Stieglitz passed away in July of 1946, 82 years old.

That fall, Georgia spent in Abiquiu and as the snow began to cover the high desert landscape with fresh snow, she painted the powerful, quietly soaring black bird against a blue sky. The bird is placed very high up in the picture, overviewing the world, rising and soaring as if the bird would be on its way out of the picture.

The Black Bird gives me associations to a picture of Stieglitz in his black  cloak I have seen somewhere. Maybe deep inside, the White Georgia, felt as dazzlingly lonely and still like the snow, emotionally frozen like the icy landscape, that her old promoter, mentor and deep and passionate friend was gone.

This painting is probably her farewell.

The bird stieglitz is actually a symbol of the suffering of Christ, or resurrection. Considering that Stieglitz was a symbolist he may have liked the symbolism in a more poetic sense, even though he was jewish. If he could identify with a tree, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that he at some time compared himself with a bird, since his name carried that meaning.

Kandinsky on white

Kandinsky says about white, that it sometimes is not a color at all, but a symbol from a world where color has disappeared. This world is too high above us to be able to touch our souls. Please take note of the poetic, but still concrete connection you can make in O’Keeffe’s painting, to his words.

***

The Bird motif

The motif returned four years later, in the same colors, but simplified, abstract. O’Keeffe has taken a geometrical approach to where the black bird is simplified and emphasized into a straight, black ‘V’. It is almost reminiscent of some of Stieglitz’s earlier photographies of a section of Georgia’s bikini area.

You could almost get the idea that they were still communicating with each other, four years after his death.

Black Bird series, 1950

Perhaps he was, in a dreamlike way, still in the picture…

Books

Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set – Volume I & II: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs

In Focus: Alfred Steiglitz : Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (In Focus (J. Paul Getty Museum))

American Masters – Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye

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Pelvis IV, 1944

O’Keeffe blue

There is an irregular oval and a circle, the color white and an intensely blue nuance. The motif is a pelvic bone and sky with moon. This blue color is a saturated, almost electrical blue, drawing towards turquoise.

Pelvic bones and the moon

In the painting there are romantic elements like exaggerated scale, symbols for micro- and macrocosmos, the blue color and the circle, both as a geometrically shaped heavenly body and an organic oval shape – the hole. Pelvic bones and the moon can be seen as symbols for both life and death. We are born through the opening of the pelvic bone, and according to Egyptian mythology, the moon is the home for the soul, to where it returns after passing from this life. The motif is fascinating and thought-provoking and there may be several interpretations to come up with.

Indian ecology

In New Mexico, O’Keeffe could see first hand, how the proud identity and ecologically balanced lifestyle of the American Indians had been narrowed into small reservations. They had but become a lost minority, still without voting rights, in one of the worlds largest democracies.

The bones she painted must have belonged to horses and prey animals in the Native Indian environment, and perhaps the paintings were intended as some sort of cleansing incantation against the effects of our military and industrial civilization.

The Atomic bomb

For the second time in three decades, nations of the world were involved in fullblown war in 1944. A secret atomic laboratory was established nearby, in Los Alamos in New Mexico some time between 1942-44 and the first atomic bomb seen by our civilization, was detonated at the Trinity Site in southern New Mexico in 1945.

Apocalypse à la Kandinsky & Marc

Therefore it is fair to say that O’Keeffe’s Pelvis-series actually makes the connection to Kandinsky’s and Marc’s apocalyptical prophecies from earlier in the century, as an apocalypse with devastation never before seen, was released on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just a few months later.

Kandinsky dies

But it was an interesting coincidence that first lead me further – 1944 was the year Kandinsky died.

***

O’Keeffe and Circles within Circles – A Coincidence?

Circles within circles, was a common motif with Kandinsky. His painting Several Circles, from 1926, gave me an idea, that may be somewhat far-fetched, but not inconceivable. Upon looking at his picture, my eye wandered around, taking it all in, and then it felt natural to rest at the circle in the lower right hand corner. It slowly dawned on me that the shapes were surprisingly similar to O’Keeffe’s Pelvis IV.

The idea hit me: could it be that O’Keeffe sometimes amused herself with looking for Kandinsky’s abstract shapes in her environment? This particular painting of Kandinsky was bought by the Guggenheim museum in 1941, according to the museum website, and O’Keeffe might have seen it, when she was in New York to make arrangements for one of her yearly exhibitions.

Perhaps she painted in riddles, sometimes connected to Kandinsky’s motifs, and now and then directly to his words?

With a little more thought, there are other coincidences, when following this idea…

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