Privates on parade

In 1927, Georgia O’Keeffe announced that she would like her next exhibition to be ‘so magnificently vulgar that all the people who have liked what I have been doing would stop speaking to me’. Perhaps, then, she would approve of the massive retrospective of her work at Tate Modern. This show is, as is frequently the case in the largest suites of galleries on Bankside, considerably too big for its subject. The scale, however, is a matter of institutional overkill. Its vulgarity, magnificent or otherwise, is supplied by O’Keeffe (1887–1986) herself — in a pared-down, high-modernist way.

Resident for much of her long, long life in the New Mexican desert, she prided herself on her all-American toughness. ‘They make me seem like some strange unearthly sort of creature floating in the air,’ she complained in 1922 — ‘they’ being male critics and artists. The fact was, she continued, ‘I like beef steak — and like it rare at that.