Eight Years Ago Today: Georgia O’Keeffe, at one with nature

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 15, 2009, not a word different.]

Last night I watched my recording of Lifetime!’s 2009 TV movie, Georgia O’Keeffe, directed by Bob Balaban. The interplay between Joan Allen as O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) is as scintillating cinema as the story of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s affecting 30-year relationship is fascinating drama. And as far as I have been able to tell, the actors were successfully cast for their physical resemblance to the principals.

Georgia O’Keeffe, at one with nature

Last night I watched my recording of Lifetime!’s 2009 TV movie, Georgia O’Keeffe, directed by Bob Balaban. The interplay between Joan Allen as O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) is as scintillating cinema as the story of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s affecting 30-year relationship is fascinating drama. And as far as I have been able to tell, the actors were successfully cast for their physical resemblance to the principals.
    I was arrested by a short scene in Taos, New Mexico (about 1929 perhaps). The local artists are enjoying some native dancing and O’Keeffe asks Tony Lujan (the fourth husband of her friend Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan, 1879-1962, the creator of Taos’s little artists’ colony) what the dance means. I didn’t write down precisely what he says, but the gist of it is that the dance expressed that we humans are “one” with other living creatures—neither above nor below them—and with the very Earth, the same concept, perhaps, as that expressed by my daughter’s bumper sticker quoting Chief Seattle: “The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth.”