painting of the month

Autumn -- Mary Cassatt (1880)

george and georgia

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE, whose latest paintings are being exhibited at the Anderson Galleries, is our only woman painter whose art is a natural flower of life. The tart axiom of George Moore, that woman always paints in evening dress, has been shattered forever by the burning intensity of this Texas woman's art.  (The New York Times -- January 16, 1927)

The actual essay being referred to here is George Augustus Moore's Sex in Art, taken from this decisively damning paragraph:

In her art woman is always in evening dress: there are flowers in her hair, and her fan waves to and fro, and she wishes to sigh in the ear of him who sits beside her. Her mental nudeness is parallel with her low bodice, it is that and nothing more. She will make no sacrifice for her art; she will not tell the truth about herself as frankly as Jean-Jacques, nor will she observe life from the outside with the grave impersonal vision of Flaubert. In music women have done nothing, and in painting their achievement has been almost as slight. It is only in the inferior art--the art of acting--that women approach men. In that art it is not certain that they do not stand even higher.

George Augustus Moore (1852-1933) was born in Ireland and spent much of his life in London and Paris; he originally hoped to be a painter but turned to writing instead.  Some of his novels were considered to be realistically progressive but his thoughts on ladies in the arts seem rather reactionary.  I don't think he ever met Georgia O'Keeffe or acknowledged her work but I sense that her opinion of him would have been just about as dismissive.

(Pictured:  Portrait of George Moore (1879) by Edouard Manet; Georgia O'Keeffe in Hawaii, 1939 -- Wikimedia Commons)