This movie is a fictional portrayal with actors depicting the relationship of Georgia O’Keeffe with her promoter and mentor, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz who was 23 years older than her. Overall, the movie focuses more on their relationship than her career as an artist; but it does show how their problems inspire her to take off on her own to New Mexico where she discovers herself and creates some of her most famous works. Stieglitz viewed her both as a profitable commodity in the art world and someone to help him with his own personal issues. He is an art financer in New York, who discovers her works and is shocked to learn that the extraordinary drawings he has discovered are rendered by a woman. Stieglitz displays some of O’Keeffe’s art works in a gallery without her permission and she confronts him about it once she finds out. She is extremely private and does not want her work displayed. However, he manages to charm her anyway, which starts their 20-year relationship.
Stieglitz convinces her to allow him to become her benefactor and to champion her artistry, all while their relationship evolves and they fall deeply in love. Their relationship begins as an affair because Stieglitz is married to another woman. By the end of the movie, Stieglitz’s suspicion of his wife’s own infidelity prompts him to have a heart attack while a rift between him and O’Keeffe over a commission she received from Radio City Music Hall sends her to the hospital due to a nervous breakdown. Stieglitz pushes O’Keeffe to the status of celebrity by displaying his nude photographs of her alongside her own work and profits off of her the whole way. She has many concerns about his strategies and is also tormented over his deranged notions of commitment. Stieglitz is incredibly needy, childish and hypocritical throughout the movie, displaying no appealing characteristics besides his talent for photography and star making. Once Stieglitz leaves his wife for O’Keeffe, he soon realizes her rising stardom is going to eclipse his light. As O’Keeffe becomes more famous, he becomes more controlling. As their relationship starts to unwind because of this, he finds twisted ways to emotionally manipulate and destroy her. He eventually cheats on her, which breaks her heart but also fuels her into a period of exploration that becomes her trademark years.
O’Keeffe searches for solace and recovery, moves west and finds new inspiration for her paintings in New Mexico. The rocky love affair between the two helps to inspire some of the most important art of the 20th century. Her new surroundings give her inspiration and she begins creating works that pair landscapes with the skulls of dead animals. This new style represented symbols of the Southwest in a more feminine way. O’Keeffe used light brush strokes and the occasional use of flowers added to the animal skulls to soften what were symbols of the harsh nature of the desert. She attempted to capture the emotion and power of objects through abstracting the natural world in her works. O’Keeffe painted in a modern style and eventually played a vital role in the development of American modernism art as well as its relationship to European avant-garde movements of the early 20th century.
O’Keeffe produced a large collection of work over seven decades as an artist. she is identified as the first female American modernist, whose paintings of flowers, landscapes, and still life scenes have become iconic in modern American art. The subject she was most known for was her flowers. Her flowers were oversized and close-cropped to draw attention to such small, delicate details, and the paintings reshaped ideas of what a still life work could be. She was one of the first artists to adapt the method of painting close-ups of objects that were highly detailed yet abstract. Some of O’Keeffe’s paintings from the American Southwest, although not intentionally drawing on Surrealism, showed signs of that influence from Europe, with paintings such as Summer Days.
O’Keeffe was well-informed in terms of what was happening in the art world around her. At the same time, she remained true to herself and her artistic vision throughout her entire life, therefore creating art that has surpassed time. Her style was combining abstraction and realism to develop works that showcased the primary forms of nature. Some of O’Keeffe’s works are highly detailed while in others she puts the focus more on shape and color. This is demonstrated in the works shown in the movie. O’Keeffe observed nature, experimented with scales, lines and colors to produce art that pushed its limits. Much of her artwork was outside the mainstream at the time as she was one of the few artists to adhere to her own principles and styles of experimentation, which set her apart and caused her work to become historical icons in the art world.
