Song of a Reformed Headhunter

With JS I saw the show "Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction" at the Whitney last night. Known for her representational art (flowers, landscapes), O'Keeffe began in the 1920's as an abstract painter, and abstract painting continued to inform her dominant mode. The early charcoal drawings, which Alfred Stieglitz saw and showed at his NY gallery, were striking. In shades of gray that resemble early photography, they already showed a love for the spiral, as in the scroll of a violin, or the shiver of desert air as a train disappears into the night. From gray she moved on to the mastery of blue. "Blue II" is a powerful spiraling in, that could be a hand or a fetus or something else. The surging organic spiral stands in sharp contrast with the sharp, flat, analytical abstractions practiced by contemporaneous European Cubism. I like her one or two-color paintings much better than the later multiple-hued pastel-like palette. A colleague described the latter aptly as...

I have not seen all that many photographic exhibitions (Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Stephen Shore, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, James Bidgood spring to mind) but William Eggleston : Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 struck me as the best I have ever seen. It was consistently eye-pleasing, thought-provoking, and heart-warming; it was also very funny in places. Refusing to rank or exclude objects from his democratic field of vision, Eggleston trains his camera everywhere, making what the exhibition justifiably calls "indelible images" out of common things.  I remember a green-tiled bathroom, with a green bathtub. Though a little moldy between the tiles in the corner, the bathroom glows of cleaning. A light coming into the bathroom creates a chapel-like arch above the green tiles, and the bathtub becomes a baptismal pool. A man in his fifties sits on a bed covered in a rubber sheet. He is balding, and he stares vacantly into the air ...