ShareThis"Work doesn't become art until some rich person comes along and buys it. Then it's art."
That's a rather cynical assertion, all the more so when uttered by internationally known photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz to his wife, artist Georgia O'Keeffe, played impeccably by Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen in the biopic "Georgia O'Keeffe" airing at 9 p.m. EDT Saturday on Lifetime Television.
Stieglitz was trying to convince O'Keeffe to return to the opening reception for an exhibition of nude photographs of her that he had taken and was showing, without forewarning, in his avant-garde New York gallery.
It will make you famous, he tells her. She counters that it has made her infamous.
While the film gives some attention to other aspects of O'Keeffe's life, including sumptuous views of the New Mexican landscape that she would immortalize on canvas in her later years, its focus is her tortured love relationship with Stieglitz.
Both were passionate and sensitive, but O'Keeffe was ultimately the stronger and the more accomplished.
Stieglitz left his wife of 25 years, marrying O'Keeffe in 1924 and devoting himself to promoting her artwork. But eventually his smarmy business instincts and inability to achieve a regular income led to an ongoing affair with a young, wealthy benefactress and, ultimately, the departure of O'Keeffe to the Southwest and solace. Still, he would represent her work throughout his life.
When he died in 1946, an addendum to the film informs us, Stieglitz was all but forgotten. By the time of her death, in 1986, O'Keeffe had gained recognition as one of the most accomplished painters of the century.
O'Keeffe exhibition
"Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction," an exhibition of 125 paintings, drawings, watercolors and sculptures by O'Keeffe and a selection of Stieglitz's photographs of her, has just opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It runs through Jan. 17.
(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette art critic Mary Thomas can be reached at mthomas(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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