CulBeat Express
2018.06.14 19:00
조지아 오키프의 하와이 비전 도서 출간
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Georgia O'Keeffe: Visions of Hawai'i
Edited by Theresa Papanikolas & Joanna L. Groarke
With contributions by Brian M. Boom, DeSoto Brown, Otto Degener and Isa Degener, Samuel M. 'Ohukani'ohi'a Gon III, and Alicia Inez Guzmán
In 1939 Georgia O'Keeffe, who was among the most famous artists in the United States, traveled on commission to Hawai'i to produce images for a Hawaiian Pineapple Company promotional campaign.
The artworks resulting from her nine-week trip reveal that O'Keeffe-most commonly associated with the stark deserts of New Mexico-was profoundly inspired by what she saw and experienced in the lush, tropical Hawaiian Islands. This volume, accompanying the exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe: Visions of Hawai'i, organized by The New York Botanical Garden , explores a little-known chapter in the artist's career.
Glowing with color, the paintings from Hawai'i demonstrate O'Keeffe's ability to make any place her own. The subjects range from close-up views of flowers-for which the artist was already acclaimed-to coastal and mountain landscapes. Painting and drawing many of the same subjects repeatedly, she examined, responded to, and, ultimately, assimilated all she encountered in Hawai'i's unfamiliar environment at a time when it was still a remote U.S. territory.
In addition to essays discussing the Hawai'i pictures and their significance in O'Keeffe's oeuvre as a whole, this landmark volume offers a unique perspective by foregrounding the ecological complexity that is hidden behind O'Keeffe's depictions of Hawai'i-one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth.
One of the essays in this volume is Losing Paradise by Otto and Isa Degener. For many decades in the 20th century, Drs. Otto and Isa Degener botanized and published on the Hawaiian flora while they served as Collaborators in Hawaiian Botany with The New York Botanical Garden. Most of their prodigious published scholarship¹ appeared in the monumental Flora Hawaiiensis and related works, but the Degeners were also prolific writers of articles for the lay public on plant conservation themes in the Hawaiian Islands. One particularly powerful, but unpublished essay was discovered in The Otto Degener Records (1920-1987) of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden while research was being done for the exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawai’i. The Degeners’ essay captures the essence of the botanical couple’s own vision of Hawai’i as it relates to the many threats posed to the archipelago’s native flora. In 1985, the Degeners wrote Losing Paradise in response to a May 31, 1985, article² in Science magazine describing a debate between commercial and environmental interests over the industrial chipping of old-growth trees for biofuel on the Big Island. This never-before published essay provides a deeply insightful view of the Degenerianvision of the complex origins, present state, and precarious fate of the authors’ beloved Hawaiian ecosystems.
