Why is the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum presenting an exhibition of portraits by Robert Henri (1865–1929) that he completed while in Ireland? As stated in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s mission: “The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is dedicated to perpetuating the artistic legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe and to the study and interpretation of American Modernism (late nineteenth century to the present).” Therefore, we often present exhibitions by contemporaries of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) that shed light on her role and position in the history of American Modernism. When O’Keeffe attended the Art Students League in New York City from 1907 to 1908, Henri was teaching there. Although she never took his courses, she was aware of his approach to imagemaking, called imitative realism, which had been fundamental to the curriculum in art schools since their founding. Imitative realism involved transforming a two-dimensional surface into a painted illusion of a three-dimensional world filled with recognizable forms. This was also the approach of William Merritt Chase, another teacher at the Art Students League, whose courses O’Keeffe did take. O’Keeffe quickly mastered imitative realism and in 1908 won the League’s William Merritt Chase still-life prize. Henri was the leader of the Ashcan School of American painters—artists whose work was traditional in its reliance on imitative realism but innovative in its content. These painters were the first to make working-class people and ordinary events the subject of their work. Other Ashcan School artists included William Glackens (1870–1938), George Luks (1867–1933), Everett Shinn (1876–1953), and John French Sloan (1871–1951). Like Henri and Chase, O’Keeffe was an excellent portrait artist—one of her lesser-known abilities as she seldom made portraits after her professional career began in 1916. A selection of portraits she completed before 1916 are included in the Robert Henri & Ireland exhibition. They relate specifically to the kind of imagery Henri produced throughout his career and especially during his two trips to Ireland (1913 and 1928), where he completed some of his most distinctive portraits. O’Keeffe began to question the value of imitative realism after winning the Chase prize, and then abandoned artmaking until 1912, when she learned through one of her colleagues about the then-revolutionary ideas of American artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922), head of the art department at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dow had rejected
imitative realism, believing that artists should make their own ideas and feelings the subject of their work. His approach appealed greatly to O’Keeffe and shaped all of her subsequent work. But not even his influence can explain O’Keeffe’s remarkable turn to abstraction in 1915, when she produced some of the most innovative work in American art of that period. Several examples of her early abstractions are included in the Robert Henri & Ireland exhibition as well. At first, Henri and O’Keeffe approached imagemaking in a similar manner, but the work that launched O’Keeffe’s career in the 1910s was abstract and modernist, and anything but a furthering of the imitative realism to which Henri remained committed. Because abstraction informed all of O’Keeffe’s work, even when she painted recognizable forms, she became known as one of America’s leading modernist artists. Yet she never lost her ability to capture a likeness, and several of her portraits from the 1930s and ’40s have been included in this exhibition along with other examples from the 1910s through the ’60s in order to demonstrate the fundamental differences between the works of these two twentieth-century artists.
Robert Henri, Girl in Pink (Anne Lavelle),1928, Oil on Canvas, 28 3/8 x 20 1/2 Inches, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger, 1963. okeeffemuseum.org
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