In 1993, the reviews for Georgia O’Keeffe’s exhibition at London’s Hayward gallery came in. In the Independent, Andrew Graham-Dixon likened the American artist to a “commercial illustrator” who had “limited talents … but the ambition to be remembered as a Rembrandt”. The Evening Standard’s Brian Sewell said her works were “irredeemably amateur”. William Feaver of the Observer proclaimed that her paintings “made good monthly images on calendars”, while Hilton Kramer’s review in the Sunday Telegraph called her “grossly overrated”, adding that “her great personal beauty played a major role in the myth that now attaches to her name”.
Many of these comments are quoted in an article by Beatrix Campbell, published in the Independent in 1993, with the headline: A Woman’s Art That Men Refuse to See. Campbell argued for a more intellectual reading of O’Keeffe – complaining that “national newspaper art critics do not think it necessary to explain or empathise with … or to locate her in the history of American modernism”. This made me think about how so much art criticism is written from a male point of view, and the exceedingly wide gender imbalance that still exists within it.
