Paris (AFP)

He is an icon in the United States, whose work covers most of the 20th century.

In Europe, it remains little known, with the exception of its giant flowers: Georgia O'Keeffe, immense painter and extraordinary personality, is the subject of a first retrospective in France, in Beaubourg.

Pioneer of modern painting, her talent and her longevity (she died almost a century in 1986) allowed her "to be on the wave of several movements of American modernity", explains to AFP Didier Ottinger, commissioner of the exhibition, which takes place at the Center Pompidou in Paris from September 8 to December 6.

New York skyscrapers seen from a low angle, giant flowers, bones of bleached animals in the desert, landscapes of New Mexico (where she lived from 1946 until her death), abstract paintings ... Her work is renewed ceaselessly, always with light, sensuality, play of colors and dazzling in the face of nature.

The Center Pompidou exhibits nearly a hundred of his paintings and drawings, most of them on loan from major American institutions - the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe etc.

Paintings by Georgia O'Keefe exhibited on September 6, 2021 at the Center Pompidou, in Paris, which devotes a retrospective to him ALAIN JOCARD AFP

The Grenoble museum devoted a monograph to him in the winter of 2015-2016, with the theme "Georgia O'Keeffe and her friends".

But this is the first time that France has mounted an exhibition dedicated solely to the painter.

Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1886 in Wisconsin, a rural state, she wanted to become a painter from childhood, studied and then taught Fine Arts in schools and universities.

She resides in Texas in 1916, when a friend sends her drawings to Gallery 291 in New York, a place that exhibits modern European artists of the time (Rodin, Picasso, Matisse ...).

The owner, Alfred Stieglitz, a figure in American photography, is once again setting up an exhibition of the young artist.

Without warning her.

Furious, she arrives in New York for an explanation.

The paintings will not be unhooked, the two artists married in 1924 and will remain so until the death of Stieglitz in 1946.

- American mythology -

Stieglitz and O'Keeffe are a couple who have become legendary in the art world.

But for once, the woman has not been effaced in favor of the man: he promotes the works of his wife, who very quickly acquires fame and success.

Paintings by Georgia O'Keefe exhibited on September 6, 2021 at the Center Pompidou, in Paris, which devotes a retrospective to him ALAIN JOCARD AFP

The exhibition of its giant flowers in 1923 panicked critics, it detected "the expression of desire, female sexuality, even metaphors of the female orgasm", says Didier Ottinger.

“This one-key reading” of art critics who have just discovered Freud's theories, “it tires her a bit,” he smiles.

"They spoke of themselves, not of me", assures the painter with a touch of challenge in the voice, in a film projected at the end of the course in Beaubourg.

When she died in 1986, The New York Times explains that "she showed the American public that a woman can be equal to any man in her chosen field."

She is at the same time the author of a celebrated work and "a figure, a character in the United States", where she is "almost better known than Norman Rockwell and Edward Hopper", says the curator of the exhibition.

Paintings by Georgia O'Keefe exhibited on September 6, 2021 at the Center Pompidou, in Paris, which devotes a retrospective to him ALAIN JOCARD AFP

It belongs to "American mythology," notes a panel in the exhibition.

One of her paintings sold for $ 44 million (37 million euros) in 2014, a record for a painting by a female painter.

But then why is it so little known in Europe?

Even the Tate Modern in London waited until 2016 to devote a major exhibition to it.

"It escapes our reading grids," says Didier Ottinger.

"It was long considered that the history of modern American art began in 1947 with Jackson Pollock's drippings," he says.

"American art from before 1945 is not very present in our collections, and therefore very little studied".

The Center Pompidou has only one painting by Georgia O'Keeffe.

© 2021 AFP