Georgia O`Keeffe
There always has been a handful of famous women artists, of course. Georgia O`Keeffe is a case in point. Her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, battled for recognition of photography as an art form through exhibitions at a series of New York galleries he owned until his death in 1946. He also championed acceptance of modern art in general and women artists in particular.
”He was a maverick in many ways,” says Roxana Robinson, whose ”Georgia O`Keeffe: A Life” (Harper & Row, $25), was published in 1989.
”He was looking for a great woman artist. He was looking for Georgia before she was born.”
O`Keeffe became a mainstay of her husband`s gallery with her early work. The book documents how she matured beyond starry-eyed admiration in her love for Stieglitz and he turned to a younger, adoring woman.
Though O`Keeffe remained married, ”the affair and the publicity humiliated her,” Robinson says. ”She was conscious that she mustn`t get into a pattern of allowing her emotional life to control her professsional life. That`s when she went to New Mexico.
”People think she let him (Stieglitz) make her a star and then left him,” Robinson says, but O`Keeffe split her time between her art in New Mexico and Stieglitz in New York.
Still, O`Keeffe garnered and focused the psychic energy needed to pursue her art, something many women weren`t able to do giventhe negative feedback of their times, Robinson says.
Robinson explains in her book that there were more women than men in O`Keeffe`s classes at the School of the Art Institute when she went there in the early 1900s.
”The women became schoolteachers and taught art,” Robinson says. ”As a general rule, society didn`t recognize women as artists, and under the weight of nonrecognition they would withdraw to their homes. They practiced it as a pastime, and not much of it has survived.”
Art, a gentle skill
Women pursued art as one among the genteel skills prized in 18th and 19th Century social circles. A century later, even in a household that encouraged Coffey and her sisters to be independent, the assumptions was that girls would get married and stay home. Coffey, who grew up in the Northeast, married but never stayed home.
Coffey, 41, started her working career as a waitress with a high school diploma, an unhappy marriage and a series of sketchpads that provided her only sanctuary for artistic expression as she and her musician husband moved from place to place.
Among her various jobs in the early 1970s was that of a model for an art school in Rhode Island. That and exposure to ideas of the women`s movement convinced her to pursue her own voice, she says.
She divorced and enrolled in the art department at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Older than the other students and fearful of failure, she found that her background offered unexpected self-reliance:
”Women who had never supported themselves, who maybe had an easier life- they didn`t have the discipline I had. And I didn`t need as much encouragement as they needed to keep going. I see the same thing in my older students, and it`s a real plus because the reward system is so undependable in the arts.”
The university gave Coffey a way to become part of a community of artists. She graduated in 1977, but her mother`s death from cancer that year truly energized her art, she says.
”I was totally gutted; I had no interest in the world without her. It was the structural collapse of my universe.”
In death her mother gave her one more gift: the need to communicate what she was feeling. She began to paint about a realm separating life and death, a realm that later would evolve into the paintings and drawings about Demeter.
In addition to a degree, Coffey had the crucial alchemy of determination and a personal vision to generate the sustained body of work that tends to attract recognition. On the strength of her new work, she was accepted into Yale University`s graduate school in the late `70s and earned a master`s degree in fine arts.
Graduate school offered artistic growth and practical contacts that led to teaching jobs and exhibitions. MFAs have become the modern equivalent of the apprenticeship that served from classical times into this century to train artists and introduce them to their peers and potential patrons.
In addition, the MFA is a must for most artists seeking a college-level teaching position, with the financial security and flexibility of sabbaticals it offers.
Coffey moved to Chicago in 1982 when she was hired by the School of the Art Institute, where she teaches painting; she was granted tenure in 1989.
As she explores the edge between life and death through myth, her paintings alternate between the depiction of firey netherworlds rendered in blasts of color and mystical dreamscapes maintained in fluid, pastel calm.
The poetry of light
Auerbach, 84, came to Berlin in the 1920s from her hometown in Karlsruhe and studied photography under the illustrious Bauhaus professor Walter Peterhans. She was Ellen Rosenberg at the time, 22 years old, owner of a 9-by- 12-centimeter Linhof camera an uncle in the United States had sent as a reward for her sculpting. The camera took precedence.
”I had a strong talent for resemblance when I sculpted a head,”
Auerbach says, ”but a teacher said, `Do the head from within.` He opened my eyes.”
Peterhans opened her eyes to the poetry light could create on film.
The Bauhaus school was a hothouse of experimental art, but its founders considered it a design school that would meld art and the industrial age, bringing artistic vision to steel skyscrapers and mass-produced products.
Her modernist Bauhaus training and her own emotional touch combined to create a contemporary look in even Auerbach`s oldest prints. At the time she made them, they were firmly in the camp of the Berlin avant-garde. Auerbach and Grete Stern, another of Peterhans` students, combined their nicknames to open a studio called Ringl + Pit in Berlin in 1930. Auerbach was Pit, a play on the name of a dancer of the period.
Auerbach draws a blank on questions such as whether she was accepted as a woman photographer running a studio in Berlin.
”We just did it,” she says matter-of-factly. ”We got wonderful exposure. We got honors. But,” she adds with a laugh, ”our successes were not profitable.”
With Adolf Hitler`s ascension to power in 1933, Auerbach fled to Palestine, where she opened another studio, and then, a few years later, she moved to London.
There she married Walter Auerbach, a friend since her Berlin days. The couple moved to the United States, where Auerbach free-lanced for Time magazine. In the 1950s she traveled across Mexico for six months with the late Eliot Porter, collaborating on more than 3,000 photographs that document Mexican religious architecture, festivals and symbols.
A selection of these pictures appears in the recently published ”Mexican Celebrations” (University of New Mexico Press, $40), a sequel to the 1987 volume ”Mexican Churches” ($27.50).
Auerbach continued photographing into the 1960s, then pursued an interest in psychology, working as an educational therapist at the Educational Institute for Learning and Research in New York City, where she lives today.
Auerbach is enjoying a renewed visibility these days. An art dealer seeking out work by Peterhans called Auerbach and became fascinated with the Ringl + Pit photographs featured in several exhibitions, including the 1988 retrospective in Wuppertal, Germany. Still active, Auerbach was in Chicago last fall for two lectures, at the School of the Art Institute and the Goethe Institute.
Family expectations
Abeyta, 35, works from her home in Albuquerque while raising two children.
”My studio is in my kitchen,” Abeyta says. ”I don`t cook. The expectations of a wife and mother aren`t met. But it`s a fun household. My 4- year-old daughter works clay right beside me. I don`t feel any of us are hurting because Mom`s working.”
Abeyta`s four sisters and two brothers are artists, though some have other professions. They are the children of a Quaker, Sylvia Ann Shipley, who came to New Mexico from Philadelphia to collect art and stayed to marry a world-renowned Navajo artist, Narciso Abeyta.
The family lived in Gallup, where the children felt rejected as ”half-breeds” in the white neighborhood in which they lived and on the Navajo reservation they often visited.
”We all became artists to survive,” Abeyta says. ”It was our escape.” Both parents encouraged them.
”My mother loved Indian culture. She would spin wool the traditional way and brew pots of sagebrush to make dye for it. She got us all interested in clay.
”The tribes all have clay digs at blessed areas. The Zuni clay is white; the Hopi clay is yellow. There was every color of clay. At home, we would pull out a hunk of clay instead of a toy.”
She married young and divorced before pursuing once more her interest in art. In 1980 she set off to the San Francisco Art Institute with a scholarship and her son, a baby at the time.
”There were years and years when my son and I lived in basements and backrooms,” she recalls. ”I had a work/study job as cleanup girl in the clay studio, and a lot of times my son and I would sleep there.”
She earned her degree, married again and fell into a pattern of being a housewife who relegated her art to a hobby for making a little extra money.
Then, five years ago, life changed abruptly when a car ran over her son, crushing his body and leaving him partially paralyzed. Her art suddenly became a lifeline to help pay for the operations that have restored his mobility. In committing herself to art full-time, she restored her sense of herself as well as her son`s health, she says.
She submitted her work to various Native American group exhibits and competitions, winning top honors and invitations by gallery owners to represent her.
Abeyta says the overwhelming appetite for Native American art in recent years has definitely helped her success. But her style combines Native American legends and symbols in figures that incorporate Egyptian, Asian and other cultural motifs.
The combination shows cross-cultural ties and delivers power and wit to a piece such as ”Two Sisters: After the Squaw Dance,” which depicts two women stealing home after staying much too late at the equivalent of a ”coming out” party.
Abeyta sculpts about 45 pieces a year, an extraordinary output for an artist. Her work is collected here and abroad and has been featured in numerous publications. But despite the acclaim, she says the labels of
”figurine” and ”doll” persist. The result is more than semantic: It means price tags that can be half those of male colleagues, she says.
”Hopefully, I`ll hit the big time. We were girls raised to think the possibilities were endless. All of us pursued our dreams. If things stay like this, I`ll be perfectly happy.”
