"I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart"
About this Quote
O'Keeffe admits a kind of trained sabotage: the expert's eye that can't simply receive an image, only interrogate it. "I don't very much enjoy" lands with the dryness of someone refusing the polite fiction that art is always pleasurable, especially for artists. Enjoyment is cast as a luxury of the uninitiated; knowledge is the price of admission and the cost of staying.
"I know too much about them" isn't bragging so much as a diagnosis. To "know" a painting, in her sense, is to see the scaffolding: composition, facture, pigments, the little decisions and compromises that hold an image together. And once you can see those joints, "I take them apart" becomes inevitable. It's a line that reframes looking as labor, almost like a mechanic hearing every rattle in an engine. The subtext is protective, too: distance keeps you from being seduced by other people's solutions, from absorbing styles that might contaminate your own vision. For an artist who fought to be read on her own terms (not as Stieglitz's muse, not as a symbol machine), dismantling is a way to stay autonomous.
The context matters: modernism prized analysis, structure, and a suspicion of sentimentality. O'Keeffe's work is famous for its distilled forms, its refusal of clutter. This quote reveals the discipline behind that clarity. She isn't anti-art; she's anti-passive looking. Her method turns spectatorship into critique, and critique into a kind of creative hygiene: break it down, keep what's useful, discard the rest.
"I know too much about them" isn't bragging so much as a diagnosis. To "know" a painting, in her sense, is to see the scaffolding: composition, facture, pigments, the little decisions and compromises that hold an image together. And once you can see those joints, "I take them apart" becomes inevitable. It's a line that reframes looking as labor, almost like a mechanic hearing every rattle in an engine. The subtext is protective, too: distance keeps you from being seduced by other people's solutions, from absorbing styles that might contaminate your own vision. For an artist who fought to be read on her own terms (not as Stieglitz's muse, not as a symbol machine), dismantling is a way to stay autonomous.
The context matters: modernism prized analysis, structure, and a suspicion of sentimentality. O'Keeffe's work is famous for its distilled forms, its refusal of clutter. This quote reveals the discipline behind that clarity. She isn't anti-art; she's anti-passive looking. Her method turns spectatorship into critique, and critique into a kind of creative hygiene: break it down, keep what's useful, discard the rest.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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