Georgia O'Keeffe

Recalling a charcoal she made in 1916, Georgia O'Keeffe later wrote, “I have made this drawing several times—never remembering that I had made it before—and not knowing where the idea came from.” These drawings, and the majority of O’Keeffe’s works in charcoal, watercolor, pastel and graphite, belong to series in which she develops and transforms motifs that lie between observation and abstraction. In the formative years of 1915 to 1918, she made as many works on paper as she would in the next 40 years, producing sequences in watercolor of abstract lines, organic landscapes and nudes, along with charcoal drawings she would group according to the designation “specials.” While her practice turned increasingly toward canvas in subsequent decades, important series on paper reappeared—including charcoal flowers of the 1930s, portraits of the 1940s and aerial views of the 1950s.
Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this richly illustrated volume highlights the drawings of an artist better known as a painter, and reunites individual sheets with their contextual series to illuminate O’Keeffe’s persistently sequential practice.
Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) first received critical attention when her breakthrough charcoal drawings were exhibited in New York in 1916. Two years later, she moved to the city to work full time on her art. Beginning in 1929, O’Keeffe spent summers in New Mexico, where she would relocate in 1949. The most famous female artist of her age, she thought of herself not as “the best woman painter” but as “one of the best painters.”

During the 1920s, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) became widely known for her paintings of enlarged flowers. But she regularly returned to abstraction, and indeed found it “surprising how many people separate the objective from the abstract.” Executed in 1927, Abstraction Blue illustrates that belief, retaining the glowing color, careful modulation and zoomed-in view of the artist’s contemporaneous blooms, while forgoing any obligation toward representation. In this latest volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Samantha Friedman considers how these and other factors converged in the creation of this composition.

Offering a complete survey of Georgia O’Keeffe’s illustrious career, this magnificent new book ranges from the works produced between 1910 and 1920 that made her a pioneer of abstraction to her celebrated flower paintings and views of New York, which led to her recognition as one of the key figures in modern American art, and culminating with her paintings of New Mexico.

The selection of color plates is accompanied by quotes from O’Keeffe on her art and additional photographic material pertaining to the paintings. The sense of reverence for the world and its forms emerges vividly through O’Keeffe’s words. “The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding—to understand maybe by trying to put it into form,” she writes. “To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.”

Also featured are a biography and texts by contributing curators from the venues to which the show travels, by scholars at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and by acclaimed French art writer Catherine Millet.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) began her art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York. She moved to New York in 1918, and in 1924 married Alfred Stieglitz. From 1929, O'Keeffe began spending part of the year in the Southwest, which served as inspiration for her paintings of New Mexico landscapes. After Stieglitz's death, she lived permanently in New Mexico, in Abiquiú, later moving to Santa Fe.