The Event Horizon

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Black Iris (1926) presents a single magnified flower whose petals extend extravagantly and equilaterally to fill the canvas edge to edge, with a deep velvet singularity that yields to gradations of mauve, ash-gray, and bone-white. In Greenberg’s “American-Type Painting,” painting matures when it becomes more fully itself: setting aside everything it borrowed from sculpture, theater, or storytelling and concentrating on what only paint on a flat surface can do. (Greenberg 208). Rosenberg’s argument against such formalism claims that “the canvas began to appear… as an arena to act — rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object” (Rosenberg 2). Despite both critics failing to discuss O’Keeffe, Greenberg’s premise illuminates Black Iris more compellingly than Rosenberg’s, since the power of a painting lies in true, formal decisions that Rosenberg’s vocabulary of “the act” cannot describe.

What makes Black Iris extraordinary is O’Keeffe’s ability to commit to a flat surface organized by color. She gives the viewer no horizon, no setting, no sense of scale. The flower has been dragged so close and upfront that one cannot ascertain where the flower ends or what surrounds it. The conventional components of illusion, which evoke the feeling of looking through the canvas into a deeper space, are altered. More specifically, this is what Greenberg means when he praises “a new kind of flatness, one that breathes and pulsates” through “the darkened, value-muffling warmth of color” (Greenberg 226). He reveres painters like Rothko who arrive at this ‘flatness’ by abandoning recognizable subjects altogether. O’Keeffe arrives there too, but in a much more unique route, by magnifying her subject until it no longer creates the illusion of depth and stops functioning as a three-dimensional world. Greenberg identifies the most ambitious paintings that refuse to categorize themselves through strong contrasts of light and dark, and Black Iris does this, holding the viewer’s eye with muted purples and grays that keep the surface intact (Greenberg 220).

Rosenberg’s vision demands perspective differently. For him, it is crucial for a painting to register as “an event” and not a “picture” (Rosenberg 2). The artist must throw themselves at the canvas, passion intrinsic in each of the artist’s gestures, where the drama of decision and risk is made visible. Black Iris materializes otherwise; its surface is calm and composed. There lacks struggle, governed by control with forms that are carefully resolved rather than fought into shape. It could be argued that Rosenberg’s ideas apply to Abstract Expressionism, not O’Keeffe. But that is precisely the issue, since his criteria for painting are too narrow to recognize a serious American modernist whose seriousness is quiet and not theatrical.

To stand before Black Iris is to be held by a surface. The painting rewards the attention that Greenberg taught viewers to bring to modern art: patience with color and a willingness to let the picture be what it is rather than to ask what it is of. Black Iris is best understood as Greenberg would have understood it, had he looked.

Works Cited