Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1917 (Heft 49-50))

THE GEORGIA O’KEEFFE DRAWINGS AND
PAINTINGS AT “291”
WHILE gladly welcoming new words into our vocabulary, words
which intensify and increase our sense of the complexity of modern
life, it is often quite impossible not to regret the lapse of older,
simpler ones, especially as such lapse implies that the meaning and
force of the words has also become obsolete. I am thinking, in this con-
nection, of a phrase much loved by Lionel Johnson: the old magnali-
ties, and I feel sure he used it so often in the hope that others would
not willingly let it die. But I have met with it in no other modern
writer. Is it because it no longer has significance for us? Have the
old magnalities indeed crumbled to dust and ashes, together with all
sense of the sublime, the worshipful, and the prophetic ? Is it no longer
good form, in this avid and impatient age, to mention the things that
are God’s? Must all tribute, then, go to Caesar? These reflections
are forced upon the contemplative mind, and one must take counsel
with one’s own self in meeting them. And it is in so communing that
the consciousness comes that one’s self is other than oneself, is something
larger, something almost tangibly universal, since it is en rapport with a
wholeness in which one’s separateness is, for the time, lost.
Some such consciousness, it seems to me, is active in the mystic
and musical drawings of Georgia O’Keeffe. Here are emotional forms
quite beyond the reach of conscious design, beyond the grasp of reason—
yet strongly appealing to that apparently unanalyzable sensitivity
in us through which we feel the grandeur and sublimity of life.
In recent years there have been many deliberate attempts to
translate into line and color the visual effect of emotions aroused by
music, and I am inclined to think they failed just because they were
so deliberate. The setting down of such purely mental forms escapes
the conscious hand—one must become, as it were, a channel, a willing
medium, through which this visible music flows. And doubtless it
more often comes from unheard melodies than from the listening to
instruments—from that true music of the spheres referred to by the
mystics of all ages. Quite sensibly, there is an inner law of harmony
at work in the composition of these drawings and paintings by Miss
O’Keeffe, and they are more truly inspired than any work I have seen;
and although, as is frequently the case with “given writings” and religious
“revelations,” most are but fragments of vision, incompleted movements,
yet even the least satisfactory of them has the quality of completeness—
while in at least three instances the effect is of a quite cosmic grandeur.
Of all things earthly, it is only in music that one finds any analogy to
the emotional content of these drawings—to the gigantic, swirling
rhythms, and the exquisite tendernesses so powerfully and sensitively
rendered—and music is the condition towards which, according to
Pater, all art constantly aspires. Well, plastic art, in the hands of
Miss O’Keeffe, seems now to have approximated that.
Wm. Murrell Fisher.

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