Matisse and O\'Keeffe: Modern Artists With Talent

Matisse and O'Keeffe: Modern Artists with Talent and Connections

What Paul Johnson calls fashion art in the 20th century grew out of the experimental and impressionistic work of the late 19th century. It may be said to have originated with Picasso and Braque and Cubism, which helped launch a number of techniques and movements, such as Abstractionism and Surrealism. Like Picasso and Braque, Henri Matisse had connections with the rich American art patron in Paris, Gertrude Stein. (She purchased Matisse's La Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat) and sat for Picasso) (Johnson 657). The American painter Georgia O'Keeffe was not connected to Stein, but she did study fashion art and transpose it (after a series of skyscraper works) onto the natural world. Matisse and O'Keeffe, though disconnected by the Atlantic, both found support from the art establishment (Matisse through Stein, O'Keeffe through her husband Alfred Stieglitz, "the owner of New York's most enterprising gallery in the 1920s" (Johnson 677). Matisse won success early with Fauvism and O'Keeffe with her blend of sexuality, modernism and naturalism, which was in turn a spin-off from the fashion art in vogue across the sea in Europe at the time. This paper will show how both Matisse and O'Keeffe came to represent two distinct styles united by the common thread of modernism -- the rise of the avant-garde propitiously connected to the bourgeois.

Tom Wolfe identifies the propitious connection of artists like Matisse and O'Keeffe as more than chance: he describes it as success based on a desire by the artist to be discovered by "le monde, the social sphere described so well by Balzac, the milieu of those who find it important to be in fashion" (Wolfe 13). Stein was Matisse's gateway to le monde; and Stieglitz was O'Keeffe's. But this says nothing of the individual talent and styles of the two artists. It merely helps illuminate their rise in the art world.

Before meeting Stein, Matisse approached his art through a rather conventional way, building off what those before him had done. His early works such as Woman Reading (1894) were traditional in style. By the turn of the century, however, he was introduced to the works of Van Gogh and other Impressionists, who inspired his artwork in a modern direction. Form there, he experimented with Paul Signac's Divisionist technique, and then worked his way into Fauvism, which was one of the highlights of the first decade of the 20th century.

Matisse was a leader of Fauvism, a style that utilized bright colors, flat shapes, and expressive strokes. Woman with a Hat (1905) is one of the most famous examples of Matisse's Fauvism. Its purchase by Stein helped lift Matisse in the eyes of the art world, and his reception into the Montparnasse clique gave him the impetus to strike out with more new and bold designs. Compared to O'Keeffe, Matisse may be seen as a forerunner. For Matisse himself attempted to combine the modernist technique he had developed in Paris with the naturalism of the world he went on to explore. His paintings took on a more orderly appearance and moved away from the Abstract style coming into being. His Odalisque with Arms Raised (1923) is a feminine nude in a fully realized setting: she reclines on a sofa in the corner of a room. Its softer colors and semi-realistic rendering connect it to O'Keeffe's semi-realistic rendering of both cityscapes and flora.

Like Matisse, O'Keeffe found her support in an art patron (whom she happened to marry). She brought to her American audience a new approach to modernism: modernism through naturalism. Her Gray Line with Black, Blue and Yellow (1923) is a perfect example of the kind of work she produced after turning her attention to plants and flowers. If Matisse reflected female sexuality by painting nudes, O'Keeffe portrayed female sexuality by painting flowers and their organs. Gray Line with Black represents the natural world through the modernist lens (it is somewhat abstract). And yet it also celebrates and glorifies the vagina, which it (like many of her works of this sort) appears to call to mind. O'Keeffe's works, it may be argued, were veiled works of commentary on a world of sexuality hitherto belonging only to men.