Serial Icon Georgia O’Keeffe Gets the Documentary Treatment

The preamble to Paul Wagner’s documentary, “Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light,” serves as a reminder that fame has geographical limitations. Mr. Wagner ushers us onto the grounds of a Swiss museum, Fondation Beyeler, in order to hear the reactions of local citizens to the paintings of an American artist who is, by and large, unknown to them. One observer, after having traversed the 2022 exhibition, “Georgia On My Mind,” comes to the conclusion that “[O’Keeffe] feels OK with her life.”But did Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) feel okay with fame, particularly when she became a fixture of the popular imagination? A bevy of art historians and biographers speak to O’Keeffe’s accomplishments during the course of “The Brightness of Light,” including a former curator at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., Sarah Greenhough. “O’Keeffe,” Ms. Greenhough tells us, “has almost become more important for the symbol that she is than her actual work.” You want iconic? O’Keeffe is iconic. She’s been adopted as feminist forebear, environmental harbinger, civil rights pioneer, avatar of the desert southwest, and a tight-lipped herald of gender non-conformity. There will be additional pegs on which to hang O’Keeffe’s oeuvre as the years go on. As mores shift and taste evolves, the broader culture cherry-picks whatever contemporary relevance it can from historical precedent. The permanence of an art object doesn’t guarantee the permanence of how it is perceived. Aesthetic experience is nothing if it isn’t a little bedeviling.The bedeviling thing about O’Keeffe is that each of the aforementioned pigeonholes is as ill-fitting as it is spot-on. It’s to Mr. Wagner’s credit that his film, which is streaming on a variety of platforms and showing in selected cinemas, touches upon her myriad contradictions and complexities. Part-and-parcel of O’Keeffe’s story was her long-standing relationship with a photographer, impresario and businessman, Alfred Stieglitz. Headstrong and independent O’Keeffe most certainly was, but she tied her fortunes to a man without whom her life would have been radically different.Take O’Keeffe’s paintings. Though it’s not mentioned in “The Brightness of Light,” Stieglitz strong-armed O’Keeffe into working with oils. His gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue already had a “paper artist” in John Marin. O’Keeffe’s charcoal drawings, in the long run, just wouldn’t do. Mr. Wagner’s picture does make note of Stieglitz’s unstinting efforts in championing O’Keeffe, even if they sometimes took on a salacious cast. Was O’Keeffe scandalized when a number of nude photos of her were featured in a 1921 Stieglitz show at Anderson Galleries? Though the coupling of an up-and-coming midwesterner and a married man who was 23-years her senior was already known in Manhattan’s art circles, a certain notoriety did ensue. We learn in the film that Stieglitz’s behavior was “problematic,” even as biographer Roxana Robinson affirms that there is no evidence that O’Keeffe objected to or was angered by Stieglitz’s gambit. Men behaving badly, we know about, but O’Keeffe was no mean observer of the hows-and-whys of publicity and did much to cultivate a public persona. She may well have encouraged Stieglitz to exhibit the nudes. Stranger things have happened.“The Brightness of Light” is narrated by the English actor Hugh Dancy, whose accent is remarkably free of British affect, and features the actress Claire Danes reading from O’Keeffe’s letters and notebooks. Mr. Wagner and his wife, the producer Ellen Casey Wagner, clearly have done their legwork. If their documentary is modest in means and overlong, it will nevertheless pique the interest of general viewers and make skeptics want to give the work another look. In that regard, O’Keeffe would have been very much gratified.

Serial Icon Georgia O’Keeffe Gets the Documentary Treatment

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