Still – in a way – nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small – we haven’t time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Blue Lines X, 1916, watercolor and pencil on paper, 64 × 48 cm. By emphasising procedure, materiality and small differences, this repetition of figure makes something visible. The title comes from her catalogue text for a 1939 ‘Exhibition of Oil and Pastels’, and suggests the organising concept: that her ‘serial’ work creates the temporal conditions for really seeing. ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time’ focuses on the artist’s iterative pastel, charcoal and watercolour works, with a few exceptions made for oil paintings on canvas that extend a paper-based series. Okay, that last bit is false – in the interview, which postdates O’Keeffe’s line about vision’s duration by four decades, Warhol just changes the subject – but it rings about as true as the phrase’s use as the title of MoMA’s current show. Warhol insists she see it anyway, but she won’t budge – after all, to see takes time. O’KEEFFE: Well, I didn’t think what he created was the most beautiful woman in the world.’ He said you were the most beautiful woman in the world. ‘HAMILTON: You shouldn’t criticize Philip Johnson. Warhol recommended she visit the new AT&T building, but she refused, since the architect of 550 Madison Avenue ‘wasn’t really a talent’:
Having overseen Hamilton’s curation, O’Keeffe also authorised the inclusion of her dead husband’s famous portraits of herself, or of the self that she and those images co-constructed: a few years earlier in The New Yorker, Janet Malcolm wrote that ‘so strong is the identification of O’Keeffe with her photographed likeness that the photographs have seemed to belong among her works rather than among Stieglitz’s.’ While O’Keeffe was in town, she and Hamilton spoke with Andy Warhol for Interview magazine. At 96, Georgia O’Keeffe – supported by her young companion, Juan Hamilton – came to New York for the 1983 Alfred Stieglitz retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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