Commissioner of the first retrospective dedicated to the artist in Paris, Didier Ottinger gives to see, among others, the New York of the years 1910-1920.
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Western music with backdrop the ocher of the new Mexico desert. It is in this wild country that the American painter Georgia o’keeffe (1887-1986) spent the second part of his life; there she wrote the annotations of Georgia O’Keeffe, where more than a hundred her canvases are reproduced (Penguin Books, 1977); there that the documentary dedicated to it on France 5. “If I strive today to speak myself of my paintings is that no one else knows how they were created,” Explain the artist by the voice of Anita Pollitzer (1894-1975), a friend and a classmate, with whom she shares the same recognizable accent between all.
Didier OTTINGER, co-author and director with Sylvain Bergère of this documentary, knows the painter very well: he is the Commissioner of his first Parisian retrospective at the Center Pompidou, until 6 December. In the exercise after making Magritte, the betrayal of images, in 2016, on the occasion of an exhibition already organized at the Pompidou Center, the two men offer much more than the life and work of the artist, icon in his country but still unknown in France: a look at the evolution of American society for six decades – which should seduce a wider audience.
To achieve this, the film relies in particular on many archive sequences, on an interview with the painter then nonagenarian and on the incredible correspondence – more than 5,000 letters – maintained with photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864 -1946), started well before they meet, before he reveals it, they love each other and that he wife in 1924.
Love and career are intimately linked. Thus the layout of the clichés and the canvases makes it possible to visualize the influences of one on the other, before the young painter only chooses his interests, passing flowers with a strong erotic connotation to the bones of the sands, New York Buildings with Anthropomorphic Landscapes of New Mexico.
A more refined life
His career offers a magnificent testimony in pictures of the 1910-1920’s New York, the Empire State Building, the V E Avenue, which houses at 291 the place of The most avant-garde exhibition of the time, or the Shelton Hotel, where the couple will house a time on the thirtieth floor.
Very quickly, the young woman also appears avant-garde in her reflections that in his paintings: “It’s funny,” she says, women have always been treated here [in the United States] like blacks, and they do not know it. “Similarly when in 1929, near Taos in New Mexico, she attends the sacred dances of the Pueblo tribe:” I will never forget this first evening where I entered into contact with the Red Man in Apache Country (…). A real shock. “
While the financial crisis shakes the balances, Georgia o’keeffe will gradually abandon urban and materialistic civilization for a more refined life. As the journalists visited him at Ghost Ranch where she settles definitively after the death of her husband. The laughing eye, the old woman shares his passion for “painting, always painting” and nothing else, with always the same ability to astonish and sensuality.