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Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 8
Lesson 4: 291- 291—Little Galleries of the Photo Secession
- The first modern photograph? Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Florine Stettheimer, Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz
- Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer
- The City at night, Joseph Stella's The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted
- Charles Demuth, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold
- Georgia O'Keeffe, Radiator Building—Night, New York
- O'Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree
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O'Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree
Georgia O'Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree, 1929, oil on canvas, 31 x 40 inches (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford) Painted in the summer of 1929 while visiting D.H. Lawrence at his Kiowa Ranch during O'Keeffe's first trip to New Mexico, the tree stands in front of the house. Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Am I the only one who sees the circular patch of sky, with the single star shining, as an eye looking back at the viewer (or perhaps the artist)? For me it is as if the subject is contemplating the viewer.(7 votes)
- I agree. The dot kind of reminds me of a spherical eye, yet at the same time it's just a patch of sky.(4 votes)
- How cool would it be to have this painting reproduced (in expansive size) on your bedroom ceiling?(5 votes)
- Very cool. Great idea walks on the Clouds. Is your user-name what you think your Native-American name would be?(2 votes)
- Am I the only person who sees this picture two ways: as a tree under a night sky, and as a squid in the ocean with the leaves of the tree being ink?(4 votes)
- No, I think this is a fabulous point. It feels to me like a deliberate gestalt, an ambiguity that maybe reveals ourselves as we interpret - or refuse to decide which interpretation is right. You've described it very nicely, too. :)(3 votes)
- Is Georgia O'Keefe's signature on this somewhere? I wonder how she would sign a painting that could "...be hung in any direction..."?(4 votes)
Video transcript
(piano music playing) Steven: We're in the
remarkable Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut
and we're looking at Georgia O'Keeffe's The Lawrence Tree. It's really early
O'Keeffe. It dates to 1929. Beth: It doesn't look like a tree at all. It looks almost like this
organic octopus-like form, but when you just stop for
a second and look at it, you can see that we're
looking up at the branches of a tree, like we often
do when we're lying on the grass and looking up at the sky. Steven: I mean, we always
take over the artist's view in a sense, when we look at a painting. But because the view is so unusual here, in some ways, we really inhabit her eyes as she's looking up at
that clear, night sky. Beth: There's something
incredibly poignant about it. We become her or we see through her eyes at a very particular moment in a very particular view on a very particular night. I have a strong sense
of the passage of time and the momentary and how
human life is so brief, a whole set of things that
happened because of this unusual point of view. Looking up through the
tree at the night sky, the subject and the point
of view come together. I almost feel the nighttime and this tree and the smell of the pine. Steven: Space and time are
beautifully interwoven. Our eye travels up that trunk. We're lying just just below. O'Keeffe spoke about how there was a carpenter's bench just
at the base of this tree, that she liked to lie on. This was painted on D.H. Lawrence's ranch during her first summer in New Mexico. There's something very
particular about the way our eye travels up the tree and then past this wildlike form that
are the needles of the pine and then beyond that,
the sky which intrudes and just comes towards us and of course recedes infinitely in dome of that sky. The radical changes of scale, speak of both space and time, our minuteness and our rootedness in this much larger, celestial space. Beth: There is that pulling
down and that sense of rootedness in the earth
and at the same time that sublime suggestion of the infinite and the blue and the way that it Steven: Yes. Steven: Apparently, the
artist felt that this painting could be hung in any direction, but the museum has hung it in a way that she seemed to have preferred. Beth: She instructed that
the tree appear to be standing on its head. (piano music playing)