Actually, these pictures should be exhibited in the open air, the longing for the open horizon is so intense in many of them: like hardly any other artist, Georgia O'Keeffe drew and painted the landscapes in which she took views for her works found, whether in Texas, in rural New York or in New Mexico, where she spent the most important part of her more than six decades of creative work.

A Ford served as a mobile studio, under which she crept when the sun beat down too unbearably on her.

But the light-flooded, open halls of the Fondation Beyeler in Basel prove to be extremely suitable presentation rooms for their works: Before the external blinds are hurriedly lowered to shield the exhibits from the breaking sun,

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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It was a wise decision by the curator Theodora Vischer not to arrange the O'Keeffe retrospective with almost ninety works, including 77 partly large-format paintings, on its third station after Madrid and Paris topographically, rather than chronologically. Enriched by thirteen exhibits that could not be seen in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Center Pompidou, the work of the "mother of American modernism", who was born in 1887 on her parents' dairy farm in Wisconsin, unfolds in Basel, starting from places that shaped her art . The show dispels the cliché that O'Keeffe was primarily the painter of monumental flower paintings in which feminists from the 1960s saw forms of the female intimate zone paraphrased. O'Keeffe himself was rather perplexed by such interpretations,which does not deny their legitimacy, but should put the Freudian élan into perspective.

The retrospective also does not allow itself to be tempted by overly great biographical fascination, particularly with regard to O'Keeffe's marriage to the much older photographer Alfred Stieglitz: a connection that the young art student - educated in Chicago and New York - not only enjoyed through Stieglitz's circle and his gallery "291" on Fifth Avenue with avant-garde art from France and American photo artists such as Paul Strand, but also secured a platform and support for it without paternalism. Stieglitz took countless sensual photos of his wife; they play just as little a role in this retrospective as other private moments: failed motherhood, a nervous breakdown. It's not about what image you can get of O'Keeffe, it's about understanding her perspective.It is the fascinating journey through a work that astounds in its diversity and yet shows a coherence that seems to contain everything that is to come in the bud right from the start.

The entrance, in which early works are collected, is kept low and dark, as if for a root system. As an art teacher in South Carolina, O'Keeffe created abstract charcoal drawings in 1915-16, which she considered her first original creations. After moving to Texas, she painted landscape watercolors in bright colors and oil paintings in which the artist was still visibly struggling with the pastosity of the color. Her predilection for the representational, only vaguely evoking arches and curves, as well as a detail-like quality copied from photography, which obscures proportions to the immeasurable, can already be observed here. The depiction of a nocturnal train on the prairie from 1916 is impressive: a tiny graphic element is the locomotive without wagons,above which a gigantic cloud of steam grows into the sky. It could also be a petal.