be to that of Catherine the Great or Lucrezia Borgia.
Georgia O'Keeffe wears no poisoned emeralds. She wears too much white;
she is impaled with a white consciousness. It is not without
significance that she wishes to paint red in white and still have it
look like red. She thinks it can be done and yet there is more red in
her pictures than any other color at present; though they do, it must
be said, run to rose from ashy white with oppositions of blue to keep
them companionable and calm. The work of Georgia O'Keeffe startles by
its actual experience in life. This does not imply street life or sky
life or drawing room life, but life in all its huge abstraction of
pain and misery and its huge propensity for silencing the spirit of
adventure. These pictures might also be called expositions of psychism
in color and movement.

Without some one to steady her, I think O'Keeffe would not wish the
company of more tangible things than trees. She knows why she despises
existence, and it comes from facing the acute dilemma with more
acuteness than it could comprehend. She is vastly over-size as to
experience in the spiritual geometric of the world. All this gives her
painting as clean an appearance as it is possible to imagine in
painting. She soils nothing with cheap indulgence of wishing
commonplace things. She has wished too large and finds the world
altogether too small in comparison.

What the future holds for Georgia O'Keeffe as artist depends upon
herself. She is modern by instinct and therefore cannot avoid
modernity of expression. It is not willed, it is inevitable. When she
looks at a person or a thing she senses the effluvia that radiate from
them and it is by this that she gauges her loves and hates or her
tolerance of them. It is enough that her pictures arrive with a
strange incongruous beauty which, though metaphysically an import,
does not disconcert by this insistence. She knows the psychism of
patterns and evolves them with strict regard for the pictural aspects
in them which save them from banality as ideas. She has no preachment
to offer and utters no rubbish on the subject of life and the problem.
She is one of the exceptional girls of the world both in art and in
life. As artist she is as pure and free from affectation as in life
she is relieved from the necessity of it.

* * * * *

If there are other significant women in modern art I am not as yet
familiarized with them. T