Stuhlman, Jonathan (Jon Stuhlman)

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Stuhlman, Jonathan (Jon Stuhlman)

PERSONAL:

Male.

ADDRESSES:

CAREER:

Curator and writer. Formerly the Anne and Harold Berkley Smith Curator of American Art at the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL. Served as exhibition curator for "Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling around Abstraction."

WRITINGS:

(Author of foreword) Reverie and Reality: Photographs by Rodney Smith, University of Virginia Art Museum (Charlottesville, VA), 2003.

(With Barbara Buhler Lynes) Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling around Abstraction, Hudson Hills Press (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jonathan Stuhlman is an art curator and the author, with Barbara Buhler Lynes, of the text for Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling around Abstraction, an art catalogue accompanying a traveling exhibition of O'Keeffe's works. Stuhlman also served as the curator for the exhibit. The artist's works have primarily been associated with American Southwest, where she lived later in her career. Best known for her paintings of desert Southwest flowers, animal bones, and landscapes, the artist typically incorporated both elements of realism and abstraction in her works. However, before she became known for her Southwestern paintings, O'Keeffe produced numerous abstract paintings beginning early in her career. The catalog features fifty-one of these paintings, some of which appeared in a successful New York art show in 1916.

"Sensual and undulating, O'Keeffe's drawings in that exhibit were—for her—just personal expressions of private thoughts," noted StarTribune.com contributor Mary Abbe about the 1916 exhibit in an article reporting on the new traveling exhibit. "But others saw in them a passionate sexuality that had never been put to paper before. As O'Keeffe biographer Laurie Lisle reported in her 1980 ‘Portrait of an Artist,’ one female fan brought psychoanalysts to scrutinize the drawings, while a scandalized male critic dismissed them as pictures that said nothing more than ‘I want to have a baby.’"

In the catalog's two essays by the authors, they discuss the origins of these lesser-known works by the artist and the author's irritation at critics interpreting them in a feminine light while other similar works by male artists received no such gender identification. Writing on Artscope.net, Katherine B. Lieber noted that Stuhlman's essay "discusses the artistic influences on O'Keeffe's use of circular forms, tracing its lineage to diverse sources from the theories of her instructor to the tightly-cropped images of modernist photographer Paul Strand," adding in the same review that the author "briefly places O'Keeffe among several peers by noting the increased frequency with which she explored the circular motif, as well as her interest in putting the form itself over the colors employed." A contributor to Reference & Research Book News referred to Stuhlman's essay as "thoughtful." The 132-page catalog contains fifty-one color plates and twenty-six black-and-white images, with the plates covering abstractions by O'Keeffe dating from 1915 to the 1970s. A contributor to California Bookwatch noted that the catalog is one "that any serious college-level art library … must have."