"[Juan] Hamilton became the handyman, assistant and friend of [Georgia] O’Keeffe when he was 27 and she was 85."

"He worked and travelled with her for the next 14 years, helping her to paint again as her eyesight was failing, to mount exhibitions and to publish an acclaimed book about her life and work. But it was also noted by neighbours in New Mexico that he was tall, dark and handsome. O’Keeffe’s former agent, Doris Bry, noticed that he was invited to accompany O’Keeffe on a trip to Morocco, apparently in her stead and later filed a lawsuit alleging that he was interfering in her business relationship with the artist. And after O’Keeffe died in 1986, without children, her surviving relatives noticed that he had been made the sole beneficiary of her $70 million estate and filed a suit, later settled out of court...."

From "Juan Hamilton, Georgia O’Keeffe’s caretaker and friend, dies aged 79/The artist’s assistant inherited her entire estate when she died in 1986, but her relatives sued him and they settled out of court" (London Times).

What if you had to argue this Georgia O'Keeffe painting is not "conservative"?

 I'm reading "To Sell Prized Paintings, a University Proclaims They’re Not ‘Conservative’/Valparaiso University is arguing it should never have acquired two paintings, including a Georgia O’Keeffe, in the 1960s. It hopes to sell them to pay for dorm renovations" (NYT)(free-access link).

The school bought the painting with money from a gift that restricted the purchase of art to work "exclusively by American artists preferably of American subjects' and "of the general character known as conservative and of any period of American art." Now that the school wants to sell the painting, it's saying the painting should never have been bought.

"'Hardness' has not been in our century a quality much admired in women, nor in the past twenty years has it even been in official favor for men."

"When hardness surfaces in the very old we tend to transform it into 'crustiness”' or eccentricity, some tonic pepperiness to be indulged at a distance. On the evidence of her work and what she has said about it, Georgia O’Keeffe is neither 'crusty' nor eccentric. She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees. This is a woman who could early on dismiss most of her contemporaries as 'dreamy,' and would later single out one she liked as 'a very poor painter.' (And then add, apparently by way of softening the judgment: 'I guess he wasn’t a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.')... The men talked about Cezanne, 'long involved remarks about the "plastic quality" of his form and color,' and took one another’s long involved remarks, in the view of this angelic rattlesnake in their midst, altogether too seriously. 'I can paint—one of those dismal-colored paintings like the men,' the woman who regarded herself always as an outsider remembers thinking one day in 1922, and she did: a painting of a shed 'all low-toned and dreary with the tree beside the door.' She called this act of rancor 'The Shanty' and hung it in her next show. 'The men seemed to approve of it,' she reported fifty-four years later, her contempt undimmed. 'They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint. That was my only low-toned dismal-colored painting.'"

From the essay "Georgia O'Keeffe" in Joan Didion's "White Album" (1979).

"Reader, I rolled my eyes. I know that’s not the kind or constructive thing to do when someone is brave enough to come out, but I’m afraid I couldn’t help it..."

"... my old gay eyes rolled involuntarily....When I came out, 20 years ago, I wasn’t worried that people might think I was declaring myself queer because it was cool – it was decidedly not cool... Last time I checked, demisexuals weren’t exactly an oppressed minority fighting for equal rights. They are just people who aren’t sexually attracted to others unless they form a strong emotional bond with them first. (Congratulations, some of you may suddenly have realised that you are not actually the boring hetero you thought you were – you are an exciting demisexual! You even get your very own flag!) Acting as if needing to get to know someone before jumping into bed with them constitutes a marginalised sexual orientation that needs a flag seems to play into the hands of rightwingers who are desperate to argue that liberals are narcissists with a victimhood complex."

From "What does the dawn of demisexuals tell us?/How sex-drenched society has become" by Arwa Mahdawi (The Guardian). Mahdawi is reacting to Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo's announcing that she's "demisexual."

"Coxcomb."

That's a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. The title is "Coxcomb," and because I like Georgia O'Keeffe, I feel as though I've prevailed in my debate with Meade about whether the name of the flower is spelled "coxcomb" or "cockscomb."

The subject came up in connection with a visual joke I presented in the previous post, which is about a brain wrapped in tinfoil that was found on a beach in Racine, Wisconsin. Along with the brain — which was not a human brain, so don't engage the empathy regions of your human brain — were money and flowers. The visual joke was that that the flowers that belong with a brain are the flowers that look like brains — coxcomb. Or cockscomb.

The truth is, I defer to Meade's spelling. He's the gardener. He's even saying "Celosia," which means nothing to me. In fact, I didn't even know the name "cockscomb/coxcomb." I said something like "What's that flower that looks like a brain?" I knew the flower. Had no idea at all of the name. When he said "cockscomb," I spelled it "coxcomb," and I got my images of the flower all labeled with that spelling. But if you google the other spelling, you get all the images, and now they're labeled "cockscomb."

I was still arguing for "coxcomb" because I'm an aesthete of the visual text, and I think "x" is a great-looking letter. Much lovelier than the "cks" combination. Good for playing Scrabble too — a high-scoring tile. On the other hand, if I say I prefer "cox," I can be accused of shying away from "cocks," that good old-fashioned genitalia word.

But the whole dispute is resolved, I believe, by Georgia O'Keeffe. She spelled it "coxcomb," so "cockscomb" it is.

"On the drive back, she said it would be very easy for her to convert someone to Catholicism. 'It has great appeal,' she said."

"'Not for me, of course, but I can see the appeal.' A few years after she discovered the Ghost Ranch and built her house there, the ranch (not including her property) was sold to the Presbyterian Church, which used it as a conference center. 'I gave the Presbyterians a wide berth,' she told us. 'You know about the Indian eye that passes over you without lingering, as though you didn’t exist? That was the way I looked at the Presbyterians, so they wouldn’t become too friendly.'"

She = Georgia O'Keeffe. I = Calvin Tomkins, who's writing today about an encounter that occurred in 1962.

"The Indian eye" — I don't remember seeing that before, but maybe I did and passed over it, as though it didn't exist. But it seems politically incorrect, no? Isn't it unkind to pin that on Georgia, after all these years?

I idly google "Was Georgia O'Keeffe racist?" and I get to a passage in a biography I read a long time ago (by Roxana Robinson). The word "racism" appears in the context of her comparison of sexism to racism: "I think it's pretty funny that women have always been treated like Negroes in this country and they don't even know it." That was said in the 1970s, when feminists took to idolizing her. I enjoyed this paragraph on the next page:

WaPo's Robin Givhan asserts that Hillary Clinton — and the idea of the "handsome woman" — was the inspiration for the designers at Fashion Week.

I've followed Givhan's writing over the years, but I'd missed this September 16th piece — "Hillary Clinton, style icon? The unexpected inspiration for women’s spring fashion" — because the pay wall at The Washington Post has put it out of my line of sight. (I'd subscribe to read it if links to it would give you nonsubscribers access, which is how the NYT works.)

But I'm noticing Givhan's article now because I see Emily Zanotti at Heatstreet making fun of it: "Let Hillary Clinton, ‘Style Icon,’ Inspire Your Spring/Summer 2017 Look.:

Of all the liberal press straining to boost our love and respect for Hillary, Givhan's Hillary-the-style-icon piece strikes me as the most ludicrous. To be fair, the headline exaggerates the importance of Hillary Clinton in Givhan's essay. It begins with one designer's claim that he was inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe, whom Givhan calls "the artist who was so often described as 'handsome,' a polite way of saying that she was not a great beauty."*

You have to scroll way down to get to the first mention of Hillary Clinton, and even there, she's mixed in a crowd:

But beyond cut and color, designers are obsessing about strong and powerful women who are independent and enduring — perhaps even a bit scandalous. There has been talk of O’Keeffe, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, influential mothers and grandmothers — and of course, Hillary Clinton.

Givhan jumps to assure us that Hillary belongs in this explanation of the new fashions:

The Democratic presidential nominee is, by no means, the typical fashion icon, not in the manner of an actress, a musician or even First Lady Michelle Obama. But it is hard to deny her influence, whether direct or indirect — on so many designers....

Why is it hard to deny?! Hillary's fashions have been horrifying. I should think designers would reflexively deny her influence and that it would be hard to admit it.  Givhan's argument for influence is that people in the fashion industry politically support Clinton. Since when is political support for a candidate any kind of statement of enthusiasm about their clothes? Yes, the idea of a first woman President excites some people but to translate that to interest in what she's wearing smacks more of sexism than feminism. Either the designers were inspired by Hillary Clinton's awful outfits or they were not.

Givhan offers not one statement from any designer suggesting actual inspiration by Hillary Clinton. She claims, vaguely and abstractly, that "Clinton’s proximity to the presidency has invited designers to reconsider the relationship that women have to power and how it manifests in attire and style." Here's an example of one of the styles Givhan is talking about:



I must say that I could picture that jacket — just the jacket — on Hillary. But could that possibly be the impression the designer — Marc Jacobs — wanted to convey? Well... maybe! Who has the money to buy these clothes? Not the kookie child the whole getup expresses, but some lady who would see that she could wear just the jacket. And maybe for that lady, thinking about Hillary Clinton would help her decide that it makes sense to spent the money on something so odd: It is what powerful, serious women wear. Maybe Marc Jacobs is very savvy about the workings of the minds of rich older women.
_____________________

* Here's my post from September 6, 2016, "Nobody says 'handsome woman' anymore." I spoke too soon. Or Givhan reads my blog and took up the challenge.

"Am I actually seeing vaginas here, am I a pervert? I’m either a pervert or this woman was a pervert."

Said the schoolteacher, drumming up interest in art by describing how someone viewing a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe might have felt. Allison Wint got fired for using the word "vagina" without prior approval as supposedly required by Harper Creek Middle School policy... though other teachers seem to be saying that what the policy requires is approval "before discussing reproductive health," and obviously the question of what a painting looks like is not about reproductive health.



I'd like to know the entire context, and so far I'm critical of the school for firing this woman, but I do have a few problems with what she said: 1. Please maintain the vulva/vagina distinction (especially if you want to rely on the claim that you were using anatomical terminology). 2. O'Keeffe paintings looking like genitalia is trite and probably too cheap of a way to try to get adolescents interested in art, and 3. Don't use the word "pervert" to describe people who are interested in looking at the details of genitalia! "Pervert" is the real bad word here. My dictionary — the OED — defines it as "A person whose sexual behaviour or inclinations are regarded as abnormal and unacceptable" and gives as the earliest historic use of the word — I'm not kidding — "The virulent fagotty-minded pervert Scheffler" (from 1856, R. A. Vaughan, Hours with Mystics).

"What struck me about the Georgia O'Keeffe sale was not the high price paid for the work."

"Nor was it the discrepancy between what the market will pay for art made by men and what it will pay for art made by women... Is it ingrained sexism, or, as Germaine Greer told me in her opinion, historically work by female artists has generally not been as good as that produced by their male counterparts? No, what caught my eye was the institution selling the painting, which was The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Doesn't that strike you as odd? A museum selling an artwork by the artist it was founded to represent? I can't imagine it happening in this country.... The Americans take a more strategic approach when it comes to buying and selling work in and out of institutional collections. They generally have a policy of 'trading up,' whereby lesser works are sold to raise the necessary money to buy better examples from an artist's oeuvre."

Writes BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz, opining on the sale of a painting of "the simple white blossom of a weed" for $44.4 million, which is the most ever paid at auction for the work of a female artist. So... presumably, this painting — would it kill you to give the title?* — is a lesser O'Keeffe. Actually, Gompertz assumes otherwise — it's "considered to be of the highest quality" — as he questions the sale by the O'Keeffe Museum.

But one could reason the other way: The Museum's off-loading of the weed pic is evidence of its opinion that it is not her best work. Or perhaps: It's like other paintings in the collection — a closeup of a flower — and not the one they like best. I see 9 other flower pics at that link that could easily be considered superior to the painting the BBC assumed was "of the highest quality" but couldn't bring itself to name. It's "Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1," by the way.

Jimson weed — AKA Devil's snare, datura, hell's bells, devil’s trumpet, devil’s weed, tolguacha, Jamestown weed, stinkweed, locoweed, pricklyburr, and devil’s cucumber — is "a powerful hallucinogen and delirian... used spiritually for the intense visions it produces... fatally toxic in only slightly higher amounts than the medicinal dosage." That's some kind of metaphor for Georgia O'Keeffe. Take the right dose.

Now, let's get back to Germaine Greer. I love how Gompertz got out the opinion that female artists have just not been that good by slapping the name Germaine Greer on it. Women are so useful when it comes to insulting women. I didn't say it. Germaine said it.

* ADDED: The 7th paragraph of the article does — at least now — have the title of the painting. That's after referring to it as 1. "Georgia O'Keeffe painting," 3. "the simple white blossom of a weed,"  3. "A floral painting," and 4. "O'Keeffe's work." The separate section by Gompertz does not use the title of the painting.

Things that are not actually strange.

"It is strange that the sculptor John Chamberlain and the painter Helen Frankenthaler should have died within a week of each other — he on Dec. 21, and she on Tuesday — considering that they occupy such similar positions within the history of American art."

That's the beginning of an article by Roberta Smith in the NYT. Maybe something here is strange, but it's not strange that 2 elderly individuals died within a few days of each other. If I were to try to articulate what is strange that comes to mind as we are prompted to think about these 2 artists at the same time, I would say it's the way art like this doesn't matter in American culture anymore, and it used to matter so much.

It was a big deal in the late 1950s when Chamberlain made sculptures out of scraps from old cars. It seemed really important and controversial enough to argue about. And then there was Frankenthaler with her "pastels and slithery forms [that] could be read as descending from Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowery colors and labial shapes." Did abstract expressionism make men do one thing and women another?

Some feminist art historians have suggested that Ms. Frankenthaler’s stain technique could perhaps even be likened to menstruation.

That used to matter so much. Imagine the arguments of long ago. We're so post-menopausal now. We can't get excited things like that anymore.

"The Top 100 Influential Figures in American History."

I'm going to click through all this, beginning with Herman Melville at #100 — he's "the American Shakespeare." Come with me. #99 is Nixon! Why's Nixon only 99? I know. He's ugly. And we hate him. Have to click to 86 to get to the first woman. It's Mary Baker Eddy, who, of course, influenced health care reform. Another lady at 81. It's Margaret Mead, famous for being had by 3d world pranksters. Nothing more American than that. A woman at 77: Betty Friedan. I never read her book. I thought it was for my parents' generation. My — my my my — generation transcended sex roles. We were star dust, we were golden.

Frank Lloyd Wright is 76. Architects may come and architects may go, and never change your point of view. Not Frank. He'd sock you in the head with a low-hanging roof as soon as look at you. He was from Wisconsin. That's important. So was Georgia O'Keeffe, who might be on this list. She's a woman, you know. 20 bonus points for being a woman? Here's Jane Addams at 64. Another woman. And I, your humble female blogger, would like to register a complaint against my high school speech teacher who rejected my proposal to do a speech on the topic of Jane Addams. He said she wasn't important enough. I used to want to be a social worker.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is 53. The only judge so far. Another woman at 51: Margaret Sanger. (A "thoroughgoing racist" says Jonah Goldberg.) Not too many Presidents. After Nixon, you have to wait until #44 for another President. It's Lyndon Johnson. I call him "LBJ." Works better in rhyming chants. LOL! It's Eleanor Roosevelt at #42. "She used the first lady’s office and the mass media to become 'first lady of the world.'" Women playing the media to focus attention on themselves. Yeah, I guess that's a big deal in American culture. She's responsible for that? All right then. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe. #41. The power of novels. Rachel Carson is #39. She saved the eagles... and the mosquitoes. Susan B. Anthony is 38. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is #30. Women's rights. Earl Warren is 29. A second judge. Eisenhower is 28. A third President. Eli Whitney deserves to be 27: "His gin made cotton king and sustained an empire for slavery."

John Adams at 25? Come on? Is HBO/David McCullough the arbiter of history? But yeah, he was President. Truman is 21. A 5th President. Man, get a David McCullough biography about you to cement your historical importance. Andrew Jackson is 18. A 6th President. Reagan's 17. That's 7. Theodore Roosevelt is 15. The 8th Prez on the list, and the 2d of what I predict will be 3 Roosevelts. James Madison is 13. The 9th President, a Founding Father. Ulysses S. Grant gets to be 12. A 10th Prez. And he won the war. Woodrow Wilson is #10 and the 11th President on the list. Martin Luther King Jr. is only #8. John Marshall is #7, the 3d judge. Ben Franklin is 6, deservedly. Another Founder at 5: Alexander Hamilton. FDR snags #4 and is the 12th President on the list. Jefferson is #3, so you know who ##1 and 2 are. And Lincoln beats Washington for the top spot. A total of 15 Presidents.

The final count for women was 10. 10 out of 100. (I think.) Fair enough. I'm not going to say there should have been more. If they'd counted femaleness as a plus factor, they'd have had to "plus-factor" a lot of other groups, and they didn't. Not one Native American?! That's politically incorrect.

ADDED: Actually there were a couple more Presidents, Polk and John Quincy Adams. I'm noticing this leaning over Meade's shoulder as he clicks through. Sorry. My effort was studiously haphazard.

Cross-country driving mania.

Yesterday, I did a post on long cross-country drives, which is a special little mania of mine. The post brought this email:

I once drove straight through from (approximately) Ft. Madison, IA to Monck's Corner, SC (just north of Charleston). A bit more than 1150 miles, as I remember it, and I made it in just over 21 hours. The most amazing think about the whole trip was that, while well over 75% of it was via Interstate, I saw not one, single police car the whole way. Wonder what the odds of that are?

Also, back in the '60s, when I was younger and dumber (I hope) a fellow cadet and I drove back from the St. Louis area to Denver on the way to the Air Force Academy. We were taking his sister-in-law to Denver prior to returning to the Academy. It was a bit over 850 miles and we made the trip in a bit over 11 hours, counting all stops. That's an average of over 75 MPH, and most of Interstate 70 (or 40 or whichever one it is) didn't exist. We used mostly old US 40 between St. Louis and Denver. Other than that, it was all two-lane highway. Once when we stopped in Kansas for gas, I went to check the oil and popped the hood. The engine block was glowing a dull orange. I figured since the oil pressure gauge was registering good pressure I really, really didn't need to touch that dipstick. We were driving a 327 '65 Chevy Impala with a Muncie 4-speed. We drove US 40 in the middle of the night pretty much flat-out, pedal to the metal, and the speedo registered pegged. Don't know how fast we were actually going. Plus 100 MPH, for sure. Nice car. Wish I still had it.

Yikes! A glowing orange engine. In the middle of Kansas. I've gotten myself in trouble a few times driving. I've made some mistake that I still shudder to think about. Like the emailer, I've driven very long distances -- from Orlando to Madison -- without seeing one police car. Now, I'm thinking I'd like to do another long drive again. Kansas is one of the states I've never been to. I'd like to drive through all the states, including Alaska (and some day I'll get to Hawaii). I could hit the most as-yet-undriven-through states if I did a northwestern trip: North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon. If I did that, then the only states I haven't visited, aside from Alaska and Hawaii, would be Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and South Carolina. My all-time favorite drive was through Death Valley. Also great: the Badlands. And it is just great fun driving across Nevada on Route 50 --the "loneliest road in America" the signs posted along the way tell you. It's nice to do the two-lane blacktop through the desert. I also loved driving from Boulder to Sante Fe, especially the Arkansas Basin and the northern New Mexican landscape that let me know I'd overestimated Georgia O'Keeffe's powers of imagination.

That email reminded me that I used to drive an Impala, a 1961 seafoam green convertible. My father had bought it new and passed it on to me when he bought another car a few years later. I now realize what a fabulous classic car I drove to high school every day in the late 1960s. I also realize that I need a new car now to do the kind of driving I like! I loved my New Beetle when I got it five years ago, but the fun has worn off. Yesterday, I got a big black envelope in the mail, obviously an advertisement.

"What the hell is this? Chevrolet is wasting money sending me a big advertisement. What's the point of putting it in this big envelope?" I say with my usual outrage that anyone would dare to send me an advertisement in the mail and amazed that they would put it inside an envelope, which would normally end up in the trash, unopened.

"You're opening it," said Chris, making me laugh.

"Oh! It's for Corvette!" I say and pretty soon I am literally petting the glossy pages of the brochure. Within the minute, I'm checking out the Corvette websites, trying to find a price, discussing with Chris the problem of a person with two sons buying a car with no backseat, and comparison shopping for an Audi TT Coupe, which does have a place to put a third and fourth person in a pinch. "Mmmm ... what color?"

"Red! Then you could sing 'Little Red Corvette.'"

"If I got red I would think the song 'Little Red Corvette' whenever I was in the car. Every time I parked it, I'd think about parking it 'sideways.' Much as I love Prince, that might get a little annoying. Plus, if I got a red car, I'd have to have my house painted. Or move."

"Black."

"Or blue. I like the blue ... this particular blue. I'm really quite opposed to most blue, especially for a car. I object to a blue car, as a general principle. But this blue -- 'Le Mans Blue Metallic' -- I like that!"