Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr, O’Keeffe, and Kahlo: Places of Their Own, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.

Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall’s book Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own was published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name curated by Udall and organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. Not an exhibition catalogue in the traditional sense, Udall’s book is meant to accompany and compliment the exhibition while standing on its own as a trade publication.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) are undeniably the most famous female artists of the 20th century and have for decades inspired veritable cottage industries of art historical and feminist scholarship. The artists have proven equally irresistible commercially. In May 2001 Christie’s New York sold O’Keeffe’s Calla Lillies with Red Anenome (1928, oil on masonite, Private Collection) for just over $6 million, setting the world auction record for a work by any woman artist. Prices for Kahlo’s paintings do not lag far behind, and it is well known that pop icon Madonna is an avid collector. The market for Kahlo and O’Keeffe and their works also extends to the more general public. Their images proliferate as posters that adorn innumerable college dorm room walls, and coffee mugs and calendars that inhabit countless homes and offices. The shop at the O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico offers a product line ranging from jewelry and clothing to videos and compact discs, all inspired by the artist’s life and work. Miramax’s 2002 biographical film Frida is the largest commercial venture to date, capitalizing on the enormous dramatic potential of the artist’s well-known life story.

Emily Carr (1871-1945) has likewise been the subject attention lately, though on a much smaller scale than her counterparts. Udall’s book is one of two recently published on Carr. That the second, Susan Crean’s 2001 The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr, is a personal take on and tribute to the artist indicates that Carr’s own biography may have the dramatic potential it takes to endear her to both scholars and non-scholars alike, and thus propel to her cult figure status. Canadian landscape painting of the first half of the 20th century has become increasingly popular in recent years. Numerous exhibitions and publications have been dedicated to the subject, and prices for the works have been soaring.

In bringing Carr, O’Keeffe, and Kahlo together, Udall sets out to highlight both the similarities and differences in their approaches to creating art and creating their own lives. Taking a broad approach to The Americas, Udall demonstrates how each of these three female artists – in Canada, the United States, and Mexico – rooted herself in her native landscape and then reinvented the image of that place in her work. Carr, O’Keeffe, and Kahlo were each expressing a keen sense of national identity, which Udall conceives of as “a space which is simultaneously physical, linguistic, symbolic, cultural, and social.” (9) But because the three were artists in an increasingly “transnational period,” their aesthetic and geographic boundaries were fluid and permeable. This process of reinventing the landscape, Udall argues, holds the key to aspects of each artist’s developing social and personal identities.

Udall’s methodological approach negotiates a place between essentialist and social constructivist theories. She argues “that women’s identity is complex and nuanced, a product of both history and social construction” (vii) and draws upon feminist, and postcolonial theory, as well as on ethnohistorical material. Rather than approaching her subjects via biography (as Kahlo and O’Keeffe scholars almost always do), Udall begins with the works themselves. Careful analysis of the themes, structures, and forms of their art bears out her point that their works and creative processes were inextricably linked to tied to their sense of place and developing sense of self. Their work shares an attachment to place and nationality, an intense connection to nature and to indigenous cultures, and a resistance to European influence that unites Carr, O’Keeffe, and Kahlo in their conception of the landscape.

The book is organized in three parts, within which are smaller chapters. In Part One, “Landscape and Identity,” Udall explores the artists’ special connectedness to place, which she sees as the key to understanding their art. Chapter I, “Nationality, Religion, and the Cultural Landscape,” considers the landscape, both real and as imagined by Carr, O’Keeffe, and Kahlo, as it relates to a sense of national identity. All three artists took pains to understand and establish a strong sense of cultural nationalism in their lives and in their work. For Kahlo, it was through Mexicanidad – she identified closely with the Mexican past and Mexican earth. Carr’s nationalism was grounded in the balance between European and Canadian culture – her psyche was deeply connected to Canada’s history, geography, and people. In considering O’Keeffe’s sense of her own nationality, we are struck form the outset by the self-conscious way she set out to be an American painter. She capitalized on her Americanness and her connectedness to the unique aspects of the American landscape.
In Chapter II, “The Natural Self: The Body and Nature,” Udall explores the ways in which each artist visualized a psychic and physical connection between their bodies and the earth. She argues that images of the landscape are almost always self-referential. This is perhaps most apparent in Kahlo’s self-portraits where her she is literally seated in the lap of Mother Earth or else physically connected to the earth by hair, which frequently takes the form of root-like tendrils that burrow into the landscape. Instead of depicting their bodies in the landscape O’Keeffe and Carr connected themselves with nature by cloaking experience in natural forms. For O’Keeffe, trees provide a means of understanding how the artist’s sensibilities developed. Trees are the central subject of Carr’s work, and Udall demonstrates that they were the botanical counterpart of her own imagined existence in nature. Udall highlights the similarities and differences in the ways in which the three artists explore their connectedness to aspects of the landscape.

“To state it succinctly, identity is complex: multiple, fluid, and subject to interpretation.” (201) Udall examines the themes of self-discovery and the creation of a personal mythology in Chapter III, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.” The biographies of Carr, O’Keeffe, and Kahlo are similar several important ways: all were born into comfortably wealthy homes; all became connected to powerful male artists; and all remained childless. It is in the differences, however, that Udall claims we can best understand the choices and sacrifices that each artist made in order to succeed as an artist. For each artist, the creation of her identity, like the creation of her art, was ongoing. In this chapter, Udall documents the early lives of the artists and shows how their childhood experiences and their families exerted a profound influence on their adult lives as artists.

The theme of Chapter IV, “Private Spaces: The Artist in a Place of Her Own,” is that the places Carr, O’Keeffe, and Kahlo chose to live and work were important to their self-mythologizing. “Each labored, over many years, to create highly idiosyncratic living and working spaces, places that in time became repositories of their energies.” (217) Udall uses photographs of the spaces and the artists’ own writings to convey the central role that Carr’s studio in Victoria, British Columbia, O’Keeffe’s in Abiquiu, and Kahlo’s at her parents’ home in Coyoacán, had on their creation of themselves and their work.

In Chapter V, “The Spiritual Core,” Udall argues that Carr, O’Keeffe, and Kahlo, however differently they constructed their own realities, all probed for meaning within the spiritual aspects of consciousness. “They formed their individual mythologies, which were deeply entwined with their conceptions of the spiritual, by contemplation of the universe at large as well as some of its smallest parts.”(235) She finds evidence of their quests in their paintings and in their words which, for Udall, adds a dimension of complexity and depth to their work.
Udall considers the ways Carr, O’Keeffe, and Kahlo subverted the world of strong gender dichotomies into which they were born in the sixth chapter, “Sexuality, Androgyny, and Personal Appearance.” Dress helped each artist project a distinctive personal persona. Kahlo adopted the distinctive colorful dresses of Mexico’s Tehuana women, while O’Keeffe preferred clothing traditionally worn by men. “By appearing and painting in a manner that resembled no other, each achieved the singularity she sought all her life.”(276) Carr, on the other hand, never tried to look like a member of the artistic avant-garde, doing “nothing to suggest that she as other than a middle-aged, plump Anglo-Canadian woman.”(276) Despite the differences, Udall concludes that in their attitudes about personal appearance, gender, and sexuality, the artists revealed unique aspects of their creative selves.
Carr, O’Keeffe, and Kahlo each carefully crafted a narrative of how they had become the people and artists they were. That is the theme of Udall’s seventh and final chapter, “The Public Self: Careers, Contacts, and Reputations,” where she examines the ways the artists negotiated between their private and public selves, and what aspects of themselves they chose to reveal and what to protect. O’Keeffe and Carr shared an antipathy to outsiders prying into their personal lives, but also thrived on their roles as public artists. Kahlo, despite her growing fame in the 1930s, clung to what Udall calls “a kind of ironic primitivist public identity”(292) that was contrived despite the realities of her personal history. This desire to both be known and not known is shared by all three artists.

The final section of the book is a tripartite chronology where the histories of the artists unfold parallel to one another. This linking of their biographies through the chronology could lead one to falsely assume that the three artists were in constant contact throughout their lives. On the contrary, Udall points out early in the book that Kahlo and O’Keeffe met only a handful of times, and each time briefly. Carr met O’Keeffe only once quickly during a visit to New York in 1930. Carr and O’Keeffe never met. This begs the question, “So why devote an entire book comparing and contrasting the works of three artists who barely even knew one other? What is the point of drawing these connections?” Udall does an excellent job of using primary source materials – the artists’ paintings and writings – to demonstrate the similarities in their approaches to the landscape, to themselves, and to art making in general were similar. What she fails to do in any convincing way is to make the reader understand why demonstrating these similarities and differences is an important or particularly enlightening exercise.

In addition to the tripartite chronology the book includes an index, but no bibliography. The design of the book is not ideal; taller than it is wide, the pages have too small of an upper margin and too wide of a lower one. However the book is generously illustrated with 60 in color and 101 in black and white. Certain of the chapters seem to short and irrelevant to have warranted separate headings. The first two chapters on nationality and landscape were both strong and hearty, rendering the shorter chapters in Parts Two and Three less consequential in comparison.

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