The enormously successful “Living Modern” exhibition continues its travels. It is now showing at the Cleveland Museum of Art until March 3, 2018. Three portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe by Yousuf Karsh are included in the exhibition, alongside portraits of O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, her lover and husband, and by Ansel Adams, Bruce Weber and Andy Warhol.
Steven Litt, writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
… O’Keeffe later posed for widely published photographic portraits that broadcast her cultural presence as an icon of independence and self-determination. One such picture is Yousuf Karsh’s magnificent 1956 image of O’Keeffe in the walled adobe compound where she lived in the northern New Mexico village of Abiquiu.
Wearing a black suit, the artist sits on a low bench under a deer’s skull and antlers suspended on the wall overhead like a protective totem. Reflected light from an open doorway at the right etches the artist’s profile against the shadowy interior.
Such pictures – which O’Keeffe helped create in full collaboration with visiting photographers – helped her attain secular sainthood as a high priestess of modernism. Read all of Mr. Litt’s review of the exhibition.