Georgia O'Keefe..

OK, so I am an art museum maniac. When I do have the time I see as much as I can as I did this past weekend. The Cezanne exhibit at the Montclair Art Museum is fantastic--focus is his American following of artists in the years after his death--how they incorporated his genius into their works.

Alfred Stieglitz, by 1910, was using his magazine, Camera Works, to reproduce artwork by Cezanne, Picasso and other artists of the day. He understood the close connection between painting and seeing with light using a camera.

This exhibit led me to The Whitney and the Georgia O'Keefe exhibit with its focus on the abstract nature of her work. Of course she was greatly influenced by the photographic style and studies of her husband Stieglitz. O'Keefe claimed to crop and enlarge her paintings similarly to how a photographer would

his/her photographs.

A room was dedicated to the very famous Steiglitz photographs of O'Keefe's hands, torso and body. She got a little too much notice for those images and in later years worked hard on projecting an image of herself as a "strong" woman, not just a beautiful one.