Georgia O’Keeffe’s Radiator Building, Article Critique Example

In Vivien Green Fryd’s text “Georgia O’Keefe’s Radiator Building: Gender, Sexuality, Modernism, and Urban Imagery” the author attempts to tie together, on the one hand, a biographical approach to the work of art, in question, whereby Fryd attempts to uncover the complex personal aetiology that led to the work’s production, with a theoretical approach, largely defined by Freudian psychoanalysis. However, one of the founding tensions of the article is precisely the sense in which an artist creates a work of art in relation to, not only a particular theory, but also in relation to particular interpretations of the work of art produced. Namely, Fryd’s article is most interesting in so far as it suggests that the creation of a work of art is not the spontaneous act of the creator, but rather involves a dialogue between the artist and the critics the artist knows will eventually provide commentary on his or her work.

In this regard, Fryd’s text perhaps can be considered to be a faithful attempt to re-construct the perspective of the artist who produced the work under the conditions of the eventual criticism of the work. In the particular case of O’Keefe, Fryd seeks to develop her analysis of the artist’s work according to the her continuous denials of sexualized interpretations”, which, however, from Fryd’s standpoint nevertheless indicates O’Keefe’s perhaps unconscious sexualized response to the equally sexualized interpretations of her work, in so far as Fryd notes that “what appears more important that the drawings and paintings themselves is the artist’s responses to the critics, whose interpretations, I contend helped motivate her to paint The Radiator Building.” Accordingly, what Fryd arguably develops in her article is a complex relationship between the artist and the reception of the artist’s work: the artist does not produce work in a vacuum, but is rather in a continuous dialogue with the critics of his or her work, which, in turn, affects the content of the work in question.

Whether Fryd’s conclusions are correct or incorrect are, in this greater meta-analysis irrelevant. Rather, what makes this article compelling is that it discloses the possibility of how an artist may be affected by the conscious anticipation of his or her critics. In this sense Fryd opens the reader unto a complex process of creation, where the reasons why a particular work of art exists as it does must be called into question. Art is not only a distinct product, but anticipates subsequent dialogues about the reasoning behind its very existence: whether the artist does or does not deny the importance of this dialogue is inconsequential, since both approaches are reflective of the effect of the relationship between the work of art and the reception of the work of art.

Works Cited

Fryd, Viven Green. “Georgia O’Keefe’s Radiator Building: Gender, Sexuality,

Modernism, and Urban Imagery.”