Georgia OKeeffe

Georgia OKeeffe (18871986) was one of the foundational
Georgia
figures of American modernism and a pioneering woman
in the arts. Widely acclaimed for her abstractions, flower
Georgia OKeeffe
paintings and Southwest landscapes, this lavish new book
celebrates the seven-decade career of this most prominent
female artist. Coming one hundred years after her debut in
1916, this book also marks a century of OKeeffe.
Illustrating her highly distinctive paintings from well-known

masterpieces including flower paintings and skulls, to less
well-known abstractions, nature studies and New York
City scenes, this illuminating new study surveys OKeeffes
complete oeuvre and dispels many assumptions that persist
about her and her artistic output. New scholarship includes
explorations of the artists personal and aesthetic partnership
with Alfred Stieglitz, feminism and her work, and OKeeffes
relationship with American landscape and identity.
Georgia OKeeffe is the definitive volume for our time on
one of Americas most beloved and influential artists.
30.00
ISBN 978-1-84976-403-2
OKeeffe
Georgia OKeeffe
Georgia
OKeeffe
Edited by Tanya Barson
Tate Publishing
First published 2016 by order of the Tate Trustees
by Tate Publishing, a division of Tate Enterprises Ltd,
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
www.tate.org.uk/publishing
on the occasion of the exhibition Foreword p.6

Georgia OKeeffe
Tate Modern, London OKeeffes Century p.8
6 July 30 October 2016
Tanya Barson
Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien Esoteric Art at 291, 1917 Henry Tyrrell p.48
7 December 2016 26 March 2017
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Touching the Centre:

22 April 30 July 2017 Georgia OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitzs Artistic Dialogue p.50
Tate Enterprises Ltd 2016
Sarah Greenough
To MSS. and Its 33 Subscribers ..., 1922 Georgia OKeeffe p.98
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, Seeing OKeeffe Seeing p.102
including photocopying and recording, or in any information Griselda Pollock
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
The Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe, 1922 Paul Rosenfeld p.138
publishers or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd,
www.cla.co.uk
Location and Dislocation in the Life and Art of Georgia OKeeffe p.144
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
Cody Hartley
White Paint and Good Order, 1926 Waldo Frank p.180
ISBN 978 1 84976 371 4 (hbk)
ISBN 978 1 84976 403 2 (pbk)
OKeeffes Late Blooms: The Abstract Landscapes p.184
Designed by The Studio of Williamson Curran Heike Eipeldauer and Florian Steininger
Colour reproduction by DL Imaging, London
Printed and bound in Italy by Graphicom Review of an Exhibition of Georgia OKeeffe, 1946 Clement Greenberg p.216

Cover: Georgia O'Keeffe, Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1, 1932
The Light One: A Case Study p.218
Measurements of artworks are given in centimetres, Georgiana Uhlyarik
height before width
OKeeffe as I see her, 1993 Susan Hiller p.226

Chronology p.232
Hannah Johnston
Notes p.244
Exhibited Works p.252
Further Reading p.258
Index p.260
Picture Credits p.264
Georgia OKeeffe Foreword
The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe; David Henry, Henry Art, San over the past century, paying particular attention to reviewing
Francisco; Andrew L. Schoelkopf, Menconi + Schoelkopf, New gendered and feminist readings; Heike Eipeldauer and Florian
York; Eric Widing, Deputy Chairman, American Art, Christies, Steininger write about OKeeffes engagement with abstraction
New York; Rebecca Senf, Chief Curator, Center for Creative and a spiritual sensibility, drawing connections between the early
Photography, University of Arizona; Ellen Roberts, Harold and and late work; Georgiana Uhlyarik delves in a more focused way
Anne Berkley Smith Curator of American Art, Norton Museum of into a single body of work, OKeeffes Patio series, to address
Foreword
Art; Howard Greenberg, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York; the formal developments she introduces and aspects of seriality
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; and and difference within her treatment of this important late motif;
Polly Fleury, The Wilson Centre for Photography. Additional and Hannah Johnston has compiled a detailed and fascinating
advice has been generously provided by Simon Baker, Senior chronology of OKeeffes life. At Tate Publishing thanks go to
Curator, International Art (Photography), and Shoair Mavlian, Anjali Bulley who worked diligently to accomplish the successful
Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. completion of the publication. We would also like to thank
Caroline Waight for her translation of the German text, Faye
The exhibition has been curated by Tanya Barson, Curator, Robson for her copy-editing and Emma Woodiwiss for her work on
International Art, Tate Modern, who has made an intelligent and the picture research and copyright.
visually striking selection of works and has driven this exhibition
to realisation with energy and flair. She has been aided with The elegant design of this book is down to Chris Curran and
exceptional dedication and professionalism by Hannah Johnston, Geoff Williamson at The Studio of Williamson Curran.
A century after Georgia OKeeffes debut at 291 the gallery Head of Conservation, for sharing his considerable knowledge Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. Nathan Ladd, Curatorial Assistant,
of Alfred Stieglitz in New York it seems timely to revisit her of OKeeffes work, and Judith Chiba Smith, Registrar/Collections Tate Modern and Samantha Manton, Exhibitions Administrator, We are especially grateful to Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne
work and explore its richness and complexity anew. It has been Manager. We are also grateful to the National Gallery of Art in have provided further instrumental support, while Caroline for their generous lead support of the exhibition. Our thanks are
a generation since her last institutional showing in London, at the Washington for their generous advice and support, particularly McCarthy, Exhibition Registrar, Lucy Fisher, Assistant Registrar, also due to those individuals who join us as part of the Georgia
Hayward Gallery in 1993, and her work is seen only infrequently that of Sarah Greenough, Senior Curator and Head of the and Claire Allerton, Assistant Registrar have shepherded the works OKeeffe Exhibition Supporters Group, including Huo Family
in Europe and Canada. This exhibition therefore affords audiences Department of Photographs, and Harry Cooper, Curator and with assiduousness. Many thanks are due to Nicholas Serota, Foundation (UK), and our media partner The Times/The Sunday
in London, Vienna and Toronto a very rare opportunity to Head of Modern Art, and for lending both a group of OKeeffes Director, Tate; Chris Dercon, previously Director, Tate Modern; Times, for their most kind support of the London presentation.
experience OKeeffes work in depth. works and, in addition, a substantial number of prints by Alfred Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern; The Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien would like to thank its sponsors
Stieglitz. We are also delighted to have had a fruitful dialogue Helen Sainsbury, Head of Programme Realisation; Rachel Kent, UniCredit Bank Austria, SIGNA, UniCredit Leasing, ERGO,
Georgia OKeeffe stands out as a pioneering artist not only for with Rod Bigelow, Director, Margaret C. Conrads, Director of Programme Manager; Phil Monk, Art Installation Manager; Schoellerbank, Pioneer Investments, and cardcomplete, as well
being one of the first women to participate in early modernist Curatorial Affairs, and Manuela Well-Off-Man, Curator, at Crystal Rhona OBrien, Art Installation Assistant; Jenny Hunter, Senior Art as its media partners Die Presse, Falter and 1 for their support of
movements, for achieving significant success immediately and Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Handling Technician and the team of technicians at Tate Modern; the Vienna presentation.
sustaining this over a long career, and for forging the way for Patricia Smithen, Head of Conservation and her colleagues;
successive generations of artists, but also as an American icon. We are grateful to have had the support of Juan Hamilton on the Simon Grant at Tate etc; and the teams at Tate Learning, Press Georgia OKeeffe has been made possible by the provision of
Given her status as such, the work itself has often been obscured project. Likewise we have benefited from the generous assistance and Marketing, Tate Media, and Visitor Experience. insurance through the UK Government Indemnity Scheme.
by the limited readings placed on it and by the wide dissemination of Agapita Lopez, Director of Abiqui Historic Properties, in We would like to thank the Department of Culture, Media and
and overriding fame of a small part of her overall production. giving access to OKeeffes houses and sharing her memories of We are delighted to be sharing this exhibition with our tour Sport and Arts Council England for providing and arranging this
Consequently, with this ambitious exhibition, we aim to return to Miss OKeeffe. Suzanne OLeary of JLH Media has facilitated partners, the Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna and the Art Gallery indemnity.
the work and give a more reflective, detailed and nuanced valuable connections in New Mexico. We would like to thank of Ontario, Toronto. We have been fortunate to work with
reading of her considerable oeuvre than has often been presented, a number of individuals for their assistance with research for the Ingried Brugger, Director, Heike Eipeldauer, Curator, and Florian Frances Morris,
spanning the six principal decades of her activity from her early exhibition and with securing key loans: Christophe Cherix, The Steininger, Curator, at the Bank Austria Kunstforum; and with Director, Tate Modern
charcoal abstractions to her late skyscape paintings. Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, Matthew Teitelbaum, former Michael and Sonja Koerner Director,
Ann Temkin, The Marie-Jose and Henry Kravis Chief Curator and CEO (prior to his departure to the Museum of Fine Arts, Ingried Brugger,
Mounting an exhibition of Georgia OKeeffes work is a of Painting and Sculpture, Leah Dickerman, the Marlene Hess Boston), Stephanie Smith, Chief Curator, Jessica Bright, Director, Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien
challenging undertaking not least because it means asking Curator of Painting and Sculpture and Cora Rosevear, Associate Director, Exhibitions, Georgiana Uhlyarik, Associate Curator,
institutions and private individuals to part with some of the most Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Timothy Rub, The Canadian Art, and Curtis Strilchuk, Exhibition Registrar, at the Stephan Jost, Michael and Sonja Koerner
important and beloved masterpieces in their collections, if only George D. Widener Director, and Carlos Basualdo, Keith L. and Art Gallery of Ontario. Director, and CEO, Art Gallery of Ontario
temporarily, and we are deeply indebted to the generosity of Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
all the lenders to the exhibition for making this project possible, Museum of Art; Sheena Wagstaff, Leonard A. Lauder Chairman The exhibition is accompanied by this book, whose essay
even where they wish to remain anonymous. The largest group for Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum authors have responded with rich and rewarding new readings
of works comes from the Georgia OKeeffe Museum in Santa of Art; Adam Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney of OKeeffes work. Tanya Barson introduces the scope of the
Fe, New Mexico, and we are especially grateful to their Trustees Museum of American Art; Josef Helfenstein, formerly Director, The exhibition, OKeeffes place in history and the dual centuries of
as well as to Robert A. Kret, Director, Cody Hartley, Director of Menil Collection; Garry Tinterow, Director, the Museum of Fine OKeeffes life and that which has elapsed since her debut in
Curatorial Affairs, and Carolyn Kastner, Curator, for lending such Arts, Houston; Sarah Kelly Oehler, Associate Curator of American 1916; Sarah Greenough addresses the complex relationship
a substantial number of significant works, and for their outstanding Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; Gavin Delahunty, Hoffman between OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitz and their mutual influence,
expertise, support and enduring collegiality, which has been Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of pointing to precise instances of aesthetic exchange; Cody
crucial to many aspects of the project throughout the time it has Art; Stephen Lockwood, Collections Manager, University of New Hartley has written on OKeeffes sense of place and her sensitive
taken to stage it. We are likewise grateful to the wider team at Mexico Art Museum; Barney A. Ebsworth; Jan and Marica Vilcek; interaction with the various locations in which she lived; Griselda
the museum for their support, particularly to Dale Kronkright, Nicholas Maclean, Eykyn Maclean, London; Nathaniel Owings, Pollock deals with the considerable historiography developed
6 7
OKeeffes Century Tanya Barson
OKeeffes Fig.1
Series I From the Plains 1919
Century
Oil paint on canvas
68.6 x 58.4
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe
I dont know what Art is. No one has ever been able administration of Grover Cleveland, she died, having lived for the
to give me a satisfactory definition. best part of a century, in 1986, during that of Ronald Reagan.4
I have not been in Europe. In-between, the U.S. endured the Great Depression, two World
I prefer to live in a room as bare as possible. Wars, one Cold one, and had no fewer than seventeen Presidents.
I have been much photographed. OKeeffes career was formed before the U.S. became a modern
I paint because color is a significant language to me but I superpower and New York the centre of the art world, but it
do not like pictures and I do not like exhibitions of pictures. traversed this complex and transformational era of national history
However I am very much interested in them. and thus her work must be considered in the context of the various
Georgia OKeeffe, 19221 times in which she lived and worked; the shifts in aesthetics that
occurred, bound up in the project to create a national art; and the
It is quite easy to show that abstract art like every other subsequent years of her ongoing influence.
cultural phenomenon reflects the social and other
circumstances of the age in which its creators live, and that Like her contemporaries a group of brilliant young men who were
there is nothing inside art itself disconnected from history, set on placing American culture firmly within modernism and on
which compels it to go in one direction or another. a different cultural plane than, as they perceived it, it had occupied
Clement Greenberg, 19402 previously OKeeffe came to maturity during the Progressive
Tanya Barson Era, lasting from the 1890s to the 1920s. One of their number,
A century after her debut in New York at 291, the renowned the writer Paul Rosenfeld (18901946), commented: For the
gallery of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (18641946), this first time, among these modern men and women, I found myself
exhibition revisits six decades of the work of Georgia OKeeffe. in an America where it was good to be [Their works] gave me
There are few artists more clearly and resolutely associated with the happy sense of a new spirit dawning in American life, and
the United States, and with identifying and embodying what it awakened a sense of wealth, of confidence, and of power which
means to be both American and Modern, than OKeeffe.3 was not there before.5 In the arts, this generation looked towards
Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1887, under the first presidential one figure in particular as their leader: the photographer, editor and
8 9
Georgia OKeeffe OKeeffes Century Tanya Barson
kept to themselves.13 Slightly later, the painter Marsden Hartley feeling of dangling her feet in a river,17 or the watercolours of
(18771943) would comment that the pictures of OKeeffe are the endless sky, lit up in a variety of colours as in Sunrise 1916
probably as living and shameless private documents as exist, in (fig.23), Sunrise and Little Clouds No. II 1916 and the two series
painting certainly, and probably in any other art.14 Interpretations Light Coming on the Plains IIII 1917 and Evening Star IVII 1917.
of OKeeffes work however, have been largely defined by three It was this rootedness in her environment that she took to New
moments: the formative years of American modernism among York, where the memory of landscape impressions, light effects
her generation, as outlined above, influenced by Stieglitz; the high and sounds inspired her to paint works such as Series I From the
modernist reassessment, and dismissal, of her work led by critic Plains 1919 and Red and Orange Streak 1919 (figs1 and 2).18
Fig.2
Red and Orange Streak 1919
Oil paint on canvas
68.6 x 58.4
Philadelphia Museum of Art Fig.3
Frederic Church
Twilight in the Wilderness 1860
Oil paint on canvas
gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. As art historian Wanda Corn has noted,
6
OKeeffes debut in 1916 consisted of the display of a small
101.6 x 162.6
this was an era in which the new urban elites became advocates number of abstract drawings in charcoal, which she had sent to The Cleveland Museum of Art
of a kind of cultural nationalism; these elites included Stieglitz, and her friend Anita Pollitzer in New York City (OKeeffe and Pollitzer
others from his circle who frequented both 291 and the Stieglitz studied together at Teachers College, Columbia University, two
family summer residence at Lake George, in upstate New York: years previously). Pollitzer had shown them to Stieglitz, who Clement Greenberg (which conceals both more positive instances Abstraction and immersion in landscape go hand in hand in
White, well-educated, and contentious, these men grew up during promptly put them on display.9 The following year, Stieglitz gave of reception and her influence, particularly from the 1940s to the these works and establish a guiding theme that runs throughout
the Progressive Era and by the time they were young adults had OKeeffe a solo exhibition at the gallery, including both charcoals 1960s); and, thirdly, her apparent rediscovery by feminist artists OKeeffes work. These works might be seen as indebted to both
ideologically committed themselves to the politics of modernism and watercolours made in Texas it was the last show to be of the 1970s.15 Kandinskys radical fusion of landscape and abstraction (see, for
and to a renaissance in the nations arts and letters.7 OKeeffe held at 291 before its closure due to financial difficulties caused instance, Cossacks 191011), as well as to nineteenth-century
was to become part of this circle a generation with their roots by the First World War. OKeeffes charcoals are her earliest Synaesthesia: abstraction and the senses American luminism, as exemplified by Frederic Church (1826
in late-nineteenth-century romantic, symbolist and transcendental mature expressions and the basis of her lifelong commitment to In the 1910s, OKeeffe was based in west Texas, teaching first in 1900) and his focus on light effects in the expansive American
aesthetics, they nevertheless embraced modernism. OKeeffe later abstraction.10 Drawn largely from emotional experience inspired Amarillo and then in Canyon. She was deeply impressed by the landscape.19 Church employed these effects as a means to convey
expressed how she had shared the excitement at the potential for a by music or landscape, they explored the Theosophical concept landscape, which was much closer to that of her early youth on the emotional weight, as in his masterpiece Twilight in the Wilderness
new national culture, but also her distance and otherness from this of the thought-form, ideas drawn from Wassily Kandinskys (1866 farm where she was born than anywhere she had since resided. 1860 (fig.3), painted as a spiritual meditation on the eve of the
group (she called them city men gendering the urban context 1944) Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911, translated She took to the wide-open spaces and massive presence of the Civil War. OKeeffes watercolours equally find a resonance in
in a telling way) and her doubtfulness as regards their dedication into English in 1914), and the compositional principals of sky, to the immersive experience of walking and the changes the context of the First World War; despite her remoteness, both
to an America in competition with Europe. She highlighted the gap OKeeffes teacher at Columbia, Arthur Wesley Dow (1857 in weather. OKeeffe was a lifelong hiker, in her element in the from the East Coast and Europe, she was nevertheless deeply
between their rhetoric and their actual commitment: 1922).11 Their interpretation first by Stieglitz and then OKeeffes landscape; her early letters to Stieglitz, Pollitzer and others reveal concerned by events.20 However, when her watercolours were
peers in his circle largely set the tone for critical responses to her how she would often go tramping at any time of day, or night, shown again during the late 1950s, they also struck a chord
As I was working I thought of the city men I had been seeing in work. Stieglitz wrote that Miss OKeeffes drawings besides their and in all conditions, and are full of impressions of the landscape, with the context of abstraction then dominating American art.21
the East. They talked so often of writing the Great American other values were of intense interest from a psycho-analytical [sic] its colours and weather.16 These works are the beginning, then, of OKeeffes art: they lay
Novel the Great American Play the Great American point of view. 291 had never before seen woman express herself out a foundational interest in abstraction; they introduce the rural
Poetry I was excited over our country and I knew that at so frankly on paper.12 Henry Tyrrell, who reviewed her first solo The notion of synaesthesia, the stimulation of one sense by an and expansive western American landscape a landscape that
that time almost any of those great minds would have been show in 1917, wrote there can be no mistaking the essential fact experience in another, and its use as a way to create images, would become so crucial within her life and art as a source of
in Europe if it had been possible for them. They didnt even that Miss OKeeffe, independent of technical abilities quite out of underpins much of OKeeffes early work. She employed the inspiration for modernism; and they reveal the ways in which her
want to live in New York how was the Great American Thing the common, has found expression in delicately veiled symbolism concept to respond to her surroundings, whether in the swirling work might be presented as an antecedent to later manifestations
going to happen?8 for what every woman knows, but what women heretofore have movement of the pastel Special No. 32 1915, inspired by the of American abstraction.
10 11
Woman as Exponent of the Abstract Free without McBride was himself a close ally of Stieglitzs circle, though not
Aid of Freud22 always uncritical. Rosenfeld, much more the disciple of Stieglitz
Once based in New York, OKeeffe turned with greater assurance than McBride was, meanwhile, reflected on the legacy of 291
towards abstraction, shifting more definitively to oil paint as a (meaning Stieglitz) in modernist magazine Dial in 1921, in a way
medium; though she used pastel, she would rarely again employ that appears to refute this tendency:
either charcoal or watercolour to the same extent as she had done
in Virginia and Texas. Her abstract compositions continued to be Here are [Arthur] Dove and [John] Marin and OKeeffe, moved
rooted in the landscape, exploring memories of the Texas plains, by something of the same impulse that moved 291; reflecting
but she also found sources of inspiration in music an art form that something of the same human maturity. All these people, no
held almost as much interest for OKeeffe as the visual arts and, doubt, were affected by what was going on in the gallery. But
famously, flowers. Following the closure of 291, Stieglitz staged none of them was actually created by the place. There must
exhibitions at the Anderson Galleries, including solo shows of have been in them something of 291 before ever they heard of
OKeeffes new work in 1923 and 1924, thus giving her far more it. Otherwise how could they have come into touch with it?28
prominence than other female artists enjoyed at this time. OKeeffes
explanations of her work emphasised their abstract formal qualities: Nevertheless, as Lynes indicates, Stieglitz had also created
I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldnt sayOKeeffe in another way; he had produced such an effective
any other way things I had no words for.23 However, the critical interpretation of OKeeffes work that it was to obscure her art
reaction to these exhibitions continued to be authored largely by for years to come: the OKeeffe perceived by most critics in the
Stieglitz and his associates. They saw in OKeeffes work the essence early years of her career was essentially the invention of Alfred
of womanhood expressed through a modernist abstraction that was Stieglitz, and his ideas about creativity in general and OKeeffes
also, importantly, American. Following Stieglitz, critics advanced creative drive in particular are a key to understanding why she
Freudian interpretations of her abstract and flower imagery, chose to define herself as an artist as she did.29 The way she
connecting these explicitly with her body and gendering her art chose to define herself was in opposition to being categorised as
in ways she found increasingly frustrating. As early as 1922, she a woman artist (and later, to being claimed by feminist artists);
commented, They make me seem like some strange unearthly sort instead, she fiercely asserted her independence and refuted the
of creature floating in the air breathing in clouds for nourishment idea that her art was essentially feminine, while nevertheless being
committed to female equality she was a lifelong member of the
when the truth is that I like beef steak and like it rare at that.24
The text that most revealingly elucidates Stieglitzs position are National Womans Party (NWP).30 By the early 1920s, as Lynes
Fig.4
his remarks on Woman in Art; first published in 1960, the piece has argued,31 OKeeffe had become frustrated by readings of The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. 1926
was, however, written in 1919 and was echoed in contemporary her work and began to change her approach, turning away from Oil paint on canvas
reviews. Stieglitz wrote, Woman feels the World differently than abstraction towards a style closer to precisionism and, perhaps 123.2 x 76.8
Man feels it. And one of the chief generating forces crystallizing ironically, more clearly towards photography and specifically The Art Institute of Chicago
into art is undoubtedly elemental feeling Womans & Mans are its opticality clarity, close-ups, cropping, magnification and
differentiated through the difference in their sex make-up distortion with a range of subjects that included flowers and still
The Woman receives the World through her Womb. That is her lifes, as well as subjects not traditionally associated with women photographing New York City since the 1890s, and, as is the case she said of their reaction: when I wanted to paint New York, the
deepest feeling. Mind comes second.25 urban views of New York City, for example in an effort to shake for several of OKeeffes New York scenes, New York Street with men thought Id lost my mind. But I did it anyway.38 Stieglitz was
off the constrictions of being labelled a woman artist.32 In 1922, Moon acknowledges Stieglitz in its inclusion of a sky dominated among the doubtful and rejected New York Street with Moon from
OKeeffes professional introduction therefore largely came about OKeeffe wrote that [Photography] has been part of my searching by rippling cloud formations, which evoke those in his sky series the exhibition Seven Americans at the Anderson Galleries in 1925.
through the mediation of Stieglitz. The art historian Barbara Buhler and through the searching maybe I am at present prejudiced in Equivalents c.192235. Through these skies, full of incident, the Having praised OKeeffes work largely for its organic qualities
Lynes identifies the double-edged nature of that introduction, favour of photography.33 Indeed, photography would remain natural world and a sense of space enter the New York paintings and femininity, he may have found the New York paintings too
given Stieglitzs contradictory position: by suggesting that there an important reference point for OKeeffes work, and her close in a way that contrasts with the solidity and mass of the buildings. much at odds with his conception of what a female artist ought to
might be equality between the sexes in art, Stieglitz adopted a friendships with photographers are well known, from Stieglitz and Likewise, The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. 1926 (fig.4) includes be. It was a reaction OKeeffe embraced, stating her intention, in
revolutionary position; but by simultaneously calling attention to Paul Strand (18901976), to Ansel Adams (190284) and Eliot photographic lens flare and a series of sunspots caused when, 1927, that her next exhibition be so magnificently vulgar that all
biological differences between men and women, he implicitly Porter (190190), among others. facing into the sun, the diffuse glare disrupts the geometry of the the people who have liked what I have been doing would stop
categorised them as separate and unequal and, thus, neutralised building within its composition. In some works, they shared speaking to me.39 Nevertheless, when New York Street with Moon
the strength of that position.26 Stieglitzs influence is clear in From New York to New Mexico subjects; New York, Night 19289 (fig.73) revisits a view was shown, in 1926, it sold immediately.
much of the early writing on OKeeffes art as in Hartleys or OKeeffes early reception led her, then, to make several further Stieglitz had photographed the year before, but at night time,
Rosenfelds early texts, published between 1921 and 1924, which shifts in her work; in 1925 towards the motifs of urban life, while OKeeffe painted the East River panorama several times OKeeffe painted New York from 1925 to 1929/30, her
stressed Stieglitzs decisive role in forging her career. When the principally skyscrapers, and, after 1929, towards the Southwest.34 before Stieglitz addressed the same subject. In Radiator Building enthusiasm for the subject ending, as Anna C. Chave points out,
critic Henry McBride wrote in 1923, reviewing the second solo In 1915, New York City was already being hailed as a social and Night, New York 1927 (fig.134), a neon sign even spells out with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great
exhibition of OKeeffes work organised by Stieglitz, that [Alfred cultural centre, both as an effect of the war, but also because of Stieglitzs name. Depression, which ended the inter-war period of affluence,
Stieglitz] is responsible for the OKeeffe exhibition in the Anderson its modernity and scale.35 OKeeffes arrival in the city in 1918 utopianism and modernity that was encapsulated by the
Galleries. Miss OKeeffe says so herself, and it is reasonably sure coincided with a building boom that would see the city, and the Although OKeeffe had admired the images of New York by burgeoning skylines of American cities such as New York and
that he is responsible for Miss OKeeffe, the artist, he emphasised modes of living within it, transformed.36 In 1925, OKeeffe and John Marin (18701953), particularly his watercolours of the Chicago.40 The financial crash called a halt to the optimism of the
how Stieglitz as impresario, agent, critic and advocate-in-chief of Stieglitz, recently married, moved to the newly completed and Woolworth building, she declared, [when] I began talking about Progressive-era metropolitans and OKeeffe turned towards the
modernism facilitated the careers of the artists he supported to such ultra-modern Shelton Hotel. It was also the year of her first painting trying to paint New York ... I was told that it was an impossible Southwest. Her relocation enabled her to develop more fully her
an extent that they were considered, in large part, his creations.27 of the city, New York Street with Moon (fig.71). Stieglitz had been idea even the men hadnt done too well with it.37 Elsewhere, personal project to produce the great American thing, to find a
12 13
Fig.5 Fig.6
John Gast Grey Hill Forms 1936
American Progress 1872 Oil paint on canvas
Oil paint on canvas 54.3 x 79.7
29.2 x 40 University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque
Autry National Center, Los Angeles
unique way to embody the nation culturally and artistically. The enlargement of the U.S. and which featured in both paintings to change the paradigm [used to describe her] from woman aspects of the locale that she could turn more easily towards
focus of OKeeffes incorporation of European-inflected modernist and collections of memorabilia that were themselves a way to painter to regional painter the objects that inspired her to paint abstraction, and nowhere in her work is this clearer than in her
abstraction into a new and American mode of modernism became construct an image of American identity, a mythic image of the animal bones, crosses, masks, Indian blankets and the way repeated and evolving representations of the area she called
the landscape as Wanda Corn has observed, the circle around once Wild West.44 Even in John Gasts well-known and widely she configured them were deeply tied to a rich regional culture or, the Black Place.
Stieglitz utilised the term American more than any other to describe reproduced image American Progress 1872 (fig.5), depicting the to be more accurate, to the multiple cultures of the Southwest.46
their work and American in their lexicon meant, among other westward expansion, a pile of bones appears in the middle of the Through her work, OKeeffe negotiated and eschewed the The Black Place paintings
things, a sense of place.41 Uniting abstraction with the American painting suggesting an indigenous loss. Unlike Gasts allegory of substantial and successive artistic traditions of American landscape OKeeffe first visited the area of Bisti Badlands, 240 kilometres
landscape, be it urban or rural, provided a way for Americans to Manifest Destiny, however, in which progress personified floats painting and their concomitant construction of the West; she west of Ghost Ranch, in 1935; returning to paint it the following
contribute in a unique way to modernism and to make modernism above a Midwestern scene, in OKeeffe canvases such as From rejected the urban as a focus of modernism and responded instead year, she was preoccupied with it until 1949 and made, in total,
relevant to Americans, for whom the landscape had always been the Faraway, Nearby 1937 (fig.126), the bleached skulls float to a broader contemporary need to root identity in landscape fourteen paintings, along with one large pastel drawing.50 Its
a principal touchstone of identity. In the history of the nation- above Southwestern desert in a way that in aesthetic terms evokes and place. As Corn has stressed: In taking herself and her art to relative remoteness meant that she needed to camp on site and
formation of the U.S., from Manifest Destiny onwards, but surrealism, without OKeeffes actually adhering to the principles New Mexico, OKeeffe shared in the Regionalists revolt against did so in different seasons, in often difficult weather conditions.51
particularly in the wake of the Civil War, the landscape played a of that movement, to describe the Dust Bowl, which itself caused Manhattan she responded most decisively to the depression OKeeffe called this area of dark grey hills the Black Place
key role in the construction of an American sense of nationhood.42 another westward migration. Bones summarise succinctly the eras intensified rhetoric of place and America. She took and described it as looking like a mile of elephants.52 In this
Corn has remarked that, when OKeeffe left the architectural resilience and individualism of the pioneer, and simultaneously modernism further from Manhattan than any other member of the place, she found an area that was marked by its exceptional
canyons of Manhattan for the God-given deserts of New Mexico signal the presence (and disappearance) of native inhabitants. second [Stieglitz] circle and artistically engaged a region where characteristics, not typical even in the context of the extraordinary
and put aside paintings of skyscrapers for those of bones, it was the past was stronger than the present.47 geological formations of the Southwestern states. By focusing on
both a private affair and a public announcement that modern A lesser-known body of work indicates OKeeffes deeper interest this exception, it is clear she was interested in something other
America could be found far west of the Hudson, not just on in the cultural complexity of the American Southwest. From the OKeeffes work in the Southwest falls into different stages: first, than representing the essence of a region in a straightforward
Wall Street, at Lake George, or on the New England Coast.43 moment she arrived in New Mexico in 1929, she became aware her initial contact in 192931, during which time she focused manner, as perhaps many other Southwestern or Western artists
of and interested in its layered native cultures. While the crosses, on learning about the new locale, its layered cultural references had done, and as she had come closer to during her own early
The paintings of bleached animal skulls that OKeeffe made during adobe churches and moradas (chapels) of the Penitentes sect, a and unfamiliar landscape forms; then, after a period of ill-health, forays into depicting New Mexico. Instead, she found an area
the 1930s offer a motif that synthesises various meanings and community dating from the Spanish colonial era, could be worked and a hiatus in her visits between 1932 and 1933, she returned that interested her aesthetically and that allowed her to push her
shows how OKeeffe constructed complex, layered allegories into her landscape representations, the Native American adobe and re-engaged with the area, this time with a clearer sense of work further towards abstraction by virtue of its already seeming a
of nationhood and identity, simultaneously reflecting both her structure became the focus of her architectural rendition of Taos those aspects that interested her. She began to truly develop her natural abstraction. OKeeffes Black Place paintings reveal the
personal aims as an artist and the predicament of the times. The Pueblo 1929/34 (fig.141) although this early work has a touch language following the discovery of Ghost Ranch in 1934 and her nature of this negotiation of landscape and abstraction, indicating
skulls that she gathered following an exceptional drought in 1930 of the touristic vista, more typical of her initial approaches to the acquisition of a house there in 1940. Then, in a later stage, from her concern with aspects of aesthetics that were also of interest
were a way to address the Great Depression and Dust Bowl (a region. Alongside these subjects, she painted a number of images the early 1940s to her final representations of the New Mexico to a new generation of artists working in New York, and point
period of drought and severe dust storms in the 1930s) without of Kachina dolls, representations of spirit beings that are sacred landscape in 1953,48 she concentrated for the most part on serial towards wider concerns that are not often discussed in relation to
illustrating them directly (as they would be in John Steinbecks objects for the Native American populations of the area. These representations of specific motifs cottonwood trees, pelvis bones OKeeffes work.
1939 realist novel The Grapes of Wrath and John Fords 1940 figurines clearly held a fascination for OKeeffe, since she made against the landscape or sky and, of course, her patio door. 49
film adaptation, for example). The resulting works call on a paintings of them repeatedly over a period of ten years.45 From the outset, however, one aspect seems consistent, and that In the years preceding and overlapping with the beginnings of
motif used to signify the West and the effects of the westward As Corn remarks, in New Mexico OKeeffe consciously worked is her eye for eccentric or unusual landscape configurations the Black Place series, OKeeffe, as we have seen, had been
14 15
The oscillation between the flatness of the canvas and the sense black area, a chromatic fissure. The composition is only legible
of recession, between all-over abstract design and its rootedness as landscape to those who understand its origins, and not
in landscape, is held in balance, with the work poised between easily understood as such by those unfamiliar with this singular
abstraction and figuration. In the last of the series, Black Place No. location; it is an imaginative, emotive response to landscape.
IV (fig.163), the landscape is largely divested of naturalistic tones Such works encapsulate and summarise all that OKeeffe had
and is rendered in a fiery palette of red, orange and yellow previously explored in relation to synaesthesia in her early
non-naturalistic colours that OKeeffe would later employ in other works, foregrounding an immersive experience of landscape
paintings.58 The slightest suggestion of sky and cloud, thus horizon, and the sensations it inspired connecting emotion, abstraction
however returns here and provides a reference to the observed and environment and touch on the reflections on nationhood,
landscape. Nevertheless, this painting was done from memory national spirit and identity familiar from the skull paintings, as
on OKeeffes return to Ghost Ranch. In it, the ravine becomes well as her connection to particular, specially-chosen locations.
a jagged zig-zag, bolting through the centre of the canvas. It is Moreover, these Black Place paintings perform a level of
shocking in its drama and violent transformation of the gentle formal, painterly abstraction that OKeeffe had practiced only
landscape. In subsequent paintings and a large-scale drawing occasionally in her work in the decades since the late 1910s
in pastel made in 1945 (fig.7), again from memory, OKeeffe and 1920s.
returned to a concern with the locations soft morphology and
grey tones. The year 1944 thus represents a rupture in her OKeeffes skull paintings reveal her concern with issues of national
Fig.7
The Black Place III 1945
rendition of this landscape region. The changing treatment seems and cultural identity in relation to the practice of modernism. They
Pastel on paper to have been primarily an interpretation of the violent weather show how she related her work to a contemporary social and
70.5 x 111.1 conditions she experienced on a number of camping trips made historical context in sometimes subtle and oblique but unmistakable
Private collection, courtesy to the Black Place with companion and aspiring writer Maria ways. Her Black Place paintings, similarly, address a wider
The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe Chabot;59 in 1945 she went with a different companion and context. The transformation of her visual language in relation
described the experience as smooth and pleasant.60 to the Black Place came following the publication of Clement
preoccupied with depictions of animal skulls against distant As OKeeffe continued the Black Place landscapes, she made Greenbergs essay advocating abstract art as the realisation of
landscapes, culminating with the emblematic From the Faraway, them progressively more abstract. Between the late 1930s and One of OKeeffes final paintings of the Black Place, and the an unavoidable historical trajectory and arguing for the purity
Nearby, in which she explored her concept of the faraway and the 1940, OKeeffe was not able to return to the Black Place, but most abstract Black Place Green was made in 1949 (fig.165); of specific art forms Towards a Newer Laocon in 1940, and
nature of space in the Southwestern landscape. The series of skull resumed her series again from 1941. In the early 1940s, she was the composition is at its flattest; the undulating hills are now the United States entry into the Second World War in 1941.61
paintings had begun with an allegory of the U.S. Cows Skull: Red, also preoccupied by the Plaza Blanca, or White Place, a site in areas of grey punctuated by diffuse stripes of pink and white It occurred in the context of debates concerning art as a form
White, and Blue 1931 (fig.135) and ended with this icon of the the Chama River Valley composed of vertical white cliffs that are representing the geological strata, and dominated by a central of escapism from, or reflection on, the war, and amid a further
vast and harsh territory, an image of the context for the formation partially visible in the distance from her house at Abiqui. She had
of American identity.53 In contrast, her paintings of the Black Place known of it since 1931, but it was not until the 1940s that she began
begin with relative naturalism. Although OKeeffe was always to paint it repeatedly, and these paintings compliment and contrast
editing, simplifying, accentuating and transforming the landscapes with those of the Black Place.56
she painted,54 it is possible to identify the particular locations she
depicted within the actual landscape. One of her first paintings of A series of four works painted in 1944 shows how OKeeffe
the area was Grey Hill Forms 1936 (fig.6), which concentrates on transformed her apprehension of the Black Place. They take as
the strange softness and distinctive morphology of the landscape, their subject a ravine, situated centrally on the canvas, either side
bounded below by a sandy arroyo (dry creek) and sage bushes, of which are the convex, rounded hill forms that recede into the
and above by the high horizon, leaving room for a narrow passage near distance but do not resolve into a horizon and sky. These
of blue sky. These naturalistic features also characterise a painting were features usually required for pictorial illusion but were
titled Black Hills with Cedar 19412 (fig.159), which features a eschewed by artists beginning with Claude Monet (18401926)
cedar bush within the central gully, and an accentuated pink in whose late paintings would influence American abstract painters
the flanking hill forms. OKeeffe often proceeded by learning the when they were exhibited in post-war New York and acquired
landscape, becoming intimate with its minute features, only later to by the Museum of Modern Art in 1955.57 The first in the series,
decide what to use and what was superfluous in the image. These Black Place I (fig.160), is naturalistic in the way that her earliest
early representations are marked by a faithful naturalism that is works of the area had been, concentrating on the soft undulations
nevertheless guided by a concern with form, which itself evokes the of the hills. In the second canvas, a slightly smaller work, Black
way in which modernist photographers were intent on looking and Place II (fig.161), she radically reimagines the configuration of the
abstracting by identifying strangeness within the observed world. location and the coloration becomes stronger, more assertive. The
Later, in 1943, she wrote to Stieglitz, describing: softly rolling forms and tonalities of grey are replaced by starkly
simplified shapes in more abrupt areas of black, grey and white, Fig.8
the long formations of black hills sometimes long lines of very the suggestion of pink proceeding horizontally across the middle The Lawrence Tree 1929
dark purple in them it is so unbelievable the color the heat of of the rock formation has become a lower border of burgundy. Oil paint on canvas
78.8 x 101.6
the sun on it the rain and the moonlight oddly When I see The pale base of the ravine has been transformed into a lightning
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford
the country in its silvery beauty and forbidding blackness in my bolt that forms a roughly serrated vertical zip running through
memory Those black hills have something of a photograph the centre of the composition. Scaled-up for her next painting,
about them.55 Black Place III (fig.162), these changes become more determined.
16 17
Fig.9 Fig.10 Fig.11

Emily Carr Dead Tree, Bear Lake, Taos 1929 Mary Beth Edelson
Untitled 192931 Oil paint on canvas O'Kevelson 1973
Charcoal on paper 81.3 x 43.1 Photograph, gelatin silver print with china
91.8 x 47.7 Private collection marker
Vancouver Art Gallery 76.2 x 40.6
Courtesy of the artist
impetus to reflect on American culture as distinct from that of early modernists through OKeeffes work (naming also Stieglitz that abroad and succeeded in superseding Stieglitz by becoming Following her encounter with OKeeffe, Carrs work took on a new
the war-torn Old World. OKeeffe found solace in the land. In attacked for his messianism Marsden Hartley and Arthur internationally recognised as embodying the foremost American expressive freedom; she began using charcoal to make drawings
1941, she wrote about her early, transformational experience of Dove (18801946)) less than a year after the end of the war art, in the new pre-eminent art centre, New York City. Mid-century, in a manner similar to the American artist, and likewise aimed to
flying how it impacted on her view of the landscape, seen as and a little less than a month before Stieglitzs death. He criticised then, OKeeffe became a target not merely for what her own work find formal equivalents for the natural world.67 Thus the drawing
abstraction and related this to the troubling times: It is breath- the preceding generation of modernists tendency towards the aimed towards, but because it had been too closely associated Untitled 192931 (fig.9) echoes both OKeeffes early charcoals
taking as one rises up over the world It is very handsome way esoteric and mystical and, through OKeeffe, the prematurity of with Stieglitz. In 1949, OKeeffe relocated to New Mexico as well as her darkly hieratic painting Dead Tree, Bear Lake, Taos
off into the level distance, fantastically handsome like some their engagement with abstraction, seemingly rejecting her work permanently, maintaining her distance from the centres of the art 1929 (fig.10). While Carr became more deeply involved in the
marvellous rug patterns of maybe Abstract Paintings the for being rooted in a time before American painters could properly world, including New York, and it was not until her exhibition at the representation of indigenous cultures during the 1930s, she did
world all simplified and beautiful and clear-cut in patterns like time be expected to cope with abstract art, and for its subsequent Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, and her rediscovery not go as far towards abstracting from them as OKeeffe did,
and history will simplify and straighten out these times of ours.62 return to realism. Greenbergs conclusion that OKeeffes work by the feminist artists of that decade, that her work would gain in paintings like Grey Blue & Black Pink Circle 1929 (fig.33),
Even though OKeeffe frequently articulated a sense of distance amounted to little more than tinted photography66 likewise the same sense of widely acknowledged currency as it had in the inspired by Hopi dances, and At the Rodeo, New Mexico 1929,
and detachment from her friends and associates in metropolitan recalls his argument in Towards a Newer Laocon that art forms 1920s and 1930s. drawn from a headdress. Like Carr, OKeeffes employment of
centres on the East Coast during the 1940s, evidently she was not should remain distinct, but also implies a further critique of Stieglitz indigenous cultural subjects was motivated in part by a search
unconcerned about the times, and, when the war was at its height, himself. In order to assert his own primacy, and that of the artists he OKeeffes influence for symbols of an authentic cultural nationality, divorced from
painted her darkest, desolate and arguably most violent images of championed, as the first true and timely group of American artists, OKeeffe began influencing her contemporaries early on, both European models. The demand to find a uniquely American brand
the landscape.63 OKeeffe repeatedly employed landscape as a Greenberg first had to discredit the preceding, and previously within the Stieglitz circle and beyond its narrow confines. In 1930, of painting, in which abstraction played a central role, however,
measure of her state of mind and her paintings from the war years dominant, claimants to that position, an Oedipal act of erasure the Canadian painter Emily Carr (18711945) visited New was never far from OKeeffes consciousness.
are no different.64 that also impacted on OKeeffe. Thus, the review can be seen to York, meeting OKeeffe at Stieglitzs final gallery, An American
be less a comment on OKeeffe than a not-so-thinly-veiled attack Place, and viewing an exhibition of her works, completed during While OKeeffe was excluded from the Greenbergian narrative
OKeeffe first exhibited two of her 1944 Black Place paintings on Stieglitz through his most prominent and successful protg, OKeeffes first prolonged visit to New Mexico. They discussed of American abstraction as pseudo-modern, it was recognised
at her retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, his wife. Nevertheless, Greenberg adopted the same project as OKeeffes work, in particular her painting The Lawrence Tree by critics such as Barbara Rose and John Canaday, if sometimes
New York, in 1946; the works included were Black Place I and Stieglitz a quest to define and promote a generation of uniquely 1929 (fig.8) and its relation to D.H. Lawrences poetry and the belatedly, that within the context of 1940s to 1960s New York,
Black Place III. Greenberg published a review of this show in The American artists, though one that excluded OKeeffe and her importance of tree-motifs for them; OKeeffe preferred Waldo art-historical narratives addressing the era should take account of
Nation,65 in which he attacked the Germanising leanings of the colleagues; he did so both for the audience at home but also for Franks portrayal of her as a tree to other early writings about her. those artists who were influenced by her. In the New York Times
18 19
Georgia OKeeffe. But I admired her no end when I first came to reinstated the Freudian and bodily interpretations imposed on
America. She was one of my gods. But Reinhardt, he hated her.69 OKeeffes work as an essence of the feminine and the association
Herreras work was transformed in the 1950s from her earlier, of her works with representations of wombs.73 It was for this
more organic, European-derived abstraction to a harder-edged, reason, as well as for the inequality implied by being labelled a
colour field painting. It is conceivable that looking at OKeeffes woman artist, that OKeeffe repudiated the claim of feminist artists
later work, especially her Patio series, may have played a role in on her work.
that development. Moreover, Herreras paintings of the 1950s and
1960s, such as Red with White Triangle 1961 and Blanco y Verde OKeeffe, as role model and pioneer an exemplar of
19667, explore pared-down compositions with sharp, triangle the contradictions of being a woman in modernism, and of
forms, which evoke OKeeffes centralised angular divisions.70 uncompromising commitment to her work has an ongoing
relevance to artists. Early in his career, land artist James Turrell
In dealing with the delayed influence of OKeeffes work on post- (b.1943) had a fascination with OKeeffe and travelled to visit
war American abstraction, we might also note the influence of her her in New Mexico.74 Though the encounter was only brief, it
early watercolours, as shown by Edith Halpert at The Downtown left a powerful impression and we might discern the influence
Gallery in New York in 1958 juxtaposing, in particular, Evening of OKeeffes Pelvis series, in which bones become apertures
Star III 1917, as well as works on canvas including Grey Line framing blue sky, in Turrells installations such as the Roden Crater,
with Lavender and Yellow and Grey Lines with Black, Blue and begun in 1979, in Arizona, that likewise frames the Southwestern
Yellow (both c.1923) with Morris Louiss (191262) poured sky as well as a similar obsession with, on the one hand, the
Veil paintings of 19589, or his While and Where (both 1960), Cerro Pedernal mountain and, on the other, the extinct volcano.
and later Unfurled and Stripe paintings of 19602.71 Still Agnes Martin (19122004), OKeeffes neighbour in New
later, artists such as Lynda Benglis (b.1941) have acknowledged Mexico, kept a poster of her work prominently displayed, and
OKeeffes importance as both a source of inspiration and as a comparisons have been drawn between her restrained minimalist
precursor. Bengliss floor painting Fling, Dribble, and Drip 1970, bands and the pale tones and horizontal formats of OKeeffes
executed at Rhode Island School of Art, Providence and featured skull paintings, as well as her later works such as Sky Above the
in Life magazine in the year of OKeeffes Whitney retrospective, Clouds III/Above the Clouds III 1963 (fig.204). In 1993, at the
may also look to OKeeffes use of colour and pigment. Benglis time of the last OKeeffe retrospective exhibition in London, Susan
is as interested as OKeeffe was in the ways that form might Hiller (b.1940) wrote of her personal relationship to OKeeffe
portray emotion, but more readily embraced the psychological (reproduced in this publication). Latterly, OKeeffes influence
implications of this as a means of regression to the womb than has hardly diminished. New generations of artists continue
Fig.12
Elizabeth Peyton did OKeeffe, who rejected the libidinal and bodily, though the to cite her as an influence on and within their work. Elizabeth
Georgia O'Keeffe after Stieglitz 1918 2006 attribution of these aspects to her work may also be seen as a Peytons (b.1965) portrait Georgia OKeeffe after Stieglitz 1918
Oil paint on canvas source of her influence on feminist artists such as Benglis. Benglis, 2006 (fig.12), based on one of the early portraits by Stieglitz,
76.5 x 58.7 along with Judy Chicago (b.1939), forms the nexus of OKeeffes acknowledges her status as a popular, feminist and aesthetic
Private collection/courtesy the artist and
influence on work that spans abstraction and feminist art. icon and also the role that photography played in her painting
Sadie Coles HQ, London
emulating the interrelation of these media in OKeeffes own work.
obituary for OKeeffe, Edith Evans Asbury wrote of Canadays late Red Lines 1923, Grey Line with Lavender and Yellow c.1923, In Mary Beth Edelsons (b.1933) controversial re-envisioning
recognition of OKeeffe as an antecedent of post-war American Line and Curve 1927 (fig.37) and Abstraction Blue 1927 (fig.30), of Leonardo da Vincis The Last Supper 14947, Some Living OKeeffes influence traverses both hard-edged and post-painterly
art, particularly abstraction: Strolling through the Whitney that could also be identified as sources. Each of these paintings, American Women Artists 1972, made as part of her poster abstraction, as well as feminist art and diverse forms of figuration.
show, one could think Miss OKeeffe had made some very neat but particularly the latter, disclose a close formal proximity to series to highlight the relative invisibility of women in the arts, If her influence has most consistently been on artists from North
adaptations of various successful styles of the 1950s and 1960s in the work Newman made in the mid-1940s. The central angular OKeeffe is given priority within the female artistic pantheon America it seems that this might stem from her own concern with
her own highly refined and slightly removed manner, wrote John divide in Abstraction Blue, narrowing as it reaches the bottom of her face superimposed over Christs at the centre of the table. In forging an imagery appropriate to expressing what it meant to be
Canaday, art critic of The New York Times. He described apparent the canvas, is mirrored both in Newmans Untitled (The Break) 1970, Edelson transformed herself into OKeeffe and American American and Modern with manifesting the Great American
similarities to Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, 1946 and The Word I 1946, while his Moment 1946, The Name sculptor Louise Nevelson (18991988) in OKevelson 1973 Thing and expressing her sense of rootedness and her connection
Ad Reinhardt and Andrew Wyeth. But the paintings that seemed to I 1949, Eve 1950 and Adam 1951/52 could be compared with (fig.11), paying homage to the two senior artists and revealing to the national history through a turbulent era. OKeeffe was
reflect those styles were done by Miss OKeeffe in 1920 or earlier, Pink Moon and Blue Lines and Red Lines, and the later Cows Skull: her understanding of OKeeffes complex image-construction born of Irish and Dutch-Hungarian immigrant stock into a farming
Mr. Canaday pointed out.68 If OKeeffes 1946 retrospective Red, White, and Blue, the flag-like vertical lines in which were (as well as her complicity in its presentation in photography from community in the Midwest; how she became an artist of global
caused Greenberg indignation, this in-depth institutional show may inspired by the bands on Navajo blankets. Newman became close Stieglitzs extended photographic portrait onwards). Chicago fame is a story of acute intelligence and artistic talent combined
nevertheless have provided an opportunity for artists in the newly- friends with the Cuban-American abstractionist Carmen Herrera would echo Edelsons placement of OKeeffe in a position of with determination. When Henry Tyrrell wrote a review of
ascendant centre of the art world to encounter OKeeffes work. (b.1915), who was herself in New York in the 1940s, studying from prominence in her The Dinner Party 19749, in which OKeeffe OKeeffes first solo exhibition at 291 in 1917, he referred to the
Barnett Newman (190570), born and raised in New York, had 1943 to 1947 at the Art Students League, where Newman had is given the last place-setting at the greatest height, representing interesting but little-known personality of the artist.75 By the later
ample opportunity from his days as a student in the 1920s to see studied intermittently from 1922, along with many of the abstract her measure of liberation and success reinforcing her primacy decades of her career, OKeeffe had become an icon of American
OKeeffes many solo shows they were staged almost annually expressionists, and where OKeeffe had been a student in 19078. in the feminist genealogy. For Chicago, OKeeffe was pivotal in modernity and individualism and is now recognised as having
through the 1920s and 1930s, and his work of the mid-1940s, Permanently relocating to New York from 1954, Herrera would the development of an authentically female iconography.72 By made a crucially important aesthetic contribution influencing
specifically the development of his trademark zip motifs, could later comment on the importance OKeeffe had for her, in contrast representing OKeeffe as a not-so-abstract arrangement of labia, successive generations of artists.
have a possible genesis within OKeeffes symmetrically arranged to another Greenbergian abstractionist, Ad Reinhardt (191367), evoking the reading Chicago and Miriam Schapiro (19232015)
canvases, including her Black Place paintings. Earlier exhibitions thereby illustrating the sharp division of opinion OKeeffe inspired: had given OKeeffes Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow
had included paintings such as Pink Moon and Blue Lines 1923, Like a lot of artists at that time, [Reinhardt] had a thing against c.1923 (fig.34) in an essay of 1973, however, Chicagos work
20 21
Fig.13 Fig.14
Early Abstraction 1915 Early No. 2 1915
Charcoal on paper Charcoal on paper
61 x 47.3 61 x 47
Milwaukee Art Museum The Menil Collection, Houston
22 23
Fig.15 Fig.16
Abstraction 1916 Special No. 9 1915
Charcoal and wash on paper Charcoal on paper
63.2 x 48.3 63.5 x 48.6
Greenville County Museum of Art The Menil Collection, Houston
24 25
Fig.17 Fig.18
No. 12 Special 1916 No. 14 Special 1916
61 x 48.3 62.9 x 47.6
The Museum of Modern Art, New York National Gallery of Art, Washington
26 27
Fig.19 Fig.20
Black Lines 1916 No. 15 Special 191617
Watercolour on paper Charcoal on paper
62.2 x 47 47.9 x 61.9
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Philadelphia Museum of Art
28 29
Fig.21 Fig.22
Pink and Blue Mountain 1916 Blue Hill No. II 1916
Watercolour on paper Watercolour on paper
22.3 x 30.3 22.5 x 30.3
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
30 31
Fig.23 Fig.24
Sunrise 1916 Abstraction 1916, cast 197980
Watercolour on paper Lacquered bronze
22.5 x 30.5 25.4 x 12.7 x 12.7
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth Number 6 in of an edition of 10
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
32 33
Fig.25 Fig.26
No. 17 Special 1919 Black Lines 1919
50.2 x 32.4 62.6 x 47.6
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Addison Gallery of American Art,
Phillips Academy, Andover
34 35
Fig.27 Fig.28
Music Pink and Blue No. I 1918 Blue and Green Music 1919/21
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
88.9 x 73.7 58.4 x 48.3
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth. The Art Institute of Chicago
Partial and promised gift to Seattle Art Museum
36 37
Fig.29 Fig.30
Flower Abstraction 1924 Abstraction Blue 1927
122.2 x 76.2 102.1 x 76
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York The Museum of Modern Art, New York
38 39
Fig.31 Fig.32
Abstraction White Rose 1927 Abstraction Alexius 1928
91.4 x 76.2 92.1 x 76.5
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Private collection, Switzerland
40 41
Fig.33 Fig.34
Grey Blue & Black Pink Circle 1929 Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow c.1923
91.4 x 121.9 121.9 x 76.2
Dallas Museum of Art The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
42 43
Fig.35 Fig.36
New York Night (Madison Avenue) 1926 Abstraction 1926
81.3 x 30.5 76.7 x 46.4
Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
44 45
Fig.37 Fig.38
Line and Curve 1927 Black, White and Blue 1930
81.2 x 41.2 121.9 x 76.2
National Gallery of Art, Washington Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth.
Partial and promised gift to National Gallery of Art, Washington
46 47
Georgia OKeeffe Esoteric Art at 291 Henry Tyrrell
side, straight and slender, though their fluid lines undulate in unconscious
Esoteric Art at 291 rhythmic sympathy, as they act and react upon one another: There is a

another self I long to meet, / Without which life, my life is incomplete.
Henry Tyrrell
But as the mans line broadens or thickens, with worldly growth, the
The Christian Science Monitor
womans becomes finer as it aspires spiritually upward, until it faints and
4 May 1917
falls off sharplynot to break, however, but to recover firmness and resume
its growth, straight heavenward as before, farther apart from the other self,
and though never wholly sundered, yet never actually joined.
This is one of the drawings, purely symbolistic, a sort of allegory in

sensitized line. More directly appealing to the material beauty-sense are two
oil paintings of lovely but singularly disquieting color tonality, which may
be interpretively called The Embrace, and Loneliness; also a water-color
The recent work, in oil, water color and charcoal of Miss Georgia OKeeffe
impression of an approaching railway train rushing steaming out of space
of Canyon, Tex., speaks for itself at that jumping-off place of modern art,
across the limitless prairie, like a vision-bearing cloud in the skies of heaven.
the little gallery of the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth Avenue. The work has
No editorial interventions
to speak for itself, as it is not numbered, catalogued, labeled, lettered or have been made in original,
historical texts, Henry Tyrrell, New York Art Exhibition and Gallery Notes: Esoteric Art at 291 [review of the exhibition
identified in any wayin fact, it is not even signed. The interesting but Georgia OKeeffe, 291, New York, 3 April 14 May 1917], The Christian Science Monitor, 4 May 1917,
with the exception of
little-known personality of the artist, who has exhibited here once before, correcting artist names, p.10. Reprinted in Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 19161929, Ann Arbor, MI,
is perhaps the only real key, and even that would not open all the chambers where they appear, 1989, pp.1678.
of the haunted palace which is a gifted womans heart. There is an appeal for reasons of consistency
and ease of use.
to sympathy, intuition, sensibility and faith in certain new ideals to which
her sex aspires. For there can be no mistaking the essential fact that Miss
OKeeffe, independently of technical abilities quite out of the common, has
found expression in delicately veiled symbolism for what every woman
knows, but what women heretofore have kept to themselves, either
instinctively or through a universal conspiracy of silence. Marie Bashkirtseff,
the little Tartar of a Russian, who was a fellow art-student in Paris with
Bastien-Lepage, wrote many audacious hints and intimate self-revelations
in her famous diary; but she did it more or less unconsciously, and in any
case she was a temperamental variant from the average femininity. Georgia
OKeeffe, offspring of an Irish father and a Levantine mother, was born
in Virginia, and has grown up in the vast provincial solitudes of Texas. OKeeffe was

actually born near

Whatever her natural temperament may be, the loneliness and privation Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
which her emotional nature must have suffered put their impress on
everything she does. Her strange art affects people variously, and some not
at all; but many feel its pathos, some its poignancy, and artists especially
wonder at its technical resourcefulness for dealing with what hitherto has
been deemed the inexpressiblein visual form, at least.
But new aspirations, and yearnings until now suppressed or concealed, find
their medium in the new manifestation which is one with the impulse of
an age occupied with eager inquiry and unrest. Style is the man, declared
Georges-Louis Leclerc,
Bouffon the biologist, with fine truth in his time. Now, perhaps for the first Comte de Buffon, an
eighteenth-century naturalist.
time in arts history, the style is the woman.
Two Lives, a mans and a womans, distinct yet invisibly joined together by
mutual attraction, grow out of the earth like two graceful saplings, side by
48 49
Touching the Centre: Georgia OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitzs Artistic Dialogue Sarah Greenough
Touching the Centre:

Georgia OKeeffe
and Alfred Stieglitzs Fig.39
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe 1918
Artistic Dialogue
Photograph, palladium print on paper
24.3 x 19.4
National Gallery of Art, Washington
In April 1929, Georgia OKeeffe left New York to spend the words, questioned how her new behaviour of gay clothes &
summer in New Mexico. Although she and her husband, Alfred hilariousness smoking & drinking could lead to any significant
Stieglitz (18641946), were still deeply in love, they found that painting, and even recounted his erotic dreams of making love
as the 1920s progressed the question of practical daily living, with her.5 He also noted that their roles had shifted: Without you
as Stieglitz wrote in 1928, had become problematic.1 Eager to I am nothing. Without me you go right ahead Will be Georgia
travel and find new inspiration for her art, OKeeffe had become OKeeffe.6 Yet he was most distressed by the possible severance of
increasingly torn between the desire she had to carry the thing I their creative union. He lashed out that he had been canonizing
do further so that people are surprised again and the obligation her day & night for thirteen years as no woman living or in
she felt to care for Stieglitz and his family at their summer home the past was ever canonized, but in the last few years, she had
in Lake George, New York.2 When she arrived in New Mexico, showed no interest in his photography and didnt help him at
she was quickly entranced by its landscape, people, and culture, all.7 Linking his own creative efforts to her presence, he wrote I
writing to Stieglitz that she felt like flying like turning the world see no work ahead for me. Not even photography I had many
Sarah Greenough over again like I used to feel.3 Even more telling, she also things I wanted to photograph but the opportunity has been taken
candidly admitted that she realised she had probably fallen into away.8 Defining the essence of his faith as a creative woman a
something from which there is no return.4 Alone at his familys creative man joined in a perfect union, he saw their Togetherness
home in Lake George, Stieglitz found no such comfort. As he grew if not physically & spiritually at least spiritually as critical to their
increasingly distraught and even psychologically unbalanced, he continued work.9
wrote to her three, four, five times a day, letters up to forty pages
in length. Lamenting that I live in a land of ghosts I sleep in a Stieglitz was right: their roles had shifted, not only from mentor
bed of [a] ghost, he bewailed the fact that he was lonely beyond and muse to dealer and star artist, but also from devoted lovers,
50 51
Georgia OKeeffe Touching the Centre: Georgia OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitzs Artistic Dialogue Sarah Greenough
collaborators and champions to competitors and occasional modernists Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and John Marin synaesthesia the stimulation of one sense by another.11 These details in the foreground and the background, focusing attention
combatants. From the time they met in the spring of 1916 until had allowed a radically new kind of art to flourish in a country ideas, especially that music could be translated into something instead on the brute strength of the engine as it sped along its
Stieglitzs death thirty years later in 1946, their relationship was as that was not always hospitable to cultural innovations. In addition, for the eye,12 as OKeeffe later said, gave her license to express preordained path (fig.40).17 Working first in charcoal, and then
complex and mutable as it was passionate, tempestuous and even through his own highly acclaimed photographs and his ceaseless feelings through abstraction that she could not otherwise articulate in watercolour, she made a picture stripped of all but the most
deeply destructive. Although they were immediately attracted advocacy he had raised the profile of the art of photography. and sparked the creation of her first major work in 1915 a series essential elements steam, railroad tracks and a light on an
to one another, they were very different people from dissimilar At twenty-eight, OKeeffe was all but unknown an art student, of a dozen charcoal drawings (see Early Abstraction, fig.13; Early approaching engine to speak of both the loneliness and sense
backgrounds. The adored son of German-Jewish immigrants, whose work had never been exhibited, and a schoolteacher who No. 2, fig.14; and Special No. 9, fig.16).13 But, just as important, of anticipation produced by the sight and sound of a train in the
Stieglitz was cultured, affluent, and well connected. Born in had passed much of her life far removed from Americas cultural these concepts also prompted her to recognise that ideas inherent barren landscape (fig.41).
Hoboken, New Jersey, raised in New York City, and educated in centres. Yet, despite these differences, they each touched the in one medium could be utilised in another.
Berlin, he was charismatic, articulate, intellectually voracious and center of the other, as they both avowed, not only emotionally,
endowed with a remarkable ability to establish a deep rapport physically and spiritually, but also artistically.10 As Stieglitz
recognised in the summer of 1929, from the time they met they
had played a game of artistic leapfrog each absorbing,
modifying and expanding the others ideas, then bounding
forward with new insights and innovations, only to have the other
follow in quick pursuit. The sustained dialogue they constructed
between their respective mediums painting and photography
was among the most original of the era and radically changed the
course of American art.
Fig.42
Alfred Stieglitz Fig.43
Georgia OKeeffe c.1918 Constantin Brancusi
Photograph, palladium print on paper Sleeping Muse I 190910
18 x 23.2 Marble
National Gallery of Art, Washington 17.2 x 27.6 x 21.2
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington
She first drew on this insight in the fall of 1916, when she arrived
Fig.40 in Canyon, Texas, to assume a new teaching position. Although It was not just Stieglitzs work that showed her how photography
Alfred Stieglitz she and Stieglitz had first met several months earlier in New York could serve her art at this time. When she saw the photographs
Snapshot In the New York Central Yards 1903, printed 1907 City, they grew much closer that fall as their correspondence of Anne Brigman in Camera Work, she recognised a kindred
From the journal Camera Work
escalated markedly, becoming more personal, intimate and spirit, who also had a powerful physical reaction to the natural
Photogravure on paper
19.2 x 15.6 unfiltered. She frequently wrote to Stieglitz, noting how the raw world, which she sought to depict by showing the union of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art beauty and vast emptiness of the west Texas plains staggered body and nature.18 Strands photographs, which she saw both in
her, provoking a strong emotional and physical response. Camera Work and when she went to New York for a brief visit in
with those around him. Yet he was also controlling, egotistical and Fig.41 Repeatedly relating herself to the landscape, she exclaimed to the summer of 1917 and spent time with him and Stieglitz, also
melodramatic, and he craved both an audience and adoration. Train at Night in the Desert 1916 Stieglitz the day after she arrived: The plains the wonderful deeply impressed her. Writing that she had been making Strand
OKeeffes background was far less comfortable. Born on a dairy Watercolour and graphite on paper great big sky makes me want to breathe so deep that Ill break photographs for myself in my head, she confided to Strand in
30.3 x 22.5
farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, she was one of seven children There is so much of it I want to get outside of it all I would if I June 1917 that she was looking at things and seeing them as I
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
of second-generation Irish and Dutch-Hungarian immigrants, who could even if it killed me.14 As she sought a way to express the thought you might have photographed them.19 In photographs
were far from prosperous. More intuitive than intellectual, more profound visceral exhilaration the landscape evoked in her, she such as The White Fence 1916 and Abstraction, Bowls, Twin
of a loner, she possessed a sharp wit, feisty sense of humour, and turned to photography, an art firmly rooted in the visible world, Lakes, Connecticut 1916, printed 1917. Strand showed OKeeffe
headstrong nature. Disarmingly frank and willing to take bold OKeeffe was at a formative stage in her development in 1916 for pictorial sources and strategies.15 Using Stieglitzs publication how the camera could lovingly describe the natural world while
actions, yet often startled by their consequences, she had learned when she first seriously looked at photography, especially Camera Work almost as a primer, she studied reproductions of his simultaneously compressing, flattening and layering space, thus
to rely on her clear sense of herself and her innate independence. Stieglitzs photographs and those of his protg, Paul Strand photographs as well as those by others he supported. Since she transforming objects into abstract forms as queer in shapes as
(18901976). With an eclectic nature, she had already had arrived in Texas, the weather of the region its violent storms, Picassos drawings, as she wrote.20 OKeeffe responded to these
In 1916, they were also at disparate points in their lives. Fifty-two absorbed aspects of symbolism and art nouveau and, through brilliantly coloured skies and massive clouds had fascinated photographs in 1917 in watercolours such as Evening Star Nos
years old, Stieglitz was the most important person in the American her study of Arthur Wesley Dow (18571922) and Wassily her.16 When she saw Stieglitzs photographs, she focused on his IVII and Pink and Green Mountains IV, where she, too, distilled
art world. His groundbreaking exhibitions of modern European art Kandinsky (18661944), she had embraced the modernist idea use of weather rain, snow, steam and mist and emulated his forms and layered space.21 She also echoed Strands use of
by Auguste Rodin, Paul Czanne, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse that art should not imitate nature but instead express the artists approach as she sought to capture the experience of hearing and strong linear shapes, punctuated by deep shadows, in works such
and Constantin Brancusi held at his New York City gallery, feelings and ideas. In addition, she was liberated by Dows watching the trains that passed through Canyon. She noted that as Figures under Rooftop, House with Picket Fence and Tree and
known as 291, had introduced Americans to the most advanced and Kandinskys belief that music, as Dow stated, was the key he had used both snow and smoke in his photograph Snapshot Picket Fence (all 1918), where she interspersed bands of bright
painting and sculpture of the time, while his support of American to the other fine arts, since its essence is pure beauty, and by In the New York Central Yards 1903 to eliminate extraneous red with deep blue and black.22
52 53
Fig.44 Fig.45
Alfred Stieglitz Tree with Cut Limb 1920
The Dying Chestnut 1919 Oil paint on canvas
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 50.8 x 43.2
24.3 x 19.3 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
OKeeffe and Stieglitzs artistic dialogue did not begin in earnest, he had owned in reproduction, when he recorded OKeeffe in a feel of her skin. Beginning in 1919, he also made his palladium was told exactly how to pose, she stated: you had to collaborate
however, until the summer of 1918, when OKeeffe left Texas erect stance with half-lowered eyes and bare breasts (Georgia prints on days when the humidity was low, because he knew [with Stieglitz]. You had to sit there and do what you were told.28
and the two began living together in New York City. Her great OKeeffe 1918); he mimicked Matisses lithographs, shown at that under those conditions it would solarise, causing a reversal Stieglitz, she concluded, was always photographing himself.29
beauty and youth, coupled with her blossoming delight in her own 291, when he posed OKeeffe as a full-frontal nude with bare of tones in the darkest areas, further intensifying the abstract
sexuality, inspired in Stieglitz a creative energy that he had never breasts and pubic hair (Georgia OKeeffe Torso 1918); he vibrancy of the image. Also, he occasionally rotated his pictures What did OKeeffe learn from this experience about photography
known before: in the first six months they lived together, he made looked to both the sculpture of Brancusi and the African masks when he mounted them, turning them 90 or 180 degrees from the and her own art? On a most basic level, she discovered that
more than 125 finished portraits of her, a staggering number he had shown at 291 when he depicted the clean, sharp outlines orientation in which they had been taken, further divorcing them photographs were not neutral, objective records of reality but
for an artist who had only made some 470 finished pictures of her face (figs 42, 43); and he turned to Cezanne's studies of from reality. The result was a series of photographs that was unlike could express the ideas, feelings and even the visceral being of
between 1884 and 1917.23 Embracing the modernist idea of the his wife, Marie-Hortense, when he sought to describe OKeeffes anything ever made before. the artist. This understanding reinforced her lifelong quest to find
fractured, ever-changing self, Stieglitz for many years had wanted childlike innocence (Georgia OKeeffe 1918).25 forms in the natural world that expressed her emotions: I seem to
to create a composite portrait, a visual diary of someones life, When Stieglitz exhibited these photographs in 1921, he be hunting for something of myself out there, she wrote in 1929,
photographing them from birth to death. With OKeeffe he had Not only were his sources different from any he had employed grouped them under a larger section of pictures devoted to A something in myself that will give me a symbol for all this a
an ever-present and, at least initially, highly willing model. At first before, so too was his method of working. For many of his pictures Demonstration of Portraiture, showing them in thematic clusters symbol for the sense of life I get out here.30 She also became
he depicted her in front of her drawings, much as he had done of her, he used a cumbersome 8 x 10 inch view camera, mounted devoted to hands, feet, torsos, and hands and breasts, along fascinated with the way in which photography articulated not
with other 291 artists, but as their intimacy quickly grew, so too on a tripod and with umbrellas to reflect the light. Yet he moved with twenty-six titled A Woman [One Portrait]. But even though only space, but form. When she first saw Stieglitzs pictures of
did his ability to conjoin the art and the artist. Radically cropping in much closer to the body than he had done in almost any of his he identified the subjects of his other portraits, he never named her in 1917, she exclaimed, I love myself. She then clarified
his compositions, he positioned her head, arms and hands in front previous portraits of other people, rendering hands, arms, feet OKeeffe. As Stieglitz made clear in his titles, his objective was not her remarks, noting that she was not responding to them in a
of her works, merging her with her creations to suggest that her and torsos not as parts of a larger whole but as independent to describe her character, but his understanding of the archetypal conventional way not judging whether she looked beautiful
art sprang out of her body (fig.39). He also repeatedly derived abstract forms (fig.60). With the aperture of his lens open wide, woman: the creative artist; the sexually liberated being; the strong, or alluring, for example but that she was intrigued by how he
poses and compositions from the art he had exhibited, collected he created a limited depth of field so that he focused most clearly even androgynous individual; the child in need of comfort and had extracted parts of her body to construct a dynamic picture:
and lived with for many years. He looked to Peter Paul Rubens on OKeeffes body, suppressing the details of her dress or protection; and the nurturing mother. His pictures, as he told I believe I like the one with my neck and hands best the hands
(15771640) Hle`ne Fourment 16368, a reproduction of surroundings (figs 58, 60). His exposures were long up to four Brigman at the time, were clean-cut sharp heartfelt mentally against me It makes me laugh that I like myself so much Like
which he had owned for many years, and the watercolours by minutes allowing the slight movement of the body caused by digested bits of universality in the shape of a woman and, he myself as you make me.31 Dow and Strand had shown her how,
Rodin (18401917) that he had reproduced in Camera Work, breathing to add a softness and sense of three-dimensionality assured her, they were new ideas all.27 OKeeffe, whose letters by moving in close to an object and radically cropping it, she
when he posed OKeeffe in her kimono in front of a window (fig.56).26 He printed most of his early negatives of her onto the show a woman very different from the intense, controlled and could turn reality into an abstraction; Stieglitz now showed her
(Georgia OKeeffe Torso 1918).24 He alluded to The Sin (Die smoothest palladium paper he could obtain, because he preferred serious person we see in Stieglitzs portrait, also recognised that how a part of an object could be expressive of both the whole
Snde) c.1908 by Franz von Stuck (18631928), another work its sepia-to-chocolate tonal range for rendering the texture and he was not representing her personality. Remembering that she and the artist herself. As she looked more closely at Stieglitzs
54 55
Fig.46 Fig.47
Alfred Stieglitz Untitled (Self-portrait, Torso) c.1919
Georgia OKeeffe Breasts 1919 Oil paint on canvas
Photograph, palladium print on paper 31.1 x 25.7
22.5 x 19.1 Private collection
photographs over the next few years, she also became entranced between her pictures and the visual world, there is evidence that younger tree, endowing its sinewy trunk and branches with a more Later we went out and the streak on the water was
with how he used light to mould objects, often highlighting areas she may even have rotated her paintings 90 or 180 degrees from supple, anthropomorphic form, as if they were the arms and legs glistening white and the moonlight glistening the waves
to articulate their shape while simultaneously stripping them of the view that had inspired them (see Abstraction Blue 1927, fig.30; of a person frolicking in the wind. Not to be outdone, Stieglitz pound me and terrify me at night Then we came in, went to
their specific details to emphasise their supple, sensuous forms. Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow c.1923, fig.34).34 made his own photographs of The Dancing Trees in 1922.38 bed I tried to write you I sat in my bed thinking of you pen
She explored these ideas in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and paper in front of me and I felt utterly helpless Finally
when she first translated one of Stieglitzs nude photographs of Stieglitzs art also changed in the early 1920s. He slowly turned Two extraordinary letters written on 25 September 1923, when put out the light and went to sleep feeling you close and
her into paint (figs 46, 47) and then further transformed those his attention away from photographing OKeeffe and, for the first OKeeffe was in York Beach, Maine, and Stieglitz was at Lake warm within me as you have always been and will always be
shapes into a picture of alligator pears.32 time in his career, embraced the landscape at Lake George, no George, reveal their symbiotic relationship and their shared All of me seeming to cry out to you for you to give to you
doubt influenced by OKeeffes own paintings of the area. Of far fascination with similar subjects. Describing the moon he had seen and to take from you to give all that I have to give you all
OKeeffes art changed markedly in the first few years the two greater importance, however, he also began to move towards an the night before, Stieglitz wrote that he never saw any night quite that you can take and to receive in return notice the [sense]
artists lived together, in no small measure due to Stieglitzs art that was more intuitive and experiential, less analytical than the like it none more beautiful. It was of give and take but a perfect coming and going like the
photographs and her growing appreciation of photography. photographs he had made before the First World War. In much the waves body and spirit souls touching flowing together
By the early 1920s, she had moved away from pure abstraction, same way that OKeeffe, as he wrote in 1921, put her experience a marvelous night. A white moonlight night Nothing stirred. all of me yours till I disappear.40
preferring instead to derive her subjects from the visual world into paint, so too did he strive to put his feelings into form.35 As he Even the moon full & round seemed not to wish to disturb
she shared with Stieglitz, especially the landscape at Lake sought to capture the essence of the moment, he did not think, the stillness The hills were not hills they were something Although each revealed their profound love of the natural world,
George. She also abandoned watercolour, which she had he told the author Sherwood Anderson, I just feel.36 bathed in an untouchable spirit of light the line produced the differences between their depictions are telling. Describing the
used extensively in Texas, and embraced oil paint. At first her where this spirit met the sky spirit was of rarest subtle beauty. view in black and white, as a photographer, Stieglitz made clear
brushstrokes were loose and feathery like those she had learned They shared many subjects in the early 1920s especially the the conceptual, even metaphysical excitement he derived from the
from William Merritt Chase (18491916) her teacher at the apples, barns and trees at Lake George yet, where OKeeffe After watching the scene throughout the night, he wrote: When landscape, while OKeeffe, painting a colourful picture in words,
Art Students League, New York City but as she grew more infused these forms with animate life, Stieglitz searched for their finally the stars light had disappeared into the light of day I felt once again related the vision to the body, seeing it as evocative
enamoured of photographys clean surfaces and sharp lines, her symbolic or spiritual meaning. In 1919 and 1920, they both as if I had witnessed a marvelous burial alone of what I dont of the union of a man and a woman, and the landscape itself as a
handling of paint became more measured and precise, making recorded an old chestnut tree that was near the familys farmhouse, know maybe myself But I have no idea what that means or site of intense physical, visceral exhilaration.
her forms smoother, their outlines crisper. As she moved in closer each emphasising a spot on the tree where a branch had recently is.39 That same day, OKeeffe told Stieglitz how she had walked
to her subjects, she, too, used a limited depth of field, allowing been cut (figs 44, 45). Eliminating the details of its bark and on the beach at sunset and seen a pink moon grow out of the 1923 marked a turning point in their relationship. The differences
background elements to fall away. She even embraced the scale leaves, Stieglitz depicted the majestic old fellow, as he wrote gray over the green sea. The moon, she wrote: in their age, background, temperament and lifestyle, which had
of photography, making a remarkable number of pictures in the to John Marin, as if it was a massive trident soaring up from the once seemed so attractive, began to cause friction. In addition,
early 1920s that are approximately 8 x 10 inches, just the size ground, releasing a cry of the Human Soul alone unheard.37 grew hotter and hotter and the path on the water brighter OKeeffe, stung by the overtly sexual criticism of her work in
of Stieglitzs prints.33 And, when she wished to loosen the links OKeeffe, on the other hand, presented a seemingly much and brighter till it burned so that I didnt want to look any the press, was disturbed to find that Stieglitz promoted these
56 57
Fig.48 Fig.49
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz
From my Window at An American Place, Southwest 1932 From my Window at An American Place, Southwest 1932
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
19.3 x 24.1 24.1 x 19
National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington
interpretations.41 As she began to assert her independence, their They continued this repartee for the next few years, with each in doing so but, no longer fueled by their passionate love, the
relationship became more fraught. They still drew inspiration appropriating the others subjects, yet striving to make it entirely fertile artistic dialogue that they had constructed ceased. In the
from each others art but each often competitively pushed his their own. In July 1931, for example, OKeeffe shipped a barrel summer of 1929, when Stieglitz was so distressed by OKeeffes
or her work down paths the other could not follow. In 1925, of bones from New Mexico to Lake George. Before she could absence, she tried to explain why this separation was necessary:
when they moved to rooms high up in the Shelton Hotel in New use them in her own art, Stieglitz photographed her holding them,
York, OKeeffe started to paint the city, a subject that Stieglitz her wary expression bespeaking the tension between them.43 You see I have not really had my way of life for many years
had explored extensively decades earlier. Of course, I was OKeeffe responded in a series of pictures that were an intentional When I felt very close to you that there was a home for me
told that it was an impossible idea, she recalled, years later, retort, as she said, to the city men who sought to create the really within you I could live I will say your way as much
even the men hadnt done too well with it.42 As in The Shelton great American work of art.44 In Cows Skull: Red, White and as it was possible for me to live another way But when that
with Sunspots, N.Y. (fig.4) and City Night, both 1926, and East Blue 1931 (fig.135), she used saturated reds, whites and blues seemed gone there is much life in me when it was checked
River No. 1 19278, she employed many of photographys and provocatively hung the skull on a black post so that its antlers in moving toward you I realised it would die if it could not
optical phenomena (lens flair, convergence and halation), its formed a cross. In others, such as Horses Skull with Pink Rose move toward something
reduced palette of colours (black, white and grey) and even its and Cows Skull with Calico Roses, both 1931 (figs 119, 121),
emphasis on negative space. Yet her reductive paintings, almost she stuck flowers in the skulls empty eye-sockets and mouths a And I chose coming away because here at least I feel good
caricatures in their stylised simplicity, were dramatically different whimsical, surrealist gambit that the more sober and lofty Stieglitz and it makes me feel I am growing very tall and straight inside
from Stieglitzs earlier, more detailed, loving views of the city. would never have pursued. and very still Maybe you will not love me for it but for me
Challenged to reclaim his subject, Stieglitz responded first in 1927 it seems to be the best thing I can do for you
and then more conclusively in the early 1930s, depicting New In the early 1930s, as OKeeffes attention turned increasing to
York in a way a painter never could. Placing the camera in the New Mexico and Stieglitzs to his much-younger new confidante A kiss Little Boy
same spot, he utilised photographys serial capabilities and made and mistress, Dorothy Norman, their artistic exchange diminished.
several sequences of photographs, recording the same view from While they remained devoted to one another until Stieglitzs I have not wanted to be anything but kind to you but there
his windows at the Shelton Hotel and his gallery, An American death, they sought to construct a different kind of relationship: one is nothing to be kind to you if I cannot be me And me is
Place, over many weeks to show the relentless growth of the city that allowed OKeeffe the independence she craved and Stieglitz something that reaches very far out into the world and all
(figs 48, 49). the companionship and affirmation he required. They succeeded around and kisses you a very warm cool loving kiss.45
58 59
Fig.50 Fig.51
Lake George, Coat and Red 1919 Mask with Golden Apple 1923
69.6 x 59 22.9 x 40.6
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
60 61
Fig.52 Fig.53 Fig.54 Fig.55
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe at 291 1917 Georgia OKeeffe 1918 Georgia OKeeffe 1918 Georgia OKeeffe 1918
Photograph, platinum print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
23.3 x 19 23.5 x 18.4 11.7 x 8.9 11.2 x 9.1
National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington
62 63
Fig.56 Fig.57
Georgia OKeeffe Torso 1918 Georgia OKeeffe 1918
Photograph, palladium print on paper Photograph, platinum print on paper
22.9 x 18.8 24.2 x 19.2
National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington
64 65
Fig.58 Fig.59
Georgia OKeeffe 1918 Interpretation 1919
Photograph, palladium print on paper Photograph, palladium print on paper
24.8 x 20.3 23 x 19.1
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles National Gallery of Art, Washington
66 67
Fig.60 Fig.61
Georgia OKeeffe Hands 1919 Georgia OKeeffe 1920
Photograph, palladium print on paper Photograph, platinum print on paper
23.8 x 19 24.5 x 19.5
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe George Eastman Museum, New York
68 69
Fig.62 Fig.63 Fig.64 Fig.65
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz
Paul Strand 1919 Paul Rosenfeld 1920 John Marin 1921/2 Marsden Hartley 191315
Photograph, palladium print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, platinum print on paper
24.5 x 19.5 23.3 x 18.6 23.2 x 18.5 25 x 20.3
National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia OKeeffe Archive, Yale Collection of National Gallery of Art, Washington The Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum
American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
70 71
Fig.66 Fig.67 Fig.68
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz
Portrait of Georgia, No. 1 1923 Portrait of Georgia, No. 2 1923 Portrait of Georgia, No. 3 1923
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
11.7 x 9.1 9.2 x 11.9 9.2 x 11.4
George Eastman Museum, New York National Gallery of Art, Washington Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
72 73
Fig.69 Fig.70
A Celebration 1924 Untitled (New York) c.192530
Oil paint on canvas Charcoal on paper
88.6 x 45.7 62.3 x 47.6
Seattle Art Museum Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
74 75
New York Street with Moon 1925 Ritz Tower, Night 1928 New York, Night 19289
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
122 x 77 102.2 x 35.6 101.9 x 48.7
Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Private collection Sheldon Museum of Art, University of NebraskaLincoln
on loan at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
76 77
Fig.74 Above Fig.75 Below left Fig.76 Below right Fig.77
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel 1928
From the Shelton, New York, Looking East 1926/7 From the Back-Window 291 1915 New York from An American Place 1931 Oil paint on canvas
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, platinum print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 76.2 x 122.2
9 x 11.7 24.1 x 19.1 24.2 x 19.2 New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut
National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington
78 79
Fig.78 Fig.79
Lake George 1922 Pool in the Woods, Lake George 1922
Oil paint on canvas Pastel on paper
41.3 x 55.9 43.2 x 69.9
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem
80 81
Fig.80 Fig.81
Alfred Stieglitz Apple Family 2 c.1920
Barn & Snow 1923 Oil paint on canvas
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 20.3 x 25.7
82 83
Fig.82 Fig.83
From the Lake No. 1 1924 From the Lake, No. 3 1924
91.4 x 76.2 91.4 x 76.2
Des Moines Art Center Philadelphia Museum of Art
84 85
Fig.84 Fig.85
Autumn Trees The Maple 1924 Grey Tree, Lake George 1925
91.4 x 76.2 91.4 x 76.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
86 87
Fig.86 Fig.87
Lake George Barns 1926 Autumn Leaves Lake George, N.Y. 1924
53.8 x 81.4 51.4 x 41.3
Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio
88 89
Fig.88 Fig.89
Oak Leaves, Pink and Grey 1929 Farmhouse Window and Door 1929
84.1 x 45.7 101.6 x 76.2
The Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum The Museum of Modern Art, New York
at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
90 91
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe 1920 Apples and Gable, Lake George 1922 House and Grape Leaves 1934
23.7 x 18.4 11.4 x 9.1 24.4 x 19.2
National Gallery of Art, Washington George Eastman Museum, New York The Cleveland Museum of Art
92 93
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Paul Strand
Lake George 1922/3 Lake George 1926 Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George, New York 1929
23.7 x 19 9.1 x 11.9 20.3 x 21.7
National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
94 95
Fig.96 Fig.97
Shell No. 2 1928 Nature Forms Gasp 1932
Oil paint on board Oil paint on canvas
23.5 x 18.4 26 x 61
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Private collection
96 97
Georgia OKeeffe To MSS. and Its 33 Subscribers Georgia OKeeffe
are doing now. I dont even hear any one talk of them with interest. As
To MSS. and Its 33 Subscribers ... many of these men were painters or had tried to be, it was natural that

they should try to make their photographs look like paintings etching
Georgia OKeeffe
drawing anything but just a photograph. They did not distinctly separate
MSS., no.4
the medium photography from other mediums. In the 50 numbers of
December 1922
Camera Work Stieglitz records the logical development of photography,
the work of these men and many others beginning with Hill through 1916
excepting Charles Sheeler and Stieglitzs own work.
Alfred Stieglitz has furnished most of the faith and enthusiasm during the
past forty years that makes photography of enough interest to force this
number of MSS. He also has faith in the painters and the writers and the
plumbers and all the other fools. He seems to be the only man I know
I studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Art Students League
who has a real spiritual faith in human beings. I often wonder what would
of New York, at Teachers College, Columbia University, at the University
have happened to painting if he had been a painter. Maybe it is because
of Virginia.
he has faith in all people that he dares and is able to record what some
I even studied with Chase and Bellows and Professor Dow. I am sorry to feel the possibly too intimate and significant moments.
say that I missed Henri.
Photography is able to flatter or embarrass the humans ego by registering
I am guilty of having tried to teach Art for four summers in a university the fleeting expression of a moment. But psychological records registered
summer school and for two years in a state normal but I dont know what in this way have nothing to do with aesthetic significance as it seems
Art is. No one has ever been able to give me a satisfactory definition. to be understood today. May be through psychology psychoanalysis
photography and other tendencies toward self knowledge the ideas
I have not been in Europe.
of aesthetics may change. To me Stieglitzs portraits repeat in a more
I prefer to live in a room as bare as possible.
recognizable form what he expresses with the photographs of trees,
I have been much photographed.
streets, room interiors, horses, houses, buildings, etcetera. Devoid of all
I paint because color is a significant language to me but I do
mannerism and of all formula they express his vision, his feeling for the
not like pictures and I do not like exhibitions of pictures.
world, for life. They are aesthetically, spiritually significant in that I can
However I am very much interested in them.
return to them, day after day, have done so almost daily for a period of
Not being satisfied with the definitions, ideas, of what is Art the approach four years with always a feeling of wonder and excitement akin to that
to photography has been fairly unprejudiced. It has been part of my
David Octavius Hill aroused in me by the Chinese, the Egyptians, Negro Art, Picasso, Henri
searching and through the searching maybe I am at present prejudiced in (180270) and Julia Rousseau, Seurat, etcetera, even including modern plumbing or a fine
Margaret Cameron
favor of photography. (181579). piece of machinery.
I feel that some of the photography being done in America today is If a Stieglitz photograph of a well to do Mid-Victorian parlor filled with all
more living, more vital, than the painting and I know that there are other sorts of horrible atrocities jumbled together makes me forget that it is a
painters who agree with me. Compared to the painter the photographer photograph, and creates a music that is more than music when viewed

The photographers listed
has no established tradition to live on. Photographys only tradition of here are Edward Steichen right side up or upside down or sideways, it is Art to me. Possibly I feel
worth is the early daguerrotype and the work of Hill and Mrs. Cameron. (18791973), Baron it is Art because I am not clogged with too much knowledge. Or is it
The painter as soon as he begins to paint almost unconsciously assumes Adolph de Meyer (1868 Stieglitz? Paul Strand has added to photography in that he has bewildered
1946), Alvin Langdon
himself the honored or unappreciated present representative of a glorious Coburn (18821966), the observer into considering shapes, in an obvious manner, for their
past tradition. He has a respected past even if he has no standing as a F. Holland Day (1864 own inherent value. Surely bolts and belts and ball bearings and pieces of
respected citizen today. The photographer has no great tradition. He must 1933), Clarence H. White all sorts of things that one does not recognize readily because of their
(18711925), Heinrich
gain all the respect he is to have by what he himself can actually do. Kuhn (18661944), Frank unfamiliarity, or because of distortion, when organized and put together
Eugene (18651936), as Strand has put them together arrest ones attention. He makes more
I have looked with great interest through rafts of photographs done before James Craig Annan obvious the fact that subject matter, as subject matter, has nothing to
the war by Steichen, De Meyer, Coburn, Holland Day, White, Kuehn, Frank (18641946) and Robert
Demachy (18591936). do with the aesthetic significance of a photograph any more than with
Eugene, Craig Annan, Demachy and many others. I dont know what they
a painting. Charles Sheeler, one of Americas most distinguished young
98 99
Georgia OKeeffe
modern painters (this includes all under 60) also photographs. No one
considering his work questions his paintings and drawings as ranking
amongst the most interesting of their type in America today. To me
his photographs are of equal importance. He is always an artist. He has
done things with photography that he could not do with painting and
vice versa. However the object that is Art must be a unity of expression
so complete that the medium becomes unimportant, is only noticed or
remembered as an after thought.
Man Ray a young American painter of ultra modern tendencies and of

varied experiments seems to be photographing. I have not seen anything
but reproductions of his work with the camera so have no definite idea
of it excepting the fact that he seems to be broadening the field of work
that can be done with it.
I can only agree with Remy de Gourmonts Antiphilos that there are An English translation

as many philosophies (I add ideas on Art) as there are temperaments of Lettres d'un Satyre,
by French symbolist
and personalities.
poet and critic Remy
de Gourmont, was
Georgia OKeeffe, To MSS. and Its 33 Subscribers and Others Who Read and Dont Subscribe! [letter to
the editor], MSS., no.4, December 1922, pp.1718. Reprinted in Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, Stieglitz
published in New
and the Critics, 1916-1929, Ann Arbor, MI, 1989, pp.1824. York in 1922 as Mr
Antiphilos, Satyr.
100
Seeing O'Keeffe Seeing Griselda Pollock
Seeing
OKeeffe Fig.98
Ralph Looney
OKeeffe in Her Studio 1962
Seeing
Photograph
The Albuquerque Museum of Art and History
Georgia OKeeffe was one of the ways to be a woman and consciousness amongst women artists and art historians alike
an artist, and it seems important to see her life as a mold, that was articulated through artistic practices and that demanded
a pattern that determines form, defining a way to live. a new kind of art history after 1970.
The circumstances of her life are not the example. It is the
abstracting as with the flowers, bones, the simplicity that What makes the comment cited above so valuable is one artists
should be the example, the abstract continuity of unseen recognition of the ethos that underlies anothers life of work in
patterns and clues, culled in perhaps unrecognizable form at ways that speak to, and counter, our usual art-historical methods
first, but revealing when examined, a simple clarity, wholeness for making sense of a career and an oeuvre. Art history typically
... Her example is as simple as the evidence: it is that she wants to know what kind of artist the artist is/was, where s/he
cared intensely about what she did each moment and, most fits within a historical story based either on movement, style or
important, that she allowed that caring to show. formal innovation. The retrospective exhibition reproduces, as a
Christine Taylor Patten, 20131 pathway in space, a story of development including deviation
and change of direction or stasis. What happens when instead
Griselda Pollock In this subtle and illuminating tribute from one American artist to we ask: what is/was the artist trying to see?
another, Christine Taylor Patten (b.1940) identifies the abstract
core of the ethical stance towards all of the world she painted that Indeed a dialectic of visible/invisible/brought-into-the-visible
Patten recognised in fellow artist Georgia OKeeffe. Not focusing might be said to underlie the modernist project. Another question,
on her life as a story, but on her life as an artist, on an artistic therefore, is: for what was the artist seeking to find forms? And
practice as a life, Pattens memoir of her encounter with OKeeffe what if the answer were something like the abstract continuity of
during the last decade of the artists long life forms one of the unseen patterns and clues, culled in perhaps unrecognizable form
diverse ways that OKeeffes life and work intersected with a new at first, but revealing when examined, a simple clarity, wholeness?
102 103
Georgia OKeeffe Seeing O'Keeffe Seeing Griselda Pollock
I want to set this astute and structural reading of a lifelong artistic making art or had just died: Berenice Abbott (18981991), custodians like trouble-making mixing politics and art when, of aesthetics and form. It is on that terrain that OKeeffe began to
project, sustained by a singular artistic ethos addressed to both Eileen Agar (18991991), Anni Albers (18991994), Louise according to their exclusionist script, modernism was defined as a work and remained at work for over seventy years.
self and the world, against the history of various moments of Bourgeois (19112010), Margaret Bourke-White (1904 practice and exhibited in a space set apart from the dirty business
reception and interpretation of OKeeffes art that have perhaps 71), Marianne Brandt (18931983), Leonora Carrington of politics and the mess of ideology. I am paraphrasing Clement Becoming OKeeffe: Modern Woman c.1920
made her work invisible to us, even in its overexposure. The (19172011), Imogen Cunningham (18831976), Louise Greenberg here explaining modern arts necessary retreat.4 OKeeffe was, of course, never forgotten during the twentieth
dominant theme of that reception at the beginning and at the end Dahl-Wolfe (18951989), Sonia Delaunay (18851979), Within the space of feminist-inflected histories of art, we were not, century. She acquired substantial renown during the 1920s,
of her career was that she is a woman artist, rather than an artist Leonor Fini (190796), Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877 however, making programmes. We were just asking questions. however, because of a carefully crafted campaign for making
who is a woman. Is there a difference, you may ask? I hope to 1968), Gluck (18951978), Barbara Hepworth (190375), We were also asking the same questions that the artists who were her work visible that solicited a powerful response from critics,
show that there is and why. Hannah Hch (18891978), Lois Mailou Jones (190598), modernist women had asked themselves through their practice. who wrote extensively on her annual exhibitions. Shaped in the
Lee Krasner (190884), Dorothea Lange (18951965), Dora manner Alfred Stieglitz strategically planned, and the men in his
A personal note Maar (190797), Lee Miller (190777), Louise Nevelson Becoming Woman: Fate or Question circle rehearsed, in a shared vocabulary, a largely Freudian and
For reasons of my initial induction into art history, c.1970, through (18991988), Meret Oppenheim (191385), Irene Rice What does it mean to make art from the complex situation of highly sexualised reception and interpretation of her work as
the prevailing conceptual turn, the paintings of OKeeffe were not Pereira (190271), Carol Rama (19182015), Hedda Sterne being a woman, when being a woman is, as Simone de Beauvoir a Woman was put in place. For this group of men, OKeeffe as
on my immediate agenda for study. I was also not a twentieth- (19102011), Dorothea Tanning (19102012), Lenore Tawney brilliantly revealed in 1949 in her magisterial study, The Second Woman was hailed for speaking herself and her body directly
century specialist at that time. Then being celebrated as part of the (19072007), Alma Thomas (18911978), Maria Helena Sex, a matter of becoming the figure that the human female and spontaneously through the forms created by her paintings
American feminist reclamation of women artists of which more Vieira da Silva (190892) and the list could go on. None were presents in society? De Beauvoirs two-volume tome showed and drawings. Art historian Barbara Buhler Lynes has carefully
shortly I could not OKeeffes work. It was opaque to me. on our curriculum; few were on show in the museums or major that this figure, Woman (in French lternel fminin) this documented this discursive creation of OKeeffe by assembling
exhibitions. The point I wish to stress is that this continuing erasure intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is the whole archive of such impassioned writings about woman
By chance, during the later 1990s, I was invited to Sante Fe, was the actual product of modernist art history and the modernist called feminine is a figure fabricated by myth, convention, speaking her own sexual truth for the first time in history.7 Let
New Mexico, and, by equal chance, was offered a ride and a museum in the twentieth century. Both, in effect, by this twentieth- politics, science, ideology and cultural representation.5 If we me just quote briefly from one very serious critic who wrote
private visit to OKeeffes former home at Abiqui. That space and century exclusiveness, failed to be modern enough.3 become women and indeed inhabit this complex configuration of extensively and thoughtfully on OKeeffes early exhibitions in
place were a revelation. It was only when I was inside this house, body and the fantasies projected onto it, and if Modernity can be New York. In 1922, Paul Rosenfeld had written in Vanity Fair: It
tracing through every room and detail the consistent aesthetic It was as a result of this radical skewing of the still-recent history of characterised as giving rise to a profound challenge to this concept is female, this art, only as is the person of a woman when dense,
that permeated all its spaces and objects, that I began to get the modern art by the official modernist art historians who were these of Woman, the making of modern art by modernist women is a quivering, endless life is felt through her body, when long tresses
OKeeffe project (fig.98). Standing at the vast picture window of womens contemporaries knew them, visited their studios and then remaking of both what woman can be and how to exist beyond its exhale the aromatic warmth of unknown primaeval submarine
the artists studio, looking out onto a vista that was almost a view installed and wrote a history of modern art without the women who definitions but not outside of ones gender, in the world. forests, and the dawn and the planets glint in the spaces between
the spaces and forms of New Mexico terrain resist the conventions co-created modernism that my generation of emerging feminist art cheeks and brows.8 In 1924, Rosenfeld wrote that her painting
we learnt from European taming of the world as landscape I historians fell prey to a particular affliction: the search for the unique The epoch of modernity had both extended that construction of derived from
also sensed the challenges and risks perpetually confronted by or the heroic exception. A partial and internally blinded recovery the feminine in various ways, while, as a result of new ideologies
this painter in choosing painting as her life-work and in locating so initially found and celebrated just a few isolated icons. Mexican of gender, also stimulating the desire amongst creative women the nature of woman, from an American girls implicit trust
much of its later phases in this part of the world, where the earth artist Frida Kahlo (190754) and OKeeffe were among the to challenge the myth of the feminine, politically (womens rights) in her senses, from an American girls utter belief, not in
itself revealed its skeleton, its joints and bones, its radical, non- handful of artists who were women who were most easily available and culturally (the New Woman). What did it mean for women, masculinity or unsexedness, but in womanhood. Georgia
human otherness.2 to counter the myth of womens lack in the field of art. The tragedy is as artists, however, to join in the modernist aesthetic project, itself OKeeffe gives her perceptions utterly immediate, quivering
that we can now see, in retrospect, how these important, intelligent still so infused with the mythic woman in either prostitutional, and warm. She gives the world as it is known to woman.
I had entered the field of art history in 1970, at the same moment and remarkable artists, grounded in the historical and geopolitical child-woman or maternal guise think of works by Pablo Picasso No man could feel as Georgia OKeeffe and utter himself
that I joined the project we then named the Womens Liberation specificity of their place and in their moment, well-populated with (18811973), Henri Matisse (18691954), Pierre-Auguste precisely in such curves and colors; for in those curves and
Movement. The latter, at that point, had little time for art and many women artists, were propelled from relative (that can include Renoir (18411919), Aristide Maillol (18611944), Andr spots and prismatic color there is a woman referring the
saw no point in artists except as potential designers of posters sexist misrepresentational) oblivion to notoriety and commercial Breton (18961966) or Willem de Kooning (190497), which universe to her own frame rendering in her picture of things
and other agitational material. Those of us who found ourselves celebrity, bypassing the station of serious art-historical analysis. fill our modernist galleries while also offering novel aesthetic her bodys subconscious knowledge of itself What men
stranded in an arcane discipline such as art history were in a This handful of exceptions became the subject of sensational tools and material-formal resources to invent something entirely have always wanted to know and women to hide, this girl sets
field that apparently offered little to our emerging consciousness biographical hype, coupled with the destructive hyper-visibility of new: modern women and a modern art articulated from a forth. Essence of Womanhood impregnates colour and mass,
and pride as women, because the story of art we diligently their works, superficially promoted on calendars and postcards. questioning and radical perspective? Rather than judging women giving proof of the truthfulness of a life.9
studied told us there were no women artists of any merit or Almost too well-known now, for wrong and usually trivialising modernists for where they do or do not fit into the exclusive, and
historical significance. Undernourished, we set out to find some reasons, the encounter with such artists as artists is too often thus partial, story of modern art built around privileged men and In a shorter study of critical responses and OKeeffes reactions
sustenance by diving into the archives. Of course, with very distorted by this extraordinary phenomenon of banalising fame. their fantasies of Woman, we are asked to see the distinctive across the decade of the 1920s, Lynes notes a significant shift
little digging, and just by looking around ourselves then and False renown refuses women their part in the shared making of a novelties produced by women as they engaged artistically with from such fulsome attribution of emotion and unconscious self-
there, we discovered the rich world of many artists who were modern modernism (one that understands gender transformation as new possibilities opened by the uncharted aesthetic space of exposure as Woman to a counter-stress on the works intellectual
women in the history of all art, but notably, influentially and central to the modern) just as much as the totally un-benign neglect modernist practice, materials, processes, gestures, forms.6 quality and even its mystical introspection, terms that aligned
excitingly, those who were numerous in the record of modern that was the fate of so many modernist women at the hands of the OKeeffes work with qualities more conventionally considered by
art of the twentieth century. curators and narrators of the official story of modern art. This profound and modernist intersection between the gendered critical discourse as masculine.10
radicalisation of artistic processes and meanings that would, at
We confronted a paradox, however. So many of the women who After 1970, therefore, many modernist women became the its most dramatic, be named non-objective or abstract, and the For the American critics of the 1920s, longing for a distinctive
had made modernism that we had thus dug up were actually topic of an emergent field of feminist analysis within art history. radicalisation of gender relations and sexed subjectivities, poses American modernism, the work of Georgia OKeeffe, particularly
still alive at this point, at which highly-educated art historians like Programmatic in our attempt to right a wrong, what I named rich and challenging questions for art-historical study of the art on paper, offered what seemed like a direct, spontaneous, almost
me were being taught nothing about them at all. As I personally feminist interventions in the Histories of Art (insisting that feminism and culture of the twentieth century, but only if art history is itself unconscious, revelation of a distinct concept of true womanhood,
encountered the question of gender in art and art history around is not a subset of the real thing, and that the histories of art are radicalised and finally modernised by recognising the decisive quite different from that which had prevailed during the preceding
1970, all of these artists, contemporaries of OKeeffe, were plural and perhaps even contested) then appeared to the official conjuncture of modernity and gender transformation on the terrain era of Victorian bourgeois culture. For the first time, it was possible
104 105
to conjugate ideas of the New Woman woman modernised like Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro associated with and It is also important to read this first moment in feminist criticism in linking OKeeffes interest in colour and shape with younger
with sexual experience as the grounds for a new autonomy and influenced by burgeoning womens consciousness and rage at the the 1970s, which embraced OKeeffe, in terms of the narcissistic fellow Americans such as Mark Rothko (190370), Kenneth
self-expression. In contrast to the Victorian ideal of pure, sexless dire histories of art they had been given looked upon the work wound inflicted on women psychologically and socially by the Noland (19242010) and Ellsworth Kelly (19232015).14
Woman, these new women were being considered as sexual of OKeeffe and imposed precisely a kind of homogenisation on absence of any analogical evocation of the female body as
yet still within a contradictory, phallocentric perspective. The her work as a woman. Ironically, they saw literal difference in the a site of active pleasure or autonomous sexuality. Given the A new group of feminist studies soon appeared to deal more
enthusiasm of some of the advanced critics for OKeeffes work anatomical rather than in the psycho-symbolic. Thus, for a while, persistence of the Greek modelling of a female nude without any critically with the historical writings that had sexualized
as symptom of this paradoxical notion of womans unconsciously, American feminist art critics toyed with the idea that, across the outward signs of her gendered sexuality; given the discourse of OKeeffe under a projected masculine gaze. Anna Chave
almost naturally sexual nature hence the floral association largely abstract work made by artists who were women over the sexuality pedalled since 1953 by Playboy and widely distributed wished not to disown the force of what we see in OKeeffes
was additionally shaped by then-current American involvement twentieth century, they could detect a recurring formal tendency pornography, of female sexuality as anticipatory and passively paintings but to explain it differently, acknowledging the import
with Freuds radical theories of sexuality, disseminated to create works around cores, volumes, circular shapes. The receptive to masculine desire, we can well understand why of sexual difference:
following his lectures in the U.S. in 1909.11 Arts patron Mabel hypothesis was exploded as fast as it was advanced.
Dodges salon at 23 Fifth Avenue was a major channel for the
dissemination of Freudian ideas in the 1910s: there was no We know that, as a lifelong feminist, OKeeffe, nonetheless,
warmer, quiet and more intensely thoughtful conversations at repudiated the appropriation of her work by artists such as Judy
Mabel Dodges than those on Freud and his implications.12 Chicago more openly than she had resisted the Stieglitz sell
and the critics orgy of Freudian fantasy projected onto her
Thus we might have to acknowledge that OKeeffes work after paintings in the 1920s. She did not want to be Judy Chicagos
1917 did inscribe within the visual field of American modernist Woman any more than she wanted to be the mens in the 1920s.
practice something so visually shocking that only the radical sex- It is easy to understand.13
talk of the new Freudian discourse could begin to articulate what
it seemed to touch upon: a woman as the enunciator of her own The problem is that any reading of her paintings as image of
sexuality in a manner so radically even the invisible sexuality of women claims her work for
distinct from the existing representations of sexuality that it iconography. Her paintings are then read as direct or veiled
offered the intimations unknown and unknowable to its images of that which now, on the basis of this iconographic
author of a sensualised and corporeal subjectivity that was reading, has an image. This is very different from suggesting that,
differently sexuated. as an artist of that specific Euro-American modernist turn towards
the non-objective, OKeeffe was engaged in finding forms for
Such framing of the work as the very emanation of a gendered sensations that remain unknown without formulation.
essence, resulting from a reductive reading of Freuds very radical,
but still gender-bound, writing on sexuality and dreams which Thus, amongst the challenges we currently face when
profoundly influenced sections of the New York avant-garde, encountering the work of OKeeffe through the prism of the
following the English translation of The Interpretation of Dreams many who have written about her work, we encounter both the Fig.99
In the Patio No. IV 1948
(1900) in 1913 and the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality historical evidence of a powerful Freudian discourse on gender Oil paint on canvas
(1905) in 1910, with a powerfully phallocentric concept of and art during the 1920s, and a late-twentieth-century critical 35.6 x 76.5
Woman as unconsciously speaking her sexual body, a sexual return to these questions about the ways in which gendered Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
body full of oceanic sensation and grounded in her womb (hence bodies and sexed subjectivities inflect an artists work. Neither
her reproductive rather than her sexual organs) made OKeeffe is, however, entirely ungrounded. For these critics, this tendency
dramatically modern as woman-artist in that climate of the early was the confident assertion of a distinctively feminine embodiment
American avant-gardes embrace of Freud-talk. It left her, however, to which modernist art languages gave new forms. The flower OKeeffes astonishing paintings, like her experimental design The problem with all these accounts is not that her pictures
relatively invisible as a modernist artist who was a woman. paintings of OKeeffe were above all susceptible to such a work, the Specials of the 1910s (figs 1618, 20, 25) and are not sexual, but that the difficult exercise she set herself,
reading because of the legacy of modernism itself: these paintings her abstract paintings, such Music Pink and Blue No. I 1918 and the now-muted, now-declamatory visual poetry it
Becoming OKeeffe c.1970: Being reclaimed were not images of flowers, but evocations through the grammar (fig.27) looked and felt so distinctively erotic, as if offering a yielded, was crudely translated into fulsome, clichd prose.
If we now jump from the decades of her becoming OKeeffe in of a floral morphology of folds, interiors, depths, layers etc., of totally new grammar for imagining the female sexual body and Her art was described not as the vision of someone
the hot criticism of the 1920s, while she systematically continued that which had, so far, had no image in art: female sexuality. its sexual sensibility. Yet these are relatively rare in her oeuvre, with real, deeply felt desires, but as the vision of that
to paint and seek out new subjects and new spaces (ultimately Followed through with a reductive literalness, Chicago would take which consistently uses art to apply a kind of analytical looking to depersonalized, essentialized Woman who obligingly stands
New Mexico) in which she could make her art, to a second this lesson to her logical conclusion, visually identifying female structures in the natural world to their order, their strangeness, for Nature and Truth.15
phase of high visibility (the intervening years included many sexuality with a specific genital iconography, even while seeking and their foreignness to the human form.
retrospectives, including one in 1946 at the Museum of Modern to find a formal artistic language for it in her own abstract prints The phrase the sexualization of Georgia OKeeffe heads a
Art, New York, and the one I first encountered at the Whitney and paintings. But linking visual forms with sexual forms tended to Interestingly, in the first surveys of women artists by feminist chapter by Vivien Green Fryd in her book Art and the Crisis of
Museum of American Art in 1970), we arrive at another moment project onto the paintings only anatomical references, however scholars, the authors insistently played down the notion of a Marriage (2003). Fryd approaches OKeeffe through parallel
of contested, sexualised interpretation in and around 1970. shocking and even liberating. The more theoretical legacy of female iconography in favour of more formal analyses. In the analyses of two couples: Edward Hopper (18821967)
Freudian thought should have reminded them that sexuality benchmark exhibition Women Artists: 1550-1950, curated by and his wife and model, the artist Josephine Nivison Hopper
Some American feminist readings embraced both the artists may have a morphology, but it is in the mind. Psychologically, Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin in 1976, the entry on (18831968), and Stieglitz and OKeeffe. Both OKeeffe and
gender and her works heady associations with a female sexual sexuality is an effect of powerful fantasies built on fractured sites OKeeffe focused on very different critical terms, used of her New Nivison Hopper became models for their husbands work,
body, notably via the floral analogue, as the key to OKeeffes of bodily investment: touch and sight, movement, rhythm and Mexico paintings: vast, lucid, epic, spartan, austere, healthy, offering an indirect way of reading the cultural stakes involved
feminist relevance. With the major show at the Whitney in 1970, sensation, not on the physiology of organs. clean-cut, unsentimental. Nochlin focused on the solitary painter in such exchanges. Fryd situates the complex relations within
American art critics and historians like Cindy Nemser, artists as a contemporary model for freedom of thought and action, these famous artistic partnerships in relation to the novel cultural
106 107
using her own nude body in relation to the drama of the Western embodiment, sexual difference and art-making. Instead of
landscape. Pyne, furthermore, focuses on artist Katharine Rhoades imaging OKeeffes work in Stieglitz-ian fashion as the un-thought
(?18851965), whom Stieglitz also sought to fashion as his emanation of her womans body thus identifying the woman
idea of the woman modernist through his embrace of the semi- as her body, which speaks itself through art contemporary
spiritualist and vitalist ideas of French philosopher Henri Bergson, feminist critical analysis is interested in how we might read the art
extracts from whose influential text Creative Evolution (1907; created by embodied, gendered, situated and sexuated subjects
translated 1911) Stieglitz printed in Camera Work between 1911 knowingly making art as a way of being in the world, while
and 1912. Bergson explored a philosophical understanding of the insisting that art is made with materials and resources that are
problem of continuity and discontinuity in life: how things evolve. crucially determined by time and place, by history and situation,
He posited the existence of a vital impulse in all living things by what the cultural codes of that moment decree as possible.
lan vital, a creative force which challenged predominantly Every artwork is an experiment handling the sometimes-contesting
mechanical ideas about change. He also countered the primacy urgencies of situation and desire. The very last thing that feminist
of rational intelligence as generating knowledge of life, proposing studies aim to do is to separate women from their place as
instead intuition as key to understanding. The creative process historically grounded co-creators of art and culture. But to
releases intuition and brings us back into contact with the vital understand the specificity of what each woman, in her singularity
impulse that is the source of both continuity and transformative as an artist, introduces into culture, there may be a tactical
discontinuity; this is creative evolution. Bergson lectured in New necessity to focus on her difference, the better to see her genius.
York City in January 1913, and, following an admiring article
in the New York Times, the numerous visitors going to Columbia By that word I do not mean to reinsert the genius theory of art.
University to hear the philosopher speak caused the first ever I am using the term as French literary theorist Julia Kristeva has
traffic jam on Broadway such was the interest in and reputation used it, drawing from the medieval European writer John Duns
of this thinker. Scotus, who postulates the singularity of each person. Instead of
asking what she is the answer might be she is a woman, i.e. a
Pyne also traces the links between the search for modernist member of a category whose meaning depends on ideology and
authenticity truth to a new, living, creative self and the key standpoint we should always address the question of who she
figures: the unconscious woman and the untutored child. Titled is.18 Who is a work of a lifetimes making.
Modernism and the Feminine Voice, Pynes book lays out the
intellectual and philosophical ground on which the New York Writing in one of the great works of feminist aesthetic polemic in
avant-gardes pre-surrealist search for its emblematic child-woman 1974, the French writer Hlne Cixous articulated a post-1968
artist was built. feminist position in which she called women to the writing of the
body, and thus to the creation of a relation between language (in
As it turned out offered Stieglitz a dress rehearsal for our case, art; existing, resisting, but also creative structures) and
OKeeffe. Through struggling to make Rhoades the voice of the embodied, sexually different, individual subject. Claiming that
female sexuality, he invented the figure of the woman-child, women have been violently driven away from their bodies by
the female partner required for the modernist theatre of phallocentric language and its stories of womens bodies, Cixous
New York Rhoades story is an important one in relation called, knowing the double entendre of her phrasing, for women
to OKeeffes because it allows us to discover the way in to come to writing without, however, assuming any homogeneity
which the woman-child opened up the possibility of a among the women who would then write new stories. She writes,
Fig.100 feminine voice in modernism, even as the woman-child drew therefore, against exactly the kind of generalisation of Woman
Blue I 1916 boundaries around that possibility.17 Stieglitz practised and de Beauvoir analysed in culture.
Watercolour on paper
78.4 x 56.5
Private collection, courtesy Christie's, Beautifully documenting the forming of Stieglitzs aesthetic What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me
New York vocabulary in the images made by, and of, women in the is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions; you
preceding decades, which he would replay across the three cannot talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous
hundred photographs that comprise the Portrait of Georgia classifiable into codes Womens imaginary is inexhaustible,
developments in the U.S. in the same period, around the relations This framing is richly explored in another major study of the larger OKeeffe (191737), Pyne finely tunes the relation of these earlier like music, like painting, like writing.19
between men and women signified by marriage. Fryd writes: context in which OKeeffe was written by Stieglitz into American images to the influential ideas shaping the New York avant-garde
art. Americanist art and cultural historian Kathleen Pyne argues into which OKeeffe stepped in 1917. Pyne indicates, however, So, the challenge is to acknowledge that gender, sexual
Passion had come of age in the United States. Stieglitz that we need to situate OKeeffe and the clearly significant that OKeeffe was not just the object of Stieglitzs vision. She had difference and the bodies we inhabit can matter in the making
contributed to this atmosphere through his sexualisation partnership with Stieglitz, after 1917, in the context of an extended to, and did, negotiate what this framework offered to her, while of art, while recognising that this is not predetermined. As an
of OKeeffes art and of her body. OKeeffe also played a circle of creative women modernists already working around ultimately having to escape its potential enclosure of her own opening up of the space of art-making to that which is not
role in this greater awareness of female eroticism through Stieglitz included in his journal of photography Camera Work artistic project. Thus the critical focus on woman, body, sexuality, previously decreed, modernism allowed women to come to
her participation in the creation of Stieglitzs nude and in exhibitions at 291. Such an extended history included her life, new forms, escape from the known and conventional, was art in greater numbers and with creative freedom. Formally, it
photographs of her and through her non-objective predecessors: the Pictorialist photographer Gertrude Ksebier indeed an opening. Onto what? also opened an uncharted space for their singular explorations
charcoals and paintings of flowers that embody her feelings (18521934) and the independent Californian photographer of what had been rendered, culturally, a dark continent: their
about specific relationships.16 Anne Brigman (18691950), both of whom were exploring A different strand in feminist discourse has sought to articulate a own subjectivities. This is precisely the tension that critical
new languages of modernist image making, in the latter case creative and theorised but less fantasised relationship between writing on OKeeffe has to maintain. Her work was conceived
108 109
etc.) actually rested on and drew from serious ideas: some Piet Mondrian (18721944), Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp
philosophical, others in the now-obscure realm of intersecting (18871968).21 The embarrassment felt by a rationalist thinker
revolutionary ideas, anti-materialism and a corresponding non- like Barr has served to foreclose our recognition of the challenging
religious spiritual yearning that could turn visionary, or occult, or but interesting pathway via thought-forms that allows us to make
aesthetically creative; or all three. sense of the turn to abstraction, without Barrs laconic account
that artists got tired of representing things: The most adventurous
We know, for instance, that OKeeffe developed her distinctive and original artists had grown bored with painting facts.22 The
aesthetic breakthrough because of her deep study of Arthur point I wish to make is that OKeeffe, working in the specifically-
Wesley Dows teachings, drawn from the turn among an earlier American context of the teacher training institution at Columbia
generation of modernist artists towards medieval, folk, Japanese University; seeing work by European modernists like Rodin,
and other Asian aesthetics, and which, expressed also at the time Matisse and Picasso at the gallery 291 in New York; working then
in terms of symbolist theory, looked to music as the paradigm in Columbia, North Carolina and in Texas in the art department
for finding new ways of sustaining the visual arts. We also know of a college, was part of this phenomenon. Appreciating the
that Wassily Kandinskys ber das Geistige in der Kunst (1911) widespread influence of the spiritualist conception of art has
translated as The Art of Spiritual Harmony by Michael T.H. lately allowed us to undo the unwarranted forgetting of the
Sadler in 1914 came across OKeeffes horizon in that critical Swedish pioneer of abstract art Hilma af Klint (18621944),
decade after 1910. Like so many of his generation, Kandinsky whose abstract paintings from around 1896 predate the first
engaged with the writings of leading Theosophists, including an abstractions by Kandinsky.23 It is through this much-less studied
influential publication by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, dimension of modernisms becoming that a notion of interiority
Thought-Forms (1901).20 In this circle, spiritual signified an that is not sexual is on offer, shaping a different understanding of
inner phenomenon, a kind of imaginative and transformative the self that art-making might explore and for which non-objective
subjective interiority and communion with sensation and affect forms, colours, shape and effects might become a suggestive
that challenged the hollowed-out materialist world, without losing grammar of thought-forms.
touch with life or with the social and political order of the world.
OKeeffe in conversation
We cannot here enter into the debate about how the Protestant So, the challenge for feminist writers is then to negotiate both the
reading of modern art advanced by a deeply spiritual man such historical and recent evidence of sexualised reading of a selection
as art historian and museum director Alfred H. Barr minimised of OKeeffes paintings and the demand posed to all art history to
the role of these social-political-spiritual-occult roots of modernist understand who this painter was in terms of what she did within a
Fig.101
Cliffs Beyond Abiqui, Dry Waterfall 1943 abstraction, which richly informed a range of early modernists like historical frame (while exceeding its limits), because it has another
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 40.6
The Cleveland Museum of Art
as an exploration of self and world in a theosophically and on genres or topics or subjects: abstractions, flowers, bones,
psychoanalytically modernist language all the rage in her artistic houses, barns, patios, mountains, skies, clouds, skulls, shells.
circle. That group was imagining art as a search for a new truth Yet again we can try and create a context, either on the basis
both beyond the visible and inside it. It is not enough to disown of shared interests (Calla Lilies in American Art, for instance)
all reference to her being an artist and a woman, distancing us or reciprocal approaches to common themes, such as we find
from the Freud-talk of the 1920s or the feminist flower-body-talk between photographer Stieglitz and painter OKeeffe. These
of the 1970s. We cannot replace the modernist engagement most often imagine authorised contexts, placing the woman in
with sexual bodies and imaginaries with merely formal concerns, relation to her contemporaries, who are men. Thus the illusion of
dividing the work by theme and chronology. her exceptionality veils the import of her singularity; for the latter,
the artist must be seen in a full context of modernisms co-made by
It is easy to deal with this challenge by following the chronology, women and men side by side.
however, and it is always important in art history to track what the
artist does: seeing where each work leads, noting the ruptures This includes taking in one other aspect of that context. If we
of continuity, the exhaustion of a theme, the displacement of the were to accept the banalised version of modernist art theory as
working space. Thus we are made to witness a lifetime of work merely the substitution of arts traditional subservience to literature,
the daily practice of this profession that is a constant investigation, religion, myth or ideology, with its autonomous embrace of its
research and refinement, of dead-ends and new beginnings. own processes as an end in itself, we would miss the complexity
We may ultimately discover unexpected and deeper structuring of what that formalist turn did for art and artists as a position from Fig.102
continuities that unfolded across different projects and even which to make art in early modernism. We would also fail to Alfred Stieglitz
alternating modes. recognise that the formalist proposition that art is answerable to Georgia O'Keeffe After Return from New Mexico
Equivalent O1 1929
and created by a fidelity to its materialities, mediums and formal
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
Another approach offered by art-historical tradition is to focus potentiality (colour, space, light, surface, mark, line, gesture, 7.9 x 11.7
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
110 111
Fig.103 Fig.104
Nude Series VII 1917 Nude Series 1917
Watercolour on paper Watercolour on paper
45.1 x 34.3 30.5 x 22.5
story to tell. In one radically important text by art historian Sharyn In another subtle and intelligent grouping of three modernist cultural norms and terms, but never entirely trapped. In order to Titian-esque gorgeousness associated with oil painting. But the
Rohlfsen Udall, who also curated an exhibition on the same artists, the American art historian Anne Wagner created this trio explain the paradox at the heart of the artistic project we call paint is applied dry and flat, refusing its distinctive delights all
theme, OKeeffe is placed in conversation with Frida Kahlo, for her analysis of modernism and sexual difference: Eva Hesse Georgia OKeeffe, in which the flower has mistakenly come to the better to make us look at the curious structures of the things of
whom OKeeffe met on a visit to Mexico in 1932, and the (193670), Lee Krasner and Georgia OKeeffe. She writes: stand for the displaced sex and body, Wagner invokes French the world that scale and detail make strange. Rather than blame
Canadian artist Emily Carr (18711945), whom OKeeffe met phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who the artist for our disappointment in the lack of correspondence
in New York in 1930, and who also set herself apart by working OKeeffes art and career also serve to demonstrate that provides an alternative way to frame an artist who never fully between texture and imagined corporality, Wagner suggests that
in British Columbia and seeking to bend her own modernism to at least earlier in the century, for a woman to represent recognised the freight her imagery carried, yet always sought to we recognise a different ambition:
engage with the aesthetics of First Nations art and culture in the the body at all is to give herself over to her interpreters; to make her mark lie between its sexuality and its negation. Wagner
forests of the Western Pacific Region. Udall defines the ground for become hostage to their limited notions of a womans world quotes this difficult phrase from Merleau-Ponty: There is no What would it be like to overturn, by sheer power of ones
bringing together three artists otherwise unconnected in terms that as simply and only an extension of her bodily feeling ... I think transcending of sexuality any more than there is any sexuality painting the (un)comfortable decorum governing ones own
reflect a move beyond the formal/iconographic split in order to she continued to see these new pictures [Wagner is referring enclosed within itself. No one is saved, and no one is totally lost.26 place in the world? To elect painting as the site of that upset is
locate artistic practice in major questions of modernity: Yet these to OKeeffes destabilizing play between abstraction and to ensure that it occurs in a space simultaneously public and
artists shared fundamental commonalities a professional stature, figuration] as stemming from her long-standing effort to find Wagner uses this delicately balanced paradox to encourage personal; it is to make the upset an effect of fantasy, ones own
an attachment to place and nationality, an intense connection a space both within and outside the body, to conceive of a us to see OKeeffes artistic project in similar terms: risking and and that of the viewer.27
to nature, and a strong interest in indigenous cultures that link body both within and outside gender.25 refusing in the same gesture, being abstract and objective in the
them both as artists and as women, and form a starting point for same work, being at once suggestively sexual and austerely Inspired by the growing body of critical feminist thinking that
an investigation into the place of the woman artist in the Wagners contribution is to resist either/or approaches and to analytical, offering the effect of luscious forms with paint applied engaged with the challenge that OKeeffes work poses still,
twentieth century.24 embrace the historical but also the psycho-symbolic instability in such a way as to minimise the equation with flesh. We look at in my own work on OKeeffe I created an exhibition, in my
of all of us. We are, in part, captured and constructed by her work and its sometimes striking colours make us anticipate the Virtual Feminist Museum (2007), in order to propose a series
112 113
Georgia OKeeffe
of provocative encounters rather than commonalities between cultural condemnation of Pandora and rescue her as the figure of a
women artists of the 1920s, under the rubric Visions of Sex.28 necessary, political curiosity epistemophilia, a love of knowledge.
My starting point was the exception, in the oeuvre of an artist
who would come to be so known for sexuality and her sexualised OKeeffes curiosity: art as knowledge
image, of the most conventional sign and site of Western arts For Mulvey, the myth of Pandora encodes three key phallocentric
concept of female body and sex the female nude. myths: femininity as enigma; the female body as an inside and an
outside, the beautiful surface of the latter hiding the dangerous
Feminist art historians had long been asking: how could horror of the former; female curiosity and desire for knowledge
representations of the female body signify creative agency when as transgressive and endangering. Mulvey proposes a feminist
the tradition was that the female body was merely the matter of art counter-reading. Pandoras curiosity does indeed act out a
and its representation as the nude the sign of masculine creativity, feminine desire to know a doubled self, surface and interior, with
driven by its own, culturally authorised desire and fantasy? Given the latter being identified with the image of a box or the calyx
that the nude also became the emblematic image of modernist of a flower. Feminist curiosity, however, transforms the negative
art, the terrain on which the male modernists laid claim to each topography of the woman as box by exposing the idea as a
innovation in the bid for leadership of the avant-gardes, how masculine psychosexual anxiety that has been projected onto
incredibly risky was it for women modernists to take on this topic? woman. By offering other ways of representing femininities, critical
feminist curiosity can, in turn, become a creative drive to know
I was thus fascinated by the suite of watercolours of a naked bodies and genders differently.31
woman drawing herself, made by OKeeffe in Texas in 1917 (on
the cusp of her departure for New York, namely just after she So I want to return to where I began this study of the attempts
had begun the Specials (see above) that had so set Stieglitz on to see and define the work of Georgia OKeeffe between the
this path to making OKeeffe the woman modernist he had been 1920s and the 1970s. The historical evidence situates OKeeffes
searching to create (figs 103, 104).29 The fluid washes with which practice in the heady spaces of emergent discourses of American
the body is evoked on paper present a body at work making art cultural modernism, which clearly overstated the sexualisation
without identifying facial features. These images are themselves of her art works in a manner that was evidently masculinist but
powerful shifters of the delineated or grotesque female nude not entirely sexist. The feminist reconsideration after 1970 of that
created repeatedly by modernist masculinity. historical representation of OKeeffe, written through the prism of
a new, theoretically expanded consideration of similar questions
What struck me most of all was the hand that is drawing. The artists art, bodies, forms, difference has given us both a critique
own body is posed to be seen by her own analytical rather than of the discourse of the 1920s and varied reassessments of the
contemplative gaze. It is this hand as the displaced signifier of unfinished business of understanding modernisms engagement
the artist at work, but also of a self-exploration, and, at the same with the world, infused with potentially eroticised or psycho-
time, the distanced and formal rendering of a body in colour on symbolic intensities by means of its preoccupations with materials,
paper that interrupts the lineage of the female nude that this artist forms and processes of making. By refusing the earlier model of
inherited. Agency as self-analysis invited a conversation with works self-expression, and by reminding ourselves that making any art
of and by OKeeffes modernist women contemporaries, who were is a negotiation with a range of conventions, tropes, systems and
represented in the nude by themselves and others, and who also ideologies, as well as with materialities, I suggest we arrive at
explored varied forms of the female body, or who were known for the proposition of art-making as a desire for knowledge: a desire
their sexuality, or who also explored the powerful formal imagery to see by means of making, not paintings of things in the world,
of the flower that has so often been considered analogous for but painting as a way to be in the world, a world constantly
femininity and female sexuality. Thus, my virtual exhibition included presenting its formal challenges, which cannot be disentangled
photographs and paintings by and of Tina Modotti, Imogen from our deeply subjective investments and fantasies. Between
Cunningham, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kthe Kollwitz, Gluck, Pan the two points of critical reception that have bound OKeeffe
Yuliang, Virginia Woolf and Josephine Baker.30 to her body and its imagined sex or gender, lies the woman
who drove cars vast distances alone across the central U.S.
Such a line-up breaches all the conventions of art history, mixing and settled far away from urban centres, walking the canyons
photographers with dancers, writers with printmakers, American, of New Mexico and fashioning a way of living expressed in
British, Chinese and German, straight and queer, politically every detail of her home, dress, collection and way of life. While
engaged and not. I shaped these unexpected encounters under the repeated exhibitions seem to generate a rash of critical writing
rubric of the interplay of modernity, femininity and representation. that anticipates the icon and then hates the celebrity and thus must
In reading OKeeffes transgressive and extraordinary crush both, always ready to find fault, it is time to try and see what
watercolours of a painting body, I drew on British film theorist Laura OKeeffe was herself trying to see in such a diversity of things of
Mulveys re-reading of the Greek myth of Pandora. Pandora the world: the abstract continuity of unseen patterns and clues,
meaning the all-gifted is the Greek equivalent of the Christian culled in perhaps unrecognizable form at first, but revealing when
interpretation of Eve because she is blamed for releasing upon examined, a simple clarity, wholeness. To wrench that from what
the world all evils, through her untamed curiosity to know. She modernist art and theory offered this artist was indeed a Pandoran
looked into the box she was given. Mulvey wished to reverse the gesture in the feminist sense; it was a desire for knowledge.
114
Fig.105 Fig.106
Calla Lily in Tall Glass No. 2 1923 Calla Lilies on Red 1928
Oil paint on board Oil paint on canvas
81.6 x 30.5 81.6 x 43.5
116 117
Fig.107 Fig.108
The Eggplant 1924 Alligator Pear 1923
81.5 x 30.5 30.5 x 25.4
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Private collection
118 119
Fig.109 Fig.110
Oriental Poppies 1927 Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 1932
76.2 x 101.9 121.9 x 101.6
The Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
120 121
Fig.111 Fig.112 Fig.113
Dark Iris No.1 1927 Petunia and Glass Bottle 1924 Black Iris 1926
81.3 x 30.5 50.8 x 25.4 91.4 x 75.9
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center Denver Art Museum The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
122 123
Fig.114 Fig.115
Red Amaryllis 1937 White Iris 1930
30.5 x 25.7 101.6 x 76.2
Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
124 125
Fig.116 Fig.117
Two Calla Lilies on Pink 1928 Jimson Weed 1936
101.6 x 76.2 177.8 x 212.1
Philadelphia Museum of Art Indianapolis Museum of Art
126 127
Fig.118 Fig.119
Horses Skull on Blue 1931 Horses Skull with Pink Rose 1931
76.2 x 40.6 101.6 x 76.2
Collection of Arizona State University Art Museum Los Angeles County Museum of Art
128 129
Fig.120 Fig.121
White Calico Flower 1931 Cows Skull with Calico Roses 1931
76.7 x 91.9 91.4 x 61
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York The Art Institute of Chicago
130 131
Fig.122 Fig.123
Rams Head, White Hollyhock-Hills Mules Skull with Pink Poinsettia 1936
(Rams Head and White Hollyhock, New Mexico) 1935 Oil paint on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, New York
132 133
Fig.124 Fig.125
Summer Days 1936 Deers Skull with Pedernal 1936
91.8 x 76.5 91.4 x 76.5
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
134 135
Fig.126
From the Faraway, Nearby 1937
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 101.9
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
136 137
Georgia OKeeffe The Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe Paul Rosenfeld
complement, its ideal opponent that gives it force; and have expressed
The Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe those complements in their works. But few have dared place a sharp triad

based on red in as close juxtaposition to one equally sharp based on green
Paul Rosenfeld
as has this American. She lays them close upon each other, point against
Vanity Fair, no.19
point, flame upon flame. For her, the complementariness of these two sets
October 1922
of colors is as natural as the process of breathing.
Other painters have recognized the relation of all colors to pure white
since pure white contains them all; few have had it in them to dare abut
hardest piercing white between baking scarlets and the green of age-old
glaciers, and been able to make ecstatically lyrical the combination. Other
painters have felt the gamut from intensest cold to intensest heat within
the limits of a single color, and have registered it in their gradations; few,
The art of Georgia OKeeffe combines amazingly exquisite subtleties of
it seems, have been able to race the entire scale with such breathless
statement with tremendous boldness of feeling. Fused in her paintings
rapidity, to proceed in one small area of green from the luxuriant
there exist tenderest, rose-petal gradations and widest, most robust
Amazonian heat of green mottled with dusty yellow, to the bitter antarctic
oppositions of color. The most complexly varied contraries of tone are
cold of green-blue.
juxtaposed with a breathtaking freshness. Chords of complementary colors
are made to abut their flames directly upon one another, filling with Orange-red and blue-green
delicate and forceful thrust and counterthrust the spaces of her canvases. But it is with subtlety that these tremendous oppositions are stated. They

OKeeffe was actually
Through this Virginian, the polyharmonies of the compositions of are more often implied than baldly set down. It may be a chord of burning
born in Wisconsin.
Stravinsky and of Leo Ornstein seem to have begotten sisters in the sister Her family moved green that is felt against one of incandescent red; a chord of intensest
art of painting. to Virginia in 1902. blue against ripe orange. But most often the greens and the blues will be
represented by unusual, subtle shades. They will be implied rather more
Her work exhibits passage upon passage comparable to nothing more
than definitely stressed; the green felt through a kindred shade of blue,
justly than to the powerfully resistant planes of close intricate harmony
the blue through a kindred green. A major triad of full rose, orange and
characteristic of some of the modern music. She appears to have a
violet will be played against one on green in which the yellow and the
power like the composers, of creating deft, subtle, intricate chords and of
blue will be scarcely more than shadowed forth in yellowish green and
concentrating two such complexes with all the appositional power of two
bluish green. Besides, OKeeffe does not play the obvious complements
simple complementary colors. And the modern music is no more removed
of hot and cold against each other. It is more often the two warm tones in
from both the polyphony of the madrigalists and the predominantly
the two triads that will be found juxtaposed in her compositions, and the
homophonic effects of the romantic composers, than this painting from
two cold. Warm orange-red of the calla is fronted with dissolving tropical
both the ruggedly but simply interplaying areas of the renaissance, and the
yellow-green; acid frozen blue-green with cool violet. Oblique, close, tart
close, gentle, melting harmonies of the impressionists.
harmonies are found throughout her work; to them are due much of its
Her use of opposites curious, biting, pungent savor. It is the latitude between proximate tones,
For Georgia OKeeffes seems to be the power of feeling simultaneously between shades of the same color, that is most often stressed by this artist.
the profoundest oppositions. Here is not the single-tracked mind, with Dazzling white is set directly against tones of pearl; arctic green against
the capacity for feeling only a single principle at a time. She seems never the hues of tropical vegetation; violet abuts upon fruity tomato-orange. It
conscious of a single principle without simultaneously being aware of the is as though OKeeffe felt the same great width between minor seconds
contrary that gives it life. And she seems aware of the opposites with a that Leo Ornstein, say, perceives. And although she manages to run the
definiteness, a clearness, a condensation that is marvellous. Close upon entire gamut between heat and coolth of a tone, within a diminutive area,
each other in her vision there lie the greatest extremes, the greatest her scale makes no sacrifice of subtleties. The most delicious gradations
distances, far and near, hot and cold, sweet and bitter; two halves of any remain distinct and pure. Hence, tiny forms have the distinct rotundity
truth. Her art is a swift sounding of the abysses of the spectrum, and an which many other painters manage to obtain only in bulkier masses.
immediate relation of every color to every other.
OKeeffes Forms
Many modern painters have perceived the relativity of all color; have A combination of boldness and subtlety like the one which exists in the
felt that every hue implies the presence in some form or other of its color of OKeeffe exists also in the shapes born in her mind with her
138 139
Georgia OKeeffe The Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe Paul Rosenfeld
color-schemes, and expressed by them. Precisely as in her harmonies, are like the shapes of sails and curtains and cloaks billowed by sea-winds;
the widest plunges and the tenderest gradations play against each other, all her masses are each in some magical fashion informed by the ruthless
and fuse marvellously, so do severe, almost harsh forms combine with Titan elements that toss the earth like a baseball in their play.
strangest, most sensitive flower-like shapes. In these masses there lives the
There are canvases of OKeeffes that make one to feel life in the dim
same subtlety in bold strokes, the same profound effects in daintiness.
regions where human and animal and plant are one, indistinguishable,
Rigid, hard-edged forms traverse her canvases like swords through cringing
and where the state of existence is blind pressure and dumb unfolding.
flesh. Great rectangular menhirs plow through veil-like textures; lie in the
There are spots in this work wherein the artist seems to bring before one
midst of diaphanous color like stones in quivering membranes. Sharp,
the outline of a whole universe, an entire course of life, mysterious cycles
straight lines, hard as though they had been ruled, divide swimming color
of birth and reproduction and death, expressed through the terms of a
from color. Rounds are described as by the scratching point of a compass.
womans body. For, there is no stroke laid by her brush, whatever it is she
But, intertwined with these naked spires thrusting upward like Alp may paint, that is not curiously, arrestingly female in quality. Essence of
pin[n]acles, there lie the strangest, unfurling, blossom-delicate forms. very womanhood permeates her pictures. Whether it be the blue lines of
Shapes as tender and sensitive as trembling lips, seem slowly, ecstatically mountains reflecting themse[l]ves in the morning stillnesses of lakewater,
to unfold before the eye. It is as though one had been given to see the or the polyphony of severe imagined shapes she represents; whether it be
mysterious parting movement of petals under the rays of sudden fierce deep-toned, lustrous, gaping tulips or wicked, regardful alligator-pears;
heat; or the scarcely perceptible twist of a leaf in a breath of air; of the it is always as though the quality of the forms of a womans body, the
tremulous throbbing of a diminutive bird-breast. Lines as sinuous and essence of the grand white surfaces had been approached to the eye,
softly breathing as melodies for the chromatic flute climb tendril-like and the elusive scent of unbound hair. Yet, it is female, this art, only as is
[beside] the severe. the person of a woman when dense, quivering, endless life is felt through
her body; when long tresses exhale the aromatic warmth of unknown
And in the definition of these flower-movements, these tremblingly
primaeval submarine forests, and the dawn and the planets glint in the
unfurling corollas, what precision, what jewel-like firmness! The color of
spaces between cheeks and brows. It speaks to one ever as do those high
OKeeffe has an edge that is like a lines. Here, for almost the first time,
moments when the very stuff of external nature in mountain-sides and
one seems to see pigment used with the exquisite definiteness, the sharp
fullbreasted clouds, in blue expanse of roving water and rolling treetops,
presence, of linear markings. There are certain of these streaks of pigment
seems enveloped, as by a membrane, by the mysterious brooding principle
which appear licked on with the point of the tongue, so vibrant and lyrical
of womans being; and never, not ever, as speak profaner others.
are they. The painter appears able to move with the utmost composure
and awareness amid sensations so intense they are well nigh insupportable, The woman in the paintings
and so rare and evanescent the mind faints in seeking to hold them; and, It is to a singularly conscious and singularly integrated personality that
here, in the regions of the spirit where the light is low on the horizon these canvases refer us. Beside the tremendous decisions that constitute
and the very flames darkling, to see clearly as in fullest noon, and to this art, one sees the interplay of an intense consciousness of the
sever with the delicacy and swiftness of the great surgeon aplunge in the elements of ordinary life and an absolute obedience to the promptings
entrails of a patient. of the inward voice; and the simple truthfulness of living becoming the
truthfulness of art, and the art in turn sharpening consciousness and trust
Her vast distances
in the intuitions. We glimpse on the plane of practical existence a woman
The sense of vasty distances imparted by even the smaller of these
singularly whole, moving from choice to choice with uttermost heartiness
curiously passionate and yet crystallinely pure paintings flows directly
and simplicity. We see a woman who herself sees deeply into ordinary
from the rapidly and unfalteringly executed decisions of the artist. The
living; perceives beside good, evil; beside love, hatred; beside life-giving,
tremendous oppositions felt between near-lying colors, the exquisite
destruction; beside birth, death; and who, for all her intense awareness of
differentiations perceived between graded shades of a single hue; and the
the way life leads, of the implications of a single choice, of the possible
extreme delicacy and unflagging sureness with which they are registered,
results of any action, nevertheless, accepts black with white in serene and
carry one down into profound abysses and out through cloud-spaces and
relaxed composure, and for the sake of the ineffable boon of life, makes
to interstellar lands that appear to have scarce any rapport with the little
her decisions. And what she is within herself, that, because of her [artists]
rectangles of canvas through which they are glimpsed. One falls from a
orientation, becomes visible to her in external objects.
single blue to another down gulfs of the empyrean. The small intense
volumes take on the bulk of protagonists in some cosmic drama. Tart, Because she feels clearly where she is woman most; because she decides
gnarled apples, smooth, naked treetrunks, strange abstract forms that in life as though her consciousness were seated beneath her heart where
140 141
Georgia OKeeffe
the race begins; she, the painter, moves with like profundity into external
nature. There is no piercing the rind of nature at any point that is not a
simultaneous piercing at many points. There is no manner of deepened
intercourse for the artist that does not become a corresponding
approfundization of his sense of his material. There is nothing really
experienced that does not become for him aesthetics. So outside herself,
Georgia OKeeffe perceives as few others have perceived, the refractions
of light on solids, the relativity of color; and registers them into unswerving
faithfulness. In rocks and trees, in flowers and skies, she feels the secret
life. She feels in them the thing that is the same with something within
herself. Through them her soul becomes visible to her.
She is one of those persons of the hour who, like Lawrence, show[s]
D.H. Lawrence
(18851930),
an insight into the facts of life of an order well nigh intenser than we
English writer.
have known. She is one of those who seem the forerunners of a more
biologically evolved humanity. Of that more richly evolved humanity she
may not be as perfect an expression as certain other artists in the world
today of their own station in evolution. Her career is very young; and to
place her work beside that of some of her contemporaries is to be aware
that the greater quickness, the greater juiciness, for all the subtlety and
vast scope of her spirit, is not always in her canvases. But her base seems
to lie high up the line of progress. Her consciousness is akin to something
that one feels stirring blindly and anguishedly in the newest men and
women all through the land. And in that fact there lies the cause of her
high importance.
Paul Rosenfeld, The Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe: The Work of the Young Artist Whose Canvases Are
to Be Exhibited in Bulk for the First Time This Winter, Vanity Fair, no.19, October 1922, pp.56, 112, 114.
Reprinted in Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929, Ann Arbor, MI, 1989,
pp.1759.
142
Location and Dislocation in the Life and Art of Georgia OKeeffe Cody Hartley
Location and Fig.127

The House I Live In 1937
Dislocation in the
Oil paint on canvas
35.6 x 76.2
Donald Clifford Gallup papers
Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Life and Art of

Where I was born and where and how I have lived is But this is not the only place that shaped OKeeffe and held
unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been significance for the artist. OKeeffe, in fact, lived in many
that should be of interest. locations across the U.S. before permanently moving to New
Georgia OKeeffe, 19761 Mexico in 1949, when she was in her early sixties. Moreover,
Georgia OKeeffe
she was intrepid exploring her immediate environment and
If you dont know where you are, you dont know who you are. enthusiastically travelling to more distant destinations. Even when
Wendell Berry, 19812 nominally settled in a given location, OKeeffe was constantly
moving: on foot, on horseback, by car, train or aeroplane.
Georgia OKeeffe and northern New Mexico are inextricably Considering OKeeffes relationship to place or rather, to many
linked in the minds of many. The region is frequently referred to places over her long lifetime offers a rewarding and productive
as OKeeffe Country, much to the chagrin of the Pueblo Indians set of contradictions to explore. What follows is a consideration of
and other Native American residents, whose forebears called this the importance, not just of place, but of the intentional disruptions
land home for millennia, and the more recently arrived Hispanic and transitions created by travel, as essential influences on
population, which traces its origins to the Spanish conquest OKeeffes art and life.
of New Mexico in the seventeenth century. OKeeffe herself
would probably have been the first to dismiss the idea. One Like the hardy crops on the farmlands surrounding her childhood
imagines that OKeeffe, who masterfully integrated herself into home in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, OKeeffe established roots
the community as a respectful and decent neighbour, rather than wherever she made her home. She also, however, thrived upon
imposing herself as the great and famous celebrity artist, would frequent transplantations, adapting to regular and radical
have been annoyed at the very notion of granting naming rights to changes in geography and climate. The contrasts between
Cody Hartley an individual who only moved permanently to the area in 1949. the various regions of the U.S. in which she lived including
Still, for many living outside New Mexico, OKeeffes paintings of the Midwest, the Southeast, West Texas, New York and New
the dramatic landscape are emblematic of the region. Her nearly Mexico could not be more stark. This was not merely a matter
mythical reputation as a staunchly independent woman living of different scenery, or the difference between urban and rural
alone in the remote high desert can overshadow all else about this areas. In meaningful ways, everything about these places was
complicated place known as New Mexico, and the association different, and she took something productive from each.
between OKeeffe and the land that she portrayed is enduring.
144 145
Georgia OKeeffe Location and Dislocation in the Life and Art of Georgia OKeeffe Cody Hartley
OKeeffes early life and career comprised a series of moves, on an isolated desert plain at the base of colourful sandstone road trip on todays well-maintained highways. In 1937, a few in travel boxes she created to hold souvenirs (fig.131). Alongside
punctuated by personal and career disruptions and familial cliffs. With little water and alkaline soil, only sagebrush and scrub years after discovering the house she would eventually purchase these global forays, OKeeffe was also travelling back and
tragedies. Already, by her thirteenth birthday, she was living can thrive. Abiqui is an ancient village, on a bluff overlooking at Ghost Ranch, she again explored Colorado, Utah and Arizona, forth to New York and other cities to oversee exhibitions of
about 24 kilometres away from her familys farm as a boarding the lush fields and green ribbon of trees that trace the route of the now driving her own Ford motor-car and travelling with a small her work. Throughout the rest of the 1960s, she continued to
student at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin. By Chama River as it flows towards the Rio Grande. group that included photographer Ansel Adams (190284).4 The travel internationally, while also making several trips to raft the
the time she moved to New York City in 1918 to live with Alfred following year she travelled with this same group to California, Colorado River, her last being in 1970 at the age of eighty-two.
Stieglitz, at age thirty, she had lived in more than a dozen The hints of a seasonal existence had begun to emerge in the to spend more than two weeks backpacking deep into Yosemite This impressive catalogue of destinations and the constant motion
locations, from large cities like Chicago and New York to smaller 1910s, as OKeeffe pursued teaching opportunities and adapted National Park (fig.133). In these years, she would also frequently and travel of this supremely peripatetic life might seem at odds
communities in Virginia and South Carolina, and as far west as her life to the academic calendar; this migratory pattern was make the 240-kilometre trip west from her home in New Mexico with an artist whose work has become so strongly associated with
the Texas panhandle. Moreover, she had moved back and forth then firmly established as part of her life with Stieglitz. After her to the isolated Black Place a dramatic lunar landscape of just a few key locations: West Texas, New York (both New York
between various communities several times, to pursue educational rediscovery of New Mexico in 1929, OKeeffe defined her own black and grey hills to camp and paint, regardless of the City and Lake George) and New Mexico.
opportunities or work, including short-term teaching assignments. seasonal pattern, spending most summers in New Mexico and freezing storms or blistering heat.
Her family was unable to support her financially and, being returning to New York for the winter, until permanently relocating Many of the modernist artists associated with Stieglitz expressed
unmarried, she was entirely self-reliant during her twenties. She to New Mexico in 1949, three years after Stieglitzs death. Even While she made her home in New Mexico for the last 37 years
managed, also, to travel to Colorado, via New Mexico, to see the then, she split her time between her two homes in New Mexico, of her life, OKeeffe continued to explore near and far, travelling
Rocky Mountains in 1917, giving her a first glimpse of the region frequently travelling the 24 kilometres between Abiqui and
that would come to absorb her attention in subsequent decades. Ghost Ranch.
OKeeffes time in New York and New Mexico, and her traversing Interspersed among stays at these many, semi-permanent
between these two poles, is the best known, in part because the residencies, there were constant travels and movements. New
journey has become a geographic proxy for her relationship with York summers in the 1920s were broken up by trips up and down
Alfred Stieglitz. However, even New York and New Mexico are
Fig.130
Georgia OKeeffe at Friday mosque, Esfahn 1959
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
7.6 x 10.2
Fig.128 Fig.131
House on the Hill, Lake George 1922/4 Georgia O'Keeffe's India travel box and ephemera c.1950s60s
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Various materials
11.4 x 9.1 7.62 x 22.9 x 29.2
Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive Fig.129 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book My Shanty, Lake George 1922 frequently across the U.S. and internationally. In the late 1940s,
and Manuscript Library Oil paint on canvas she travelled to Arizona to see Frank Lloyd Wrights winter
50.8 x 68.9
The Phillips Collection, Washington
home in Arizona, Taliesin West, and to Nashville, to oversee the
not singular locations, but represent a series of different homes, installation of the Stieglitz collection given to Fisk University. In a particular interest in understanding and conveying the distinctive
networks and geographies, enjoyed across a seasonal rhythm. the 1950s, she made her first international trip since the 1930s, character of a given region, capturing what has been referred
driving to Mexico City to visit fellow artists Diego Rivera (1886 to as a sense of place.6 Painter and poet Marsden Hartley had
There were, over the years between 1918 and 1949, three the eastern seaboard, to Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut. 1957), Frida Kahlo and Miguel Covarrubias (190457), and Maine and Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Arthur Dove created
apartments in New York City, and the sprawling rural retreat of Occasionally, trips took her further afield to Canada, Bermuda tour the Yucatn Peninsula. Subsequent international trips included poetic visual symphonies based upon his experience of Long
Lake George, where OKeeffe and Stieglitz spent their summers and Hawaii, for example, in the 1930s. Even after making visits to France and Spain, Peru and Oaxaca. She joined a small Island, New York. But perhaps none have been linked with
and often stayed long into the autumn. The site housed a number the long journey from New York to New Mexico; once there, group of travelers for a three-and-a-half-month world tour in 1959, specific American landscapes and places as strongly as OKeeffe.
of buildings, as well as gardens, orchards and access to paths OKeeffe immediately took to exploring the region. Her New which took her across India, on to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, In part, this is an accident of autobiography and art-historical
for exploring the surrounding woods and mountains (fig.128). In Mexico summers were punctuated by trips across the West. Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Pakistan, and then to Iran interpretation. OKeeffe herself, in her later years, emphasised her
New Mexico, OKeeffe spent her first few visits, between 1929 During her first, in 1929, she went west into Arizona to see the (fig.130), Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, before concluding life in New Mexico and spoke less of the Texas or Lake George
and 1936, staying with various friends, before establishing a first Grand Canyon taking roads she described as terrible, across in Rome. She claimed that she should have seen enough to years; even when she did speak of these locations, some of her
home, in 1936, at Ghost Ranch, followed by a second at Abiqui, cruel cruel country and north to Bryce Canyon in Utah, then satisfy me for the rest of my life, but clearly it was not enough. comments were understood as disparaging conflating her
creating what would effectively become summer and winter east to Colorado Springs, before looping back to the town of Just a year later, in 1960, she was travelling again, visiting Japan, complicated relationship with Alfred Stieglitz (and his family) with
homes, only a short distance apart but offering distinctly different Taos, where she was visiting Mabel Dodge Luhan.3 Covering a Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Cambodia and the Pacific her time in Lake George and reducing it to a string of annoyances
environments. Ghost Ranch is arid and dry, dramatically situated distance greater than 2,400 kilometres, this would be a trying islands on a six-week leisure trip.5 These trips were memorialised and frustrations. Comments made about enduring the green, and
146 147
artist. Her New Mexico houses exhibited other shared features, represented distinctly different cultural values. There were also
including large plate-glass windows (unusual in homes in the enough Easterners artists and writers, along with wealthy tourists
1940s, particularly those with unreinforced adobe construction) or part-time residents that one might enjoy an evening of urbane
and corner windows in her bedrooms, which afforded sweeping discussion the equal of any to be had in New York, if so desired.9
vistas to the north-west and north-east, at Ghost Ranch and Wealthy patron of the arts Mabel Dodge Luhan, escaping New
Abiqui respectively. York City to find a utopian alternative in the town of Taos, did
nothing so well as recreate her Greenwich Village salon in the
Fig.132
My Backyard 1937
Oil paint on canvas
50.8 x 91.4
New Orleans Museum of Art
a statement made in the 1970s, asserting that Lake George was OKeeffes dismissal of the importance of where and how
not really painting country, seem to have further encouraged she lived also seems at odds with the substantial energy and
scholars and biographers to reduce the entire Lake George thought invested by the artist in her homes. From her boarding-
experience to a trial to be endured before OKeeffe ultimately house rooms in Texas to her New York City apartments; from the Fig.133
found her place in New Mexico.7 Shanty (her studio) at Lake George, through Ghost Ranch and Ansel Adams
Abiqui, we see an evolution and perfection of specific ideas Untitled (David McAlpin, Al Rhode, Godfrey
Rockefeller, O'Keeffe and Helen Rockefeller) 1938
In opening her 1976 autobiography, OKeeffe explicitly about how to live, how to work and how to structure ones home
Photograph
dismissed the importance of where and how she had lived to facilitate an artistic practice. As nearly 10,000 visitors a year 11.4 x 14.6
(see opening quote, above). It seems that many OKeeffe discover on visiting her home in Abiqui, OKeeffes houses were Collection Center for Creative Photography
biographers and scholars took her at her word, but this as much expressions of her creativity and modernist aesthetic as University of Arizona
conventional wisdom is being reconsidered by a new generation her artworks. She used a minimalist colour palette of white and
of writers. As the research of curator Erin B. Coe, in her recent other neutral tones a practice started at least as early as 1917, Her own words aside, where and how OKeeffe lived is important. desert. And if one wished to escape such conversations, it was
exhibition and catalogue Modern Nature, has demonstrated when she painted the walls of a room in which she was staying OKeeffe did not live just anywhere and the places in which she easy enough to completely avoid that crowd driving off into the
by returning to the documentary evidence OKeeffes letters, in Canyon, Texas. In her New York apartments in the 1920s and spent most of her time shaped her career and identity. Beyond dust, removing to a place like Ghost Ranch.
and comments made during the 1920s while at Lake George 1930s, furnishings were spare, often covered in white slip covers. the numerous places she lived in during her teens and early
and the visual evidence of the work produced during those Nothing frivolous appeared (a strong repudiation of the Victorian twenties the selection of which was driven first and foremost by Everywhere she lived, OKeeffe interacted with diverse peoples,
years, it is clear that OKeeffe found the region of the Adirondack tastes popular during her youth), and this spartan aesthetic was educational and career opportunities, and secondarily by family enjoying varied cultural traditions, culinary to linguistic, while
mountains incredibly stimulating and artistically productive.8 continued in her New Mexico homes. considerations the poles of her adult existence were New York also having an impact on those she met. Repeatedly, one finds
Art historian Amy Von Lintel has questioned the long-standing and the Southwest. recollections of how distinctive OKeeffes personality and
assumption that OKeeffes time in Texas, where she taught At Lake George, she established her studio in a former barn style were, but also about the positive impact she had as a
art in several communities between 1912 and 1918, was (fig.129), away from the main Stieglitz family home. This separate One was the undisputed cultural and artistic capital of the U.S., teacher, a friend or a neighbour. OKeeffe navigated both New
merely a detour before she met Stieglitz and her career could space served her well and established a lifelong preference for home to the collectors, galleries and museums most significant for York and New Mexico society with dexterity. She handled
really begin. By returning, like Coe, to documentary evidence, segregating her working space from the main house. At Ghost establishing and sustaining a professional artistic career. The other wealthy collectors and patrons with aplomb; there are amusing
Von Lintel has revealed the full, glowing energy of OKeeffes Ranch, she closed off a doorway disrupting the original floor was still, in many ways, a frontier: a remote, vast and dramatic anecdotes recording the way OKeeffe would manage (and
time in Texas, discovering a confident, energetic young OKeeffe, plan of an interconnected circuit of rooms to isolate her studio landscape, largely undeveloped and un-peopled. It had a vitality subtly manipulate) visiting collectors by offering only a few works,
who immersed herself in the landscape and in her teaching and bedroom from the main living spaces. With that change, and energy quite different from that of the urban metropolis: wild sometimes suggesting that a particular artwork was not really
career, developed deep and meaningful relationships (some it became necessary to go outdoors in order to access her and windy, rough and remote. Both Texas and New Mexico available, then slowly but certainly heightening desire until she
romantic), and who was, by all accounts, a vibrant studio and bedroom. She went further at Abiqui putting her retained some of the features of the romanticised, mythical West: relented and sold the unavailable work for a higher price. There
and enthusiastic member of the communities in which she studio and bedroom in a separate building entirely, completely cowboys and cattle-drives, booms and busts, prairie, desert are also, however, accounts of deep, lasting friendships with
lived and worked. detached from the rest of her home, where guests and staff and rock. In New Mexico, those people who did occupy the collectors that far surpass the bounds of commercial transaction.
could go about their daily activities without interrupting the land both indigenous and Hispanic interested OKeeffe and
148 149
New York and New Mexico represented two distinct poles within was a compelling image, which, reinforced by her emphatically
a contemporary dialogue about national culture. During the modern, American depiction of subjects such as New York City
1920s and 1930s, as OKeeffe came to prominence, modern skyscrapers, played into the generalised hunger for a national art.
artists in the U.S. were deeply concerned with identifying
something authentic and distinct upon which they could build a It was in New Mexico, however, that OKeeffe made her most
national culture. They sought subjects that conveyed the energy distinct contribution to visually defining a national culture.
of modern life and the civic ambitions of the American people, OKeeffe was not the first modern artist to paint New Mexico.
from skyscrapers to the advanced industrial plants churning out In fact, it was already a destination for artists from the East
new consumer goods like Ford motor-cars. They also looked to Coast, modern or otherwise, and had been since the end of the
individual regions, where the people and landscape expressed nineteenth century, when the Taos Society of Artists first began
something unique and original that might distinguish the U.S. creating their highly romanticised paintings of Native American
from other nations. This search for a national art was occurring life and the New Mexican landscape. Prior to OKeeffes arrival,
in many nations. Particularly for former colonies, which had long important modern artists including Marsden Hartley and Stuart
Fig.134
Radiator Building Night, New York 1927
Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 76.2
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, co-owned by Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee
and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
At the same time, she exhibited great savvy and cultural to convey the energy and dynamism of the city (fig.134). It was at
understanding as she negotiated the complicated social politics Lake George, however, that she found the subjects that brought her
of the village of Abiqui, where residents trace their lineage (and widespread critical and popular acclaim. From the hill overlooking
land-ownership) back to the sixty families originally named when the lake and the surrounding gardens, orchards and woods, she
the land was granted by the Spanish governor in 1754. She was found the flowers, trees, leaves and landscapes that dominate her
a gracious host to her guests, be they museum directors such as output in the 1920s (figs 789, 828). To be clear, it was not the
Daniel Catton Rich of The Art Institute of Chicago, or a group of subject matter that brought her recognition her subjects could Fig.135
neighbourhood kids. not have been more conventional. Rather, it is what she did with Cows Skull: Red, White, and Blue 1931
that material: coming to terms with abstraction, incorporating a Oil paint on canvas
101.3 x 91.1
New York and New Mexico, each allowed OKeeffe to define modern sense of spiritualism based in the experience of the natural
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
a certain personal and professional identity while developing world, and developing a powerfully modern sense of composition,
different aspects of her artistic practice. In the 1920s, with her which played with scale and successfully overturned formulas
time split seasonally between New York City and Lake George, for cohesive compositions. The magnified flowers spilling across
OKeeffe developed and honed her subject matter, her approach and beyond the canvases (see Abstraction White Rose 1927, lived in the shadow of European artistic culture, the desire to Davis (18921964) had visited and worked in New Mexico,
to painting and her professional identity. It is this decade in which fig.31) reflected a new and different sensibility, which had more in differentiate and establish a valid national culture was strongly mostly at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan. John Marin
she most closely collaborated with Stieglitz (see Greenough in common with avant-garde photography than traditional painting. felt. Stieglitz was a foremost proponent of cultural nationalism (18701953) was also in residence at Luhans compound during
this publication), masterfully launching exhibitions of her work and This is not surprising, considering that the important work done at and, in OKeeffe, he found an artist who seemed to have OKeeffes first summer visit in 1929. Already, when OKeeffe
managing critics and the press an activity best done in New Lake George was often completed in dialogue with Stieglitz. The unparalleled qualifications as an authentic American. She had arrived, the Southwest had been identified as a region with
York City. She painted dramatic views of the city skyline, a leitmotif release and publication in 2011 of their correspondence shed fresh been raised on a Midwestern farm, trained only in American potential for invigorating American culture and defining an art
for many of the modernists expressing the confidence of the light on their complicated relationship, making it clear that, despite schools, and she was living and working in west Texas when they distinct from European precedents. In a series of essays published
modern city and distinctive as the single most recognisable visual many frustrations, they had an abiding love that was grounded and first corresponded. He could conceive of her as being free of the between 1918 and 1922, Marsden Hartley proposed that Native
characteristic of North American cities like New York and Chicago, sustained by their shared artistic, creative and intellectual pursuits.10 influence of European training. In truth, OKeeffes intellectual American culture could provide the inspiration for establishing an
as opposed to older European cities. Looking out across the city Her work in the 1920s also reflects deep knowledge of the latest curiosity and ambition ensured that she was fully aware of authentic national culture and resolving the perceived spiritual
from her apartment or capturing the looming skyscrapers rising into ideas in art, in both Europe and the U.S., while reflecting a specific the latest ideas emerging from the artistic centres of Europe. and aesthetic poverty of the U.S.11
the sky, she employed thoroughly modern compositional strategies and unique individual style. Nonetheless, the idea of a woman artist emerging from native soil
150 151
Fig.137
View from OKeeffes Abiqui House in Winter 1964
Photograph, diffusion transfer print on paper
Fig.136 8.9 x 11.4
Winter Road I 1963 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
Oil paint on canvas
55.9 x 45.7
Yet it was arguably OKeeffes unique vision of the New Mexico The use of bones was unexpected and, as handled by OKeeffe, constant as motion throughout her life is her drawing practice, towards the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east. A highway
landscape and her innovative and unusual incorporation of bones completely original. The depiction of skulls in artworks had a and it is not accidental that the two were often done in tandem. runs along the base of a hill beneath her home. To most, it is just
in her paintings that most firmly established New Mexico and the long history within the tradition of the memento mori of course, but Travel and exploration, like sketching, were key to OKeeffes a highway. To OKeeffe, who saw the abstract visual line of the
Southwest in the public imagination. She was aware that she was the artist denied such historical references and dismissed morbid way of knowing both place and self, of observing and belonging. road clearly, it was much more (figs 1367). The road fascinates
responding, almost in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, to the yearning associations with death. Instead, these were abstract objects, Through more than 700 sketches and drawings housed at the me with its ups and downs and finally its wide sweep as it speeds
for a nationalist artwork. Much later, in her 1976 autobiography, described by her as as beautiful as anything I know.13 During her Georgia OKeeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, it becomes toward the wall of my hilltop to go past me I began drawing
she recalled the anxiety expressed by artists and writers about first summer in New Mexico, OKeeffe became fascinated with clear that sketching was OKeeffes primary way of familiarising and painting it as a new shape.14 Once we have seen it through
creating what she called the Great American Thing (be it the the bleached white bones she found scattered about the desert. herself with the visual character of a place. While she carefully OKeeffes artwork, it is impossible to ever see or experience the
Great American Novel, the Great American Play, or the Great She shipped some of them back to New York as a souvenir of the maintained and preserved these sketchbooks throughout her life, view the same way again. The road is forever after seen as a
American Painting), which seemed ironic to her, given how region that had inspired one of her best years in painting. In fact, there is little sense of chronological or geographic organisation flowing calligraphic line across the land.
focused so many were on Europe: many of the best-known paintings of bones the very works that within the bound volumes. It appears that she simply grabbed
seem so iconically New Mexican were painted in New York the nearest sketchbook, opened to an unused page and started OKeeffe saw her surroundings with remarkable clarity and a
Czanne was so much in the air that I think the Great City during the long winter months. This includes Cows Skull: drawing. Studying them is a bit like travelling with OKeeffe: perception honed by experience and a disciplined practice a
American Painting didnt even seem a possible dream I had Red, White, and Blue 1931. The same is true for many of the New familiar places emerge and recur, interrupted occasionally by practice of looking and making artworks, naturally, but also a
driven across the country many times. I was quite excited Mexico landscapes. Conceived of during the summer, many of something new and different. In these sketches, as in the finished practice of exploration and travel. Intentional dislocation provided
over our country and knew that at that time almost any one these paintings were actually finished in New York, from sketches works (which can often be linked back to particular drawings), essential creative stimulation. Her abiding ability to understand
of those great minds would have been living in Europe if it had completed on location. OKeeffe began the process of making a place her own, giving it and convey the very essence of place, of a specific location, was
been possible for them. They didnt even want to live in New meaning through her distinct vision. In so doing, she made these equalled and sustained by her intrepid spirit. Helping us see our
York how was the Great American Thing going to happen?12 The idea of Georgia OKeeffe painting her iconic New Mexico places visible and knowable in profound ways. world differently, with a fresh perspective, is one of the gifts great
subjects from her New York City apartment seems a fitting vision artists offer. Georgia OKeeffes understanding of place, of many
Her answer was to paint a blatantly patriotic image: a cows skull of an individual whose existence and comprehension of her For many visitors to the OKeeffe home in Abiqui, this point is places, was hard-won and it is part of her lasting legacy and gift.
against a red, white and blue backdrop (fig.135). world was based upon a productive balance of rootedness and made explicit as they stand at the north-east corner of the house,
disruption, location and dislocation. The only thing that seems as where her bedroom looks out across the Chama River Valley and
152 153
Fig.138 Fig.139
Ranchos Church, New Mexico 19301 Black Cross with Stars and Blue 1929
62.2 x 91.4 101.6 x 76.2
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas Private collection
154 155
Fig.140 Fig.141
Soft Gray, Alcalde Hill 192930 Taos Pueblo 1929/34
25.5 x 61.2 61.6 x 102.2
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians
Smithsonian Institution, Washington and Western Art, Indianapolis
156 157
Fig.142 Fig.143
Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / The Mountain, New Mexico 1931
Out Back of Maries II 1930 Oil paint on canvas
61.6 x 92.1 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
158 159
Fig.144 Fig.145 Fig.146
Pauls Kachina 1931 Kachina 1934 Rust Red Hills 1930
Oil paint on board Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
21.4 diameter 55.9 x 30.5 40.6 x 76.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Private collection Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University
160 161
Fig.147 Fig.148
Purple Hills 1935 Pedernal with Red Hills 1936
40.6 x 76.2 50.2 x 75.6
The San Diego Museum of Art Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art
162 163
Fig.149 Fig.150
Another Church, Hernandez, New Mexico 1931 Chama River, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico 1937
25.4 x 60.6 77.5 x 41.9
The American Museum of Western Art Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art
The Anschutz Collection, Denver
164 165
Fig.151 Fig.152
Horn and Feathers 1937 Red and Yellow Cliffs 1940
51 x 61.4 61 x 91.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
166 167
Fig.153 Fig.154
My Front Yard, Summer 1941 Red Hills and Bones 1941
50.9 x 76.5 75.6 x 101.6
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Philadelphia Museum of Art
168 169
Fig.155 Fig.156 Fig.157
Kachina 1938 A Man from the Desert 1941 Dead Pion Tree 1943
17.8 x 17.8 43 x 18 101.6 x 76.2
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
170 171
Fig.158 Fig.159
Blue Sky 1941 Black Hills with Cedar 19412
91.8 x 40.8 40 x 76
Worcester Art Museum Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington
172 173
Fig.160 Fig.161
Black Place I 1944 Black Place II 1944
66 x 76.5 60.8 x 76.1
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
174 175
Fig.162 Fig.163
Black Place III 1944 Black Place No. IV 1944
91.9 x 101.9 76.2 x 91.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Private collection
176 177
Fig.164 Fig.165
Black Place II 1945 Black Place Green 1949
61 x 76.2 94.6 x 117.5
The Vilcek Foundation, New York Private collection
178 179
Georgia OKeeffe White Paint and Good Order Waldo Frank
learned, walking through an autumn wood, how the seeming war of shapes
White Paint and Good Order and colors the red and yellow leaves, the shrilling moods of sky melts into
~ a single harmony of peace. This is the secret of her paintings. Arabesques
Waldo Frank
of branch, form-fugues of fruit and leaf, aspirant trees, shouting skyscrapers
Time-Exposures, by Search-Light,
of the cityshe resolves them all into a sort of whiteness: she soothes the
1926
delirious colors of the world into a peaceful whiteness.
And then, along came the experts. And they prated mystic symbols: or
Freudian symbols. How could you expect New York to admit that what it
likes in OKeeffe is precisely the fact that she is clear as water? cool as water?
New York is sure, it is too sophisticated to care for anything but cocktails.
What a blow to our pride, to confess that it is neither more nor less than
the well-water deepness of OKeeffe which holds us! Better pour the simple
She is a woman who has fused the dark desires of her life into a simplicity
stuff of her art into cunningly wrought goblets of interpretation. Better talk
so clear that to most of her friends she is invisible. The smile on her face
of mystic figures of womanhood, of Sumerian entrail-symbols, of womb-
half nuns, half Nornsis due to this. She has fame as a painter: the name of
dark hieroglyphics. Doubtless, all this would make the woman tired if she
Georgia OKeeffe is known wherever people care for lovely things on canvas.
could not smile.
But she is a woman. She dislikes this invisibility of hers. She wants to be seen.
She was born in a town, prettily named Sun Prairie, in Wisconsin. She liked
So much love around her that does not touch her! So much ecstatic praise
William Merritt Chase painting so much that even her visit to New York, where she studied with
that warms her about as much as would fireworks in the air of a winter night.

(18491916), OKeeffes Chase and at Teachers College, did not turn her off. Then she proceeded
In the old days when she was a teacher of art in a Texas country school, teacher at the Art Students south and got her living by teaching clumsy boys in Texas how to make
she got used to solitudes. She dreamed not of fame then, but of a New York League of New York
(19078). pictures of vases and oranges and sunsets. The War drove her north. You
welcoming and appreciative. She did not guess that in this Manhattan vortex
wonder why: and if you understand, you will begin to know the woman.
of artists, amateurs and critics she was to find a spiritual silence beside
OKeeffe knew nothing about international events, and she cared even less.
which the Texas prairies shouted with understanding.
She had no desire to enlist; she was not aching to be a nurse in France. The
So OKeeffe smiles. It is a simple, kindling smile: it lights the face with a War, quite simply, interfered with her teaching art to boys in Texas. OKeeffe
maternal splendor. But the confused men and women who behold it, will taught art by linking it with life chiefly, by linking it with careless talks about
not have it so. They insist that her smile, like her pictures, is mysterious. all kinds of matters. And now she found that there was a subject she must
The girls work, they argue, is Kabala. The girl herself is the Sphinx. Really, steer clear of: she could no longer say she did not like bloodshed and empty
OKeeffe, despite her gifts and her benevolent spirit, has not had a chance. rhetoric and lies since a whole particular set of these had become sacred
and patriotic. They got in the way of the lines of the vase with roses she had
Look at her. In her black dress, the body is subtly warm. The hands have
set up for her pupils.
a slow grace, as if their natural cleverness had all been turned into such
arts as nursing and caressing. Her voice is like her hands. Her face is very Before her, to the north, had come certain charcoal drawings. OKeeffe
dark and the eyes are deep: but theres a twinkle in them, both intelligent had a girl chum in New York. In lieu of letters, ever since 1915, she had
and humorous. Does a peasant want to be aloof ? Does a woman want been sending these sketches. And the girl friend, despite OKeeffes stern
to be worshiped? Dont you believe it. Its far more fun to be seen and forbiddance, had shown the things to Alfred Stieglitz. And Alfred Stieglitz,
to be understood. OKeeffes years have deepened, not complicated her. after forty years in comradeship with art, said he had been waiting for just
If this town were a bit simpler, a bit less impure, it might be at home with these particular modest drawings. So when the famous gallery at 291 Fifth
her simple purity. If it were less daft on polysyllables, it might hear her Avenue gave its farewell show (the War having put a stop to it) OKeeffes
monosyllabic speech. If it were less noisy in its great affairs, it might hear things were on the walls.
her chuckle.
You will observe the woman in all this. No conquering New York with shrewd
For OKeeffe is a peasant a glorified American peasant. Like a peasant, she ambition. She was quite ready to stay on in Texas. The south was quiet, and
is full of loamy hungers of the flesh. Like a peasant, she is full of stardreams. indolent. OKeeffe got on right well with the big boys until the War turns
She is a strong-hipped creature. She has Celt eyes, she has a quiet body. And them loose. Then Alfred Stieglitz draws her northward. Now, it just happens
as to her esoteric Wisdom, I suspect that it comes down to this: OKeeffe has that Stieglitz is a man who must live in a whirlwind. Wherever the man is,
180 181
Georgia OKeeffe
there a whirlwind must foregather. And OKeeffe who is the spirit of quiet
and of peace finds her haven in this whirlwind world of Stieglitz. It is always
hushed and still at the vortex of a maelstrom. If you dont believe it, look at
Georgia OKeeffe.
This genius for quiet is the woman. It is the essence of her. From her pioneer
fathers, wandering west, she has her ability to pitch her camp in any country
and in any season. But the capacity for quiet is older: it is a deep, a peasant
virtue of her mothers.
OKeeffe is very like a tree. Her arms and her head stir like branches in a
gentle breeze. (Her ears are pointed like a fauns and her voice, like leaves,
has a subtle susurration.) She is almost as quiet as a tree, and almost as
instinctive. If a tree thinks, it thinks not with a brain but with every part of
it. So OKeeffe. If a tree speaks or smiles, it is with all its body. So OKeeffe
whose paintings are but the leaves and flowers of herself. If a tree moves,
you dont notice it. And when you find this woman moving through the
wordy whirlwind that ever rages round the rooms of Alfred Stieglitz, you
have the effect of silence.
This silence of hers, this deep peasant stuff of both her mind and body will
explain why Georgia OKeeffe is of so great a value in Babylonian New York.
Neither in Texas nor in Wisconsin did they need her half so much as we.
You know where to find the writings of our granite-marble city? In The New
Yorker. Well, OKeeffes work is the script of the landsideof its loam and of
its lowly hut.
Perhaps such script is Scripture. Well let the critics decide. This much is
sure: to see her is to be minded of some Scriptural wife tilling the soil and
homing with her husband under the storms and sunbeams of Jehovah.
And so to see her is to understand her, and to know her place in Manhattan.
[Waldo Frank], White Paint and Good Order [illustrated with a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz: Georgia
OKeeffe: A Portrait Head 1920], in [Waldo Frank], Time-Exposures by Search-Light, New York 1926,
pp.315. Reprinted in Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 19161929, Ann Arbor,
MI, 1989, pp.2535.
182
OKeeffes Late Blooms: The Abstract Landscapes - Heike Eipeldauer and Florian Steininger
OKeeffes Late Blooms: Fig.166
The Abstract
Evening Star No. VI 1917
Watercolour on paper
22.5 x 30.5
George OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
Landscapes Georgia OKeeffes work was characterised from the very

beginning by a complex interrelationship between abstraction
and an affinity for nature between a subjective and an
emotional approach. Her fellow painter Oscar Bluemner (1867
Kandinskys rejection of the external world of appearances
signified a turn towards an inner, spiritual state based on the
notion of unity between subject and cosmos. The universal rhythm
of life is given abstract form, and colour is transposed into musical
1938) described her art as the kind that springs from within, resonance: sound as the vibrating soul of art.4 Dove, who like
while that which is caused from without is imitation Whatever OKeeffe was part of the close circle around Stieglitzs New
inner impulse we address towards nature is abstract.1 Nature, in York gallery, 291, represented for her spiritual art rooted in the
OKeeffes work, is on the one hand organic, structural, elemental; universality of nature: Dove is the only American painter who is
an inwards gaze. On the other, it is manifested in landscapes that of the earth , she wrote.5 From around 1916, her work evinces
open outwards, oscillating between the Romantic sublime and a kind of organic, spiritual abstraction: Blue I 1916 (fig.100) is
spiritual infinity. a representative example, the broad, unrestrained brushstrokes
forming a spiral shape around an embryonic form. Some stylistic
Organic nature elements from her symbolist-decorative phase, as manifested in
Georgia OKeeffe, together with Wassily Kandinsky (1866 her charcoal drawings, are still evident. OKeeffe, like Kupka,
1944), Arthur Dove (18801946) and Frantiek Kupka would go on to analyse nature on an elemental level. Though she
(18711957), might be considered the key proponents of an did not have direct contact with Kupka and his work, it is possible
Heike Eipeldauer and Florian Steininger abstract movement in the 1910s that focused on the relationship to observe a consistent stylistic and thematic affinity. The inner
between nature and the spirit. Kandinskys Improvisations and, workings of flowers mutate into a cosmic, painterly world, as in
above all, his 1911 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art Kupkas Tale of Pistils and Stamens I 1919 (fig.167), for instance,
excerpts from which OKeeffes husband the photographer Alfred or numerous floral images by OKeeffe from the same period. Her
Stieglitz (18641946) reproduced in 1912 in the journal Camera synaesthetic paintings, such as Music Pink and Blue No. I 1918
Work influenced OKeeffe in her early years:2 The artist with his (fig.27), illustrate the emphatic way she cut through the surface
free spirit is above nature, and can bend it to his higher purposes. to the inner world beneath. I had to create an equivalent for
The artist wishes to address the world through a single whole.3 what I felt about what I was looking at not copy it.6 There are
184 185
Georgia OKeeffe OKeeffes Late Blooms: The Abstract Landscapes - Heike Eipeldauer and Florian Steininger
shades of Kandinsky here, too: Only through feeling, especially numerous aspects of the movement, including colour field painting Unlike the colour field painters, OKeeffe was working on a small (fig.89), opposite Window 1949, by Ellsworth Kelly (1923
at the beginning of ones path, is it possible to achieve what is and post-painterly abstraction. It was these developments, scale, preserving the intimate relationship between artist and 2015).16 Despite its opacity, the titular window is immediately
artistically right.7 The canvas becomes a membrane, affording and the discourse that accompanied them, which enabled a painting, viewer and work. In her watercolours, colour washes recognisable as such. Even Kelly, a pioneering minimal artist,
a view through to an inner landscape. Meanwhile, Stieglitz read new assessment in the 1950s of OKeeffes early abstracts. In freely across the paper, permeating it, yet is guided by traces generally derived his pared-down configurations of form and
OKeeffes vegetable forms in the paintings as sexualised symbols 1958, Edith Halpert, OKeeffes primary gallerist after the death of the desire to depict an image, by an intuitive, emotion-based colour from reality. OKeeffes depiction of the bend in the
of fertilisation. Reacting against this sexualised, gender-based of Alfred Stieglitz, exhibited the watercolours.9 The art critic translation of reality. In Blue Hill No. II 1916 (fig.22), and Pink road leading to her house in Abiqui against a monochromatic
reception, OKeeffe responded in the early 1920s with more Fairfield Porter recognised in them and also in the abstract and Blue Mountain 1916 (fig.21), for instance, OKeeffe reduces background, in which the curving road (fig.136) provided the
conventional, objective still lifes. Patio images dating from the late 1940s onwards a kinship the rolling landscapes to broad swathes of colour that shimmer impetus for the work, appears nearly abstract. In her Pelvis
with the monumental colour fields of the abstract expressionists atmospherically where they overlap. Contour and plasticity are series, 19437, where the gaps in white pelvic bones reveal an
Mark Rothko (190370; fig.168) and Barnett Newman de-emphasised in favour of pure colour. The first version of her endless blue sky beyond, OKeeffe pushed legibility to its limits:
(190570; fig.170):10 pulsating chromatic shades, broad fields watercolour series, Evening Star, dating from 1917 (fig.166), here, even still lifes take on the dimensions of landscapes. These
and washes of colour as the breathing membrane of painterly consists of bands of diluted colour stacked one on top of the works reached a degree of minimalism that approached Kellys
space. OKeeffe ascribed colour great autonomy in her work, other; the gradation from light to dark creates the sense of a hard-edge paintings (fig.169), produced around the same time.
considering it a living organism: [T]he Color just lives by it self landscape with a distant horizon. In the last two iterations, the OKeeffe herself noted the resemblance: You know every time I
[sic] its like watching a person breath [sic] when they are moment depicted gives way to the purely atmospheric, though the see that mans work, I think I did it.17
asleep.11 Art historian Robert Rosenblum has highlighted the reference to the seen and experienced remains.14 OKeeffe never
simplicity and concentration of her early images, as well as the saw herself as a purely abstract artist, although many phases
way OKeeffe would treat a single subject throughout a series, of her painting touched upon non-representational art, from the
noting a connection with the painting cycles of Claude Monet early, obscure charcoal drawings in an organic-decorative style
(18401926) and Rothkos colour modulations.12 In her essay to her abstracted floral subjects to the Patio colour fields and the
OKeeffes Originality, art historian and critic Barbara Rose empty landscapes that stretch towards an infinite horizon.
describes the innovative power of these subtle watercolours,
stressing their significance in terms of the post-painterly
abstraction of Helen Frankenthaler (19282011) and Jules Olitski
(19222007).13
Fig.170
Barnett Newman
Vir Heroicus Sublimis 19501
Oil paint on canvas
242.2 x 541.7
Fig.167
Frantiek Kupka
Tale of Pistils and Stamens I 1919
Oil paint on canvas OKeeffes paintings of the late 1950s, inspired by landscapes
85 x 73 seen from airplanes,18 are a monumental echo of her
Pompidou Centre, National Museum of Modern Art, Paris watercolours, which, as discussed earlier, were considered
forerunners of colour field painting. Rivers branch off into
shimmering areas of soft, subtly nuanced colour; the images
From Georgia OKeeffes early work in the 1910s onwards appear to be seen head-on, unfolded onto a flat plane. Visually
and particularly the watercolours of 191617 landscape Fig.169 they recall Frankenthalers lyrical pourings, though OKeeffes
Ellsworth Kelly
painting assumed great importance in her work, something were painted with highly controlled brushstrokes. A photograph
Jersey 1958
that was reflected in the relative quantity that she produced. Oil paint on canvas of her atelier, taken in 1963, shows one of the river paintings,
Her landscapes had an ambivalent structure that combined 152.4 x 184.2 From the River Pale 1959 (fig.200), immediately next to a
abstraction and references to nature, across a spectrum ranging Private collection, New York branch, evidently placed there as a model for the river. OKeeffes
from representational and topographically concrete works to the observations of structural similitude in nature resulted in a hybrid
symbolically charged and the purely abstract. Broad expanses of of representation and pure painting and, in terms of her manner of
space afforded manifold opportunities for free artistic expression, OKeeffes influence on later generations and, above all, on painting, she did not differentiate between realistic subjects and
something particularly apparent in her late work, which depicted minimal art was highlighted by the curator Eugene C. Goossen neutral planes of colour. In contrast to the proponents of colour
rivers, roads, sea and sky, and the wide, barren landscapes of Fig.168 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1968, when he field painting, who often physically applied paint to canvases
New Mexico.8 Mark Rothko showed some of her selected works in the context of post-war spread out on the floor, OKeeffe remained faithful to classic,
Untitled (White, Pink and Mustard) 1954 abstraction. In the exhibition The Art of the Real, Goossen was vertical easel painting, although in later works, such as the river
Proto colour field painting Oil paint on canvas particularly interested in artistic originality in the capacity for paintings, their orientation appears flat and horizontal.
234 x 168.5
Following an intensive phase of drawing, the years 1916 to 1917 independent creation, which he saw as reaffirming the identity
Museum Folkwang, Essen
saw OKeeffe produce a corpus of small-scale watercolours that of American art against that of Europe. He accorded OKeeffe The Romantic sublime
would prove both groundbreaking and profoundly influential a leading role in this process.15 Goossen illustrated OKeeffes In OKeeffes landscapes we encounter, again and again,
for American post-war abstraction: OKeeffes work anticipates significance by hanging her Farmhouse Window and Door 1929 instances of what might be interpreted as romanticism, as in
186 187
Fig.171
Wave, Night 1928 Fig.172 Fig.173
Oil paint on canvas The Beyond 1972 Josef Albers
76.2 x 91.4 Oil paint on canvas Variant/Adobe, Red, Blue, Violet around Light Red 1947
Addison Gallery of Modern Art, 76.2 x 101.6 Oil paint on masonite
Philips Academy, Andover Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe 39.4 x 54.3
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut
Wave, Night 1928 (fig.171), for instance, a night-time seascape merely captured the sublime motivically, as in A Storm, her later, rectangles, as in her earliest drawing of 1946, quickly gave In her three monumental, over two-metre-wide paintings My Last
she painted of the Atlantic during a stay in Maine. A white dot on large-format series themselves evoke the sublime quality of infinity. way to views of a flat, abstract shape in green or black, slight Door 19524 (fig.209), Black Door with Red 1954 (fig.208) and
the horizon appears to be the source of light, lending the work a tonal variations generating a sense of ambivalence between White Patio with Red Door 1960 (fig.174) OKeeffe took this
sense of depth that draws the viewer in. The characteristic breadth In 1949, three years after the death of Stieglitz, OKeeffe finally opacity and transparency. With this monochromatic concentration artistic process of paring down colour and form to the essentials
of the space can be read as an expression of loneliness. In decided to retreat to the total seclusion of New Mexico, where for on basic, two-dimensional architectonic forms, OKeeffe even further. In them she reached a maximum degree of reduction,
Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich two decades she had already been spending the summer months. recalled earlier compositions like Farmhouse Window and Door. recalling the nature-derived abstraction of her early creative years,
to Rothko (1975), Robert Rosenblum situated OKeeffes sublime The move represents one of the most important milestones in Taken as a whole, her Patio series plays with variation through while formal innovations like flatness, frontality, horizontality,
landscapes within the Romantic tradition of European landscape OKeeffes artistic development. It was her intense experiences of repetition a strategy with which she had already experimented, geometric purism, the open fields of colour and the large scale
painting.19 He convincingly analysed her work, along with that the boundless, unspoiled expanses of New Mexico where the and which, from the 1940s onwards, became her method for clearly refer to contemporary currents in abstract expressionism.
of Augustus Vincent Tack (18701949), as a connecting link nothingness is several sizes larger than in Texas22 that inspired artistically appropriating what she saw: I have a single-track She also anticipated the minimalist movements of the 1960s.
between American landscape painting of the late nineteenth OKeeffe to make the sublime, large-scale series found in her mind. I work on an idea for a long time. Its like getting These monumental paintings are defined by a horizontal field
century such as that of Albert Bierstadt (18301902) or Albert late work. The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel acquainted with a person and I dont get acquainted easily.25 of pure colour that seems to stretch beyond the edges of the
Pinkham Ryder (18471917), for example and the sublime the world is big far beyond my understanding to understand OKeeffes ide fixe seems to be rooted in the exercise she image, broken only by the rectangle of the door at the centre
expanses of colour found in abstract expressionism, tracing it all maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity inspired by the compositional ideas of her teacher Arthur Wesley of the composition and a horizontal row of smaller rectangles
back to European Romanticism.20 on the horizon line or just over the next hill.23 This resulted in the Dow (18571922) had once assigned to her own students (a reference to paving stones along a path). The naturalistic
pared-down, geometric images of the Patio series, paintings of in Texas: Draw a square and put a door in it somewhere colours of the early iterations of Patio have given way to three
In OKeeffes pastel drawing A Storm 1922, a crystalline bolt rivers and clouds seen from an aerial perspective, and the cycle anything to start them thinking about how to divide a space.26 autonomous colour schemes: austere greyish blue, powerful red
of lightning splits the landscape, producing an awe-inspiring From a Day with Juan (fig.178) works with an unresolved, Between 1947 and 1955, around the same time that OKeeffe and yellow, and meditative, airy pale pink. Two narrower bands
symmetry in the emptied image.21 Her dramatic series of Black transcendental quality that reveal OKeeffes attempts to find was working on her Patios, Josef Albers (18881976) was of colour border the image, like strata in a now horizontally
Place works from 19445 similarly thematises the discharging equivalents in painting to the endless, light-flooded space of her creating his Variants or Adobes (fig.173); nested, differently sized orientated field. The paintings are no longer organised according
of metaphysical energy. In 1972 OKeeffe produced The Beyond surroundings, something which became a central theme in this late rectangles of unmixed paint. Both New Mexico and Mexico to classical rules of composition, in the sense of fleshing out the
(fig.172), one of the last of her landscapes shot through with this period of creativity. inspired his interest in the interaction between colours, Albers image by placing forms against a background, but rather achieve
dark Romanticism. A broad, pitch-black horizontal strip borders referring to the latter in a letter to Kandinsky as the promised land a clear division of the surface into abstract planes of colour.
the upper area of the painting, which consists of finely gradated Abstract colour fields or the curse of the door of abstract art.27 This interest gave rise to work characterised by The connection to colour field painting is palpable here, as a
shades of blue: is it a gloomy sea or simply a dark band of The extensive Patio series originated with OKeeffes adobe ambivalent spatial and planar relationships, eventually leading to comparison with, for example, Barnett Newmans Zip paintings
colour? A dazzling white line bisects the sky. The title references house in Abiqui. Situated on a hill overlooking the Chama River his autonomous series of paintings Homage to the Square. While illustrates (fig.170).28 In these monumental, metaphysically
transcendent or otherworldly experiential states painting as Valley, this was where she spent every winter and spring from Albers was strict in his renunciation of the painterly, mapping inflected canvases, which override all expressive texture in favour
emotional experience, as visual drama. The sublime, according 1949 for the rest of her life. She was fascinated by the door cut out his Adobe images on graph paper, even the strictest of the of a flat, unmodulated expanse of colour cut through with vertical
to the philosopher Edmund Burke (172997), was a quality into the long adobe wall of the central patio, producing a total Patio variants, with their soft geometry, indicate that OKeeffe lines or zips, Newman developed a heightened sense of the
inextricably bound up with the terrifying power of nature. In of twenty-three paintings and drawings of it between 1946 and was aiming not for rigid minimalism, but for subtle irregularity. sublime or more applicable to OKeeffe the infinite. This he
abstract expressionism, it was ultimately manifested as spiritual 1960, as well as black-and-white photographs, in which she These anomalies serve to draw the viewers attention as much to achieved not by perpetuating traditional sublime subjects, but
significance the painting itself became the source of the sublime. explored the relationship between the orthogonal door and the the createdness of the image as to the warm, hand-finished clay by making the moment of aesthetic perception of his expansive,
While initially, in her depictions of nature unchained, OKeeffe wall.24 The view through the open door onto a series of receding surface of the adobe house. present canvases an overwhelming emotional sensation.
188 189
contrast to OKeeffes decidedly non-representational paintings alone with the earth and sky a feeling of something in me going
nonetheless contain structural references to nature in their off in every direction into the unknown of infinity means more to
repetitive horizontal lines, faded pastel tones and inner glow. me than anything any organized religion gives me.35
Martin explained, My work is non-objective, like that of the
Abstract Expressionists. But I want people, when they look at my Abstraction: The most definite form for the intangible
paintings, to have the same feelings they experience when they thing in myself
look at landscape. But its really about the feeling of beauty and Barbara Rose, who recognized early on the pioneering
freedom, that you experience in landscape My response to significance of OKeeffes abstract work, long overshadowed by
nature is really a response to beauty.33 her flower paintings, has suggested that it is more appropriate to
speak of a spiritual than of a stylistic development in the artists
oeuvre.36 Since her art refused to conform to a linear logic of
development, it is difficult to pin down a stylistic evolution, in
the conventional sense, across her 800 works. Her emphasis
on spirituality and on dissolving boundaries, as embodied in
the series of her later years, always remained bound to the
here and now, to a specific kind of groundedness. Thus, even
works like From a Day with Juan III are rooted in an empirical,
phenomenological experience of the world, specifically in
OKeeffes perception by this time already clouded by macular
degeneration of the Washington Monument, which she visited
with her assistant Juan Hamilton.
Fig.174
White Patio with Red Door 1960
Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 213.4
Myron Kunin Collection of American Art, Minneapolis
In her last work in the series, the ethereal, light-flooded White this resulted in another horizontal division of the painting: six
Patio with Red Door, OKeeffe transformed the patio wall motif of the eight works in the 1965 series Sky Above the Clouds,
into an intangible, metaphysical vision. The composition is are radically minimalist compositions featuring just two main
ambivalent, situated between abstraction and figuration, daily areas of pale colour: the lower one full of white clouds and Fig.175
reality and something beyond it, the near-monochromatic white covering nearly three quarters of the paintings surface, and the Agnes Martin
Happy Holiday 1999
surface suggesting an otherworldly realm of infinite space. The atmosphere above. The unattainable, the expansion of space into Acrylic paint and graphite on canvas
unresolved geometric forms have an almost hieratic frontality. boundlessness, the feeling of weightlessness during flight all 152.5 x 152.5
More than in the other two paintings, OKeeffe was concerned become immediate and palpable. Believing that the process of Tate
with differentiating between values of light and colour to create reduction revealed the essence of things, as OKeeffe had already Fig.176
atmospheric transitions: she introduces nuances into the pale described it as far back as 1922, she took figurative painting to Sky with Moon, 1966
white colour field, transforming it into a surface that glows as if the threshold of renunciation and dissolution, but without taking the The light-suffused voids that characterise OKeeffes last great Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 213.4
lit from within, and replaces the opaque black patio door of the final step into radical abstraction: Nothing is less real than realism. series, From a Day with Juan, 19767, more clearly invoke a
Private collection, Switzerland
earlier work with a transparent plane in gradated, pinkish-red Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by metaphysical experience than her other late works. The centre of
tones that, as with the other pink elements, evokes the impression emphasis that we get to the real meaning of things.30 the image is dominated by an imposing vertical trapezoid, which
of a luminous void, opening onto an endless space beyond. The recalling the metaphor of Jacobs ladder extends upwards
Feeling of Infinity The silent, contemplative experience (of nature), to which from the ground, tapering towards the top. Martin, too, in her later Over the course of her decades-long career, OKeeffe traced
OKeeffes delicate, emptied images from the 1950s onwards years, turned to the shape of the trapezoid in Homage to Life, a link between European modernism and American post-war
On the numerous aeroplane flights she took to and from New testify, renounces dramatic space, heroic gesture or any claim to 2003 though in dark, sombre colours creating a connection abstraction through her constant negotiation between references
Mexico, OKeeffe eventually found a subject that encapsulated absoluteness that one might perceive in Newmans or Rothkos with an early drawing, Mountain 1960 (fig.177). It is part of a to nature and abstraction, the organic and the geometric, and
her enthusiasm for limitless expanses, resulting in her cloud work. The visual effect of these images recalls the pared-down, small, atypical last series of works that Martin herself referred feeling and depersonalisation. She caused a good deal of
paintings from 1960 onwards (fig.176): One day when I was light-flooded abstraction of Agnes Martin (19122004), a key to as scary and that art historian Briony Fer described, not as consternation among those who were committed to the idea of
flying back to New Mexico, the sky below was a most beautiful figure between abstract expressionism and minimal art, who late works but delayed recurrences, which will always remain evolutionary artistic development chief among them Clement
solid white. It looked so secure that I thought I could walk right knew how to combine the antagonistic qualities of feeling and incomplete.34 The atmospheric radiance of the white shape set Greenberg. His paternalistic review of her 1946 MoMA
on it to the horizon if the door opened. The sky beyond was a coolness in a way that was charged with tension. Unlike Rothko, against a blue, sky-like background, gradually dimming as it retrospective was tantamount to an excommunication; he saw
light clear blue. It was so wonderful that I couldnt wait to be for instance, who spoke rather disparagingly of OKeeffe,31 climbs, diffuses past the edges of the painting, so that the viewer is in her art the antithesis of the purity he favoured in American
home to paint it.29 This view from the plane is an essentially Martin recognised in her a precursor, and they had more in confronted with the experience of a boundless, infinite vision. The formalism. He referred to OKeeffes work as a mixture of
modern and, in terms of the history of painting, original one, common than just their retreat to the isolation of New Mexico or deeply spiritual dimension that OKeeffe sensed in her constant scatology and hygiene a pathologizing assessment that also
marking a re-orientation of seeing, from the terrestrial horizon the passion for the horizontal that they both discovered there.32 search for the feeling of infinity in nature, and in her artistic encompassed her pseudo-modernity.37 OKeeffes decision to
to the immeasurable dimensions of the cosmos. Paradoxically, Martins works, such as Happy Holiday1999 (fig.175) in transformation, she described in 1952 as follows: When I stand exhibit abstract works in the 1950s can be read as a response to
190 191
Georgia OKeeffe
this.38 Moreover, her return to abstraction in New Mexico, having the artist summarised her view of the essential inseparability of
gained the necessary distance from New York, can probably only representation and abstraction:
be understood in the context of the burgeoning contemporary
discourse around abstraction in American art, which was
dominated by the Greenbergian paradigm of flat, self-referential
painting. The emptiness and austerity of the desert landscape
in New Mexico, which made it possible to capture abstraction
in the object itself, as it were, became a catalyst for OKeeffe to
construct a new, pared-down formal language; this language
transformed the abstract-symbolic formal vocabulary of her
early work both in dialogue and in contrast with contemporary
movements in American art, whether abstract expressionism,
colour field painting, hard-edge painting or minimalism. Art
historian Peter J. Schneemanns remark that OKeeffes art
contained no direct, verbally reflected attempts to come to
terms with the important currents of avant-garde American art
after 194539 needs reassessment in light of the monumental late
series, which constitute a kind of artistic response to them. The
title My Last Door (fig.209) for OKeeffes most abstract, but by
no means final, iteration in the Patio series is reminiscent of the
then oft-invoked rhetoric of the last image as the endpoint of
the inevitable development towards abstraction in art a finality
inherent in Greenbergs modernist conception of history.40
Fig.178
Untitled (From a Day with Juan III) 1976/7
Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 91.4
It is surprising to me how many people separate the objective

from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting
unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot
make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines
and color put together so that they say something. For me
that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the
Fig.177 most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can
Agnes Martin clarify in paint.41
Mountain 1960
Ink and graphite on canvas
24 x 30.3
While OKeeffes artistic achievement of reduction and

concentration was progressive, she retained a heightened
sensitivity to the simplest details: a sprinkling of snowflakes or
leaves, a rising moon or the sudden emergence of an armada
of cotton-wool clouds might well find their way into her emptied
visual world. Should we see this as a sense of wonder over the
small miracles of nature? As opposition to the purism propagated
by Greenberg? A declaration of her belief in artistic beauty?
Unconventional and hybrid, OKeeffes artistic stance has
proved groundbreaking. In 1976, at the age of eighty-nine,
192
Fig.179 Fig.180
Pelvis I 1944 Pedernal 1945
91.4 x 76.2 54.6 x 109.9
Milwaukee Art Museum Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
194 195
Fig.181 Fig.182
Pelvis Series 1947 Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow 1945
101.6 x 121.9 91.8 x 122.2
Private collection, courtesy Eykyn Maclean Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
196 197
Fig.183 Fig.184
Spring Tree No. 1 1945 Winter Trees, Abiqui, III 1950
76.2 x 91.4 64.5 x 78.7
Collecion of the New Mexico Museum of Art Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
198 199
Fig.185 Fig.186
Winter Cottonwoods East V 1954 Cottonwoods c.1952
101.6 x 91.6 76.2 x 91.4
200 201
Fig.187 Fig.188 Fig.189 Fig.190
Paul Strand Ansel Adams Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz
St Francis Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico 1931 Church at Ranchos de Taos (Built in 1772) 192930 Georgia OKeeffe 1931 Georgia OKeeffe Hands and Horse Skull 1931
Photograph, palladium print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
19.9 x 24.5 15.2 x 21.3 23.8 x 18.6 19.4 x 24.1
Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona National Gallery of Art, Washington The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
202 203
Fig.191 Fig.192
Ansel Adams Ansel Adams
Ghost Ranch Hills, Chama Valley, Northern New Mexico 1937 Georgia OKeeffe in the Southwest 1937
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
35.1 x 48.9 29.7 x 18.7
Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
204 205
Fig.193 Fig.194 Fig.195 Fig.196
Eagle Claw and Bean Necklace 1934 Kachina 1934 Abiqui Mesa I c.19445 Untitled (Patio Door) c.1946
Charcoal on paper Charcoal on paper Graphite on paper Graphite on paper
48.5 x 63.9 60 x 48.3 14.3 x 44.5 43.2 x 35.6
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
206 207
Fig.197 Fig.198
Blue I 1958 Blue II 1958
76.5 x 66.4 76.2 x 66
Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Indiana Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
208 209
Fig.199 Fig.200
Blue B 1959 From the River Pale 1959
76.2 x 91.4 105.4 x 79.7
Milwaukee Art Museum Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
210 211
Fig.201 Fig.202
It Was Blue and Green 1960 Drawing III 1959
Oil paint on canvas Charcoal on paper
76.5 x 101.6 47.3 x 62.9
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Philadelphia Museum of Art
212 213
Fig.203 Fig.204
Sky with Flat White Cloud 1962 Sky Above the Clouds III / Above the Clouds III 1963
152.4 x 203.2 122 x 213.4
National Gallery of Art, Washington Private collection, Texas
214 215
Georgia OKeeffe Review of an Exhibition of Georgia OKeeffe, 1946 Clement Greenberg
Review of an Exhibition Later on, in the twenties, almost all these painters, including Miss OKeeffe,
of Georgia OKeeffe renounced abstract painting and returned to representation, as if
acknowledging that they had been premature and had skipped essential

intermediate stages. It turned out that there was more to the new art than
Clement Greenberg
the mere abandonment of fidelity to nature; even more important was the
The Nation
fact that Matisse and the cubists had evolved a new treatment of the picture
15 June 1946
plane, a new perspective that could not be exploited without a stricter and
more physical discipline than these pioneers had originally bargained for.
A period of assimilation of French painting then set in that has led American
artists to a more integral understanding of what is involved in modern
art. But the cost has been a certain loss of originality and independence.
Today the more hopeful members of the latest generation of American
Georgia OKeeffes retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art artists again show Germanizing or expressionist tendencies; and these,
confirms an impression left by the Pioneers of Modern Art in America whether they stem from Klee, surrealism, or anything else, seem to remain
exhibition at the Whitney Museum last monthnamely, that the first indispensable to the originality of our art, even though they offer a serious
American practitioners of modern art showed an almost constant handicap to the formation of a solid, painterly tradition.
disposition to deflect the influences received from twentieth-century
The importance of Georgia OKeeffes pseudo-modern art is almost entirely
Paris painting in the direction of German expressionism. This tendency Pioneers of Modern Art in historical and symptomatic. The errors it exhibits are significant because

was more obvious and general in the period that saw Miss OKeeffes debut America, Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York, of the time and place and context in which they were made. Otherwise her
(1915) than it has been since, but it survives even today.
(9 April 19 May 1946). art has very little inherent value. The deftness and precision of her brush
The first American modernists mistook cubism for an applied style; or, and the neatness with which she places a picture inside its frame exert

This seems to be an error.
like many German artists, they saw the entire point of post-impressionist OKeeffes debut was her a certain inevitable charm which may explain her popularity; and some
painting in fauve coloror else they addressed themselves directly to 1916 showing at 291 in of her architectural subjects may have even more than charmbut the
a group context, but her
German expressionist art as a version of the modern which they found greatest part of her work adds up to little more than tinted photography.
first solo exhibition was the
more sympathetic and understandable than that of the School of Paris. following year in New York The lapidarian patience she has expended in trimming, breathing upon, and
In any case they read a certain amount of esotericism into the new art. (3 April 14 May 1917). polishing these bits of opaque cellophane betrays a concern that has less
Picassos and Matisses break with nature, the outcome of an absorption in to do with art than with private worship and the embellishment of private
the physical aspect of painting and, underneath everything, a reflection of fetishes with secret and arbitrary meanings.
the profoundest essence of contemporary society, seemed to them, rightly
That an institution as influential as the Museum of Modern Art should
or wrongly, the signal for a new kind of hermetic literature with mystical
dignify this arty manifestation with a large-scale exhibition is a bad sign.
overtones and a messagepantheism and pan-love and the repudiation of
I know that many experts some of them on the museums own staff
technics and rationalism, which were identified with the philistine economic
identify the opposed extremes of hygiene and scatology with modern art,
world against which the early American avant-garde was so much in revolt.
but the particular experts at the museum should have had at least enough
Alfred Stieglitzwho became Miss OKeeffes husbandincarnated, and still
sophistication to keep them apart.
incarnates, the messianism which in the America of that time was identified
with ultra modern art.
Stieglitz passed away
on 13 July 1946, less than a Clement Greenberg, Review of an Exhibition of Georgia OKeeffe [Museum of Modern Art, New York,
It was this misconception of non-naturalist art as a vehicle for an esoteric month after the publication 14 May 25 August 1946], The Nation, 15 June 1946, pp.7278. Reprinted in Clement Greenberg, The
of this article. Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 19451949, John OBrian (ed.), 2nd ed.,
message that encouraged Miss OKeeffe, along with Arthur Dove, Marsden
Chicago 1988, pp.857.
Hartley, and others, to proceed to abstract art so immediately upon her Copyright Clement Greenberg 1949, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited
first acquaintance with the modern. (It should not be forgotten, however,
that the period in question was one that in general hastened to draw
radical conclusions even when it did not understand them.) Conscious
or unconscious esotericism also accounts largely for the resemblances
between much of these artists work and that of Kandinsky in his first phase;
this being less a matter of direct influence than of an a priori community of
spirit and cultural bias.
216 217
The Light One: A Case Study Georgiana Uhlyarik
The
Light One:
A Case Fig.205
Study
Black Patio Door 1955
Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 76.2
Amon Carter Museum of American Art,
Fort Worth, Texas
In 1952, at the age of sixty-four, Georgia OKeeffe created be described as minimal, in anticipation of the new direction
one of her most simplified and distilled paintings. The light one, of abstraction brewing in New York City in the late 1950s.
as she once referred to it, is essentially a painting of soft-edged As OKeeffe quipped in 1973, Ive actually looked at one of
rectangles a geometric composition of distinct fields of black [Ellsworth] Kellys pictures and thought for a moment that Id
and grey on an expansive white ground, painted even whiter done it.4
a few years later.1 The artist exhibited it only once during her
lifetime. For some time after, the painting hung beside her bed Not since her visionary charcoal drawings and watercolours of
Georgiana Uhlyarik at Ghost Ranch, in New Mexico, taking up most of the wide the 1910s had the artist restricted her palette and her composition
wall that separated the bedroom from her studio.2 My Last Door, so intensely. These early, intuitive abstractions may, at first glance,
as she titled it, had been painted there, in her summer studio have little in common formally with her ambitious, late canvas.
at the Ranch.3 However, the two are linked by the way in which they reveal her
continuous uncompromising experiments in the relations of a few
My Last Door 19524 (fig.209) is a remarkable painting simple forms and colours.5 There is a consistency and a unity
in OKeeffes long career, inventive in its formal simplicity, throughout OKeeffes career that is rare in the art of a painter
planar arrangement of shapes and restricted palette. It might who has continued to grow and evolve as she has, remarked
218 219
Georgia OKeeffe The Light One: A Case Study Georgiana Uhlyarik
critic Barbara Rose, connecting the early and late works in her Between the black shape and the bottom grey band is a row
review of the artists 1970 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of eleven light grey rectangles fading from white to grey and
of American Art, New York.6 My Last Door opens up for OKeeffe dissolving once more into white as they traverse the length of the
a new area of experimentation in abstraction, one that she further canvas. Their faint gradations add a subtle pulse to the painting,
develops in the last years of her career. further enhanced by their rhythmical repetition and spacing at
regular intervals. They imbue it with a dynamism, held in tension
The paintings descriptive title signals, inevitably, the specificity of with the solidity of the black. They are precisely placed so that the
the thing it references. As OKeeffe said of the series of twenty or right edge of the black aligns with the small grey rectangle just
so related works painted between 1946 and 1960, Im always below. The right edge of the bottom grey band is similarly aligned
trying to paint that door I never quite get it. Its a curse the with a rectangle above. These are the only vertical arrangements
way I feel I must continually go on with that door.7 She later in the composition, suggesting the presence of an internal logic, a
wrote: That wall with a door in it was something I had to have self-generating dynamic.
and ... was painted many times.8 Yet there is something in My
Last Door that surpasses its assigned frame of reference and the The black rectangle orients and acknowledges the viewers
repeated assertion, by the artist and then by scholars, that it is first body it acts as both a vestige, and in defiance of, one-point
and foremost about a real thing and thus realistic.9 The wall with perspective. In many of OKeeffes paintings, there is no middle
the door in it is only part of the paintings content. ground; rather, foreground and background are collapsed and
yet still read as distinct. However, here, the illusion of space is
The primacy given to the subjects from the natural world, which entirely denied. Instead, the binary planes of black and white
inspired OKeeffes late abstractions, while both accurate offer at once an absence of space and a view into infinity. This
and highly revealing, has limited the discussion of her work impossible space, so eloquently evoked through simple contrasts
as being grounded in the visual environment, with scholars and geometry, speaks to Kublers description of the existential
concluding that her uneasy peace with abstraction has made her value of the work of art, as a declaration about being.16 In My
contribution to art in the United States less profound.10 However, Last Door, OKeeffe achieves a resolution in actual experience
as art historian and OKeeffe specialist Wanda Corn points out: of her problem that is to say her cursed fascination with the
wall with the door in it.
It is in the gap between the colloquial story and the Fig.206
transcendent work of art that we experience OKeeffes OKeeffes home in Abiqui has an enclosed courtyard with a In the Patio V 1948
theoretical predilections, particularly her deeply modernist double door in the centre of its long south wall, sometimes called Oil paint on canvas
belief in the autonomy of the individual work of art It is the salita door.17 The artist often stated that this door was the 61 x 101.6
National Institute of Fine Arts;
OKeeffe the person who has the quotidian experience, but reason she bought the property: I bought the house because it Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum
it is OKeeffe the painter who transforms it into a timeless had that door in the patio, the one Ive painted so often. I had no
work of art.11 peace until I bought the house.18 The patio is a kind of central
cortex of the property, with several doors and passageways are connected by the blue sky visible at the top and again seen detail and reduced to planes of colour. Each includes a thin band
George Kubler, art historian and theoretician, argues in his leading off it, including the main entrance to the house. And through the central aperture of the painting a rectangular of blue sky, the undulating shadow of the wall cast on the ground
influential 1962 book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History yet the space feels contained, singular. It stands apart as a portal that speaks to OKeeffes interest in views of the sky below, and, in the centre, the door as a stout rectangle of dark
of Things that a work of art transmits a kind of behaviour by the rectangular prism of light surrounded on its perimeter by sheltered through animal pelvic bones, which preoccupied her at the time. colour. Light is the active agent that leads OKeeffe to simplify
artist, and it also serves, like a relay, as the point of departure spaces. As the artist stated, The patio is quite wonderful in itself. Between 1943 and 1947, she produced a series of sophisticatedly these new compositions. In number II and its more colourfully
for impulses that often attain extraordinary magnitudes in later Youre in a square box; you see the sky over you, the ground abstracted paintings of this void as form, which she reformulates pronounced variation, number III, the deep shadow cast by the
transmissions.12 As Kubler further asserts, the picture is the beneath.19 The salita door feels both very close and very far in this first patio work as an interlocking series of rectangular strong, desert light obscures the edge where the adobe wall meets
resolution in actual experience of the problem that confronted away. The intense light of the New Mexico high desert casts long, black and white shapes. This ambiguous space, which alternates the ground, flattening space into a continuous field of colour. The
the painter.13 It is the viewers direct and primary encounter with pronounced shadows. In OKeeffes photographs of the patio, the between here and there, is placed in the centre of a series of blurred bottom edge of the dark rectangle is the only remnant of a
the work itself that makes possible the paintings full transformative deeply recessed door appears as a solid black rectangle with a nested rectangles shaped by the solidity of the adobe walls and fold in space.
power, however subjective or individual this experience might be. strong diagonal shadow, cast by the adjoining wall, bisecting the the formlessness of light. It is reminiscent in approach of OKeeffes
Significantly, it was the colour field artists of the 1960s who first wall.20 It is the combination of these essential elements of the patio early painting of her temporary studio apartment 59th St. Once I had the idea of making the door larger and the picture
responded to the impulse they sensed in the formal brilliance that OKeeffe explored in the series of works produced over a Studio 1919.22 A dark doorway, framed within an irregular and smaller, but then the wall, the whole surface of that wonderful
and arresting originality of OKeeffes late paintings.14, 15 My Last period of a decade and a half, starting the year after she bought unstable lit room, contains a paneled door. Painted soon after wall, would have been lost, OKeeffe said.24 This suggests
Door belongs to this group. the house in Abiqui.21 she moved to New York City, this is one of her first works inspired that she was deeply interested in the proportional relationship
by architecture. Renovations at Abiqui lasted over three years; between these two rectangles as an active source of content. The
The painting is anchored by a black rectangle, taller than it is Interestingly, OKeeffe did not begin by painting the south wall. OKeeffe moved there permanently in June 1949. While the artist wall and the door define each other they complete one another.
wide, placed just below the centre of the canvas. Along the She purchased the nearly 1.6-hectare property and the cluster said I rarely paint anything I dont know very well, these two This unique proportion is maintained even when the composition
top edge is a thin band of grey, accentuating the paintings of buildings on it, many in need of repair, in December 1945. works suggest that she got to know a new place by painting it.23 is vertical, as in her 1955 canvas Green Patio Door (see also note
horizontality and its remarkable size (it measures 122.5 x 213.8). She visited in June 1946 and drew the north patio corridor 25). Indeed, this very particular sense of scale, which allows the
At the bottom edge is a grey band twice as thick, extending from (fig.196). Her first painting of the space relates to these drawings. There are nine paintings titled In the Patio, numbered I to IX. picture plane to be nearly filled by the surface of the adobe wall,
the left only partially across, to just past the black rectangle. In the Patio I 1946 is a large work in oil paint on paper and OKeeffe painted four, numbered II to V, in 1948 for the first is first developed in her long and narrow paintings of Canadian
This break opens up the white field to extend beyond the picture the only composition in the series to suggest passage, across time taking on the subject of the wall and the door. They are barns, made in the early 1930s. In the Patio No. IV (fig.99), the
plane and challenges the simple containment of the composition. a dark threshold, between two light-filled spaces. The spaces frontal portraits of the wall with the door in it, nearly devoid of smallest of the four 1948 works, and nearly the same size as
220 221
Fig.208
Fig.207 Black Door with Red 1954
In the Patio No. IX 1950 Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 101.6 Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia
Collection of Jan T. and Marica Vilcek, promised gift
to The Vilcek Foundation
White Canadian Barn II 1932, is the most detailed of the set. with more than half of each of the canvasses dedicated to stylised was also in this show.29 Black Door with Red (fig.208) is the same size and, although it
It is the only one that suggests the three dimensionality of the clouds pulsating above. (In number VI, she extends the painting is formally dated 1954, it was likely painted around the same
patio, with a wedge of light wall protruding into the top-right edge by continuing the composition on the frame, a feature she repeats In 1951, when the artist again takes on the subject of the wall time as My Last Door.32 In Black Door with Red, OKeeffe blows
of the image, implying the continuity of the walled-in perimeter. in some of the 1955 vertical compositions).25 The world opens with a door in it, she returns to the horizontal composition and up the modest Patio Door Green Red, removing the diagonal
The flat wall is punctured twice, featuring both the salita door and up above the patio into a patterned sky. OKeeffe places the geometrical arrangement of In the Patio V, this time employing shadow, and thus the green, and retaining only the bright yellow
the entry to the south passage of the patio, with its beam structure. hard-edged geometry of the bottom register in contrast with the soft strong combinations of colour. Patio Door Green Red 1951 is a and the deep red. The hues are intense and explosive. The black
These representational details are eliminated after this painting. white forms floating in a uniform blue. The two radically different rather small painting that uses the bright yellow and orange- rectangle is overwhelmed by colour. She introduces a new
spaces meet at the top of her adobe patio wall. OKeeffe zooms in reds characteristic of OKeeffes intense explorations of colour element: a row of horizontal, light-red rectangles that cross the
In her first big painting of the series, In the Patio V (fig.206), to this top edge in a corner of the patio to create a highly abstract throughout her career. The Green Red in the title references the bottom length of the painting. Below, the yellow band is now
OKeeffe intensifies the reddish-brown colour of the diagonal composition in the largest painting of the nine, In the Patio No. IX, colour of the door and wall in bright light the reverse of the way interrupted by the field of red that spills out of the lower right-hand
shadow that slices through the door, rendering the rectangle also from 1950 (fig.207). The horizontal canvas is bifurcated by light was working in the earlier painting. Very little in this small, corner of the painting. Black Door with Red is the extreme, colour
green in the shade and black in the light. A fine edge delineates a black chevron delineating the patio walls from the sky. Dynamic intense canvas anticipates the serenity and restraint, and size, of version of My Last Door.
the wall from the ground and the sharp shapes of the wall contrast and commanding, it is today the only painting in the series that her next composition.
with the softly contoured ones on the ground. The colours are does not feature a door.26 (In her 1976 publication, OKeeffe These two large paintings were included in a group show at The
more strident, the geometry of the composition more pronounced. includes a reproduction of this painting and titles it Black Bird My Last Door is as big as Manhattan, a painting commissioned Downtown Gallery in New York in October 1955 and were
However, the sky is filled with clouds, announcing the next area of Series.)27 in 1932 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as part of an highly admired.33 Black Door with Red was often exhibited in the
interest in this group of paintings. exhibition meant to showcase mural painting.30 The paintings 1950s and 1960s, and then owned by various private collectors
OKeeffe exhibited the In the Patio paintings in her solo exhibition dimensions were set by the museum; its proportions seem to have during OKeeffes lifetime. My Last Door was returned to the
Looking up from the square box, OKeeffe turns her attention to at An American Place in 1950 the last before she permanently resonated with OKeeffe over the years.31 It seems appropriate artist after the exhibition, as she requested. Despite the finality
the sky in two smaller works from 1950. The vertical orientation closed the gallery.28 Among the many other subjects on view that in order to push herself further in her preoccupation with implied by the title, OKeeffe was not done with the door. In 1955
of In the Patio VI and VIII further accentuates the upward view, trees, flowers and the Brooklyn Bridge her final pelvis painting her wonderful wall, OKeeffe takes on a mural-size canvas. and 1956, she painted ten more, very different, wall-and-door
222 223
Fig.210
Fig.209 Wall with Green Door 1953
My Last Door 19524 Oil paint on canvas
122.5 x 213.8 National Gallery of Art, Washington
canvases. They are smaller and, with one exception, vertical offered both creative stimulation and frustration. In the Patio series she lived with it, but because it kept her engaged and fascinated.
compositions (see, for example, Black Patio Door 1955; OKeeffe sought her way through perception, not through logic. The ever-changing light and the ever-changing weather offered
fig.205). In most, the view is from the side, thus skewing the scale; limitless ways to perceive it. It is akin to John Constable studying
sometimes there is snow, and the wall is always adobe-colour. OKeeffe culled from her artistic experimentations across time, clouds. The wall with a door in it was an ongoing, active
After a pause of four years, OKeeffe painted the final work in the much as she travelled intrepidly throughout her life in search problem to be addressed. If you have an empty wall, you can
series. It is a return to the light one. The ghost of My Last Door is of creative stimulus. In this way, she continued to challenge think on it better. I like a space to think in if you can call what I
resurrected in pinkish-red and white in White Patio with Red Door herself in each new series, seeking new directions and further do thinking, she said.35
1960 (fig.174). experimenting with pictorial space. Her time in New Mexico,
while still living in New York, triggered an intense desire to paint It is unlikely that many knew or saw My Last Door until it was
OKeeffe approached the motif of the wall with a door in it the bigness of the place. The Abiqui house offered the special included in OKeeffes memorial retrospective at the National
differently than she had her previous subjects. For example, in her challenge of painting expanse. Unlike her house at Ghost Gallery of Art, Washington, in 1987.36 Barbara Rose had singled
Jack-in-the-Pulpit series of 1930, there is a gradual zooming in Ranch, which was open to the sky and offered huge vistas to her out White Patio with Red Door for lengthy discussion in her
from the full flower in the first painting to an increasingly abstract perennial Cerro Pedernal, the patios view is focused inward review of the Whitney Museum retrospective in 1970, praising its
depiction of its pistil in the last. She treats the combination of capped by the sky that opens above. In her Pelvis series, the introduction of the theme of the infinite, likely unaware that it was
desert bones and sky in a similar way; the journey from From the distillation of the bone and sky motif to a simple blue oval held a reworking of its predecessor from 1952.37 OKeeffes innovative
Faraway, Nearby 1937 (fig.126) to the void of Pelvis Series 1947 within an ivory-white edge reveals a search for ways to contain abstraction, distilled beyond reference in My Last Door, led to the
(fig.181), is similarly telescopic. The patio does not lend itself vastness. Taken as a group, the Patio paintings explore various imagining of the ribbon of road seen out her bedroom window
comfortably to this strategy. Instead, OKeeffes explorations of ways of making containment infinite. (Winter Road I 1963; fig.136) and into the endless horizon of the
the subject take an indirect route. She comes at it from a number sky above the clouds (Sky Above the Clouds III 1963; fig.204).
of vantage points and even seasons, exploring variations and then What did OKeeffe mean when she titled the light one My Last
returning to push some of these further. Although there is a sense of Door? I hope it is my last door, she writes to her dealer in 1952. Above all, My Last Door opened up OKeeffes view into infinity
a gradual progression from one painting to the next, it is limited to You can call the light picture My Last Door.34 There are the a compelling totality of meaning and existence.
a few, linked paintings. Each advances an element, be it inclusion practical implications, but there is a further truth made implicit. My
of representational detail, overall composition, or use of colour, Last Door opened up for OKeeffe a whole new state of being.
and then she seems to start all over again. This continual search She had to continually go on with that wall not only because
224 225
Georgia OKeeffe OKeeffe as I see her - Susan Hiller
1. Marya Mannes, who wrote in 1928 that, despite the works frequent and
OKeeffe as I see her Marya Mannes, Gallery
unprecedented beauty it is somehow bodiless.1
Notes: Intimate Gallery,

Creative Art, no.2,
Susan Hiller February 1928. But I was an ignorant child, and she was the only artist who was female,
frieze, no.11 whom Id ever heard positively praised. Without her, I might have gone
JuneAugust 1993 for longer imagining that art was an exclusively male game, like American
football. Artemisia Gentileschi, Rosa Bonheur, Judith Leyster, had been
forgotten. Artists I heard about, like Mary Cassatt, Marie Laurencin,
Berthe Morisot, Meret Oppenheim, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Helen
Frankenthaler, Sonia Delaunay, Alice Neel were belittled or denigrated.
People said they were all second-rate
I didnt have the good luck to mistakenly believe when I was young that
To begin with, she was always old. I thought I had discovered her for myself Czanne was a woman, as one artist friend of mine did. She grew up
when I scissored a photograph of her from a magazine and pinned it up in thinking that, like Marianne or Joanne, Czanne was clearly female, as well
my college bedroom in 1960 or thereabouts. as the greatest modern artist in the world. By the time my friend discovered
her mistake, she had internalised the notion that she, too, might someday
She was old, she was famous, I was 17 maybe 18 and bored with Eleanor
be the greatest modern artist in the world, since it would be only natural for
Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, Helen Keller and other worthy role models. Four
one woman to follow another in that position.
years later, after graduation, when I had to dismantle my college room with
its wall of hundreds of massed images, what impulse, what motive, made But speaking personally, it took effort and it took time to figure out why I
me save only this one? I really cant remember now, but was it because the was having certain doubts, certain depressions, certain complications. In
artist still intrigued me? Or was it because I liked this particular photograph the 70s I struggled to define in words the implications of my ambiguous
so much? Or was it because I, too, wanted to live in New Mexico and placement in language and culture as a woman and an artist. Thinking
wear Navajo jewellery? Or was it because I admired the luminous abstract
This is the work
about these things was discouraging thinking about these things was
painting from the Pelvis Series? reproduced as Pelvis encouraging there were debates, polemics, theories. I made work, I
Series, Red with Yellow thought about work, I thought about making work.
How can I remember what exactly made me put this cut-out photograph 1945 (fig.182). See also
away so carefully, like a flower commemorating a special day, pressed ill., p.242. Still, I hadnt looked at Art and Life in America for years and years. The book
between two of the 600 large pages of the book I still think is the very best remained unopened until recently, when I loaned it to an English art critic
history of American art, Oliver Larkins Art and Life in America? Preserved like who had been, I felt, expressing rather too freely his views on American art
a secret in the midst of this vast expanse, the photograph came with me to without knowing anything at all about its history. As I handed the book to
England inside the book, completely unremembered. I didnt look at either him, the photograph fell out. I realised I had been looking at OKeeffe as
of them again for years. though peering into a mirror to get a glimpse of myself, trying to see some
of the contradictory aspects of her importance for me, and for so many
By 1985, when I was asked to discuss my personal heroines for a book of
other artists.
the same title, I had been looking for a long time into the life and work of
Georgia OKeeffe. Curiously perhaps, like so many others, I had always been If I cant see myself except through looking at the other, what does
looking at her in isolation, not as part of any history of art. I proposed her as looking at OKeeffe show me? For one thing, it shows me that the frame
one of my heroines. of this mirror is too constricting, the reflection of OKeeffe takes up the
whole surface, its too binary, just me and her, with no space for background
My existence as an artist requires absolute honesty about my sources of
or context.
inspiration. No degree of potential historical or social embarrassment could
prevent my saying that undoubtedly, I would not have been able to be an When I pinned the photograph on my wall, I must have already seen many
artist of the kind I am, without having leaned on her Or, rather, on my reproductions of Stieglitzs photos representing the hands, the face, the
image of her. naked torso of Georgia OKeeffe. (In fact, some of these images were so
familiar that my college friends and I sometimes referred sarcastically to our
And I dont even like her work that much, aside from the early vivid
own inky or paint-stained hands as the hands of Georgia OKeeffe, which
watercolours which I find very exciting and certain of the more abstract
struck us as hilariously funny.)
pieces from other periods of her life. I am in general agreement with
226 227
This photograph is not by Stieglitz. It is an image of an old woman looking the artworks produced by her are available for the same kind of erotic
at a medium-sized abstract painting. It is her painting, she painted it. delectation and scrutiny as her body. This is complicated.
And she is showing it to the photographer and to us, rather artificially
Insofar as this is a womans body, the female onlooker, willingly or not,
its clear, on a large studio easel transported out to the desert probably
entirely or partially, is identified with the body under observation. It happens
just to display this painting, which, being abstract, does not seem to me
to be that of Georgia OKeeffe, artist. Her art is shown as part of her body.
to benefit from being literally placed back in the landscape. In fact, this
In his portraits of her with her work, Stieglitz illustrates his belief that
now makes me very uneasy. I know how posed this image must be, I have
what he had found in her work, to quote his famous words, was Finally, a
posed for some similar ones myself. Still, it is a fairly conventional portrayal
woman on paper. Is there some way of looking at her work, or some kind of
of the artist with one of her works. I must have been very glad, so many
interpretation by means of which we could exempt ourselves from seeing
years ago, to come across, among all the remarkable images of her that
as if in collusion with the great artist, her husband, photographing her?
exist, this one relatively straightforward picture of OKeeffe standing by her
Here the dimension of desire appears, since we are not really in the image
work in an ordinary way. Stieglitz photographed we see: I desire to see OKeeffes work as separate from her body, as an act

her painting in 1918, and

Did no one ever photograph OKeeffe actually working, painting? Did she Ansel Adams in 1937. of conscious creation, as art. I do not wish to consume these photographs
refuse this? Was it too private? Or did she simply co-operate with various as the photographer intended me to; I do desire to see his intention as an
photographers, none of whom, for whatever reason, wanted to picture artefact of his own desire, as his representation, not as a reading of her
her at work? If so, her function in other peoples work that is, in their work, her desire. Or of mine.
photographs is that of an artists model, providing a vehicle for the vision,
How might I function so as not to be fixed in my pose as the embodiment
fantasies, or projections of others. In which case, hardly any photograph
of the desire of another? This is urgent, for the future. Reading the body as
of her can tell us much about her. They are all constructions, quite clearly.
the sole sign of identity is how patriarchy regulates the bodies of women.
These images of OKeeffe do not display her subjectivity, but rather the
Herself as her body. Her body as a site of natural reproduction, not cultural
constitutive forces of desire in the men who photographed her. And though
production. Her femaleness reduced to her sexuality. To have to endure,
they may well be art, and useful, too, in showing a range of fantasies and
as OKeeffe did, having this said of ones lifes work that it registered the
projections our culture allows as legitimate in respect to the female body,
manner of perception anchored in the constitution of the woman. The
I care for them much less than I care for OKeeffes paintings.
organs that differentiate the sex speak. Women always feel, when they feel
Stieglitz showed her hands sewing, but never painting. Her hands caress a 2. strongly, through the womb.2 No wonder she hated being called a woman
Paul Rosenfeld, American
skull or a bit of gnarled wood, they are oddly folded or peculiarly posed in artist; she couldnt speak as a woman, since her sexual organs did.
Painting, The Dial,
relation to her breasts, her neck, etc. In his photograph of her hands with December 1921, no.71,
The artists terrible struggle to locate, define, and represent her own
a large pelvis-like watercolour, Stieglitz poses the hands at the perimeter pp.64970.
subjectivity is conveyed by OKeeffe in her work. But subjectivity, a sense
of the pelvis shape as though fondling it languidly. By implication, these
of identity, doesnt reside in the body you can see your own or anothers.
hands and this suggestive void are parts of one body. There is no separation
Re-presenting the body as a sign, identifying self with a sexuality defined by
between the artist and the work, her painting replaces a specific area
and for the other, re-inscribing woman as flower, is like rattling the chains
of her body, and her hands end at the wrist. We are witnesses to the
of your prison. Without showing a way out, it signals the desire to escape.
representation of the artists work as an intimate part of her own anatomy.
In OKeeffes work, the signal is loud and clear, sustained and courageous.
In several related photographs, OKeeffe is shown gesturing provocatively, There is no reason, having heard it, not to understand it as a message or
oddly echoing the arrangement of certain forms in her abstract paintings, statement lucidly analysing a situation, a predicament.
which are displayed only as backgrounds, not as autonomous works. In
One of OKeeffes strategies in painting was to undermine or destabilise
another image, which features the juxtaposition of two artworks without
the notion of the female body by eliminating its traces in her work.
any human presence, Stieglitz placed a small phallus-shaped sculpture in
Her paintings are always images, never objects. In this they seem to be
front of the large void at the centre of Music Pink and Blue No. I (1919),
talking back to photography. This is implied in her adroit references to
documenting his own fantasy of a sexual relationship between the abstract
photographic artefacts, in The Shelton with Sunspots (1923), for example, or in
forms of the two works.
This is the work
reproduced as Music

This is the work the extreme closeups of flowers for which she is famous. Her refusal to
In looking at these photographs, we are truly participating in a private Pink and Blue No. I 1918 reproduced as The Shelton evoke body has especially interesting implications in those works, like the
(fig.27) in this catalogue. with Sunspots, N.Y. 1926
view not just witnessing the traditional relationship of a photographer (fig.4) in this catalogue. flowers, which are said to represent body, female body. In my experience,
See Interpretation 1919
to a beloved model but being invited to share in the revelation that (fig.59) for Stieglitzs work. while it is possible in art to evoke body, this is not what is communicated
228 229
through representation. Intimacy is a blur, a smear, a stain, not a clinical studio. In fact, it now occurs to me, my image of OKeeffe is based on a
sharpness. There is nothing in her works content to justify its reception by photograph cut from a magazine long ago, that may well be the only one
viewers as living and shameless private documents.3 3. showing the artist as an unfetishised, full-bodied individual, alongside her
Ibid.
work Was it his idea? Or did she, for once, suggest the idea for her pose
I read content in the rhythms, contrasts, flows and gaps of the material [This quotation is incorrectly
attributed to Rosenfeld. to the photographer?
practice of painting, not in its subject matter. (To confuse subject matter
See Tanya Barson,
with content is literary.) Aside from early watercolours, her technique is OKeeffes Century, n.14,
coolly detached. No texture. Everything is surface, as in a mirror or through in this catalogue.] Susan Hiller, OKeeffe as I see her, frieze, issue 11, JuneAugust 1993, pp.246
(Reproduced with the note: This text was originally given as a talk for Birkbeck College,
a lens. One might well say that it implied a kind of visual efficiency that University of London at the South Bank Centre.)
could be taken as a symbol of intellectual honesty.4 That was how she dealt 4.
Oliver Larkin, Art and Life
with the issue of subjectivity for most of her life.
in America, revised and
enlarged ed., New York
As Gertrude Stein insisted, A rose is a rose is a rose. It is not part of a
1960, p.390.
womans body, nor is a woman a flower. In an important way, much of
OKeeffes work is as ungendered as the work of most American artists of
her generation. To do justice to OKeeffe in an historical context we need
to look very hard at the other artists who emerged in the United States
during the same period. She was in touch with many of them, and this set
of connections ought to be visible to us. OKeeffes New York paintings
need to be seen alongside, say, Charles Sheelers Church Street El [1920].
Her early and late abstractions are related to those of her close friend
Arthur Dove, for instance his Snow Thaw [1930]. Her approach to landscape
ought to be viewed in relation to the work of those of her contemporaries
with whom she had personal connections, like John Marin or the now-
forgotten Louis Eilshemius, and the better-known Charles Demuth.
Otherwise, she will continue to be seen as an isolated figure, an aberration,
a sport, a freak of nature.
Linda Nochlins conclusion to her historical survey of women artists points

out that, In every instance, women artists would seem to be closer to other
artists and writers of their own period than they are to each other. This is
an anti-essentialist refusal to see all women as woman, mans other. The
artist who is a woman is a speaking subject whose work represents her time
as much as her place, her world view as well as herself, her mind as well
as her body. OKeeffes work, more than most, exemplifies this dialectical
sequence of terms. And in addition, it implies something more, something
for the future. In 1925, in a letter to Mabel Dodge, she wrote: What the men
cant what I want written I do not know I have no definite idea of what it
should be but a woman who has lived many things and who sees lines and
colours as an expression of living might say something that a man cant I
feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can
explore the men have done all they can do about it.5 5.
Georgia OKeeffe, letter to
There is one very early Stieglitz photograph of her in a long dress holding a Mabel Dodge Luhan, 1925,
saw in her hand, beside a man on a ladder trimming trees but I have never in Katherine Hoffmann,
An Enduring Spirit: The
seen an image of her holding in her hand a paintbrush or a pencil. There are Art of Georgia OKeeffe,
pictures of her looking at rocks, bones, sticks; standing at social gatherings; Metuchen, NJ, 1984, p.21.
and sitting in the desert. There are no photographs of her at work in the
230 231
Georgia OKeeffe Chronology Hannah Johnston
1887 1914
1887 19035 the gallery often to see other shows. OKeeffe, renewing her ambitions as an
Georgia Totto OKeeffe is born on 15 OKeeffe re-joins her family in As the recipient of the Chase Award artist, and will have a lifelong impact
November to Francis Calyxtus and Ida Williamsburg in the spring and, in the scholarship, she participates in the on her ideas. In August, she moves to
Totto OKeeffe at the familys dairy autumn, enrols as a boarding student at Leagues outdoor summer school at Amarillo, Texas, to take up a two-year
farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Chatham Episcopal Institute. Supported Lake George, in upstate New York. position as head of the art department
the eldest daughter and the second by her art teacher and headmistress, of the citys public school.
of seven children including: Francis Elizabeth May Willis, she edits the 190810
Calyxtus (18851959); Ida Ten Eyck schools yearbook in her final year. With a downturn in her fathers business 1913
(18891961); Anita Natalie (1891 fortunes, OKeeffe returns to the Tottos OKeeffe returns to the University of
1985); Alexis Wyckoff 1 (18921930); 1905 in Chicago and undertakes freelance Virginia for the summer as Bements
Catherine Blanche (18951987); and Again taking up residence with family commercial artwork until eyesight teaching assistant a position she holds
Claudia Ruth (18991984). Within her uncle and aunt, Charles and Alletta problems caused by a bout of measles until 1916.
living memory of the Civil War, she is Totto OKeeffe begins studies at the force her to give up. She returns to
born under the presidency of Grover School of The Art Institute of Chicago, her family, who have relocated to 1914
Cleveland, the first Democrat elected Illinois, under John Vanderpoel. Charlottesville, Virginia, following her On 28 July, the First World War
following the conflict. mothers contracting tuberculosis. The begins. OKeeffe reads the translation
1906 disease is unrelenting in its impact on of Wassily Kandinskys The Art of
18921900 OKeeffe contracts typhoid fever Rufus W. Holsinger the family, having already claimed the Spiritual Harmony (1911) with Bements
OKeeffe begins her education at Town in the summer, and begins a long Miss Georgia OKeeffe 1915 lives of OKeeffes grandfather and encouragement and enrols at Teachers
Hall School, a one-room primary school convalescence at home, where she three paternal uncles. College in the autumn, where she
in Sun Prairie. She receives weekly remains until the following year. studies with Dow for the first time.2
drawing lessons at home with her It is the first of a number of spells of 1911 She develops a friendship with
Georgia OKeeffe 1903 sisters, Ida and Anita, and later studies ill health that recur periodically OKeeffe takes up her first teaching post classmate Anita Pollitzer, with whom
with local watercolourist, Sarah Mann. throughout her life. in the autumn, acting as a substitute she visits an exhibition of the work of
for Elizabeth May Willis at Chatham Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque at
1901 19078 Episcopal Institute. 291 in December.
OKeeffe enrols as a boarding student OKeeffe resumes her studies in
at Sacred Heart Academy, a convent September at the Art Students League 1912
school in Madison, Wisconsin, of New York, where she is taught by During the summer, OKeeffe attends
where she receives her first formal art William Merritt Chase. Photographer a drawing class at the University
instruction from Sister Angelique. Alfred Stieglitz (born 1864 in Hoboken, Claudia O'Keeffe of Virginia, Charlottesville, run by
Georgia OKeeffe in Canyon, Texas 1917
New Jersey, to German-Jewish Alon Bement from Teachers College,
1902 immigrants) shows nude figurative Columbia University, New York.
When the family move to Williamsburg, drawings by Auguste Rodin at his New An introduction to the principles
Virginia, OKeeffe stays behind to York gallery the Little Galleries of of Bements colleague, Arthur
attend Madison High School. She and the Photo-Secession, known as 291 Wesley Dow the head of the art
her elder brother live with their maternal after its Fifth Avenue address in the department at Teachers College, who
aunt, Leonore (Lola) Totto. first of many pioneering exhibitions of emphasises freedom of expression and
avant-garde European artists. OKeeffe compositional harmony in opposition to
visits with classmates and returns to an imitation of nature is revelatory for
232 233
1915 1922
1915 1917 July, when he leaves his wife Emmeline 1921
OKeeffe begins a one-year position as Stieglitz opens OKeeffes first solo (ne Obermeyer) after twenty-five A retrospective of Stieglitzs
an art teacher at Columbia College, exhibition at 291 on 3 April; it is the years of marriage. OKeeffe accepts photographs, including forty-five
South Carolina, in September. last before the gallerys closure in the Stieglitzs offer of a years financial portraits of OKeeffe (some nudes),
Correspondence with Pollitzer is a summer due to financial difficulties. As support and resigns from her position opens to huge popular interest at the
vital link to the political and artistic the show has already been dismantled in Texas to concentrate on painting. Anderson Galleries, New York, on
happenings in New York and is by the time OKeeffe arrives in New Stieglitz photographs her intensely and 7 February. In the year that follows,
enriched by copies of Stieglitzs York in May, Stieglitz re-hangs it for intimately over the summer and takes artist Marsden Hartley and critic Paul
periodicals, Camera Work (190317) her to view and photographs her for her to his familys summer residence at Rosenfeld, amongst others, publish
and 291 (191516), which she requests the first time, both with and without her Lake George for the first time in August. articles that lay the foundations for
Alfred Stieglitz from the gallery. A series of charcoal works. OKeeffe meets members of OKeeffes father dies on 6 November psychoanalytical interpretations of her
Alfred Stieglitz
Main Room Wall, Next to Door, Right 1917
abstractions, partly indebted to Dows Stieglitzs circle, including photographer Georgia OKeeffe with watercolour paint box 1918 in Petersburg, Virginia, but the news work.6 They draw on Stieglitzs views
teachings, are begun in October and Paul Strand, with whom she begins does not reach her until the armistice on he first portrays her art as an expression
posted to Pollitzer before Christmas. a correspondence on her return to 11 November. of her female sexuality, with recourse
Canyon. For encouraging her students to Sigmund Freud, in the October 1916
1916 to finish their studies rather than 1919 issue of Camera Work as well as the
On 1 January, Pollitzer shows enlisting in the war effort she is labelled OKeeffe and Stieglitz spend the way his own compositions conflated her
the charcoals to Stieglitz. His unpatriotic.4 During a holiday to summer at Lake George they travel work and body.7
enthusiastic interest initiates a fervent Colorado with sister Claudia in August, there from New York City seasonally for
correspondence, which encourages OKeeffes train passes through the next decade. 1922
the artist to send packages of her work New Mexico and she is captivated by In February, OKeeffe designs a
as she completes it. OKeeffe receives the landscape.5 1920 typographic logo for Manuscripts
her professional, public debut on 23 Seeking respite from a frantic New (MSS.), a new periodical published
May when Stieglitz includes ten of 1918 York and distractions at Lake George, by Stieglitz and several collaborators.
the charcoals in a group exhibition Taken ill in January as strains of flu OKeeffe makes her first journey to She contributes an essay to a special
at 291. Whilst it has been widely spread across the country later York Beach, Maine, in March. After issue in December that explores the
suggested that the work was hung resulting in the Great Pandemic a long fight for womens suffrage, the question: Can a photograph have the
without her permission, research into OKeeffe takes a leave of absence right to vote is granted on 18 August significance of art?8
the correspondence confirms that from West Texas State and relocates to with the ratification of the Nineteenth
O'Keeffe knew that Stieglitz intended the home of a friend in Waring, Texas, Amendment of the United States
to exhibit it.3 OKeeffe returns to to avoid catching influenza. Stieglitz Constitution. The victory is celebrated
Texas in September as head of the art is increasingly concerned about her by the National Womans Party
department at West Texas State Normal health and, in May, sends Strand from (NWP) which OKeeffe had joined
College in Canyon, and is immediately New York to persuade her to return in 1914, remaining a member until its
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz inspired by the vastness of the Texas with him to the city. She is met at the dissolution in the 1970s. OKeeffe and
Georgia OKeeffe c.1919 Panhandle. Following the death of her train station in New York on 10 June. Stieglitz move into his brother Leopolds
mother from tuberculosis on 1 May, OKeeffe takes up residence in a studio apartment at 60 East 65th Street, where
OKeeffe assumes responsibility for her apartment at 114 East 59th Street they live until 1924.
youngest sister, Claudia, who moves to belonging to Stieglitzs niece, Elizabeth,
live with her in October. and is joined by the photographer in
234 235
1923 1931
1923 1925 1928 1930
Stieglitz opens a second solo exhibition On 9 March, Stieglitz opens Seven In April, Stieglitzs announcement of his On 7 January, OKeeffes brother
of OKeeffes work on 29 January Americans at the Anderson Galleries. sale of six OKeeffe calla lily paintings Alexius dies from injuries to his heart
at the Anderson Galleries, which is The exhibition features 159 works by for $25,000 is widely publicised. and lungs originally sustained through
again reviewed in Freudian terms. Marin, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Although the transaction ultimately falls gas exposure on the Western Front.
Following a period of postnatal Hartley, Strand, OKeeffe and himself through, it confirms the artists economic OKeeffes first exhibition at An
depression, Stieglitzs daughter Kitty a group he upholds as authentically independence and importance to the American Place, where she shows
(Katherine, b.1898) is diagnosed with American and OKeeffe first shows gallerys commercial stability. OKeeffe annually until 1946, opens in February.
schizophrenia in June and permanently her large-scale flower paintings to great journeys to the Midwest in the summer She returns for a second summer
institutionalised. At this time Stieglitz acclaim. OKeeffe and Stieglitz move to visit her family. as Dodge Luhans guest in Taos,
makes clear he will not agree to have into an apartment in the 34-storey establishing her independent seasonal
Alfred Stieglitz children with OKeeffe. Undoubtedly Shelton Hotel on Lexington Avenue 1929 pilgrimage to New Mexico.
Georgia OKeeffe probably1924 scarred by personal experience, in November. In December, Stieglitz In place of Lake George, OKeeffe
Stieglitz ends discussions on the opens his second gallery, the Intimate departs for New Mexico in April with 1931
matter, fearing parenthood would Gallery, in the Anderson Galleries Strands wife, Rebecca, spending four OKeeffe rents a property on the H&M
be a distraction from OKeeffes work, building and OKeeffe assumes a key months as the guest of arts patron and Ranch at Alcalde, New Mexico, in
a risk to her health and a burden for role in exhibition installation. writer, Mabel Dodge Luhan (married April. In May, she first discovers the
all concerned. to Pueblo Indian Tony Luhan), in Taos. Plaza Blanca or White Place near
1926 Whilst it has been suggested that Abiqui in the Chama River Valley
1924 OKeeffes first solo exhibition opens her visit was prompted by Stieglitzs a limestone rock formation that she
Simultaneous exhibitions of OKeeffes in February at the Intimate Gallery, Alfred Stieglitz intensifying relationship with Norman, revisits often. Having long been a
and Stieglitzs work open at the where she shows annually until 1929. Georgia OKeeffe near The Pink House, research into the correspondence collector of stones, shells and other
Anderson Galleries in March. Later that month, OKeeffe speaks at the Taos, New Mexico 1929 confirms that he remained focused small souvenirs from her tramping
Attempting to control what has become NWP dinner in Washington, D.C. on O'Keeffe this summer.10 She meets through the landscape, OKeeffe picks
an undesirably sexualised public photographer Ansel Adams, who up sun-bleached animal bones from
profile, OKeeffe withholds her early 1927 becomes a lifelong friend, and is the desert throughout the summer and
abstractions and includes a statement The artists first museum exhibition (a rejuvenated by the artistic possibilities of ships a container of them back to Lake
in the catalogue that proclaims her small retrospective of fifteen paintings) the landscape. OKeeffe learns to drive George. Before she can integrate them
intention to clarify the issues written opens at the Brooklyn Museum, New and purchases a Ford car. She makes into her work, Stieglitz photographs her
of by the critics.9 Stieglitz is granted York, in June. Over the same period, excursions to Navajo sites in Arizona, with them.11
a divorce six years after separating OKeeffe develops, and undergoes Colorado and Utah and attends Native
from Emmeline and marries OKeeffe surgeries for, two successive (benign) American dances. The Intimate Gallery
Alfred Stieglitz in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, on breast tumours from which her recovery closes in June with the demolition of the
Georgia OKeeffe 1930s 11 December. George Engelhard is lengthy. Dorothy Norman, the twenty- building, and Norman and the Strands
(Stieglitzs brother-in-law) and artist two-year-old wife of an heir to the campaign to secure and underwrite a
John Marin are witnesses. OKeeffe Sears, Roebuck & Co. department store Alfred Stieglitz new space; Stieglitz opens An American
fortune, first visits the Intimate Gallery in Georgia OKeeffe 1931
keeps her maiden name. Place, his final gallery, at 509 Madison
the autumn. Enthralled by Stieglitz, she Avenue on 15 December. The New York
returns frequently. stock market crashes on 24 October,
triggering the Great Depression.
236 237
1932 1944
1932 landscape. Norman publishes America 1938 1942
OKeeffe accepts a $1,500 commission & Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait Stieglitzs second heart attack, in April, While in Madison to receive an
to paint a mural for the powder room on the occasion of Stieglitzs seventieth delays OKeeffes customary summer honorary degree from the University
of Radio City Music Hall, New York, in birthday.12 OKeeffe declines to departure for New Mexico. In May, she of Wisconsin, OKeeffe meets architect
April without consulting Stieglitz. In spite contribute to the publication. travels to receive an honorary Doctorate Frank Lloyd Wright for the first time, at
of his disapproval (largely on financial in Fine Arts from the College of William his Spring Green home, Taliesin East.
grounds), she spends the summer at 1935 and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia She and an ageing Stieglitz move to a
Lake George working on the project The artist returns to New Mexico in the the first of many such distinctions. Again new apartment in December, one block
until technical difficulties become summer, detouring through Texas to accompanied by Adams and McAlpin, away from An American Place at 59
insurmountable in the autumn. OKeeffe collect works she left in Canyon on her OKeeffe visits California and the Sierra East 54th Street.
leaves the U.S. for the first time in sudden departure in 1918. Demuth dies Nevada for the first time in August.
June, visiting the Gasp Peninsula in in the autumn and names OKeeffe as 1943
Canada with Stieglitzs niece, Georgia the beneficiary of his works on canvas. 1939 In January, OKeeffe oversees the
Engelhard. Norman spearheads Arnold Newman
OKeeffe travels to Hawaii in February installation of her first full-scale
the renewal of An American Places 1936 Portrait of Georgia OKeeffe and her husband, with a commission to produce work retrospective at The Art Institute
lease following its expiration in the In April, OKeeffe and Stieglitz relocate photographer Alfred Stieglitz, New York 1944 for a Dole Food Company promotion. of Chicago.
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe 1933 summer and Stieglitz registers the new from the Shelton Hotel to an apartment Having unsuccessfully submitted
paperwork in her name. OKeeffe at 405 East 54th Street. OKeeffe paintings of other subjects, she 1944
moves into her sister Anitas apartment spends the summer at a rented adobe grudgingly delivers the requested Accompanied by Chabot, OKeeffe
on Park Avenue in late December as house on Ghost Ranch called Rancho de pineapple in April. In the same month, makes multiple camping excursions to
Stieglitzs affair with Norman continues. los Burros, which she would later own. the futuristic New York Worlds Fair a site she calls the Black Place, an
Its patio offers expansive views of the opens at Flushing Meadows-Corona area of the Bisti Badlands in Navajo
1933 Cerro Pedernal, a flat-topped mountain Park. OKeeffe is celebrated by the Country, approximately 240 kilometres
In February, OKeeffe is diagnosed that she claimed God would give to her committee as one of the twelve most west of Ghost Ranch, that she first
with psychoneurosis. She spends two if she painted it enough.13 In September, notable women of the past fifty years. visited in 1936. The distinctive black
months at Doctors Hospital, New York, OKeeffe receives a $10,000 and grey hills prove captivating and act
before convalescing with friends in commission from Elizabeth Arden to 1940 as the inspiration for one of the artists
Bermuda. The profoundly traumatic make a large-scale flower painting for OKeeffe purchases Rancho de los most radically progressive series of
experience leaves her unable to paint her New York exercise salon. Burros, her first property, in October. abstractions (Black Place IIV 1944,
for thirteen months. In the same month, she meets budding figs 1603). In September, Rosalind
1937 writer Maria Chabot, who becomes a Irvine from the Whitney Museum of
1934 From Ghost Ranch, OKeeffe continues close associate. American Arts Art Research Council
Charles Peterson OKeeffe spends the summer in New her excursions into the dramatic begins a conversation with Stieglitz
Elizabeth Arden and Georgia OKeeffe Mexico for the first time in three years, landscapes of Arizona, Colorado 1941 about producing a catalogue of
at the opening of the New School again based at the H&M Ranch. In and Utah: with writer Spud Johnson For the first time, in May, OKeeffe OKeeffes work.
(with OKeeffes Jimson Weed) 1936
August, she first visits Ghost Ranch a in September; and with Adams and makes the journey to New Mexico
dude ranch north of Abiqui, owned collector David McAlpin in October. At by aeroplane from Chicago. On 7
by Arthur Pack and returns often to the end of the year, poor health forces December the Japanese strike Pearl
paint the spectacularly-coloured rock Stieglitz to end his six-decade-long Harbor and the U.S. enters the Second
Maria Chabot
formations of the surrounding photographic career. World War.
Georgia OKeeffe, The Black Place 1944
238 239
1945 1962
1945 Manuscript Library, Yale University.14 In 1953 1960
Following the detonation of two atomic June 1949, OKeeffe leaves New York OKeeffes third retrospective, organised The artists fourth retrospective
bombs in August weapons that had to live permanently in New Mexico, by The Downtown Gallery, opens opens at the Worcester Art Museum,
been tested at Los Alamos in the New where she divides her time seasonally at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, Massachusetts, in October. The same
Mexico desert in July the Second between Abiqui (winter and spring) in February. The artist visits Europe month, OKeeffe returns to Asia and
World War ends on 2 September. In and Ghost Ranch (summer and autumn). for the first time in the spring, making journeys on to the Pacific Islands.
December, OKeeffe purchases from August sees her election to the illustrious excursions to France and Spain. In
the Catholic Archdiocese a ruined National Institute of Arts and Letters. August, Cold War fears are amplified 1961
adobe haienda in Abiqui that she by the news that the Soviet Union has OKeeffe makes a rafting trip down the
had first sought in 1940, and appoints 1950 tested its first hydrogen bomb. OKeeffe Colorado River (290 kilometres in seven
Chabot to oversee its renovation over In June, Pollitzer begins a biography installs a fallout shelter at Abiqui. days) with Porter and photographer
the next three years. Her organic that the artist will later underwrite. Todd Webb in late July. She repeats the
garden eventually feeds the household It is the first of many such records 1956 expedition in 1969 and 1970.
year-round. of OKeeffes life that are produced In the spring, OKeeffe spends three
with and without her endorsement. months in Peru. She is unhappy with the 1962
1946 OKeeffes exhibition at An American Yousuf Karsh
first draft of Pollitzers biography and In December, OKeeffe is elected to the
In February, Stieglitz opens his last Place between October and November Georgia OKeeffe 1956 ceases financial support.15 American Academy of Arts and Letters.
exhibition of OKeeffes work at An marks its closure. She appoints Edith
Ansel Adams American Place. Three months later, Halpert at The Downtown Gallery as 1959
Alfred Stieglitz and Painting by Georgia OKeeffe, her second retrospective (and the her new gallerist. OKeeffe embarks on a lengthy period
An American Place, New York City 1944 institutions first solo exhibition devoted of travel, visiting East and Southeast
to a woman artist) opens at the Museum 1951 Asia and the Near and Middle East,
of Modern Art, New York. Stieglitz Initiating an extensive schedule of as well as India, Pakistan and Italy. It
suffers a stroke on 10 July, which international travel over the next inspires work that synthesises her view
leaves him in a coma. OKeeffe returns thirty years, OKeeffe drives to of clouds and landscape formations
immediately from New Mexico and is Mexico in February with Johnson and from the air a novel experience for
with him when he dies on 13 July, aged photographer Eliot Porter. She visits most Americans in the early stages of
eighty-two. As Stieglitzs principal heir artists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and the Jet Age.
and sole executor, OKeeffe dismisses Miguel Covarrubias (who she had
Norman and assumes managerial met in Taos in 1929) as well as the
responsibility for An American Place. Mayan ruins in Yucatn. In September,
She employs Doris Bry in the autumn to she climbs the Cerro Pedernal for the
help organise Stieglitzs papers. first time.
19479 1952
Over two years, OKeeffe works with OKeeffe receives her first solo
Bry to settle Stieglitzs estate. His art exhibition at The Downtown Gallery Todd Webb
Philippe Halsman collection is distributed among seven in February. A second (1955) and OKeeffe Walking in the White Place, Abiqui,
Georgia OKeeffe at Ghost Ranch, Abiqui,
public institutions and his papers sent third (1958) will follow, before her New Mexico 1957
New Mexico 1948
to the Beinecke Rare Book and last in 1961
.
240 241
1963 1986
Postscript
1963 19712 1978
To celebrate the artists centennial, a
OKeeffe visits Greece, Egypt and the OKeeffe gradually loses her central OKeeffe writes the catalogue
major retrospective was staged at the
Near East in the spring. In August, she vision due to macular degeneration introduction for Georgia OKeeffe:
National Gallery of Art, Washington,
ends her relationship with Halpert and and is left only with peripheral eyesight. A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz at The
in 1987 and subsequently toured
appoints Bry as her new agent. While she continues to paint until the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
nationwide. The Georgia OKeeffe
late 1970s, she produces her last York. The exhibition reintroduces
Foundation was established in 1989
1965 unassisted work in this medium in 1972. nudes not seen since the early 1920s
to sustain the artists legacy and, in
Aged seventy-seven, the artist paints the to the public.
1997, the Georgia OKeeffe Museum
largest work of her career: Sky Above 1973
was opened in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
Clouds IV (243.8 x 731.5 cm). Potter-sculptor Juan Hamilton visits 1983
Tony Vaccaro through the generosity of Anne and
Georgia OKeeffe with painting in the desert, OKeeffe at Abiqui. He becomes her A visit to Costa Rica in November
John Marion. Following the dissolution
New Mexico 1960 1966 assistant and close friend, facilitating marks the end of the artists
of the Foundation in 2006, OKeeffes
A career survey opens in March at the exhibitions, publications and travel, as international travel.
estate is now held by the museum. The
Amon Carter Museum of American Art well as teaching her to work with clay.
OKeeffe-Stieglitz correspondence at
in Fort Worth, Texas. OKeeffe visits 1984
the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
England and Austria in September. 1974 After a career spanning seven decades
Todd Webb Library, Yale University which had
A book of reproductions of a 1968 and in declining health OKeeffe
Georgia OKeeffe on the portal at the been sealed by the artist until twenty
1970 portfolio of OKeeffes work on paper makes her final drawing. She takes up
Ghost Ranch 1963 years after her death was opened
OKeeffe is awarded the Gold Medal from 1915 to 1963, with a text by the residence with Hamilton and his family
in 2006 for public view. On 20
for Painting by the National Institute of artist, Some Memories of Drawings, is in Santa Fe in the spring, in need of
November 2014, the financial success
Arts and Letters in May. In the autumn, produced in collaboration with Bry.16 greater proximity to medical facilities.
enjoyed by OKeeffe throughout her life
a major retrospective opens at the
was surpassed with the sale of Jimson
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1976 1985
Weed/White Flower No. 1 1932
New York and later travels to The and Viking Press, New York, publishes the OKeeffe receives the prestigious
(fig.110) at Sothebys, New York, for
San Francisco Museum of Art (now first monograph of the artists work. National Medal of Arts from President
$44.4 million. It is the highest value
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Ronald Reagan.
work of art ever sold at auction by an
OKeeffe is heralded as a figurehead 1977
artist who was a woman.
by a new generation of feminist In January, OKeeffe is presented with 1986
artists, whose sexualised readings and the Presidential Medal of Freedom the On 6 March, OKeeffe dies in Santa Fe
essentialist understanding of her work United States highest civilian award at the age of 98. Following
she nonetheless continues to refute, by President Gerald Ford. She dismisses her wishes, no memorial service is held
and receives fresh admiration from the Bry in the spring and appoints Hamilton and her ashes are scattered from the
general public nationwide. as her new representative. Lengthy Cerro Pedernal.
lawsuits and countersuits follow and
continue for eight years.
Ansel Adams
Georgia OKeeffe, Carmel, California 1976
242 243
Georgia OKeeffe Notes
researchers for the last ten ties were with Germany, where Herald, 4 February 1923. Reprinted 27. McBride in Lynes 1989, p.187.
years. They continue to yield he studied (at Berlins Technische in Lynes 1989, pp.1879. McBride 28. Rosenfeld in Lynes 1989, p.174.
new information. Hochschule) as a young man. commented that all OKeeffes
29. Lynes in Broude and Garrard
17. OKeeffe refers to this in a As an early gift to OKeeffe in inhibitions had been removed
(eds.) 1992, pp.4389.
letter to Anita Pollitzer in October Texas, he sent his favourite book, before Freud had reached across
30. OKeeffes friend Anita Pollitzer
1915, where she describes a swirling Johann Wolfgang von Goethes the Atlantic, but that another
Faust (1808). Later, in the 1940s, Stieglitz had taken the place would become chairman of the
form as representing herself and
Clement Greenberg would critique of Freud. NWP in 1945.
Notes
a companion, Arthur Macmahon,
dabbling our feet in the water the Germanizing tendencies of 23. Georgia OKeeffe, Statement, 31. Lynes identifies 1922 as the
and later, in 1977, to a private this earlier modernist generation, in Alfred Stieglitz Presents One pivotal year when OKeeffe
collector, these abstractions were in the wake of the Second World Hundred Pictures: Oils, Water- introduced her own voice into the
done after sitting on the edge of War, of which more below. In colors, Pastels, Drawings, by criticism, which demonstrated her
a river, and having a conversation a letter to Alfred Stieglitz on 1 Georgia OKeeffe, American, exh. fundamental disagreement with
with a friend about abstractions July 1917, OKeeffe refers to her brochure, The Anderson Galleries, how she had been promoted. See
from nature. Imade two experiences of teaching children 29 January 10 February 1923, Lynes 1989, p.53.
pastels to illustrate to him what to paint and how it related to war: New York 1923. Reprinted in Lynes 32. This turn to photographic
I meant. See Clive Giboire (ed.), One youngster explained that 1989, p.184. clarity is ironic given that it might
Lovingly Georgia: The Complete bright colored spots all mixed
24. OKeeffe in Corn 1999, again be seen as owing to the
Correspondence of Georgia up sort of like a sunset was war
pp.2434. influence of Stieglitz. Some still
OKeeffe & Anita Pollitzer, New clouds in Europe. Also see Georgia
lifes might be seen as a form of
25. Alfred Stieglitz in Dorothy
York 1990, p.48, and Barbara Buhler OKeeffe to Alfred Stieglitz, 24 object-portrait, as, for instance,
OKeeffes Century pp.12. See also Wanda Corns
examination of this text in Corn
Forms in 1901 and Kandinsky also
drew on these ideas in his text,
publication. In contrast to these
readings, Wanda Corns The Great
Lynes, Georgia OKeeffe: Catalogue April 1917: Whats the use of Art
if there is war and 27 April 1917:
Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An
American Seer, New York
Mask with Golden Apple 1923
Raisonne, New Haven 1999, (fig.51). Gertrude Stein developed
Tanya Barson 1999, pp.440. which was initially translated American Thing (1999), titled after I cannot clap and wave a flag, in 1990 [1960], pp.1202. Stieglitz,
vol.1, CR 57, p.57. the written-portrait in texts on
1. Georgia OKeeffe, To MSS. into English with the title The Art OKeeffes statement, remains one Greenough (ed.) 2011, pp.170, 139 at the time, published only
6. Alfred Stieglitz was highly 18. This would happen most Picasso and Matisse, published
and Its 33 Subscribers and Others of Spiritual Harmony. Dow was of the most detailed analyses of and 140 respectively. short passages on OKeeffes
influential as both a photographer famously later, with her by Stieglitz in August 1912, in
Who Read and Dont Subscribe! an influential arts educator, as her work in relation to cultural work in Camera Work, but his
and a tireless promoter of modern development of her skull and 21. In 1958 (25 February 22 March), Camera Work, and these inspired
[letter to the editor], MSS., no.4, well as a painter, printmaker and politics and national identity. influence depended on his
art in the U.S. He and OKeeffe bone paintings in the early 1930s. Edith Halpert staged an exhibition object-portraits such as Charles
December 1922, pp.1718. Reprinted photographer. He was Professor verbal explanations, which were
would live together from 1918, and 16. See, for example, Georgia However, this early period also of fifty-three of OKeeffes early Demuth would make of OKeeffe,
in Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, of Fine Arts at Teachers College, conveyed to anyone visiting
were married from 1924 until his OKeeffe, letters to Alfred Stieglitz augmented her love of flora watercolours from 191617 at The also in 1923, as well as of others
Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929, Columbia University. OKeeffe his galleries, from 291 onwards.
death. His influence on the story on 4 November 1916 from Canyon, and her horticultural-farming Downtown Gallery: The bold, in Stieglitzs circle. In OKeeffes
Ann Arbor, MI, 1989, p.182, and in studied at the University of Virginia His thinking on women artists
of modernism in the U.S. can Texas: Tonight Id like to paint the knowledge; among the many saturated colors, the simplified painting, the African mask and
this volume, p.98. with Alon Bement of Teachers was formed in relation to
hardly be exaggerated; his impact world with a broom and I think publications dealing with flowers, shapes, and the atmosphere apple might be considered
College, in 1912, and he first OKeeffes art. Writing in a letter
2. Clement Greenberg, Towards on OKeeffes career, however, Id like great buckets of color like organic gardening, botany or of dreamlike intensity in these signifiers of modernism in art,
introduced her to both Kandinskys to OKeeffe in 1917, he described
a Newer Laocon (1940), in while significant, is more complex Hartleys to start at it with lots of natural history that belong to created a strong parallel to the but also, more specifically, stand
text and to Dows ideas. OKeeffe a blue watercolour (CR 119) as
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood to estimate. Twenty-three years red vermillion and I dont want OKeeffes library at Abiqui is work of the color-field artists. in for Stieglitz; the African mask
later studied at Teachers College representing the world all thats
(eds.), Art in Theory 1900-1990, older than OKeeffe, his aesthetic to be careful of the floor I just the relatively early but beautifully When critics suggested that reflecting the modernist interest
in 191415 and 1916. Dows book wonderful in the making in a
Oxford 1992, p.554. formation, and a number of his want to splash; 10 December 1916 illustrated book by Margaret OKeeffe had simply been trying in such objects (Stieglitz had
Composition: A Series of Exercises womans womb. Stieglitz, letter
3. The reasons for this are perhaps attitudes, were grounded in the from Canyon, Texas: Wonderful Armstrong, Field Book of Western to fall into step with recent art, organised an exhibition of African
in Art Structure for the Use of to OKeeffe, 10 March 1917 from
threefold: her designation as such nineteenth century and his early distances colors all kinds; 2 Wild Flowers (1915). Halpert gleefully told them to look sculpture at 291 in 1914), and the
Students and Teachers (1899), was New York, in Greenough (ed.) 2011,
by Alfred Stieglitz; her personal training in Germany. July 1917 from Canyon, Texas: Sun at the dates. Roxana Robinson, apple, a signifier of both American
an important foundational text; 19. Luminism also frequently p.119. While his most substantial
image and her biographical 7. Corn 1999, p.4 is out a little wonderful streaks Georgia OKeeffe: A Life, London identity and the apples of Paul
this and his teaching provided an employed an aerial perspective, text on women as artists remained
conformity to notions of pioneer of color on the plains; 21? August 1997, p.498. The works indeed have Czanne (again, an artist exhibited
8. Ibid., p.1, quoting Georgia important grounding for OKeeffes which might be considered unpublished until 1960, its
spirit; and her work. Stieglitzs 1917, from Ward, Colorado: It was an incredible similarity to the use by Stieglitz in 1910 and 1911).
OKeeffe, Georgia OKeeffe, New approach to abstract composition. an influence on OKeeffes late message, and some of its phrases,
claiming of the term American, wonderful so bare and lonesome and effects of thin washes of paint
York 1976, unpaginated. However paintings of the 1950s and 60s, found their way into a text on 33. OKeeffe in Lynes 1989, p.182,
the reinforcement of this by his 12. Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia looking over the lake at the on a surface that characterises
an earlier version of this account showing views from aeroplanes. OKeeffe by his close associate Paul and in this publication, p.98.
second circle, and the context of OKeeffe - C. Duncan - Rn snow spotted bare mountain the colour-field painting. They were
appeared in Calvin Tomkins, 20. Based as she was in a Rosenfeld: Her art is gloriously 34. Wanda Corn has analysed
others use of the term has been Lafferty, Camera Work, no.48, ground underfoot covered with mistaken for works that were
The Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty small community in Canyon, female. Her great painful and the importance of New York City
examined in depth by Wanda October 1916, pp.1213. Reprinted in brilliant flowers brilliant red derivative of contemporary
Fine, New Yorker, issue 50, 4 March Texas, during the years of the ecstatic climaxes make us at last in the work of what she calls the
Corn in The Great American Thing: 1974, p.49. Lynes 1989, p.166. deepest blue light blue lavender abstraction until the dates of their
U.S. participation in the First to know something that man has second Stieglitz circle namely,
Modern Art and National Identity 13. Henry Tyrrell, New York Art purple yellow every color execution, nearly half a century
9. Her work was shown alongside World War, OKeeffe found always wanted to know. For here, those American artists and writers
19151935, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Exhibition and Gallery Notes: it seemed yellow-green grass earlier, were pointed out. See also
that of Masson C. Duncan and herself at odds with this society in painting, there is registered the whom Stieglitz gathered during
and London, 1999. See especially Esoteric Art at 291 [review of the slushy at the edge of the lake The Downtown Gallery Records
Rn Lafferty at 291, from 23 May culturally and politically. She manner of perception anchored the First World War and after,
the introduction, Spiritual exhibition Georgia OKeeffe, 291, and the tall dark pines friendly in the Archives of American Art,
to 5 July 1916. was a committed pacifist and in the constitution of the woman. including OKeeffe, John Marin,
America, and chapter five, The New York, 3 April 14 May 1917], The loving you blue-green on the Artist Files, OKeeffe, Georgia
sympathetic to German culture The organs that differentiate the Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove,
Great American Thing. The last 10. Barbara Haskells exhibition Christian Science Monitor, 4 May edges deepest black in the center 1958-61, available at http://www.
an attitude she shared with sex speak. Women, one would and the writers Paul Rosenfeld,
OKeeffe exhibition in the UK was Georgia OKeeffe: Abstraction 1917, p.10. Reprinted in Lynes 1989, Repeatedly, OKeeffe expresses aaa.si.edu/collections/container/
Stieglitz. From 1917 she had judge, always feel, when they feel Waldo Frank and Sherwood
curated by Charles C. Eldredge at the Whitney Museum of p.168, and in this volume pp.489. her enthusiasm for the outdoors viewer/O-Keeffe-Georgia--196939.
further cause for concern as her strongly, through the womb. Paul Anderson. She does so through
at the Hayward Gallery, London, American Art, New York in 2009 in terms of colour and similarly her 22. Henry McBride reviewed
14. Marsden Hartley, Georgia favourite brother Alexis joined up Rosenfeld, American Painting, analysis of Rosenfelds text Port
in 1993 and was titled Georgia is perhaps the most detailed love for Stieglitz. Sarah Greenough OKeeffes exhibition at The
OKeeffe, in Marsden Hartley, and fought in France. It was the Dial, no.71, December 1921 in Lynes of New York (1924, see note 5) a
OKeeffe: American and Modern. examination of the importance (ed.), My Faraway One: Selected Andersen Galleries in 1923 under
Adventures in the Arts: Informal discomfort of being out of step 1989, pp.1712. collection of essays on artists
of OKeeffes commitment and Letters of Georgia OKeeffe and the title Art News and Reviews
4. Grover Cleveland was the Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, with her Texan community, as well 26. Barbara Buhler Lynes, and figures of the progressive
contribution to abstract art, Alfred Stieglitz, Volume One, Woman as Exponent of the
22nd and 24th President of the and Poets, New York 1921. as concerns regarding her health, Georgia OKeeffe and Feminism: generation, many of whom were
recognising a previously under- 19151933, New Haven 2011, pp.58, 87, Abstract: Curious Responses
United States, in 18859 and 18937 Reprinted in Lynes 1989, p.170. that eventually compelled her to A Problem of Position, in Norma also among Stieglitzs circle.
appreciated yet significant aspect 171 and 182 respectively. OKeeffe to Work of Miss OKeefe [sic]
respectively; Ronald Reagan was 15. More analysis of this and Stieglitzs letters, of which leave and relocate to New York, Broude and Mary D. Garrard 35. Anna C. Chave cites a
of OKeeffes career. on Others; Free without Aid of
the 40th, from 1981 to 1989. historiography follows, and it there are over 5,000, were sealed on Stieglitzs invitation he sent (eds.), The Expanding Discourse: 1915 New-York Tribune article,
11. Theosophist Annie Besant Freud, She Now Says Anything
5. Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New is also examined in depth by for twenty years after her death, photographer Paul Strand to fetch Feminism and Art History, announcing that for the first time
originally published the book, with She Wants to Say Much Color-
York, Urbana, IL, 1961 [1924], Griselda Pollock and others in this and have only been accessible to her. Stieglitzs strongest European New York 1992, p.440. Europe seeks inspiration at our
Charles Leadbeater, Thought- Music in Her Pictures, New York
244 245
shores in the persons of a groups

of modernist French artists, who
conditions. Once she owned
her house at Abiqui, with its
in New Mexico: Architecture,
Katsinam, and the Land, exh.cat.,
made five paintings. They bear a
formal relation to the later Pelvis
64. It had been a tradition rooted
in the romanticism that had been
Touching the made to tell her friend, political
scientist Arthur MacMahon,
of Rubens, Hle `ne Fourment;
Rodin, Hell c.190008; Brancusi,
find Europe impossible because precious water rights, OKeeffe Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa series paintings in their use of central to American painting of the Centre: things. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, Sleeping Muse; and unknown
of its war-drenched atmosphere. maintained an organic garden that Fe 2012, p.10. bleached white forms framing previous century, in the work of 31 October 1916, in Greenough (ed.) artist, Mask, The Guro People.
Anna C. Chave, Who Will Paint fed the household year-round. 49. See Uhlyarik in this publication. monochromatic blue sky. painters such as Albert Bierstadt Georgia OKeeffe 2011, p.57. For Matisses lithographs and
New York?: The Worlds New
Art Center and the Skyscraper
Another aspect of its safety and
security was the introduction of
50. Seriality was to become a 57. OKeeffe had first employed and Frederic Church. As Robert
Hughes has written: One of the
and Alfred Stieglitzs 14. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, Cezannes drawings shown at
291, see Sarah Greenough (ed.),
more central feature of OKeeffes such an eradication of horizon and 3 September 1916, in Greenough
Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe, a subterranean fallout shelter
work in the 1940s and 1950s and sky in representing the cliffs at great themes of nineteenth- Artistic Dialogue (ed.) 2011, p.26. Modern Art and America: Alfred
in Christopher Merrill and Ellen kept well stocked in the garden century romantic painting was Stieglitz and His New York Galleries,
these landscapes, which originate Ghost Ranch, in works such as Red Sarah Greenough 15. Sarah Whitaker Peters was
Bradbury (eds.), From the Faraway directly below her panoramic and Yellow Cliffs 1940 (fig.152) and the interplay between the world exh. cat., National Gallery of Art,
this tendency, might be thought 1. Alfred Stieglitz, letter to the first person to systematically
Nearby: Georgia OKeeffe as studio window. Los Alamos (which Red Hills and Bones 1941 (fig.154). and spirit: the search for images Washington 2001, pp.97, 114; see
of as a picture of place, in an OKeeffe, 13 July 1928, as quoted in examine the influence of
Icon, Albuquerque 1992, p.65. means The Cottonwoods), of those states of mind, embodied also, for illustrations of Stieglitzs
extended series that in one sense 58. Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow Sarah Greenough (ed.), My Faraway photography on OKeeffes work,
Artists from overseas confirmed established in 1943 as the base in nature, that exist beyond or photographs made in response to
parallels Stieglitzs extended 1945 (fig.182); From the Plains II One: Selected Letters of Georgia in S.W. Peters, Becoming OKeeffe:
the change in New York Citys for the Manhattan Project, was below our conscious control. these works, Greenough 2002, CR
photographic portrait of OKeeffe 1954 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, The Early Years, New York 1991.
status. One painting reveals the relatively nearby and had hindered Hughes argues that this aspect 501, 527, 517, 518.
across multiple images. This Madrid; CR 1274); and Black Door Volume One, 19151933, New Haven 16. See, for example, Barbara
complexities of this shift. British the restoration of the house of romanticism was to inform 26. OKeeffe recalled that
indicates perhaps another way with Red 1954 (fig.208). 2011, p.314. Buhler Lynes, Georgia OKeeffe:
artist C.R.W. Nevinsons 1920 work OKeeffe frequently complained modernism via Vincent Van Stieglitzs exposures were three
in which photography inflected 59. I certainly take a beating from Catalogue Raisonne, New Haven
reflecting his admiration of the it had taken up all the local Gogh; Edvard Munch and German 2. OKeeffe, quoted in Lillian to four minutes long. OKeeffe,
OKeeffes practice. the country and the weather It 1999, CR 127, 1314, 1546,
citys architecture and combining building supplies. expressionism and eventually Sabine, Record Price for Living in Stieglitz, Georgia OKeeffe: A
elements of pre-war cubism and 51. Maria Chabot was OKeeffes was cold and it was hot. It poured abstract expressionism. Robert Artist, Brooklyn Sunday Eagle and 199211.
44. See Wanda Corns discussion Portrait, exh. cat., Metropolitan
vorticism, painted between 1919 principal camping companion rain and there was a hard hail Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art Magazine, 27 May 1928, p.11. 17. See OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, Museum of Art, New York 1978,
of Cows Skull: Red, White, and
and his return to New York for from 1941 to 1944. OKeeffe gave storm then a couple of hours and the Century of Change, London 30 November 1916, in Greenough
Blue 1931 (fig.135) in chapter five of 3. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, unpaginated. On 3 November
an exhibition at Frederick Keppel her room and board and, in return, after rain and hail while the 1991, p.269. (ed.) 2011, pp.834, for OKeeffes
Corn 1999, pp.23991, especially 10 May 1929, in Greenough (ed.) 1922, Stieglitz himself wrote to
& Co. in late 1920, was exhibited among other duties, Chabot ground very wet is like soft description of seeing a train
her discussion of art-historical and 65. Reproduced in full in this 2011, p.420. Rebecca Strand that he had made
first as New York an Abstraction organised the elaborate camping butter under a thin layer of dry coming into Canyon in the early
collection precedents. The display publication, pp.21617. 4. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, a 110-second exposure of OKeeffe
and then renamed, after the poor preparations needed for work at sand the dust is blowing a fine morning: just a light with a trail
of skulls as part of the dcor 66. Ibid., p.219. 4 May 1929, in Greenough (ed.) and she did not move. Alfred
reception of this exhibition, as The such a distance. They would rise white sand Difficult very but of smokewhite Its great to see Stieglitz/Georgia OKeeffe Archive,
across the West was something 2011, p.416.
Soul of the Soulless City (T07448). before dawn and OKeeffe would so beautiful too. OKeeffe, letter 67. Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr, that terrifically alive black thing
OKeeffe herself adopted and to Yale Collection of American
work long hours, almost until dark. to Ettie and Carrie Stettheimer, 10 OKeeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their 5. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe, coming at you in the big frosty
36. For a detailed analysis of which she gave her own minimal Literature, Beinecke Rare Book
See Valerie Ann Leeds, Georgia June 1944, in Cowart, Hamilton and Own, New Haven 2000, pp.1479. 6 July 1929, in Greenough (ed.) 2011, stillness. See OKeeffe, letter to
OKeeffes New York paintings, see inflection. Objects that denote the and Manuscript Library, Yale
OKeeffe and the Faraway: Her Greenough (eds.) 1987, p.239. 68. Edith Evans Asbury, Georgia pp.460, 457. Stieglitz, 21 December 1916, in
Chave in Ibid., pp.6582. era of Westward expansion were University, New Haven hereafter
Art and Life and the New Mexico 60. Leeds 2010, pp.2931. OKeeffe Dead at 98; Shaper of 6. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe, Greenough (ed.) 2011, pp.924,
37. Ibid., p.73. the focus of collectors, some of cited as YCAL.
Landscape, in Georgia OKeeffe Modern Art in U.S., New York 6 July 1929, in Greenough (ed.) for her comments on Stieglitzs
them turn-of-the-century Western 61. Charles Harrison made the 27. Stieglitz, letter to Anne
38. Quoted from Mary Lynn Kotz, and the Faraway: Nature and Image, Times, 7 March 1986, http://www. 2011, p.460. photographs, Snapshot In the
artists specialising in genre scenes, connection between OKeeffe and Brigman, 20 December 1919,
A Day with Georgia OKeeffe/ exh. cat., National Cowgirl Museum nytimes.com/learning/general/ New York Central Yards 1903 and
but also soon became the source Greenbergs Towards a Newer 7. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe, YCAL. See also Anne McCauley,
Georgia OKeeffe at 90, ARTnews, and Hall of Fame, Fort Worth, and onthisday/bday/1115.html, accessed The Terminal 1893.
of touristic memorabilia, stocked and Laocon, but in a discussion 6 July 1929, in Greenough (ed.) Rethinking Woman in the Age of
vol. 76, no. 10, December 1977, in Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa 20 February 2016.
by Fred Harveys souvenir shops of Red and Yellow Cliffs 1940, ends 2011, p.459. 18. See OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, Psychoanalysis: Alfred Stieglitzs
Robinson 1997, p.293. Fe 2010, pp.289.
along the railways. by comparing it to the flesh of the 69. David Batchelor, interview 10 December 1916, in Greenough Photographs of the Female
39. OKeeffe, letter to Waldo 52. Quoted in Ibid., p.27 8. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe,
45. Corn has explained: the human vulva, once again returning with Carmen Herrera, 'The Whole 5 July 1929, in Greenough (ed.) (ed.) 2011, p.87. Nude, https://www.academia.
Frank, 10 January 1927, in Jack 53. For an in-depth discussion of to the defaut image evoked in Thing', frieze, issue 152, January
Southwest, and especially Native 2011, p.456. 19. OKeeffe, letter to Paul Strand, edu/11297656/Rethinking_woman_
Cowart, Juan Hamilton and relation to OKeeffes work, which
American culture, became another the hybrid symbolism of Cows February 2013, pp.269. 3 June 1917, as quoted in Sarah in_the_age_of_psychoanalysis_
Sarah Greenough (eds.), Georgia Skull: Red, White, and Blue 1931, he considers virtually inescapable 9. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe,
divide, like jazz, skyscrapers, or 70. Carmen Julia and Juan 6 July 1929, in Greenough (ed.) Greenough, From the Faraway, in Alfred_Stieglitzs_photographs_
OKeeffe: Art and Letters, exh. see chapter five of Corn 1999, even if ideologically normative
advertising, separating those Ledezma, Carmen Herrera, exh. Jack Cowart and Juan Hamilton, of_the_female_nude, accessed 8
cat., National Gallery of Art, pp.23991. in his essay, The Effects of 2011, p.462.
for whom art spiritually healed cat., Ikon Gallery, Birmingham Georgia OKeeffe: Art and Letters, December 2015.
Washington 1987, p.185. Language. In W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), 10. See, for example, OKeeffe,
the wounds inflicted by modern 54. Georgia OKeeffe believed 2009, pp.33, 37. exh.cat., National Gallery of Art, 28. OKeeffe, as recorded by Perry
40. Chave in Merrill and Bradbury culture and those for whom it direct transcription was Landscape and Power, University letter to Stieglitz, 11 July 1929, in Washington 1987, p.161.
71. See note 21. Miller Adato in footage filmed in
(eds.) 1992, p.76. forced an honest confrontation purposeless; she said it was only of Chicago Press, Chicago and Greenough (ed.) 2011, p.472.
20. OKeeffe, letter to Anita the early 1980s and incorporated
with modern life At stake were London 1994, p.219. 72. Judy Chicago, The Dinner 11. Arthur Wesley Dow,
41. Corn 1999, p.31. by selection, by elimination, by Pollitzer, 20 June 1917, as quoted into The Eloquent Eye: Alfred
not only ideological positions for Party, New York 1981, p.155. Composition: A Series of Exercises
42. Manifest Destiny was a term emphasis that an artist could 62. OKeeffe, letter to Maria in Peters 1991, p.192. Peters points Stieglitz and Modern Art in
or against modernity but also approach the real meaning Chabot, In the Air, November 73. Judy Chicago and Miriam in Art Structure for the Use of America, American Masters,
much used in the nineteenth out that Dows lessons had also
the centrality of Manhattan in of things. OKeeffe quoted in 1941, in Cowart, Hamilton and Schapiro, Female Imagery Students and Teachers, 20th ed., Perry Miller Adato, New York 2001,
century to describe a widespread taught OKeeffe how to compose
American artistic culture and the anonymous text I Cant Sing, So Greenough (eds.) 1987, p.231. Womanspace Journal 1, Summer revised and enlarged, Garden City, 88 min, unrated.
belief in the predestination of the by cropping; p.193.
place of cultures that abided by I Paint! Says Ultra Realistic Artist 1973, pp.11, 13. The painting is New York, 1938 [1899], p.5.
westward expansion of the U.S., 63. Alongside the Black Place 21. Lynes 1999, CR 199206, 2215. 29. OKeeffe, in Stieglitz, Georgia
laws of behaviour different from ... Miss Georgia OKeeffe Explains described by Chicago and 12. OKeeffe, quoted in Bob
as an embodiment of civilisation paintings, OKeeffe was also OKeeffe: A Portrait, exh. cat.,
those of fast-paced city-dwellers Subjective Aspect of Her Work, Schapiro as being 'constructed Groves, Georgia OKeeffe and 22. Ibid., CR .229, 230, 231, 245.
and progress. preoccupied by painting her Metropolitan Museum of Art,
The emergence of New Mexico as New York Sun, 5 December 1922, like the labia of the vagina'. the Color of Music: For More than 23. Stieglitz was ruthless in editing New York 1978, unpaginated.
43. Corn 1999, p.245. One aspect Pelvis series a continuation
a site for making modern art raised see Lynes 1989, p.180. See also Lynes in Broude and a Decade, Santa Fe Chamber his work and throughout his
of OKeeffes move south-west and development of her earlier
new questions about national Garrard 1992, p.437. 30. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz,
55. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, skull paintings. She commented, Music Festival Performers and lifetime he destroyed hundreds of
less often commented on is the identity and for some artists 30 May 1929, in Greenough (ed.)
28 August 1943 in Leeds 2010, p.29. Sun-bleached bones were most 74. Nancy J. Scott, Georgia the Famous Artist Gave Each negatives and prints of OKeeffe
association of this region with turned the quest for an indigenous 2011, p.430.
OKeeffes perception seems wonderful against the blue that OKeeffe, Critical Lives, London Other the Gift of Art, Impact: and other subjects. See Sarah
health. That OKeeffe worried modernism from the metropolis
to have been premonitory, since blue that will always be there as 2015, pp.1978. I am grateful to Albuquerque Journal Magazine, Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: 31. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz,
about her health is not surprising towards regionalism and
the photographer Eliot Porter it is now after all mans destruction Simon Grant for pointing out 28 July 1987, p.5. The Key Set, The Alfred Stieglitz 16 June 1917, in Greenough (ed.)
given the multiple deaths resulting alternative community practices.
would later accompany her is finished. Catalogue statement this connection. Collection of Photographs, 2011, p.161.
from tubercular conditions in Corn 1999, p.253.
13. OKeeffe wrote that Special
and photograph the site in 1945, for her show at An American 75. Tyrrell in Lynes 1989, pp.1678, No. 9 was the drawing of a Washington and New York 2002, 32. See Peters 1991, pp.2537.
her family, including those of her
46. Ibid., pp.2489. and he thereafter photographed Place in 1944, quoted in Laurie and pp.489 in this publication. headache, Georgia OKeeffe, Some pp.xixiii.
mother, her paternal grandfather 33. See Lynes 1999, CR 268, 286,
and three paternal uncles. The 47. Ibid., pp.28990. it repeatedly. Lisle, Portrait of an Artist: A Memories of Drawings, New York 24. Greenough 2002, CR 50811. 298, 301, 304, 314316, 347, 349, 355,
dry air of the high desert was 56. OKeeffe painted this site less Biography of Georgia OKeeffe, 1974, unpaginated. She also told 365, 378, and 379.
48. Barbara Buhler Lynes and 25. See Greenough 2002,
ideal for recovery from such New York 1997, p.322. Stieglitz that these drawings were
Carolyn Kastner, Georgia OKeeffe than the Black Place she only pp.xxxvixxxix, for reproductions 34. Both OKeeffe and Stieglitz
246 247
were fascinated with the view

that could be seen from the
45. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, 9
July 1929 in Greenough (ed.) 2011,
Chevalier, New York 2010, p.295.
I am grateful to Elspeth Mitchell
19081922, in Adele Heller and Lois
Rudnick (eds.) 1991, p.134.
of formalism in art to be found
in Roger Fry, Vision and Design,
3. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, 11
August 1929, in Sarah Greenough
OKeeffes 9. See Barbara Rose, OKeeffes
Originality, in Peter H. Hassrick
Stieglitz familys farmhouse at pp.46971. for drawing the importance of 13. See Judy Chicago, Through the London 1930. (ed.), My Faraway One: Selected Late Blooms: (ed.), The Georgia OKeeffe
Lake George, looking east to the the retranslation to my attention. Letters of Georgia OKeeffe and Museum, New York 1997, p.109. See
lake and mountains. OKeeffe was Seeing OKeeffe This critical phrase is the
Flower: My Struggle As a Woman
Artist, New York 1977. Chicago
23. For the recent recognition
of Hilma af Klint, see Catherine Alfred Stieglitz, Volume One, The Abstract also Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia
particularly intrigued by the way
the mountains and clouds were Seeing opening sentence of the second
volume of this tome, whose first
places OKeeffe alongside major de Zegher (ed.), 3 x Abstraction: 19151933, New Haven 2011, p.516.
Landscapes OKeeffe and Abstraction: An
Uneasy Peace, in Barbara Haskell
abstract artists including Barbara New Methods of Drawing by Hilma 4. Lesley Poling-Kempes, Ghost
reflected in the lake, sometimes Griselda Pollock volume challenges biological, Heike Eipeldauer and (ed.), Georgia OKeeffe: Abstraction,
Hepworth and Lee Bontecou af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Ranch, Tucson 2005, p.140.
creating a mirror-image; see, for psychoanalytical and Marxist Florian Steininger exh. cat., Whitney Museum of
1. Christine Taylor Patten, but she also glibly suggests Martin, exh. cat., The Drawing 5. Charlie Eldridge, Chronology,
example, Lake George 1922 (fig.78). writing in Christine Taylor explanations of womens inferiority that OKeeffe used the flower Centre, New York 2006; John 1. Oscar Bluemner, Statement, American Art,
in Joseph S. Czestochowski (ed.),
OKeeffe painted and sketched Patten and Alvaro Cardona and difference. Volume one also as a symbol of femininity (p.141). Hutchinson (ed., with Sheena in The Forum Exhibition of Modern New York 2009, p.171.
Georgia OKeeffe: Visions of the
this view ten times (Lynes 1999, Hine, Miss OKeeffe, 2nd edition, examined the myths ideologies OKeeffe refused permission to Malone), Hilma af Klint: The American Painters, exh. cat., 10. See Fairfield Porter in
Sublime, exh.cat., University of
CR 38996, 457, 468). Other, more Alberquerque 2013 [1992], p.5. of the feminine. The second have her work reproduced in Greatness of Things, exh. cat., The Anderson Galleries, New York Rackstraw Downes (ed.), Art in
Michigan Museum of Art, Ann
abstract, works, like Pink Moon volume tracks the lived experience this volume. Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 2005; 1916, unpaginated. Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism
2. On the most trivial of notes, Arbor 2004, p.173.
1923, and Blue Lines or Red Lines from childhood to adulthood and, to accompany the major 19351975, New York 1979, p.179.
my abiding memory from this 14. Ann Sutherland Harris and 2. See Roxana Robinson,
1923 (Lynes 1999, CR 406, 407) may through which process all of 6. See Barbara Buhler Lynes,
visit was the idea of a book room. Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550- retrospective, Hilma af Klint: A Georgia OKeeffe: A Life, New York 11. Letter from Georgia OKeeffe
be this view of the lake, mountains the above impinge on and form Lesley Poling-Kempes and
Behind that blank wall of the 1950, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Pioneer of Abstraction, exh. cat., 1989, p.108. to Alfred Stieglitz, 6 May 1922.
and clouds rotated 90 degrees. (deform) the human being that is Frederick W. Turner, Georgia
adobe courtyard, so often painted Museum of Art 1976, pp.300302. Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2013. Quoted in Elizabeth Hutton
Similar and possibly rotated forms being made into woman. OKeeffe and New Mexico: A Sense 3. Extracts from Concerning the
under brilliant light that blackened 15. Anna C. Chave, OKeeffe and 24. Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, of Place, exh. cat., Georgia OKeeffe Spiritual in Art, published as On Turner, OKeeffe as Abstraction,
appear in four more works: see 6. For a fuller discussion of
its one door, was OKeeffes the Masculine Gaze, in Merrill and Carr, OKeeffe, Kahlo: Places of Museum, Santa Fe 2004. the Spiritual in Art, in Camera in Haskell (ed.) 2009, p.71.
Lynes 1999, CR 293, 294, 406, 407, modernism as a space of formal
extensive library. Hidden from Bradbury (eds.) 1992, p.38. See Their Own, New Haven 2000, Work, no.39, July 1912, p.34. For 12. Robert Rosenblum,
442, 447, 573. freedom embraced by women 7. Erin B. Coe, Gwendolyn Owens
view, not allowed to bring their also Barbara Buhler Lynes, The p.vii. Kandinskys original wording, Georgia OKeeffe and Abstract
35. Stieglitz, letter to Herbert riot and chaos into the house, artists, see Griselda Pollock, and Bruce Robertson, Modern
Language of Criticism: Its Effects 25. Anne Wagner, Three Artists see Wassily Kandinsky, ber das Expressionism, in Joseph S.
Seligmann, 18 September 1921, books awaited her coming and Painting, Feminism and History, in Nature: Georgia OKeeffe and
on Georgia OKeeffes Art in the (Three Women): Modernism and Geistige in der Kunst [Concerning Czestochowski (ed.), Georgia
YCAL; Stieglitz, quoted by Herbert selection. As someone whose Griselda Pollock, Looking Back to Lake George, exh. cat., The Hyde
1920s, in Merrill and Bradbury the Art of Hesse, Krasner and the Spiritual in Art], with an OKeeffe: Visions of the Sublime,
Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz life is spent under the towering the Future: Essays on Art, Life and Collection, Glens Falls, New York
(eds.) 1992, pp.4354. OKeeffe, Berkeley 1996, p.100. introduction by Max Bill, Bern 1952 exh. cat., University of Michigan
Talking: Notes on Some of his forms and threatening eyes of Death, London 2000, pp.73112. and Georgia O'Keeffe Museum,
(2004 edition), p.128. OKeeffe first Museum of Art, Ann Arbor 2004,
Conversations, 19251931, New ever-advancing shelves of books, 16. Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the 26. Il ny a pas de dpassement Santa Fe 2013, pp.67, 68.
7. Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, heard about Kandinskys book p.124.
Haven 1966, p.61. I hold onto the idea of one day Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper de la sexualit, comme il ny as pas 8. Ibid.
Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929, from her teacher Alon Bement.
also having a book room where and Georgia OKeeffe, Chicago de sexualit ferme sur elle-mme. 13. See Rose 1997, p.103.
36. Stieglitz, letter to Seligmann, Ann Arbor, MI, 1989. 9. Between 1930 and 1940, the See Gail Levin, Kandinsky and the
they can all rest, while I live, like 2003, pp.11718. Personne nest sauv; et personne Observations about OKeeffes
9 August 1923, YCAL; Stieglitz, 8. Paul Rosenfeld, The Paintings population of New Mexico grew First American Avant-Garde, in
OKeeffe, with objects and plain 17. Kathleen Pyne, Modernism nest perdu tout fait. Maurice role as a pioneer have been made
letter to Sherwood Anderson, of Georgia OKeeffe: The Work of from 427,000 to 531,000. The towns Gail Levin and Marianne Lorenz
spaces to rest an exhausted mind and the Feminine Voice: OKeeffe Merleau-Ponty, cited in Wagner largely in the field of OKeeffe
11 October 1923, YCAL. the Young Artist Whose Canvases and villages of northern New (eds), in Theme and Improvisation:
and always interested eyes. and the Women of the Stieglitz 1996, p.100. scholarship, and it has not yet
37. Stieglitz, letter to John Marin, Are to Be Exhibited in Bulk for Mexico remained small, however. Kandinsky & the American Avant-
Circle, exh. cat., Georgia O'Keeffe 27. Ibid., p.102. received much attention in the
2 November 1920, YCAL. 3. See Griselda Pollock, The the First Time This Winter, Vanity In the 1930s, Taos had fewer than Garde 19121950, exh. cat., The
Museum, Santa Fe 2007, p.189. literature on painters or artistic
Missing Future: MoMA and Modern Fair, no.19, October 1922, p.112, 28. Griselda Pollock, Visions of 1,000 residents; Santa Fe around Phillips Collection, Washington
38. See Greenough 2002, CR 779. trends that were influenced by her.
Women, in Cornelia H. Butler and reprinted in Lynes 1989, p.178, and 18. Julia Kristeva, Is there a Sex ca.1920, in Griselda Pollock, 15,000. Abiquis population, both 19923, Boston 1992, p.26.
39. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe, Alexandra Schwartz (eds.), Modern pp.13842 in this publication. Feminine Genius?, Critical Inquiry, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist then and now, is measured in the 14. Barbara Buhler Lynes,
4. See Gnter Brucher, Kandinsky:
25 September 1923, in Greenough Women: Women Artists at the vol.30, issue 3, Spring 2004, Museum: Time, Space and the hundreds. Georgia OKeeffe: Catalogue
9. Paul Rosenfeld, Georgia Wege zur Abstraktion (Kandinsky:
(ed.) 2011, p.354. Museum of Modern Art, New York OKeeffe, in Paul Rosenfeld, Port pp.493504. See also Julia Kristeva, Archive, London 2007, pp.10534. Raisonne, New Haven 1999,
10. See Greenough (ed.) 2011. Paths towards Abstraction),
40. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, 2010, pp.2854. Le Gnie fminin: La Vie, la folie, les CR 205, 206.
of New York: Essays on Fourteen 29. Now titled Nude Series, the 11. See Marsden Hartley, Tribal Munich 1999, pp.1557.
25 September 1923, in Greenough 4. Griselda Pollock, Feminist mots, 3 vols., Paris 19992002, trans. thirteen watercolours are listed 15. Eugene C. Goossen, The Art
American Moderns, New York 1924, Esthetics, Dial, vol.65, no.77, 1918, 5. Georgia OKeeffe, in Herbert
(ed.) 2011, p.357. Interventions in the Histories of as three separate works, under and illustrated in Barbara Buhler of the Real, exh. cat., Museum of
p.207, cited in Lynes 1989, p.207. p.399; Red Man Ceremonials: J. Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz
41. For further discussion, see Art, in Griselda Pollock, Vision and the titles Melanie Klein, Hannah Lynes, Georgia OKeeffe: Catalogue Modern Art, New York 1968, p.7.
10. Barbara Buhler Lynes, The An American Plea for American Talking: Notes on Some of His
Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, Difference: Feminism, Femininity Arendt and Colette, by Ross Raisonne, vol. 1, New Haven 1999, More than two decades earlier,
Language of Criticism: Its Effects Esthetics, Art and Archaeology, Conversations, 19251931, New
Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929, and Histories of Art, Routledge Guberman, New York 20012004. pp.10611, CR 17688. however, in a review critical of
on Georgia OKeeffes Art in the vol.9, no.1, 1920, pp.714; The Haven 1966, unpaginated. Quoted
Ann Arbor, MI, 1989. Classic, London 2003 [1988], 19. Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of her 1946 retrospective at MoMA,
1920s, in Christopher Merrill and 30. Pollock 2007. Scientific Esthetic of the Red in Barbara Haskell (ed.), The
pp.117. The reference to ideology the Medusa [1974], trans. by Keith the critic Clement Greenberg had
42. OKeeffe, Georgia OKeeffe, Ellen Bradbury (eds.), From the 31. Laura Mulvey, Pandoras Box: Man, Part I: The Great Corn American Century: Art & Culture
and politics is a paraphrasing Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, dismissed OKeeffe as a pseudo-
New York 1976, unpaginated. Faraway Nearby: Georgia OKeeffe Topographies of Curiosity, in Laura Ceremony at Santo Domingo, Art 19001950, exh. cat., Whitney
of Clement Greenbergs classic vol.1, no.4, Summer 1976, pp.87593; modern figure, indebted to realist
43. The Stieglitz-OKeeffe as Icon, Reading, MA 1992, pp.4354. Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, and Archaeology, vol.13, no.3, 1922, Museum of American Art,
explanation of modernist arts citation p.876. regionalism and antithetical to
correspondence indicates that London 1996, p.59. p.114; and The Scientific Esthetic New York 1999, p.197.
retreat the better to protect 11. As Sanford Gifford has written, modernist painting. Clement
Stieglitzs photographs of OKeeffe 20. These attempts at giving of the Red Man, Part II: The Fiesta 6. Georgia OKeeffe, Georgia
Freuds lectures at Clark University, Greenberg, Review, The Nation,
with horse and cow skulls, such
art against political abuse
under capitalism; see Clement Worcester, Massachussetts, in 1909,
visual forms to non-objective Location and of San Geronimo at Taos, Art and OKeeffe, New York 1985 (original 15 June 1946, p.727f, reproduced
perceptions of emotions and Archaeology, vol.14, no.3, 1922, p.138.
as Georgia OKeeffe Hands and
Horse Skull 1931 (fig.190),
Greenberg, Towards a Newer were the equivalent of the Armory
Show for the history of painting in
responses to art were recently a Dislocation in the 12. OKeeffe 1976, unpaginated.
edition: New York 1976), p.62.
7. Kandinsky 1952, p.84.
in this publication.
Laocon, Partisan Review, no.7, 16. Goossen 1968.
were most likely made between
mid-July and late September 1931,
JulyAugust 1940, pp.296310. the United States. Sanford Gifford,
centrepiece of the 14th Istanbul
Biennial, SALTWATER: A Theory of
Life and Art of 13. OKeeffe, About myself, in 8. OKeeffes late abstract works 17. See Barbara Rose, Opinion:
The American Reception of
Georgia OKeeffe
Georgia OKeeffe: Exhibition of oils have long been overlooked.
before OKeeffe painted several 5. On ne nat pas femme: on le Thought Forms, drafted by Carolyn The Truth About Georgia OKeeffe,
Psychoanalysis 19081922, in Adele and pastels, exh. cat., An American Authors such as Barbara Rose
pictures of the subject, including devient., Simone de Beauvoir, Christov-Bakargiev. Journal of Art, 5, February 1990,
Heller and Lois Rudnick (eds.), Cody Hartley Place, New York 1939, unpaginated. and Robert Rosenblum, and
Cows Skull with Calico Roses 1931 Le Deuxime Sexe, Paris 1949, 21. See Maurice Tuchman and p.24.
1915, The Cultural Moment: The
p.13. One is not born, but rather 1. OKeeffe, Georgia OKeeffe, New 14. OKeeffe 1976, unpaginated. exhibitions such as Georgia
(fig.121) and Cows Skull: Red, White, New Politics, the New Woman, the Judi Freeman, The Spiritual in Art: 18. Lisa Mintz Messinger, Georgia
becomes, a woman, The Second York 1976, unpaginated. OKeeffe: Visions of the Sublime
and Blue 1931 (fig.135) in late- New Psychology, the New Art and Abstract Painting 1890-1985, exh. OKeeffe, London 2001, p.177.
Sex, trans. by H.M. Parsley, New 2. Wendell Berry quoted in (20045), Georgia OKeeffe:
October and early November 1931. the New Theatre in America, New cat., Los Angeles County Museum 19. Robert Rosenblum, Modern
York 1953, p.9. One is not born, Wallace Stegner, The Sense of Nature and Abstraction (2007)
See Greenough (ed.) 2011, Brunswick, N.J., 1991, p.128. of Art 1989. Painting and the Northern
but rather becomes, woman, Place, in Where the Bluebird Sings and Georgia OKeeffe: Abstraction
pp.6034, 61213. 22. Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to
The Second Sex, complete, new, 12. Lincoln Steffens, quoted in (200910) were the first to
to the Lemonade Springs: Living
44. OKeeffe 1976, unpaginated. Sanford Gifford, The American Abstract Art, exh. cat., Museum recognise their significance. Rothko, New York 1975, p.201. See
unabridged trans. by Constance and Writing in the West, New York
Reception of Psychoanalysis of Modern Art, New York 1936, also Marjorie Balge-Crozier, The
Borde and Sheila Malvany- 1992, p.199.
p.11. There are richer accounts Sublime Landscapes of Georgia
248 249
OKeeffe, in Czestochowski (ed.)

2004, pp.10311. Rosenblums
and Herbert Ferber, 19 August 1952,
in Mark Rothko and Miguel Lpez-
The Light One: Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York 2009, pp.1712.
house in 1949. It was her primary
fall and winter residence. See
OKeeffe, letter to Edith Halpert,
18 September 1952, Downtown
Georgia OKeeffe: Catalogue
Raisonne, vol.2, New Haven 1999,
this. See Dorothy Norman papers,
Yale Collection of American
interpretation of the abstract Remiro (eds.), Writings on Art, A Case Study 10. Ibid., in Haskell (ed.) 2009, p.175. Lynes and Lopez 2012, p.112. Gallery Papers, 18241974, Archives pp.11427. I am grateful to Sarah Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and
expressionists in terms of the New Haven 2006, p.80. 22. In June 1918, OKeeffe of American Art, Smithsonian Greenough for pointing out that Manuscript Library, Yale University,
Georgiana Uhlyarik 11. Wanda Corn, Telling Tales:
Romantic tradition was heavily 32. Agnes Martin relocated to moves into a studio apartment Institution, Georgia OKeeffe file the correspondence between New Haven, CT.
The author would like to thank Georgia OKeeffe on Georgia
criticised; among other things, his New Mexico in 1940, where she OKeeffe, American Art, vol.23, at 114 East 59th Street. Haskell (ed.) 19505, box 25, reel 5550, frame 1065. Stieglitz and O'Keeffe supports 11. In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz
reading of Mark Rothkos abstract Carolyn Kastner and Brent Raycroft NB: it is likely that the red one this, see Greenough (ed.) 2011. I am
met Georgia OKeeffe. Until the no.2, Summer 2009, p.68. 2009, p.212. on 10 July 1931, OKeeffe writes
colour fields as landscapes was for their sensitive insights and mentioned in OKeeffes 1952 also indebted to the chronologies
end of her life, a poster of one of 23. Quoted in Kuh 1962, p.200. that she is sending a barrel and
problematised. See Anna C. valuable comments in the writing 12. George Kubler,The Shape letter is the same as Black Door compiled by Charles C. Eldredge
OKeeffes paintings hung on her See also Hartley in this publication. two packages aside from my box.
Chave, Mark Rothko: Subject in of this text. of Time: Remarks on the History with Red (fig.208), however records for Georgia O'Keeffe: American and
wall. See Tiffany Bell, Happiness Reprinted in Greenough (ed.) 2011,
Abstraction, dissertation, London 1. In the letter that accompanied of Things, New Haven 1962, p.20. 24. Ibid., p.190. are incomplete. Barbara Buhler Modern, exh.cat., Hayward Gallery,
is the Goal, in Frances Morris and pp.5956. For further details, see
1989, pp.12832. Tiffany Bell (eds.), Agnes Martin, the shipment of the painting to 13. Ibid., p.25. 25. See OKeeffe, Green Patio Door Lynes, email to the author, 28 London 1993; and Barbara Haskell also Greenough, note 43.
20. Rosenblum wrote that, the exh. cat., Tate Modern, London New York, OKeeffe requests that
14. Formal brilliance, from 1955 (Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia December 2015. and Sasha Nicholas for Georgia
12. Waldo Frank et al (eds.),
expansiveness of its conception of 2015, p.23. the light one be sent back to her OKeeffe: Catalogue Raisonne, New 33. Edith Halpert, letter to O'Keeffe: Abstraction, exh.cat.,
Rose 1970, p.44. Rose later notes America & Alfred Stieglitz: A
primeval nature was also reflected after it is shown, in order to paint Haven 1999, CR 1282) and Black Georgia OKeeffe, 21 October Whitney Museum of American Art,
33. Irving Sandler, Interview with that it was New York artists Collective Portrait, New York
in [Clyfford] Stills completely the white whiter. OKeeffe, letter Patio Door 1955 (fig.205). 1955, Downtown Gallery Papers, New York 2009.
Agnes Martin, Art Monthly, 169, such as Don Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, 1934. Norman spearheads the
non-representational, enormous to Edith Halpert, 18 September 18241974, Archives of American 4. An account of OKeeffes
September 1993, p.4f. and Frank Stella who did much 26. OKeeffe first painted a similar publication and acts as co-editor.
planes of colour, which translate 1952, Downtown Gallery Papers, Art, Smithsonian Institution, disagreement with a shopkeeper
to revive interest in her work but smaller composition: In the
34. Lynne Cooke, in Distant Light, 18241974, Archives of American 13. Georgia OKeeffe, quoted in
the experience of a sublime, during the Sixties. See Barbara Patio VII 1950. She exhibited it in Georgia OKeeffe file 19557, box 25, in Canyon, Texas, over her
Arforum, issue 43, no. 6, February Art, Smithsonian Institution, Laurie Lisle, Portrait of an Artist:
desolate landscape into the Rose, OKeeffes Trail,New 1950 at An American Place. She reel 5551, frame 43. request for the removal of a
2005, p.27. Briony Fer, Whos Afraid Georgia OKeeffe file 19505, box 25, A Biography of Georgia OKeeffe,
language of pure abstraction. York Review of Books, 31 March later painted over the canvas. The 34. See OKeeffe, letter to group of vehemently anti-German
of Triangles?, in Morris and Bells reel 5550, frame 1065. New York 1980; revised ed.,
Rosenblum 1975, p.212. 1977, www.nybooks.com/ painting no longer exists. Elizabeth Edith Halpert, 18 September Christmas cards is given in a letter
(eds.) 2015, pp.17282, 188. New York 1986, p.295.
21. Ibid., p.211. 2. Barbara Buhler Lynes and articles/1977/03/31/okeeffes-trail/, Ehrnst, Archives and Digital 1952, Downtown Gallery Papers, to Elizabeth Stieglitz [Davidson]
35. See Balge-Crozier 2004, Agapita Judy Lopez,Georgia accessed 17 April 2016. Collections Librarian, Georgia in January 1918. Reprinted in 14. Stieglitzs collection is
22. See Balge-Crozier, The 18241974, Archives of American
p.110. OKeeffe sensed in this OKeeffe and Her Houses: Ghost OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe, email Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton and distributed among: The Art
Sublime Landscapes of Georgia 15. Painter Rita Donagh wrote Art, Smithsonian Institution,
the opportunity to emancipate Institute of Chicago; Museum
O'Keeffe, in Czestochowski (ed.)
Ranch and Abiqui, New York and
in 1980, The arresting originality to the author, 8 December 2015. Georgia OKeeffe file 19505, box 25, Sarah Greenough (eds.), Georgia
herself from her strict Catholic London 2012, pp.445. See John In the Patio VII is not included in OKeeffe: Art and Letters, exh. of Fine Arts, Boston; Fisk
2004, p.106. of these late works lies to some reel 5550, frame 1064.
upbringing. Eugenia Parry, That Loengard photograph, 1966, p.45. the OKeeffe catalogue raisonne, cat., National Gallery of Art, University, Nashville; The
extent within the imagery. Rita 35. Quoted in Tomkins 1974, p.41.
23. OKeeffe 1985, p.100. Memory or Dream Thing I Do, in Lynes 1999. Washington 1987, p.1667. Metropolitan Museum of Art,
3. OKeeffe, letter to Edith Halpert, Donagh, Georgia OKeeffe in
24. Retrospectively, OKeeffe Czestochowski (ed.) 2004, p.2. 36. In 1983, OKeeffe sold the New York; National Gallery of Art,
18 September 1952, Downtown Context, Oxford Art Journal, vol.3, 27. OKeeffe 1976, unpaginated, 5. OKeeffe describes her
actually spoke of the curse of 36. Barbara Rose, Georgia painting to fashion designer Washington; Philadelphia Museum
Gallery Papers, 18241974, Archives no.1, Women in Art, April 1980, p.44. pl.87. impressions of the New Mexican
the door. See Katherine Kuh, The OKeeffe: The Paintings of Calvin Klein. See Charlotte of Art; and San Francisco Museum
of American Art, Smithsonian landscape in a letter to Alfred
16. Kubler 1962, p.25. 28. In the Patio V appears not to Curtis, Of Mr. Klein and Miss of Modern Art.
Artists Voice: Talks with Seventeen the Sixties, Artforum, issue 9, Institution, Georgia OKeeffe file Stieglitz, 15 August 1917. In Sarah
17. The door leads to a salita a have been hung in this display. OKeeffe, Arts section, New York
Artists, New York 1961. Quoted in November 1970, pp.426; Rose 19505, box 25, reel 5550, frame 1065. Greenough (ed.), My Faraway 15. Pollitzers biography is
sitting room but OKeeffe used See Lynes 1999, CR 1162. Times, 26 July 1983, http://www.
Robinson 1989, p.479. 1990; Rose 1997. One: Selected Letters of Georgia eventually published by Simon &
4. Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, the room for storage and as a work 29. She exhibited Pelvis Series 1947 nytimes.com/1983/07/26/arts/
25. Ibid., p.479. 37. Greenberg 1946 and in this OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Schuster in 1988 as A Woman on
Profiles: The Rose in the Eye no-headline-057517.html, accessed
space. See Buhler Lynes and Lopez (fig.181). In 1956 and 1958, OKeeffe Volume One, 19151933, New Haven Paper: Georgia OKeeffe, two years
26. Calvin Tomkins, Profiles: The publication. See also Caroline A. Looked Pretty Fine, New Yorker,
2012, pp.14853. painted two versions of Pedernal 22 December 2015. The painting after OKeeffes death and thirteen
Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement issue 50, 4 March 1974, p.53. 2011, p.181.
Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty From the Ranch, which are also has recently entered mainstream
Greenbergs Modernism and the 18. Quoted in Kuh 1962, p.190. years after the authors.
Fine, New Yorker, issue 50, 5. Lloyd Goodrich,Georgia related to Pelvis Series. culture in the U.S.; it is featured in 6. See Griselda Pollock in
Bureaucratization of the Senses, OKeeffe also wrote: When I first 16. Georgia OKeeffe, Some
4 March 1974, p.42. OKeeffe, exh. cat., Whitney the opening scenes of an episode this publication.
Chicago and London 2005, p.145f saw that Abiquiu [sic] house it was 30. It is a painting OKeeffe kept, Memories of Drawings,
27. Letter from Josef Albers to Museum of American Art, New of Breaking Bad: Abiquiu, season 3, 7. Stieglitz, Georgia OKeeffe C.
and 170f. a ruin with an adobe wall around and had been thought lost or introduction by Doris Bry, New
Wassily Kandinsky, 22 August 1936. York 1970, p.26. This retrospective episode 11, dir. Michelle MacLaren, Duncan Rn Lafferty, Camera
the garden broken in a couple of destroyed until the contents of her York, 2nd ed., Albuquerque 1988.
Quoted in Brenda Danilowitz 38. Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia was the largest OKeeffe exhibition aired 30 May 2010, 47 min, AMC Work, no.48, October 1916, pp.1213.
places by falling trees. As I climbed estate became public. See Wanda
and Heinz Liesbrock (eds), Anni O'Keeffe and Abstraction: An assembled in her lifetime. Network Entertainment LLC. Reprinted in Barbara Buhler
and walked about in the ruin I Corn, Painting Big: OKeeffes
und Josef Albers: Begegnung Uneasy Peace in Haskell (ed.), Lynes, OKeeffe, Stieglitz and the
6. Barbara Rose, Georgia found a patio with a very pretty Manhattan, American Art, vol.20, 37. Rose 1970, p.44.
mit Lateinamerika [Anni and 2009, p.170f. Critics, 1916-1929, Ann Arbor 1989,
OKeeffe: The Paintings of the well house and bucket to draw up no.2, Summer 2006, pp.225.
Josef Albers: Encountering Latin 39. Peter J. Schneemann, Sixties, Artforum, vol.9, November water. It was a good-sized patio 31. With one exception, a mural
Chronology appendix A, no.2, p.166.
America], exh. cat., Josef Albers Erklrungen der Schnheit 1970, p.46. with a long wall with a door on 8. Georgia OKeeffe, To MSS.
commission in 1936, Manhattan Hannah Johnston
Museum, Bottrop 2007, p.209. [Explanations of Beauty], in Bice one side. That wall with a door in and Its 33 Subscribers and Others
7. O'Keeffe quoted in Katharine was among her largest paintings 1. Whilst O'Keeffe's younger
28. Porter 1979; Rose 1997, p.104. Curiger (ed.), Georgia OKeeffe, exh. it was something I had to have. It Who Read and Dont Subscribe!
Kuh,Georgia OKeeffe, in The until the late 1940s. brother is widely referred to as
cat., Kunsthaus Zrich 2003, p.56. took me ten years to get it three [letter to the editor], MSS., no.4,
29 . O'Keeffe 1985, p.106. Artists Voice: Talks with Seventeen Alexius (see also fig.32), research
32. OKeeffe mentions two December 1922, pp.1718. Reprinted
40. Rather than joining in with Artists, New York 1962, p.190. more years to fix the house so I
30. I Cant Sing, So I Paint! Says paintings in a 1952 letter to her conducted by Sarah Greenough
paintings swan-song, here could live in it and after that the in Lynes 1989, pp.1824 and in
Ultra Realistic Artist, New York 8. OKeeffe, Georgia OKeeffe, New dealer: the light one and the red has confirmed that the correct
OKeeffe seems to be voicing wall with a door was painted many this publication.
Sun, 5 December 1922. Quoted York 1976, unpaginated, opp. pl.82. one. She uses these descriptions spelling of his name is Alexis.
her desire to end the curse of times. OKeeffe 1976, opp. pl.82. 9. Georgia OKeeffe in Alfred
in Laurie Lisle (ed.), Portrait of 9. In a 1962 interview with to differentiate between My Last 2. The Art of Spiritual Harmony,
the door. 19. Quoted in Kuh 1962, p.190. Stieglitz Presents Fifty-one Recent
an Artist: A Biography of Georgia Katharine Kuh, OKeeffe insisted Door, the light one, from the originally published in German
41. OKeeffe 1985, p.88. Pictures: Oils, Water-colors,
OKeeffe, Albuquerque 1986, p.278. that the paintings are not abstract: 20. See Georgia OKeeffe, Door other painting she was writing in 1911 as Uber das Geistige in der
Pastels, Drawings by Georgia
31. Two months after the end of Those little squares in the door and Adobe Wall, Abiquiu, New about. It is interesting to note Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual
OKeeffe, exhibition leaflet, the
the exhibition Fifteen Americans, paintings are tiles in front of the Mexico 19578, (Metropolitan that, while the two paintings are in Art) was fully translated into
Anderson Galleries, New York 1924,
Rothko wrote to Herbert Ferber, door; theyre really there, so you Museum of Art, New York, acc. identical in both composition and English, by Michael Sadler, in 1914.
unpaginated. Reprinted in Lynes
having just come from MoMA: My see the painting is not abstract. Its no. 1977.657.2). See more related size, OKeeffe priced the light
3. The group exhibition includes 1999, vol.2, p.1098.
room is now inhabited by [John] quite realistic, she said. Quoted in photographs: acc. nos. 1977.657.1, one higher than the red one.
work by OKeeffe, Masson C.
Kuh 1962, p.190. See also Barbara 1977.657.4, 1977.657.6. Colour must have accounted for 10. See Greenough (ed.) 2011. I
Marins and OKeefe [sic]. I must Duncan and Rn Lafferty. For
Buhler Lynes, Georgia OKeeffe the $1,000 difference. The range am grateful to Sarah Greenough
admit the after-show remaining 21. OKeeffe first saw the house a comprehensive record of
and Abstraction: An Uneasy Peace, now given for the light painting, for pointing out that the
from my own stuff made those in 1935. She purchased it in 1945 OKeeffes exhibition history,
in Barbara Haskell (ed.), Georgia 1952 to 1954, denotes OKeeffes correspondence between Stieglitz
quite invisible for me at least. and renovations began in 1946. see the chronology compiled
OKeeffe: Abstraction, exh. cat., intention to repaint both. See and Dorothy Norman supports
Letter from Mark Rothko to Ilse She moved permanently into the by Barbara Buhler Lynes for
250 251
Georgia OKeeffe
Mask with Golden Apple 1923 the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987 Line and Curve 1927 81.6 x 43.5
Oil paint on canvas (1987-70-2) Oil paint on canvas Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of
22.9 x 40.6 CR 471 81.2 x 41.2 Anne Windfohr Marion (1996.05.01)
Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum National Gallery of Art, Washington, CR 628
of American Art, Bentonville, Autumn Trees The Maple 1924
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest
Arkansas Oil paint on canvas New York, Night 19289
of Georgia OKeeffe, 1987.58.6
CR 408 91.4 x 76.2 Oil paint on canvas
CR 572
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of 101.9 x 48.7
Exhibited Works
Alligator Pear 1923 The Burnett Foundation and Gerald Abstraction Blue 1927 Sheldon Museum of Art, Sheldon
Pastel on paper and Kathleen Peters (1996.03.001) Oil paint on canvas Art Association, Thomas C. Woods
30.5 x 25.4 CR 474 102.1 x 76 Memorial, N-107.1958
Private collection The Museum of Modern Art, CR 646
CR 414 Petunia and Glass Bottle 1924
New York. Acquired through the
Oil paint on canvas Farmhouse Window and Door 1929
Helen Acheson Bequest, 1979
Calla Lily in Tall Glass No.2 1923 50.8 x 25.4
CR 573 Oil paint on canvas
Oil paint on board Denver Art Museum collection, 101.6 x 76.2
81.6 x 30.5 Gift of the Charles Francis Hendrie Dark Iris No. 1 1927 The Museum of Modern Art,
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Memorial Collection, 1966.44 Oil paint on canvas New York. Acquired through the
Gift of The Burnett Foundation CR 489 81.3 x 30.5 Richard D. Brixey Bequest, 1945
(1997.06.010)
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, CR 653
CR 426 New York Street with Moon 1925
Anonymous gift, FA1954.4
Oil paint on canvas Black Cross with Stars and Blue 1929
CR 583
Georgia OKeeffe Abstraction 1916 (2006.05.063) Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Grey Lines with Black, Blue and 122 x 77 Oil paint on canvas
Charcoal and wash on paper CR 167 gift of Georgia OKeeffe, 1969.835 Yellow c.1923 Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Oriental Poppies 1927 101.6 x 76.2
(18871986) 63.2 x 48.3
Untitled (Figure) c.1916/17
CR 344 Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 76.2
Collection, on loan at the Thyssen- Oil paint on canvas Private collection
Greenville County Museum of Bornemisza Museum 76.2 x 101.9
Graphite on paper Black Lines 1919 CR 668
Early No. 2 1915 Art, Museum purchase with The Museum of Fine Arts, CR 483 The Collection of the Frederick
9.2 x 7.6 Charcoal on paper
funds donated by The Museum Houston. Museum purchase with Oak Leaves, Pink and Grey 1929
Charcoal on paper Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of R. Weisman Art Museum at
62.6 x 47.6 Oil paint on canvas
61 x 47 Association, Mr and Mrs funds provided by the Agnes Grey Tree, Lake George 1925 the University of Minnesota,
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation Addison Gallery of American
Thomas Howard Suitt, Jr., Richs Cullen Arnold Endowment Fund Oil paint on canvas 84.1 x 45.7
The Menil Collection, Houston, (2006.05.066) Minneapolis, Museum Purchase,
Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, The Collection of the Frederick
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe Department Store; and Mr and Mrs CR 477 91.4 x 76.2 1937
CR 170 Massachusetts, museum
C. H. Abbe The Metropolitan Museum of R. Weisman Art Museum at
Foundation, 1995 CR 595
purchase, 1959.22 A Celebration 1924 the University of Minnesota,
CR 51 CR 98 Adrienne Brugger sketchbook Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
CR 275 Oil paint on canvas Abstraction White Rose 1927 Minneapolis, Museum Purchase,
191718 Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe, 1986
No. 12 Special 1916 88.6 x 45.7
Special No. 9 1915 No. 17 Special 1919 (1987.377.2) Oil paint on canvas 1936.85
Charcoal on paper Graphite and watercolour on
Seattle Art Museum. Gift of The 91.4 x 76.2 CR 677
Charcoal on paper paper Charcoal on paper CR 512
61 x 48.3 Georgia OKeeffe Foundation,
63.5 x 48.6 50.2 x 32.4 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift
The Museum of Modern Art, New 28.9 x 19.4 Untitled (New York) c.192530 Soft Gray, Alcalde Hill 192930
94.89 of The Burnett Foundation and
The Menil Collection, Houston Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift
York. Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe CR 452 Charcoal on paper Oil paint on canvas
CR 54 of The Burnett Foundation and The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
Foundation, 1995 The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation 62.3 x 47.6 25.5 x 61.2
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation (1997.04.002)
Pink and Blue Mountain 1916 CR 117 2006.05.6192006.05.628 The Eggplant 1924 Fine Arts Museums of San Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
(1997.05.015) CR 599
Watercolour on paper CR 17931806 Oil paint on canvas Francisco, Gift of Mrs Charlotte S. Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Abstraction 1916, cast 197980 CR 280 Abstraction Alexius 1928
22.3 x 30.3 81.5 x 30.5 Mack 1961.48.1 Washington, D.C.
Music Pink and Blue No. I 1918
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift Lacquered bronze Apple Family 2 c.1920 Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, CR 525 Oil paint on canvas CR 691
Oil paint on canvas
of The Burnett Foundation and 25.4 x 12.7 x 12.7 Oil paint on canvas Toronto. Donated in memory of 92.1 x 76.5
88.9 x 73.7
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation Number 6 in an edition of 10 20.3 x 25.7 Doris Huestis Mills Speirs by her Abstraction 1926 Private collection, Switzerland Taos Pueblo 1929/34
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth.
(1997.04.015) Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift husband Dr J. Murray Speirs, 1990 Oil paint on canvas CR 616 Oil paint on canvas
Partial and promised gift to Seattle
CR 106 The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation of The Burnett Foundation and 90/36 76.7 x 46.4 61.6 x 102.2
Art Museum East River from the 30th Story of
(2006.05.021) The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation CR 453 Whitney Museum of American Art, Courtesy of the Eiteljorg
Blue Hill No. II 1916 CR 257 the Shelton Hotel 1928
CR 73 (1997.04.003) New York. Purchase, with funds Museum of American Indians
Watercolour on paper Oil paint on canvas
Autumn Leaves Lake George, N.Y. from Georgia OKeeffe and by and Western Art, Indianapolis
No. 15 Special 191617 Red and Orange Streak 1919 CR 315 76.2 x 122.2
22.5 x 30.3 1924 CR 699
exchange, 58.43
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift Charcoal on paper Oil paint on canvas Lake George 1922 Courtesy of the New Britain
Oil paint on canvas CR 522
of Dr and Mrs John B. Chewning 47.9 x 61.9 68.6 x 58.4 Oil paint on canvas Museum of American Art,
51.4 x 41.3 Schneider sketchbook 1929/30s
(2002.01.001) Philadelphia Museum of Art: Philadelphia Museum of Art: 41.3 x 55.9 New York Night (Madison Avenue) Stephen B. Lawrence Fund 1958.09
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Graphite on paper
CR 109 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe for San Francisco Museum of Modern 1926 CR 620
Museum Purchase, Howald Fund II 12.7 x 20
Purchased with the gift the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987 Art, Gift of Charlotte Mack Oil paint on canvas
CR 464 Ritz Tower, Night 1928 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of
Sunrise 1916 (by exchange) of Dr and Mrs (1987-70-3) CR 395 81.3 x 30.5
Oil paint on canvas The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
Watercolour on paper Paul Todd Makler, with funds CR 287 From the Lake No. 1 1924 Museum of Fine Arts, St
102.2 x 35.6 (2006.05.6332006.05.674)
22.5 x 30.2 contributed by Mr and Mrs Pool in the Woods, Lake George Petersburg, Florida. Gift of Charles
Lake George, Coat and Red 1919 Oil paint on canvas Private collection CR 18071848
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth John J. F. Sherrerd, the Alice 1922 C. and Margaret Stevenson
Oil paint on canvas 91.4 x 76.2 CR 621
CR 131 Newton Osborn Fund, the Lola Pastel on paper Henderson in memory of Hunt
69.6 x 59 Purchased with funds from the Pelican V sketchbook 1929/30s
Downin Peck Fund, and gift of The 43.2 x 69.9 Henderson, 1971.31 Shell No. 2 1928
No. 14 Special 1916 The Museum of Modern Art, New Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan Graphite on paper
Georgia OKeeffe Foundation, 1997 Courtesy of Reynolda House Oil paint on board
Charcoal on paper York. Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe Emory Coffin Collection of the Des CR 530 17.8 x 11.7
(1997-39-1) Museum of American Art, 23.5 x 18.4
62.9 x 47.6 Foundation, 1995 Moines Art Center, 1984.3 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of
CR 154 Winston-Salem, NC, an Affiliate Lake George Barns 1926 Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
National Gallery of Art, CR 289 CR 470 The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
of Wake Forest University. Gift of Oil paint on canvas Gift of The Burnett Foundation
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz (2006.05.6852006.05.717)
Untitled (Still-Life) c.1916/17 Barbara B. Milhouse in memory of From the Lake, No. 3 1924 53.8 x 81.4 (1997.06.037)
Collection, Gift of The Georgia Blue and Green Music 1919/21 CR 18591891
Ink on paper E. Carter, Nancy Susan Reynolds, Oil paint on canvas Collection Walker Art Center, CR 624
OKeeffe Foundation, Oil paint on canvas
8.8 x 6.3 and Winifred Babcock 91.4 x 76.2 Minneapolis. Gift of the T.B.
58.4 x 48.3 Black, White and Blue 1930
1992.89.9 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of CR 396 Philadelphia Museum of Art: Calla Lilies on Red 1928
Walker Foundation, 1954 Oil paint on canvas
CR 61 The Art Institute of Chicago;
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe for CR 575 Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 76.2
252 253
Georgia OKeeffe
Collection of Barney A.
Ebsworth. Partial and promised
Whitney Museum of American Art, Grey Hill Forms 1936
New York. Purchase 32.14 Oil paint on canvas
w(1987.377.4)
CR 997
(1997.06.006)
CR 1070
Private collection, courtesy
Eykyn Maclean
Notre Dame, Gift of Mr Walter R.
Beardsley, 1978.073.001 Ansel Adams
gift to National Gallery of Art, CR 790 50.5 x 75.7
Gift of the Estate of Georgia
A Man from the Desert 1941 Pelvis I 1944
CR 1157 CR 1330 (190284)
Washington Oil paint on canvas
Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 Oil paint on canvas In the Patio No. IV 1948 Blue II 1958
CR 701 OKeeffe, University of New Mexico Ranchos de Taos Church, Front 1929
1932 43 x 18 91.4 x 76.2 Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
Art Museum, Albuquerque, P87.1 Photograph, gelatin silver print
White Iris 1930 Oil paint on canvas Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum. Gift of 35.6 x 76.5 76.2 x 66
CR 895 on paper
Oil paint on canvas 121.9 x 101.6 Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe Mrs Harry Lynde Bradley, 1973 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
101.6 x 76.2 Crystal Bridges Museum of Foundation (2006.05.167) CR 1075 Gift of the William H. Lane Gift of The Burnett Foundation 15.2 x 18.7
Pedernal with Red Hills 1936
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift American Art, Bentonville, CR 1015 Foundation, 1990 and The Georgia OKeeffe Gift of Ansel Adams,
Oil paint on canvas Black Place III 1944
of Mr and Mrs Bruce C. Gottwald Arkansas, 2014.35 CR 1161 Foundation (1997.05.005) University of New Mexico
CR 721 My Front Yard, Summer 1941 Art Museum, Albuquerque
CR 815 Collection of the New Mexico CR 1331
Oil paint on canvas 91.9 x 101.9 68.129
Black Place Green 1949
Rust Red Hills 1930 Nature Forms Gasp 1932 Museum of Art. Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Blue B 1959
Helen Miller Jones, 1986 Oil paint on canvas A Man of Taos, Tony Lujan c.1930
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of The Burnett Foundation
94.6 x 117.5 Photograph, gelatin silver print
40.6 x 76.2 26 x 61 (1986.137.18) (2007.01.026) 76.2 x 91.4
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe Private collection
CR 900 Milwaukee Art Museum. Gift of on paper
Sloan Fund Purchase, Private collection Foundation (2006.05.173) CR 1082
CR 1175 31.3 x 22.7
Brauer Museum of Art, 62.02, CR 819 From the Faraway, Nearby 1937 CR 1023 Mrs Harry Lynde Bradley, 1973
Black Place No. IV 1944 Rams Horns I c.1949 CR 1357 Collection Center for Creative
Valparaiso University Oil paint on canvas
Kachina 1934 Photography, University of Arizona
CR 740 Red Hills and Bones 1941 Oil paint on canvas Charcoal on paper
76.2 x 91.4 47.3 x 63.2 From the River Pale 1959 78.187.6
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oil paint on canvas
Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico 75.6 x 101.6 Private collection Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Private collection Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1959 Ghost Ranch Hills, Chama Valley,
/ Out Back of Maries II 1930 CR 1083 Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe 105.4 x 79.7
(59.204.2) Philadelphia Museum of Art:
CR 826 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Northern New Mexico 1937
Oil paint on canvas The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Foundation (2006.05.207)
CR 914 Untitled (Black Place) c.1944/5 Photograph, gelatin silver print
61.6 x 92.1 Kachina 1934 CR 1176 Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
1949 (1949-18-109) Graphite on paper Foundation (2006.05.280) on paper
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Charcoal on paper Horn and Feathers 1937 CR 1025 29.8 x 45.4 CR 1360 35.1 x 48.9
Gift of The Burnett Foundation 60 x 48.3 Winter Trees, Abiqui, III 1950
Oil paint on canvas Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Blue Sky 1941 Oil paint on canvas Collection Center for Creative
(1997.06.015) Georgia OKeeffe Museum, 51 x 61.4 Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe Drawing III 1959 Photography, University of Arizona
CR 730 Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe Oil paint on canvas 64.5 x 78.7
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Foundation (2006.05.184)
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Charcoal on paper 84.92.555
Foundation (1997.12.001) Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe 91.8 x 40.8
Ranchos Church, New Mexico 19301 CR 1093 47.3 x 62.9
CR 823 Worcester Art Museum, Gift of Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe Thunderstorm, Ghost Ranch,
Oil paint on canvas Foundation (2006.05.152)
Foundation (2006.05.229) Philadelphia Museum of Art:
CR 916 Mr and Mrs Robert W. Stoddard Untitled (Black Place) c.1944/5 Chama Valley, Northern New
62.2 x 91.4 125th Anniversary Acquisition.
Kachina 1934 CR 1028 CR 1220 Mexico 1937
Amon Carter Museum of Graphite on paper Purchased with funds contributed
Charcoal on paper My Backyard 1937 Photograph, gelatin silver print
American Art, Fort Worth, Texas 45.1 x 29.8 by the Arcadia Foundation, and
60 x 48.3 Black Hills with Cedar 19412 My Last Door 19524
Oil paint on canvas Georgia OKeeffe Museum, on paper
CR 705 Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, 50.8 x 91.4 36.7 x 49.9
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation, 1997 (1997-42-1)
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe 40 x 76 122.5 x 213.8
Another Church, Hernandez, New Orleans Museum of Art: Foundation (2006.05.185) Collection Center for Creative
Foundation (1997.12.002) Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Georgia OKeeffe Museum, CR 1351
New Mexico 1931 Museum purchase, City of CR 1094 Photography, University of Arizona
CR 824 Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of The Burnett Foundation
Oil paint on canvas New Orleans Capital Funds, 73.8 76.89.96
Washington, D.C. (1997.06.029) It Was Blue and Green 1960
25.4 x 60.6 cm CR 932 Black Place II 1945
Eagle Claw and Bean Necklace 1934 CR 1040 CR 1263 Oil paint on canvas Georgia OKeeffe in the
American Museum of Western Art Oil paint on canvas 76.5 x 101.6
Charcoal on paper Chama River, Ghost Ranch, Southwest 1937
The Anschutz Collection, Denver 61 x 76.2 Whitney Museum of American Art,
48.5 x 63.9 Dead Pion Tree 1943 Cottonwoods c.1952 Photograph, gelatin silver print
Colorado, purchase, 1973 New Mexico 1937 The Vilcek Foundation
The Museum of Modern Art, Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas New York; Lawrence H. Bloedel on paper
CR 770 Oil paint on canvas CR, appendix ii, no.119, p.1107
New York. Given anonymously 101.6 x 76.2 76.2 x 91.4 Bequest 77.1.37 29.7 x 18.7
77.5 x 41.9
Horses Skull on Blue 1931 (by exchange), 1936 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Spring Tree No. 1 1945 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, CR 1444 Collection Center for Creative
Collection of the New Mexico
Oil paint on canvas CR 829 Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe Oil paint on canvas Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe Photography, University of Arizona
Museum of Art. Gift of the
76.2 x 40.6 Foundation (2006.05.180) 76.2 x 91.4 Foundation (2006.05.244) Sky with Flat White Cloud 1962
Georgia OKeeffe Estate, 1987 84.89.205
Collection of Arizona State Untitled (Skull) c.1934 CR 1068 Collection of the New Mexico CR 1261 Oil paint on canvas
(1987.312.1) Georgia OKeeffe and Orville
University Art Museum, Tempe; Charcoal on paper Museum of Art. Gift of the Georgia 152.4 x 203.2
CR 933 Cox, Canyon de Chelly National
Gift of Oliver B. James 47.3 x 62.9 Untitled (Abstraction) 1943 OKeeffe Estate, 1987 (1987.312.3) Wall with Green Door 1953 National Gallery of Art,
Deer Horns 1938 Charcoal and chalk on paper Oil paint on canvas Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Monument 1937
CR 776 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, CR 1120
Oil paint on canvas 61 x 45.4 76.2 x 122.6 Collection, Bequest of Photograph, gelatin silver print on
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Kachina 1931 91.4 x 40.6 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, The Black Place III 1945 National Gallery of Art, Georgia OKeeffe, 1987.58.8 paper
Foundation (2006.05.144)
Oil paint on wood panel Private collection Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe Pastel on paper Washington, Corcoran Collection CR 1473 17.5 x 26.2
CR 848
52.4 x 40.6 CR 941 Foundation (2006.05.177) 70.5 x 111.1 (Gift of the Woodward Foundation) Collection Center for Creative
Winter Road I 1963
Collection of Jan T. and Purple Hills 1935 CR 1051 Private collection, courtesy (2015.19.155) Photography, University of Arizona
Kachina 1938 Oil paint on canvas
Marica Vilcek, Promised Gift to Oil paint on canvas The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, CR 1265 76.83.12
The Vilcek Foundation 40.6 x 76.2 Untitled (Dry Waterfall, Ghost New Mexico
17.8 x 17.8 Winter Cottonwoods East V 1954 National Gallery of Art, Road and the Pedernal, Chama
CR 781 The San Diego Museum of Art, Ranch) c.1943 CR 1112
San Francisco Museum of Oil paint on canvas Washington, Gift of The Georgia Valley, New Mexico c.1937
Gift of Mr and Mrs Norton S. Graphite and charcoal on paper
Modern Art. Gift of the 101.6 x 91.6 OKeeffe Foundation, 1995.4.1 Photograph, gelatin silver print
Pauls Kachina 1931 Walbridge, 1976 60.6 x 45.4 Pedernal 1945
Hamilton-Wells Collection Georgia OKeeffe Museum, CR 1477 on paper
Oil paint on board CR 870 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Pastel on paper
CR 942 Gift of The Burnett Foundation 21.5 x 32.8
21.4 diameter Gift of The Burnett Foundation 54.6 x 109.9
(1997.06.024) Collection Center for Creative
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Mules Skull with Pink Poinsettia (1997.06.005) Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
CR 1276 Sky Above the Clouds III / Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe 1936 Red and Yellow Cliffs 1940 CR 1071 Gift of The Burnett Foundation Above the Clouds III 1963 76.89.8
Foundation (2006.05.134) Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas (1997.06.008)
Untitled (Ghost Ranch Cliff) c.1943 Blue I 1958 Oil paint on canvas
CR 782 101.9 x 76.2 61 x 91.4 CR 1117 Moonrise, Hernandez,
Graphite and charcoal on paper Oil paint on canvas 122 x 213.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Mexico 1941
60.6 x 45.4 76.5 x 66.4 Private collection, Texas
The Mountain, New Mexico 1931 Gift of The Burnett Foundation Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest Pelvis Series 1947 Photograph, gelatin silver print
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Permanent Collection, Snite CR 1479
Oil paint on canvas (1997.06.014) of Georgia OKeeffe, 1986 Oil paint on canvas on paper
Gift of The Burnett Foundation Museum of Art, University of
76.4 x 91.8 CR 876 101.6 x 121.9 39 x 48.5
254 255
Georgia OKeeffe
Victoria and Albert Museum, on paper Washington, Alfred Stieglitz on paper Portrait of Georgia, No. 3 1923 London New York from An American Georgia OKeeffe
London 24 x 19.2 Collection, 1980.70.52 23.3 x 18.6 Photograph, gelatin silver print PH.366-1982 Place 1931 1974.0052.0074
CIRC.600-1975 National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print
Georgia OKeeffe 1918, printed 1920s From the Shelton, New York,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Washington, Alfred Stieglitz 9.2 x 11.4 on paper
Photograph, gelatin silver print Looking East 1926/7
Collection, 1949.3.401
on paper
Collection, 1949.3.446 Ackland Art Museum, The
Photograph, gelatin silver print
24.2 x 19.2 Paul Strand
Mary Hunter Austin Georgia OKeeffe at 291 1917 11.7 x 8.9 Georgia OKeeffe 1920
University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, 80.32.1
on paper
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz (18901976)
(18681934) and Photograph, platinum print National Gallery of Art, Photograph, platinum print 9 x 11.7
on paper Washington, Alfred Stieglitz on paper National Gallery of Art,
Barn & Snow 1923 Abstraction, Porch Shadows,
Ansel Adams 23.3 x 19
National Gallery of Art,
Collection, 1980.70.76 24.5 x 19.5
George Eastman Museum,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Twin Lakes, Connecticut 1917
(190284) Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Georgia OKeeffe 1918 purchase and gift of
on paper
24.5 x 19.2 From the Shelton, New York (Room
on paper
23.7 x 16.6
Photograph, heliogravure on paper
Collection, 1980.70.1 Photograph, palladium print Georgia OKeeffe 23.8 x 18.6
National Gallery of Art, 3003) Looking Southeast 1927 Muse dOrsay, Paris, Gift of Minda
Taos Pueblo 1930 on paper 1974.0052.0092 National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Photograph, gelatin silver print de Gunzburg, 1981
San Francisco: Grabhorn Press, OKeeffe Exhibition at 291, 24.8 x 20.3 Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
John Marin 1921/2 Collection, 1949.3.617 on paper PHO 1981 35 10
no.61 Interior Gallery View 1917 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Collection, 1980.70.252
Photograph, gelatin silver print 8.8 x 11.5
43.1 x 31.8 Photograph, gelatin silver print Los Angeles
on paper Ida and Georgia OKeeffe 1924 National Gallery of Art, Abstraction, Bowls, Twin Lakes,
University of New Mexico, on paper (91.XM.63.13) Georgia OKeeffe Hands and
23.2 x 18.5 Photograph, gelatin silver print Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Connecticut 1917
University Libraries, Center for 20.3 x 25.4 Horse Skull 1931
National Gallery of Art, on paper Collection, 1949.3.1197 23.8 x 16.7
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Georgia OKeeffe with watercolor Photograph, gelatin silver print
Southwest Research Washington, Alfred Stieglitz 11.2 x 9 Photograph, heliogravure on paper
Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe paint box 1918 From the Shelton Looking on paper
Taos Pueblo 1930 Collection, 1949.3.510 National Gallery of Art, Muse dOrsay, Paris, Gift of Minda
Foundation (2006.06.1128) Photograph, gelatin silver print North 1927 19.4 x 24.1
San Francisco: Grabhorn Press, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz de Gunzburg, 1981
on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum,
no.61 OKeeffe Exhibition at 291, Claudia OKeeffe 1922 Collection, 1980.70.198 PHO 1981 35 11
9 x 11.7 on paper Los Angeles
43.1 x 31.8 Interior Gallery View 1917 Photograph, gelatin silver print
George Eastman Museum, 11.4 x 8.9 (93.XM.25.58)
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Equivalent 1925 Ranchos de Taos Church,
The Richard and Ronay Menschel purchase and gift of
Photograph, gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, New Mexico 1931
Library, George Eastman Museum on paper 18.4 x 23 From My Window at the Shelton,
Georgia OKeeffe Los Angeles
20.3 x 25.4 National Gallery of Art, on paper North 1931 Photograph, gelatin silver print
1974.0052.0045 (84.XM.914.1)
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz 11.8 x 9.2 Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
George Eastman Museum, 11.4 x 14.4
Marsden Hartley Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe
Foundation
Georgia OKeeffe Torso 1918/19
Photograph, platinum print
purchase and gift of
Equivalent 1927
on paper
24.3 x 19.1 Private collection, USA
(18771943) (2006.06.1129) on paper
23.9 x 17.8
Rebecca Salsbury Strand 1922
Photograph, palladium print
Georgia OKeeffe
1974.0052.0006
on paper
11.4 x 9.4
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Church, Ranchos de Taos,
Los Angeles
Georgia OKeeffe Exhibition at 291, on paper New Mexico 1931
New Mexico Recollection #14 c.1923 National Gallery of Art, Equivalent 1925 Victoria and Albert Museum, (87.XM.62)
Interior Gallery View 1917 23.7 x 19.2 Photograph, platinum print
Oil paint on canvas Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Photograph, gelatin silver print London, Gift of The Georgia
Photograph, gelatin silver print Dorothy Norman 1932 on paper
Collection, 1980.70.33 National Gallery of Art, OKeeffe Foundation
76.2 x 101.6 on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print 14 x 11.2
on paper Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection of Jan T. and 9.3 x 11.8 E.892-2003
20.3 x 25.4 on paper Private collection, USA
Georgia OKeeffe Torso 191819 Collection, 1949.3.543
Marica Vilcek, Promised Gift to George Eastman Museum, Equivalent 1927 11.4 x 9.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of Photograph, platinum/palladium
The Vilcek Foundation purchase and gift of Ranchos de Taos Church,
The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation Apples and Gable, Lake George 1922 Photograph, gelatin silver print George Eastman Museum,
print on paper New Mexico 1930-2
Georgia OKeeffe on paper purchase and gift of
(2006.06.1483) 23.6 x 19.8 Photograph, gelatin silver print
1974.0052.0021 Photograph, platinum print
on paper 9.5 x 11.8 Georgia OKeeffe
Victoria and Albert Museum,
John Marin Georgia OKeeffe 1918
Photograph, platinum print London, Gift of The Georgia 11.4 x 9.1 Equivalent 192534 Victoria and Albert Museum, 1974.0052.0001
on paper
9.2 x 11.7
London, Gift of The Georgia
(18701953) OKeeffe Foundation George Eastman Museum, Photograph, gelatin silver print Georgia OKeeffe 1933
on paper Private collection, USA
purchase and gift of on paper OKeeffe Foundation
24.2 x 19.2 E.888-2003 Photograph, gelatin silver print
Georgia OKeeffe 11.7 x 9.1 E.893-2003 Ranchos de Taos Church,
National Gallery of Art, on paper
Downtown, New York 1923 Georgia OKeeffe Breasts 1919
1974.0052.0069 Victoria and Albert Museum, Georgia OKeeffe After Return 22 x 18.8 New Mexico 1931/2
Watercolour on paper Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Photograph, gelatin silver print
London, Gift of The Georgia from New Mexico 1929 Private collection, Switzerland Photograph, platinum print
67.9 x 55.2 Collection, 1980.70.12 on paper Lake George 1922/3
OKeeffe Foundation Equivalent O1 on paper
Tate: Purchased out of a sum of 22.5 x 17.2 Photograph, gelatin silver print House and Grape Leaves 1934
Georgia OKeeffe 1918, printed PH.1385-1980 Photograph, gelatin silver print 8.6 x 11.5
money made available from the National Gallery of Art, on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print
1924/37 on paper Private collection, USA
Bruern Foundation 1956 Washington, Alfred Stieglitz 23.7 x 19 Equivalent 1925 on paper
Photograph, gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Photograph, gelatin silver print 7.9 x 11.7
T00080 Collection, 1980.70.109 24.4 x 19.2 Church Buttress, Ranchos de Taos,
on paper Washington, Alfred Stieglitz on paper The J. Paul Getty Museum,
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift New Mexico 1932
23.5 x 18.4 Georgia OKeeffe Hands 1919, Collection, 1949.3.916 11.9 x 9.3 Los Angeles
of Cary Ross, Knoxville, Tennessee Photograph, platinum print
National Gallery of Art, printed 1920s/30s Victoria and Albert Museum, (93.XM.25.72)
Alfred Stieglitz Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Photograph, gelatin silver print Portrait of Georgia, No. 1 1923 London
Equivalent 1929
1935.54 on paper
14.6 x 11.3
(18641946) Collection, 1980.70.19 on paper
24.2 x 19.5
on paper
E.891-2003
Door to Shanty, Lake George 1934/7 Private collection, USA
Georgia OKeeffe Torso 1918 on paper
The J. Paul Getty Museum, 11.7 x 9.1 Lake George 1926 on paper
Portrait of Marsden Hartley 191315 Photograph, gelatin silver print 11.8 x 9.3
Los Angeles George Eastman Museum, Photograph, gelatin silver print 11.6 x 9.2
Photograph, platinum print on paper Victoria and Albert Museum,
(93.XM.25.43) purchase and gift of on paper National Gallery of Art,
on paper 23.6 x 18.5 London
Georgia OKeeffe 9.1 x 11.9 Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
23.8 x 20.3 National Gallery of Art, Georgia OKeeffe 1920 PH.369-1982
1974.0052.0047 National Gallery of Art, Collection, 1949.3.824
The Collection of the Frederick Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Photograph, gelatin silver print
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
R. Weisman Art Museum at Collection, 1980.70.36 on paper Portrait of Georgia, No. 2 1923 Equivalent 1930
Collection, 1949.3.667 From the Shelton, Looking West,
the University of Minnesota, 23.7 x 18.4 Photograph, gelatin silver print Photograph, gelatin silver print
Georgia OKeeffe 1918, printed 1930s 1933 1935
Minneapolis. Gift of Ione and National Gallery of Art, on paper on paper
Equivalent 1926 Photograph, gelatin silver print
Photograph, gelatin silver print 9.2 x 11.9 9 x 11.8
Hudson D. Walker, 1975 Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper on paper
1975.17.25 Collection, 1980.70.143 National Gallery of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum,
on paper 24.2 x 19.1
11.2 x 9.1 Washington, Alfred Stieglitz London, Gift of The Georgia
11.9 x 9.1 George Eastman Museum,
From the Back-Window 291 1915 National Gallery of Art, Paul Rosenfeld 1920 Collection, 1949.3.889 OKeeffe Foundation
Victoria and Albert Museum, purchase and gift of
Photograph, platinum print Photograph, gelatin silver print E.896-2003
256 257
Georgia OKeeffe
John Loengard, Georgia OKeeffe Emily Balley Neff, The Modern Modernism, New Haven and and pastels, exh. cat., An American
at Ghost Ranch: A Photo Essay, West: American Landscapes 1890- Santa Fe 2007 Place, New York 1939
New York 1998 1950, exh. cat., The Museum of
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Anita Pollitzer, Thats Georgia,
Fine Arts, Houston 2006
Agapita Judy Lopez and Barbara Spiritual in Art, London 2006 [1914] Saturday Review, 4 November 1950,
Buhler Lynes, Georgia OKeeffe pp.41-3
Peter Barbarie, Paul Strand: Barbara Buhler Lynes, Shared
and Her Houses: Ghost Ranch Photography and Film for the Intelligence: American Painting and Griselda Pollock, The Missing
and Abiquiu, New York and Twentieth Century, exh. cat., the Photograph, exh. cat., Georgia Future: MoMA and Modern
Further Reading
London 2012 Philadelphia Museum of Art 2014 OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe 2011 Women, in Cornelia Butler and
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia Alexandra Schwarz (eds.) Modern
Annie Besant and Charles Sarah Milroy and Ian Dejardin
OKeeffe Museum Collections, Women: Women Artists at the
Leadbeater, Thought-Forms, (eds.), From the Forest to the Sea:
New York 2007 Museum of Modern Art, New York
London 1901 Emily Carr in British Columbia,
2010, pp.2854
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia exh. cat., Art Gallery of Ontario,
Marcia Brennan, Painting Gender,
OKeeffe Catalogue Raisonn, Toronto 2015 Griselda Pollock, Feminist
Constructing Theory: The Alfred
vols 1 and 2, New Haven 1999 Interventions in the Histories
Stieglitz Circle and American Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz:
An American Seer, New York 1990 of Art in Vision and Difference:
Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, Formalist Aesthetics, Cambridge
[1960] Feminism, Femininity and the
Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929, MA and London 2001
Histories of Art, London 2003,
Ann Arbor 1989
Flannery Burke, From Greenwich Lesley Poling-Kempes, Ghost pp.117
Barbara Buhler Lynes and Ann Village to Taos: Primitivism and Ranch, Tucson 2005
Barbara Rose, Georgia OKeeffe:
Exhibition catalogues: Kathleen Pyne, Modernism and Ruth E. Fine and Barbara Buhler The Whitney Museum of American Paden, (eds), Maria Chabot/Georgia Place at Mabel Dodge Luhans, Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York:
Lawrence, Kansas 2008 The Paintings of the Sixties,
The Feminine Voice: OKeeffe Lynes, OKeeffe on Paper, exh. Art, New York 1970 OKeeffe: Correspondence, 1941- Essays on Fourteen American
Artforum, November 1970, vol.5,
Ellen Roberts, OKeeffe, and the Women of the Stieglitz cat., National Gallery of Art, 1949, Albuquerque 2003 Moderns, New York 1924
Daniel Catton Rich, Georgia Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: no.5, pp.42-6
Stettheimer, Torr, Zorach: Women Circle, exh. cat., Georgia OKeeffe Washington 2000
OKeeffe, The Art Institute of Christopher Merrill and Ellen My Struggle As a Woman Artist, John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams at
Modernists in New York, exh. cat., Museum, Santa Fe 2007
Chicago 1943 Nancy Scott, The OKeeffe-
Norton Museum of Art, Palm Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Georgia Bradbury (eds.), From the Faraway New York 1977 100, exh. cat., Museum of Modern
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia Pollitzer Correspondence, 1915-1917,
Beach 2016 OKeeffe: The Poetry of Things, Nearby: Georgia OKeeffe as Icon, Art San Francisco 2001
Wanda Corn, The Great American Notes in the History of Art, vol.3,
OKeeffe: Circling Around Albuquerque, 1992
exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Thing: Modern Art and National
Sophie Bernard, Georgia OKeeffe Abstraction, exh. cat., Norton Martha Tedeschi with Kristi Dahm no.1, Fall 1983, pp.3442
Washington 1999 Books and Collections: Identity, 19151935, Berkeley,
et Ses Amis Photographs (Georgia Museum of Art, Palm Beach 2007 Lisa Mintz Messinger, et al., John Marins Watercolors:
OKeeffe and Her Photographer Georgia OKeeffe, New York and Los Angeles and London 1999 A Medium for Modernism, exh.
Amy Ellis, Elizabeth Mankin Michael Berry, Georgia OKeeffe:
Friends), exh. cat., Muse de Richard D. Marshall, Georgia London 2001 cat., The Art Institute of Chicago,
Kornhauser and Maura Lyons, Painter, New York 1988 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Winter in
Grenoble 2015 OKeeffe: Nature and Abstraction, Yale University Press, New Haven
Stieglitz, OKeeffe & American
exh. cat., Irish Museum of Modern Doris Bry (ed.), Georgia OKeefe, Georgia OKeeffe, Georgia OKeeffe, Taos, Santa Fe 2007 [1935] 2011
Erin Coe et al, Modern Nature: Modernism, exh. cat., Wadsworth
Art, Dublin 2007 Some Memories of Drawings, New York 1976 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of
Georgia OKeeffe and Lake George, Atheneum, Hartford 1999 Maurice Tuchman, The Spiritual in
Albuquerque 1988 [1974]
exh cat., The Hyde Collection, Anita Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper: Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality,
Ren Paul Barilleaux and Sarah Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, OKeeffe Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985,
Georgia OKeeffe, New York 1988 Albuquerque 1987 [1937]
Glens Falls, New York and Georgia Jan Garden Castro, The Art & Life Los Angeles 1989
Whitaker Peters, Georgia OKeeffe: and Texas, exh. cat., The Marion
OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe, 2013 of Georgia OKeeffe, New York 1985 Christine Taylor Patten and Alvaro Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition:
Color and Conservation, exh. cat., Koogler McNay Art Museum,
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia Mississippi Art Museum, San Antonio 1998 Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Full Cardona Hine, Miss OKeeffe, A Series of Exercises in Art
OKeeffe: Leben und Werk (Life and Jackson 2006 Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia Albuquerque 2013 Structure for the Use of Students
Journals and Articles:
Work), exh. cat., Kunsthalle der Ruth E. Fine, Elizabeth Glassman, OKeeffe, New York 2005 and Teachers, New York 1914 [1899]
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia Sarah Whitaker Peters, Becoming
Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich 2012 and Juan Hamilton, The Book Edith Evans Asbury, Georgia
OKeeffe and Andy Warhol: Flowers OKeeffe: The Early Years,
Room: Georgia OKeeffes Library in Charles C. Eldredge, Georgia Waldo Frank, Our America,
OKeeffe Dead at 98; Shaper of
of Distinction, exh. cat., Georgia New York 1991
Barbara Buhler Lynes and Carolyn Abiquiu, exh. cat., The Grolier Club, OKeeffe, New York 1991 New York 1919
Modern Art in U.S., New York
OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe 2005
Kastner, Georgia OKeeffe in New New York 1997 Clive Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Roxanna Robinson, Georgia Waldo Frank [Search-Light, pseud.], Times, 7 March 1986
Mexico: Architecture, Katsinam, Georgia: The Complete OKeeffe: A Life, London 1990 Time-Exposures by Search-Light,
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Lesley Charles C. Eldredge, Georgia
and the Land, exh. cat., Georgia Correspondence of Georgia New York 1926 Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro,
Poling-Kempes and Frederick W. OKeeffe: American and Modern, Nancy J. Scott, Critical Lives:
O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, 2012 OKeeffe and Anita Pollitzer, Female Imagery, Womanspace
Turner, Georgia OKeeffe and New exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, Georgia OKeeffe, London 2015 Waldo Frank (ed.), America and Journal 1, Summer 1973
Valerie Ann Leeds, Georgia Mexico: A Sense of Place, exh. cat., London 1993 New York 1990
Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia OKeeffe: Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective
OKeeffe and the Faraway: Nature Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Donald C. Gallup, Georgia
a Portrait, Introduction by Portrait, New York 1934.
and Image, exh. cat. National Santa Fe 2004 Alexander Arrowsmith and
Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper OKeeffe: 1949-1986 in Pigeons
Thomas West (eds.), Two Lives, Georgia OKeeffe, exh cat.,
Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, and Georgia OKeeffe, Sarah Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz, on the Granite: Memories of a
Joseph S. Czestochowski, Georgia Georgia OKeeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Fort Worth and Georgia O'Keeffe Chicago 2003 The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Yale Librarian, New Haven 1988,
OKeeffe: Visions of the Sublime, A Conversation in Paintings and New York 1978
Museum, Santa Fe 2010 Collection of Photographs, at the pp.221-53
exh. cat., University of Michigan, Photographs, exh. cat., The Phillips Sarah Greenough, My Faraway Anne Middleton Wagner, Three National Gallery of Art, Washington,
Barbara Haskell, Georgia OKeeffe: Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Collection, Washington 1992 Mary Lynn Kotz, Georgia OKeeffe
One: Selected Letters of Georgia Artists (Three Women): Modernism vols 1 and 2, New York 2002
Abstraction, exh. cat., Whitney Memphis 2004 at 90, ARTnews, December 1977,
OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: and the Art of Hesse, Krasner
Museum of American Art, New Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton and Sarah Greenough, Modern Art pp.36-45
Bice Curiger, Georgia OKeeffe, exh. Volume One, 1915-1933, and OKeeffe, Berkeley and
York 2009 Sarah Greenough (eds.), Georgia and America: Alfred Stieglitz
cat., Kunsthaus Zurich 2003 New Haven 2011 Los Angeles 1996 Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia
OKeeffe: Art and Letters, exh. and His New York Galleries, exh.
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia cat., National Gallery of Art, Randall Griffin, Georgia OKeeffe, Myron Wood, OKeeffe at Abiquiu, cat., National Gallery of Art, OKeeffe and Feminism: A Problem
OKeeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural OKeeffe and the Calla Lily in Washington 1987 London and New York 2014 New York 1995 Washington 2000 of Position, in Norma Broude
Affinities, exh. cat. Georgia American Art, 1860- 1940, exh. cat., and Mary D. Garrard (eds.), The
Barbara Haskell, Georgia OKeeffe: Hannah Johnston, Georgia Marsden Hartley, Adventures in the
OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe 2008 Georgia OKeeffe Museum Expanding Discourse: Feminism
Works on Paper, exh. cat., Museum OKeeffe, London 2016 Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters,
Santa Fe, 2002 and Art History, New York, 1992,
of Fine Arts (Museum of New Contextual Books: Vaudeville and Poets, New York 1921
Susan Danly, Georgia OKeeffe and Laura Lisle, Portrait of an Artist: pp.436-449
Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr, Mexico), Santa Fe 1985
the Camera: the Art of Identity, A Biography of Georgia OKeeffe, Mary Austin and Ansel Adams, Heather Hole and Barbara Buhler
OKeeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Georgia OKeeffe, About myself in
exh. cat., Portland Museum of Art, New York, 1980 Taos Pueblo, San Francisco 1930 Lynes. Marsden Hartley and the
Own, New Haven 2000 Doris Bry and Lloyd Goodrich,
Maine 2008 Georgia OKeeffe: Exhibition of oils
Georgia OKeeffe, exh. cat., West: The Search For an American
258 259
Georgia OKeeffe
drawings 10, 19, 1523, 181, 185, 234 German expressionism 216 J M
Duchamp, Marcel 111 Ghost Ranch 15, 17, 1469, 219, 238, Jack-in-the-Pulpit series 224 Maar, Dora 104
Dust Bowl 14 240 Jimson Weed 238; fig.117 McAlpin, David 238, 239; fig.133
Gluck 104, 114 Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 McBride, Henry 12
E Goossen, Eugene C. 187 243; fig.110 Maillol, Aristide 105
Eagle Claw and Bean Necklace Gourmont, Remy de Johnson, Spud 238, 240 A Man from the Desert fig.156
fig.193 Mr Antiphilos, Satyr 100 Jones, Lois Mailou 104 Manhattan 223
Early Abstraction 53; fig.13 Great Depression 13, 14, 237 Manifest Destiny 14
Index
Early No. 2 53; fig.14 Greenberg, Clement 9, 11, 17, 1820, K Mannes, Marya 227
East River No. 1 58 105, 1912 Kachina (17.8 x 17.8) fig.155 Man Ray 100
East River from the 30th Story of Review of an Exhibition of Kachina (55.9 x 30.5) fig.145 235
the Shelton Hotel fig.77 Georgia OKeeffe 21617 Kachina (charcoal) fig.194 Marin, John 12, 13, 52, 56, 151, 230,
Edelson, Mary Beth Towards a Newer Laocon 17, Kahlo, Frida 104, 112, 147, 240 236
OKevelson 21; fig.11 18 Kandinsky, Wassily 1011, 52, 111, 112, portrait by Stieglitz fig.64
Some Living American Women Green Patio Door 221 1856, 216, 233 Martin, Agnes 21, 1901
Artists 21 Grey Blue & Black Pink Circle 19; The Art of Spiritual Harmony 233 Happy Holiday 1901; fig.175
The Eggplant fig.107 fig.33 Concerning the Spiritual in Art Homage to Life 191
Eilshemius, Louis 230 Grey Hill Forms 16; fig.6 10, 111, 185 Mountain 191; fig.177
Engelhard, George 236 Grey Line with Lavender and Yellow Cossacks 11 Mask with Golden Apple fig.51
Engelhard, Georgia 238 20, 21 Improvisations 185 Matisse, Henri 52, 54, 105, 111, 216,
Eugene, Frank 98 Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Karsh, Yousuf 217
Page numbers in italic type refer Letters 241 Black Place I 16, 18; fig.160 Chatham Episcopal Institute 2323 Evening Star series 11, 53 Yellow 21, 56; fig.34 Georgia OKeeffe 241 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 113
to pictures in the chronology. American luminism 11 Black Place II 1944 1617; fig.161 Chave, Anna C. 13, 107 Evening Star III 11, 21, 53 Grey Tree, Lake George fig.85 Ksebier, Gertrude 109 Meyer, Adolph de 98
All other pictures are referred to Anderson, Sherwood 56 Black Place II 1945 239; fig.164 Chicago 146, 150, 233 Evening Star No. VI 11, 187; fig.166 Kelly, Ellsworth 107, 219 Miller, Lee 104
by figure number. Annan, James Craig 98 Black Place III (oil) 16, 18; fig.162 Chicago, Judy 21, 106 H Jersey 187; fig.169 minimalism 187, 189, 190, 192, 219
Another Church, Hernandez, New The Black Place III (pastel) 17; fig.7 The Dinner Party 21 F Halpert, Edith 21, 186, 240, 242 Window 187 modernism 910, 11, 12, 1314, 15, 17,
59th St. Studio 221 Mexico fig.149 Black Place No. IV 17; fig.163 Church, Frederic Farmhouse Window and Door 187, Halsman, Philippe Klee, Paul 217 18, 21, 52, 1045, 192, 216
Apple Family fig.81 Black, White and Blue fig.38 Twilight in the Wilderness 11; fig.3 189; fig.89 Georgia OKeeffe at Ghost Ranch Klint, Hilma af 111 formalism 111
A Arden, Elizabeth 238, 238 Blue I (1916) 185; fig.100 City Night 58 Fauvism 216 ... 240 Kollwitz, Kthe 114 influence of Stieglitz 12
Abbott, Berenice 104 Art Institute of Chicago 232. 242 Blue I (1958) fig.197 Cixous, Hlne 109 feminist interpretation of Hamilton, Juan 191, 2423 Krasner, Lee 104, 112, 227 New York City 150
Abiqui 16, 104, 146, 148, 149, 150, Art Students League 20, 56, 98, Blue II fig.198 Cliffs Beyond Abiqui, Dry Waterfall OKeeffes work 11, 12, 19, 21, 1048, hard-edged abstraction 21 Kristeva, Julia 109 Protestant readings 111
153, 1878, 2201, 224, 235, 237, 2401, 232 Blue B fig.199 fig.101 11014, 242 Harris, Ann Sutherland 107 Kubler, George women artists 10415
240, 241; figs.98, 137 Asbury, Edith Evans 20 Blue and Green Music fig.28 Coburn, Alvin Langdon 98 Fer, Briony 191 Hartley, Marsden 11, 12, 18, 52, 147, The Shape of Time 220 Modersohn-Becker, Paula 114
Abiqui Mesa I fig.195 At the Rodeo, New Mexico 19 Blue Hill No. II 187; fig.22 Coe, Erin B. 148 figuration 17, 21, 190 151, 216, 235, 236 Kuhn, Heinrich 98 Modotti, Tina 114
abstract expressionism 20, 186, Autumn Leaves Lake George, N.Y. Blue Sky fig.158 colour field painters 1867, 18990, Figures under Rooftop 53 portrait by Stieglitz fig.65 Kupka, Frantiek 185 Mondrian, Piet 111
188, 189, 190, 192 fig.87 Bluemner, Oscar 185 192, 220 Fini, Leonor 104 Hepworth, Barbara 104 Tale of Pistils and Stamens I 185; Monet, Claude 16, 186
abstraction 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 53, Autumn Trees The Maple fig.84 Bonheur, Rosa 227 colour palette 58, 13840, 219 Flower Abstraction fig.29 Herrera, Carmen 201 fig.167 Morisot, Berthe 227
55, 56, 11011, 150, 1856, 1912, 21920 Bourgeois, Louise 104 Columbia College, South Carolina Ford, John Blanco y Verde 21 The Mountain, New Mexico fig.143
Abstraction (charcoal and wash) B Bourke-White, Margaret 104 234 The Grapes of Wrath 14 Red with White Triangle 21 L Mules Skull with Pink Poinsettia
fig.15 Baker, Josephine 114 Brancusi, Constantin 52 Corn, Wanda 10, 14, 220 Frank, Waldo 19 Hesse, Eva 112 Lake George 10, 51, 56, 146, 147, 148, fig.123
Abstraction (oil) fig.36 Barr, Alfred H. 111 Sleeping Muse I 54; fig.43 Cottonwoods fig.186 White Paint and Good Order hiking 11, 237 150, 233, 235; figs 50, 789, 823, 867, Mulvey, Laura 114
Abstraction (sculpture) fig.24 Bashkirtseff, Marie 48 Brandt, Marianne 104 Covarrubias, Miguel 147, 240 1802 Hill, David Octavius 98, 99 934, 1289 music and synaesthesia 12, 53, 138
Abstraction Alexius fig.32 Beauvoir, Simone de Braque, Georges 233 Cows Skull: Red, White, and Blue Frankenthaler, Helen 20, 186, 187, Hiller, Susan 21 Lake George fig.78 Music Pink and Blue No. I 107, 185,
Abstraction Blue 20, 56; fig.30 The Second Sex 105, 109 Breton, Andr 105 16, 20, 58, 152; fig.135 227 OKeeffe as I see her 22631 Lake George, Coat and Red fig.50 228; fig.27
Abstraction White Rose 150; fig.31 Bement, Alon 233 Brigman, Anne 53, 55, 108 Cows Skull with Calico Roses 58; Freud, Sigmund 105, 106, 110 Hch, Hannah 104 Lake George Barns fig.86 My Backyard fig.132
Adams, Ansel 12, 237, 238, 239 Benglis, Lynda 21 Bry, Doris 240, 242 fig.121 The Interpretation of Hopper, Edward 107 Lange, Dorothea 104 My Front Yard, Summer fig.153
Alfred Stieglitz and Painting by Fling, Dribble, and Drip 21 Buffon, Comte de 48 cubism 216, 217 Dreams 106 Hopper, Josephine Nivison 107 Larkin, Oliver My Last Door 189, 192, 21925;
Georgia OKeeffe ... 240 Bergson, Henri Burke, Edmund 188 Cunningham, Imogen 104, 114 Three Essays on the Theory of Horn and Feathers fig.151 Art and Life in America 226, 227 fig.209
Church at Ranchos de Taos ... Creative Evolution 109 Sexuality 106 Horses Skull on Blue fig.118 Laurencin, Marie 227 My Shanty, Lake George 148; fig.129
fig.188 Besant, Annie 111 C D Freudian interpretations of Horses Skull with Pink Rose 58; Lawrence, D.H. 19, 142
Georgia OKeeffe, Carmel, The Beyond 188; fig.172 Calla Lilies on Red fig.106 Dahl-Wolfe, Louise 104 OKeefes work 12, 21, 105, 235, 236 fig.119 The Lawrence Tree 19; fig.8 N
California 243 Bierstadt, Albert 188 Calla Lily in Tall Glass No. 2 fig.105 Dark Iris No.1 fig.111 From a Day with Juan series 188, The House I Live In fig.127 Leadbeater, Charles 111 national and cultural identity 10,
Georgia OKeeffe in the Southwest Bisti Badlands 15, 239 Cameron, Julia Margaret 98 Davis, Stuart 151 191; fig.178 House with Picket Fence 53 Leyster, Judith 227 17, 1512
fig.192 Black Bird Series 222 Canaday, John 1920 Day, F. Holland 98 From the Faraway, Nearby 14, 16, Light Coming on the Plains series National Institute of Arts and
Ghost Ranch Hills, Chama Valley Black Cross with Stars and Blue Carr, Emily 19, 112 Dead Pion Tree fig.157 224; fig.126 I 11 Letters 240, 242
... fig.191 fig.139 Untitled 19; fig.9 Dead Tree, Bear Lake, Taos 19; From the Lake No. 1 fig.82 In the Patio No. I 220 Line and Curve 20; fig.37 National Medal of Arts 243
Untitled (David McAlpin, Al Black Door with Red 189, 223; Carrington, Leonora 104 fig.10 From the Lake, No. 3 fig.83 In the Patio No. II 221 Looney, Ralph National Womans Party 12, 235,
Rhode, Godfrey Rockefeller, fig.208 Cassatt, Mary 227 Deers Skull with Pedernal fig.125 From the River Pale 187; fig.200 In the Patio No. III 221 OKeefe in her Studio fig.98 236
OKeeffe and Helen Rockefeller) Black Hills with Cedar 16; fig.159 A Celebration fig.69 de Kooning, Willem 105 Fryd, Vivien Green In the Patio No. IV 2212; fig.99 Louis, Morris Native American art and culture
fig.133 Black Iris fig.113 Cerro Pedernal 238, 241, 243 Delaunay, Sonia 104, 227 Art and the Crisis of Marriage In the Patio No. V 221, 222, 223; Stripe series 21 1415, 112
African masks 54 Black Lines (charcoal) fig.26 Czanne, Paul 52, 54, 152 Demachy, Robert 98 1078 fig.206 Unfurled series 21 naturalism 16
Agar, Eileen 104 Black Lines (watercolour) fig.19 Chabot, Maria 17, 23940 Demuth, Charles 230, 236, 238 Fuller, Meta Vaux Warrick 104 In the Patio No. VI 222 Veil series 21 Nature Forms Gasp fig.97
Albers, Anni 104 Black Mesa Landscape, New Georgia OKeeffe, The Black Place Dodge, Mabel 106, 147, 149, 151, In the Patio No. VIII 222 Where 21 Neel, Alice 227
Albers, Josef Mexico/Out Back of Maries II 239 230, 237 G In the Patio No. IX 222; fig.207 While 21 negative space 58
Homage to the Square 189 fig.142 Chama River, Ghost Ranch, New Dove, Arthur 12, 52, 147, 185, 216, 236 Gast, John Irvine, Rosalind 239 Luhan, Mabel Dodge see Dodge, Nemser, Cindy 106
Variant/Adobe series 189; fig.173 Black Patio Door 224; fig.205 Mexico fig.150 Snow Thaw 230 American Progress 14; fig.5 It Was Blue and Green fig.201 Mabel Nevelson, Louise 21, 104, 227
Alligator Pear fig.108 Black Place series 1518, 20, 239; Charlottesville, Virginia 233 Dow, Arthur Wesley 10, 52, 55, 98, Gentileschi, Artemisia 227 Luhan, Tony 237 Newman, Arnold
American, use of term 14 figs.6, 7, 1605 Chase, William Merritt 56, 181, 232 111, 189, 233, 234 Georgia OKeeffe Foundation 243 Lynes, Barbara Buhler 12, 49, 105 portrait of OKeeffe and Stieglitz
American Academy of Arts and Black Place Green 17; fig.165 Chase Award 233 Drawing III fig.202 Georgia OKeeffe Museum 243 239
260 261
Georgia OKeeffe
Newman, Barnett 20, 186, 190 temperament 55, 58, 1801 Ranchos Church, New Mexico fig.91 Woman in Art 12 Train at Night in the Desert 53;
Adam 20 To MSS. and Its 33 Subscribers fig.138 Barn & Snow fig.80 Stieglitz, Emmeline 235, 236 fig.41
Eve 20 ... 98100 Red Amaryllis fig.114 Camera Work 53, 54, 99, 109, 185, Stieglitz, Kitty 236 transcendentalism 10
Moment 20 travel 1457, 238, 2412; figs.1301, Red Hills and Bones fig.154 234, 235 Still, Clyfford 20 Tree with Cut Limb 567; fig.45
The Name I 20 243 Red Lines 20 cultural nationalism 10, 151 A Storm 188 Tree and Picket Fence 53
Untitled (The Break) 20 OKeeffe, Francis Calyxtus 232 Red and Orange Streak 11; fig.2 The Dancing Trees 57 Strand, Paul 12, 52, 53, 99, 236, 237 Turrell, James 21
Vir Heroicus Sublimis 186; fig.170 OKeeffe, Ida Totto 232 Red and Yellow Cliffs fig.152 death 18, 240 Abstraction, Bowls, Twin Lakes, Roden Crater 21
The Word I 20 Olitski, Jules 186 Regionalists 15 The Dying Chestnut 567; fig.44 Connecticut 53 Two Calla Lilies on Pink fig.116
Zip paintings 20, 189 Oppenheim, Meret 104, 227 Reinhardt, Ad 20 Equivalents 13 Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George, New Tyrrell, Henry 10, 21
New Mexico 12, 1319, 51, 58, 104, Oriental Poppies fig.109 Renoir, Pierre-August 105 family background 52 York fig.95 Esoteric Art at 291 4849
145, 1467, 14850, 1513, 18890, Ornstein, Leo 138, 139 Rhoades, Katharine 109 first marriage 235, 236 portrait by Stieglitz fig.62
23740; figs 98, 127 Rhode, Al fig.133 From the Back-Window 291 St Francis Church, Ranchos de U
New York City 1213, 19, 58, 145, 146, P Ritz Tower, Night fig.72 fig.75 Taos... fig.187 Udall, Sharyn Rohlfsen 112
14950, 151, 232, 2345; figs 4, 35, 703, Pack, Arthur 238 Rivera, Diego 147, 241 From my Window at An American The White Fence 53 University of Virginia 98, 233
77, 134 Pandora myth 114 Rockefeller, Godfrey fig.133 Place, Southwest (19.3 x 24.1) 58; Strand, Rebecca 237 Untitled (New York) fig.70
New York, Night 13; fig.73 Patio Door Green Red 223 Rockefeller, Helen fig.133 fig.48 Stravinsky, Igor 138 Untitled (Patio Door) fig.196
New York Night (Madison Avenue) Patio series 21, 186, 187, 18890, Rodin, Auguste 52, 54, 111, 232 From my Window at An American Stuck, Franz von Untitled (Self-portrait, Torso) 56;
fig.35 192, 224; fig.174 Romanticism 10, 1878 Place, Southwest (24.1 x 19) 58; The Sin (Die Snde) 54 fig.47
New York Street with Moon 13; Patten, Christine Taylor 103 Rose, Barbara 19, 186, 191, 220, 225 fig.49 subject matter 11011, 150
fig.71 Pauls Kachina fig.144 Rosenblum, Robert 186 From the Shelton, New York, allegories 14 V
New York Worlds Fair (1939) 239 Pedernal fig.180 Modern Painting and the Looking East fig.74 Black Place series 1517, 18, 20; Vaccaro, Tony
No. 12 Special 107; fig.17 Pedernal with Red Hills fig.148 Northern Romantic Tradition 188 Georgia OKeeffe fig.58 figs.6, 7, 159, 160, 162, 163, 165, 175 Georgia OKeeffe with painting in
No. 14 Special 107; fig.18 Pelvis I fig.179 Rosenfeld, Paul 9, 12, 105, 235 Georgia OKeeffe Hands fig.60 bones and skulls 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, the desert 242
No. 15 Special 107; fig.20 Pelvis series 21, 224, 226; fig.181 portrait by Stieglitz fig.63 Georgia OKeeffe at 291 fig.52 58, 152, 187, 237; figs 11819, 121, 123, Vanderpoel, John 232
No. 17 Special 107; fig.25 Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow The Paintings of Georgia Georgia OKeeffe After Return 125, 135, 154, 179, 1812,224 Vieira da Silva, Maria Helena 104
Nochlin, Linda 107, 230 fig.182 OKeeffe 13842 from New Mexico/Equivalent O1 flowers 12, 106, 22930, 236, 237 Von Lintel, Amy 148
Noland, Kenneth 107 Pereira, Irene Rice 104 Rothko, Mark 107, 186, 190 fig.102 influence of photography 1213,
Norman, Dorothy 58, 236, 237, Peterson, Charles (Untitled) White, Pink and Georgia OKeeffe Breasts 56; 16, 18, 53, 556, 58, 98100 W
238, 240 Portrait of Elizabeth Arden and Mustard fig.168 fig.46 Kachina dolls 1415; figs 1445, Wagner, Anne 11213
America & Alfred Stieglitz 238 Georgia OKeeffe 238 Rubens, Peter Paul Georgia OKeeffe Hands and 1556, 194 Wall with Green Door fig.210
Nude Series 114; fig.104 Petunia and Glass Bottle fig.112 Hlne Fourment 54 Horse Skull fig.190 Lake George 150 Wall Street Crash 13, 237
Nude Series VII 114; fig.103 Peyton, Elizabeth Rust Red Hills fig.146 Georgia OKeeffe Torso 54; landscapes 11, 1418, 56, 1503, watercolour 56
Georgia OKeeffe after Stieglitz Ryder, Albert Pinkham 188 fig.56 18592; figs.13943, 1468, 150, 1524, Wave, Night 1878; fig.171
O 21; fig.12 House and Grape Leaves fig.92 15865 Webb, Todd 241
Oak Leaves, Pink and Grey fig.88 Picasso, Pablo 52, 53, 105, 111, 216,S House on the Hill, Lake George New Mexico 1317 Georgia OKeeffe on the portal at
oil paint 56 233 Schapiro, Miriam 21, 106 146; fig.128 New York City 1213, 58, 150, 151; the Ghost Ranch 243
OKeefe, Alexius Wyckoff 232, 237 Pink and Blue Mountain 187; fig.21 Schneemann, Peter J. 192 influence of OKeefe 567 figs 4, 35, 703, 77, 134 Georgia OKeeffe on the portal at
OKeefe, Anita Natalie 232, 238 Pink and Green Mountains 53 Scotus, John Duns 109 influence on modernism 910, 12 Patio series 21, 186, 187, 18890, the Ghost Ranch 241
OKeefe, Claudia Ruth 232, 234 Pink Moon and Blue Lines 20 Series 1 From the Plains 11; fig.1 influence on OKeefe 53, 110 192, 224; fig.174 West Texas State Normal College
OKeefe, Georgia place and OKeefes work 1314, sexualized interpretations of Interpretation fig.59 Pelvis series 21, 187, 224, 226; figs 234
autobiography 148 14553 OKeefes work 12, 1058, 186, 235, Intimate Gallery 236, 237 179, 1812 White, Clarence H. 98
categorisation as woman artist Plaza Blanca 16, 237, 241 242 John Marin fig.64 still lifes 186 White Calico Flower fig.120
12 Pollitzer, Anita 10, 233, 234, 2401 Sheeler, Charles 989 Lake George (9.1 x 11.9) fig.94 White Place series 16 White Iris fig.115
death 243 biography of OKeeffe 240, 241 Church Street El 230 Lake George (23.7 x 19) fig.93 sublime, concept of 188, 189 White Patio with Red Door 18990,
early life 52, 1456, 232 Pollock, Griselda Shell No. 2 fig.96 Main Room Wall, Next to Door, Summer Days fig.124 224, 225; fig.174
economic independence 237 Virtual Feminist Museum 113 The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. Right 234 Sun Prairie, Wisconsin 9, 52, 145, White Place series 16, 237, 241
education 98, 1456, 189, 2323 Pool in the Woods, Lake George 1213, 58, 229; fig.4 Manuscripts 235 181, 232 Williamsburg 232, 239
family 232, 234 fig.79 Sky Above Clouds III fig.204 Marsden Hartley fig.65 Sunrise 11; fig.23 Willis, Elizabeth May 232, 233
first exhibitions 9, 10, 234, 235, Porter, Eliot 12, 240 Sky Above Clouds IV 242 New York from An American Sunrise and Little Clouds No. II 11 Winter Cottonwoods East V fig.185
236 Porter, Fairfield 186 Sky Above Clouds series 21, 190, Place fig.76 Surrealism 14, 217 Winter Road I 153, 187, 225; fig.136
image-construction 1013, 1819, post-impressionism 216 225, 242; fig.204 OKeefes image-construction Symbolism 10, 111 Winter Trees, Abiqui, III fig.184
21, 51, 58, 105, 109, 150, 151 post-painterly abstraction 21, 186 Sky with Flat White Cloud fig.203 1013, 1819, 21, 51, 58, 105, 109, 150, synaesthesia 11, 17, 523 woman artist, OKeefe as 12
influence 9, 1921, 103, 187 precisionism 12 Sky with Moon fig.176 151 Woolf, Virginia 114
influence of photography 1213, Presidential Medal of Freedom Soft Gray, Alcalde Hill fig.140 Paul Rosenfeld fig.63 T Wright, Frank Lloyd 147, 239
16, 18, 53, 556, 58, 98100 242 Some Memories of Drawings 242 Paul Strand fig.62 Tack, Augustus Vincent 188 Wyeth, Andrew 20
influence of Stieglitz 53, 556 Progressive Era 910, 13 Special No. 9 53; fig.16 photographs of OKeeffe 545, Tanning, Dorothea 104
influence on Stieglitz 567 Purple Hills fig.147 Special No. 32 11 56, 58, 109, 2279, 2349, 235, 243; Taos Pueblo fig.141 Y
macular degeneration 242 Pyne, Kathleen 108 Spring Tree No. 1 fig.183 figs 39, 42, 46, 528, 601, 668, 90, Taos Society of Artists 151 Yuliang, Pan 114
portraits by Stieglitz 545, 56, Modernism and the Feminine Steichen, Edward 98 102, 18990 Tawney, Lenore 104
58, 2279, 2348, 235, 243; figs.39, Voice 109 Steinbeck, John portrait by Strand fig.95 Teachers College, Columbia
42, 46, 528, 601, 668, 90, 102, The Grapes of Wrath 14 Portrait of Georgia, No. 1 fig.66 University 10, 98, 111, 233, 234
18990 R Sterne, Hedda 104 Portrait of Georgia, No. 2 fig.67 Texas 11, 12, 53, 145, 146, 148, 149,
psychoneurosis 238 Radiator Building Night, New York Stieglitz, Alfred 913, 16, 1819, 21, Portrait of Georgia, No. 3 fig.68 233, 234
relationship with Stieglitz 1013, 13: fig.134 216, 232 relationship with OKeefe 1013, Theosophy 10, 111
519, 10810, 146, 147, 150, 1812, Radio City Music Hall mural 238 291 Gallery 9, 10, 12, 489, 52, 54, 512, 549, 10810, 146, 147, 150, 1812, Thomas, Alma 104
2349 Rama, Carol 104 109, 181, 185, 232, 233, 234 2349 thought-form concept 10
spartan aesthetic 148 Rams Head, White Hollyhock-Hills... 291 periodical 234 Snapshot In the New York Totto, Alletta 232
teaching posts 11, 53, 146, 148, fig.122 An American Place 237, 238, 240 Central Yards 53; fig.40 Totto, Charles 232
2334 Rancho de los Burros 238, 239 Apples and Gable, Lake George temperament 52, 58 Totto, Leonore Lola 232
262 263
Georgia OKeeffe
The Fine Arts Museums of San The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Courtesy of the New Britain
Francisco, gift of Mrs. Charlotte S. New York; New York; Museum of American Art. Stephen
Mack, 1961.48.1: fig.70 Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1952: Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe B. Lawrence Fund 1958.09: fig.77
fig.135; Foundation, 1995: fig.17;
Co-owned by Fisk University, Collection of the New Mexico
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1959: Acquired through the Helen
Nashville, Tennessee, and Crystal Museum of Art,
figs 126, 161; Acheson Bequest, 1979: fig.30;
Bridges Museum of American Bequest of Helen Miller Jones, 1986
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1969: Acquired with matching funds
Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Alfred (1986.137.18): fig.148;
fig.113; from the Committee on Drawings
Picture Credits
Stieglitz Collection. Photography Gift of the Georgia OKeeffe Estate,
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, and the National Endowment for
by Edward C. Robison III: fig.134 1987 (1987.312.3): fig.183, (1987.312.1):
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe, 1986 the Arts: fig.41;
fig.150;
The J. Paul Getty Museum, (1987.377.2): fig.85; Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Photographs by Blair Clark
Los Angeles: figs 58, 102, 190, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Foundation, 1995: fig.50;
p.234 above Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe, 1986 Acquired through the Richard D. The New Orleans Museum of Art:
(1987.377.4): fig.152 Brixey Bequest, 1945: fig.89; Museum Purchase, City of New
Greenville County Museum of Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller. Orleans Capital Funds, 73.8: fig.132
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Art, Museum purchase with Acc. No: 240.1969: fig.170;
New York; Gift of Georgia OKeeffe, Photo by Arnold Newman/Getty
funds donated by The Museum Ruth Vollmer Bequest. Acc. N.:
through the generosity of The Images: p.241 above
Association, Mr. and Mrs. 318.1983: fig.177;
Georgia OKeeffe Foundation and
Thomas Howard Suitt, Jr., Richs Given anonymously (by exchange), Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift
Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997;
Department Store; and Mr. and 1936: fig.193; of The Burnett Foundation:
(Accession Number 1997.61.13):
Mrs. C. H. Abbe: fig.15 Photo 2015. Scala, Florence: 2007.01.013: fig.1; 2007.01.001: fig,19;
p.234 below
Copyright credits 2016 The Barnett Newman Image The Albuquerque Collection Center for Creative fig.50; 1997.04.015: fig.21; 2002.01.001: fig.22;
Photo Philippe Halsman/Magnum (1997.61.67): p.237 below Photos 2015. Digital image, The 2006.05.021: fig.24; 1997.05.015: fig.25;
Foundation, New York / DACS, Museum Photoarchives: fig.98 Photography, University of
Photos: p.240 below (1997.61.40): p.238 above
All images 2016 Georgia OKeeffe London: fig.170 Arizona: figs 133, 188, 191, 192, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1997.04.00: fig.31; 2006.05.089:
Courtesy of American Museum Photos 2015. Image copyright
Museum/ DACS, London, with the p.240 above Indianapolis Museum of Art, Gift / Scala, Florence: figs 17, 30, 41, 89, fig.45; 2003.01.003: fig.60;
The Estate of Charles Peterson: of Western Art The Anschutz The Metropolitan Museum of Art/
exception of the following: of Eli Lilly and Company, 1997.131: 177, 193 1997.04.003: fig.81; 2007.06.037:
p.240 below Collection. Photo: William J. Art Resource/ Scala, Florence:
Collection of the Colorado Springs fig.117 fig.96; 1997.04.010: fig.103;
2016 The Ansel Adams OConnor: fig.149 figs 85, 135, 152, p.236 below, p.239 Myron Kunin Collection of
Elizabeth Peyton, courtesy Sadie Fine Arts Center. Anonymous gift, 1997.04.013: fig.104; 1997.06.010:
Publishing Rights Trust: figs 133, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. below, p.240 above American Art, Minneapolis,
Coles HQ, London: fig.12 FA 1954: fig.111 fig.105; 1996.05.001: fig.106;
188, 191, 192, p.240 above, Amon Carter Museum of Photos: Malcom Varon 2015. Minnesota: fig.174
Collection : Museo Tamayo Arte 1997.06.014: fig.123; 2006.06.1082:
p.243 below 1987, Private collection: figs 162, American Art, Fort Worth, Texas. Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Image The Metropolitan
Contemporneo. Donation: National Gallery of Art, fig.137; 1997.06.015: fig.142;
1971.16: figs 138, 205
180, 196 Museum Purchase, Howald Fund II, Georgia OKeeffe Museum: fig.206 Museum of Art/ Art Resource/ Washington: fig.49 2006.05.134: fig.144; 2006.05.152:
ADAGP, Paris and DACS, 1981.006: fig.87 Scala, Florence: figs 113, 126, 161
1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Collection of Arizona State fig.151; 2006.05.173: fig.153;
London 2016: figs 43, 167 Philippe Halsman/Magnum National Gallery of Art,
Christopher Rothko ARS, NY and University Art Museum, gift of Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum Milwaukee Art Museum; 2006.05.167: fig.156; 2006.05.180:
The Josef and Anni Albers Photos: p.240 below Washington;
DACS, London: fig.168 Oliver B. James 1951.057.030: fig.118
of American Art, Bentonville, Gift of Jane Bradley Pettit fig.157; 2007.01.026: fig.162;
Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Gift (Partial and Promised)
Arkansas: figs 51, 110; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Foundation and The Georgia 1997.18.003: fig.166; 2006.05.460:
and DACS, London 2016: fig.173 Estate of Georgia O'Keeffe/ Art Gallery of Ontario. Donated in Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth
Photography by Dwight Primiano: Garden , Smithsonian Institution; OKeeffe Foundation. fig.172; 2006.05.482: fig.178;
Courtesy of University of New memory of Doris Huestis Speirs by 1998.93.1: fig.38
fig.51; Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. Photo: Malcom Varon: fig.13; 1997.06.008: fig.180; 2006.05.229:
Amon Carter Museum of Mexico Art Museum: fig.6 her husband, Dr. J. Murray Speirs, Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Photography by Edward C. Photography by Lee Stalsworth: Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, fig.184; 1997.06.024: fig.185;
American Art: figs 138, 205 1990 90/36: fig.107 Foundation 1995.4.1: fig.136;
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Robison III: fig.110, cover fig.43; MI1973.609 Photo: John Nienhuis, 2006.05.244: fig.186; 1997.05.001:
Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Gift of Georgia OKeeffe, 1949:
fig.115 Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972. Dedra Walls: fig.179; fig.195; 1997.06.003: fig.196;
The Art Institute of Chicago: figs 80, 94;
Strand Archive: figs 95, 187 Dallas Museum of Art, gift of The Photography by Cathy Carver: figs Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, 1997.05.005: fig.198; 2006.05.280:
Estate of Todd Webb, Portland, Gift of Leigh B. Block, 1985.206: Gift of Georgia OKeeffe, 1980:
The Art Institute of Chicago: Georgia OKeeffe Foundation, 140, 159 MI1973.606. Photo: Larry Sanders: fig.200; 1997.06.029: fig.209;
Maine, USA: p.241 below, fig.4; fig.53;
figs 4, 28, 121 1994.54: fig.33 fig.199 RC.2005.001.001: p.232; 2014-03-
p.243 above Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of Holsinger Studio Collection, Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe, 1987:
Georgia OKeeffe, 1969.835: fig.28; ca. 1890-1938, Accession #9862, 0056: p.236 below
Mary Beth Edelson. Image Denver Art Museum Collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; figs 37, 203;
Yale University: figs 63, 128 Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of Special Collections, University of Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
courtesy the artist: fig.11 Charles Francis Hendrie Memorial Gift of the William H. Lane Georgia OKeeffe Museum;
Georgia OKeeffe, 1947.712: fig.121 Collection, 1966.44. Photo courtesy Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.: Foundation, 1990.434: fig.99 Foundation, 1992: fig.18; Gift of The Burnett Foundation
J. Paul Getty Trust: figs 58, 102, Lender and photo credits
of the Denver Art Museum: fig.112 p.233 above Gift of the William H. Lane Corcoran Collection (Gift of the and Gerald and Kathleen Peters
190, p.234 above Autry National Center. Museum
Ackland Art Museum, The Photograph by Yousuf Karsh, Foundation, 1990.432: fig.125 Woodward Foundation) 2015.19.155: (1996.03.001): fig.84
The Estate of Yousuf Karsh: Purchase 92.126.1: fig.5 Purchased with funds from the fig.210
University of North Carolina at Camera Press London: p.241 above Photographs 2016 Museum of Extended loan, private collection
p.241 above Brauer Musuem of Art, Valpariaso Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan Fine Arts, Boston (1997.03.04L): fig.182
Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, 80.32.1: National Gallery of Art,
Emory Coffin Collection of the Des Photo courtesy Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly: fig.169 fig.68 University. Sloan Fund Purchase Gift of Maria Chabot
Moines Art Center, 1984.3: fig.82 Studio: fig.169 The Museum of Fine Arts, Washington. Alfred Stieglitz
62.02: fig.146 (RC.2001.002.105): p.239 below
Houston. Museum purchase with Collection;
The Metropolitan Museum of Addison Gallery of American Collection of Jane Lombard: fig.165
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of George Eastman Museum: figs 61, funds provided by the Agnes 1980.70.16: fig.42; 1980.70.26: fig.39; Courtesy of the Palace of the
Art: p.234 below Art, Phillips Academy, Andover,
Edith and Milton Lowenthal, 66, 91, p.235 above Los Angeles County Museum of Cullen Arnold Endowment Fund: 1949.3.439: fig.44; 1980.70.108: fig.46; Governors Photo Archives
Massachusetts;
2016. Agnes Martin / DACS: 1992.11.28: fig.122 1949.3.1240: fig.48; 1949.3.1233: fig.49; (NMHM/DCA). Negative Number
Museum purchase, 1959.22: fig.26; Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth: Art, Gift of the Georgia OKeeffe fig.34
figs 175, 177 1980.70.1: fig.52; 1980.70.76: fig.54; 009763: p.237 above
Purchased as the gift of Charles L. fig.23 Foundation 1994. Digital image
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Museum of Fine Arts, St.
Milwaukee Art Museum: fig.13 2015 Museum Associates/ 1980.70.52: fig.55; 1980.70.38: fig.56;
Stillman (PA 1922), 1947.33: fig.171; VA. Bequest of Walter P. Chrysler, Petersburg, Florida, Gift of Private collection, courtesy the
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth. 1980.70.12: fig.57; 1980.70.127: fig.59;
Photos Addison Gallery of LACMA/ Art Resource NY/ Scala,
Jr. 89.63: fig.208 Partial and Promised gift to Seattle Charles and Margaret Stevenson artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London:
Board of Trustees, National Florence: fig.119 1949.3.411: fig.62; 1949.3.510: fig.64;
American Art, Phillips Academy, Henderson in memory of Hunt fig.12
Gallery of Art, Washington: figs 39, Art Museum: fig.27 1949.3.889: fig.67; 1949.3.372: fig.74;
Andover, MA/ Art Resource, NY The Cleveland Museum of Art.
The Menil Collection, Houston; Henderson 1971.31. Photograph by
42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt 1949.3.1267: fig.75; 1949.3.1243: fig.76;
Courtesy of Mary Beth Edelson: Thomas U. Gessler: fig.35 Philadelphia Museum of Art;
59, 62, 64, 67, 74, 75, 76, 80, 90, 93, Photo The Josef and Anni Gift of the Georgia OKeeffe 1980.70.143: fig.90; 1949.3.916: fig.93;
Fund 1965.233: fig.3; fig.11 Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe for
94, 136, 189, 203, p.235 below, Albers Foundation. Photo: Tim Foundation, 1995. Photo George 1959.3.667: fig.94; 1980.70.252: fig.189;
Gift of Cary Ross, Knoxville, Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987
p.238 above Nighswander: fig.173 Courtesy of the Eiteljorg Museum Hixson: fig.14 1980.70.145: p.235 below; 1980.70.174:
Tennessee 1935.54: fig.92; Museum Folkwang Essen 1987-70-3: fig.2
of American Indians and Western p.236 above
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe Artothek: fig.168 125th Anniversary Acquisition.
New Mexico Museum of Art: The Albuquerque Museum of Art Art, Indianapolis. Cat No: 1989.3.55: The Menil Collection, Houston.
1987.141: fig.101. Photos The Purchased with the gift (by
figs 148, 183 and History, gift of the Estate of fig.141 Photo Paul Hester: fig.16
Cleveland Museum of Art exchange) of Dr. and Mrs.
Ralph and Clarabelle Looney.
264 265
Georgia OKeeffe
Paul Todd Makler, with funds Collection. Photo: Don Ross: fig.155; fig.36;
contributed by Mr. and Mrs. John Gift of Charlotte Mack. Photo: Ben Purchase, 1932: fig.120;
J. F. Sherrerd, the Alice Newton Blackwell: fig.160 Gift of Calvin Klein, 1994: fig.124;
Osborn Fund, the Lola Downin Purchase, 1932: fig.143;
Seattle Art Museum, Gift of The
Peck Fund, and gift of The Lawrence H. Bloedel Bequest
Georgia OKeeffe Foundation,
Georgia OKeeffe Foundation, 1997 77.1.37: fig.201;
94.89: fig.69
(1997.39.1): fig.20; Image Whitney Museum, NY:
Gift of Carl Zigrosser, 1966 figs 29, 36, 120, 124, 143, 201
Supporting Tate
Sheldon Museum of Art, Sheldon
(1966.205.20): fig.40; Art Association, Thomas C. Woods The collection of the Frederick
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe for Memorial, N-107.1958 Collection R. Weisman Art Museum at
the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987 Thomas C. Woods Memorial, 1958. the University of Minnesota,
(1987.70.02): fig.83; Photo Sheldon Museum of Art: Minneapolis.
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe for fig.73 Gift of Ione and Hudson D. Walker
the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987
1975.17.15: fig.65;
(1987.70.4): fig.116; The Snite Museum of Art,
Museum Purchase, 1936.85: fig.88;
The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, University of Notre Dame, Gift
Museum Purchase, 1937.1: fig.109
1949 (1949.18.109): fig.154 of Mr. Walter R. Beardsley,
125th Anniversary Acquisition. 1978.073.001: fig.197 Worcester Art Museum, Worcester,
Purchased with funds contributed Massachusetts, Gift of Mr and
Tate. Photo Tate Photography: Mrs Robert W. Stoddard, 1981.334.
by the Arcadia Foundation, and
fig.175 Image Worcester Art Museum:
gift of the Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation, 1997 (1997.42.1): fig.202 Terra Foundation for American fig.15 Tate relies on a large number Your support actively contributes Corporate Investment Tate Modern Donors to the Founding
Art, Gift of Mrs. Henrietta Roig, of supporters individuals, to new purchases of important Tate has developed a range of Capital Campaign
Yale Collection of American 29th May 1961 Charitable Trust
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Paris, Centre Pompidou - Muse Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Lord and Lady Attenborough
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Georgia OKeeffe

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Georgia OKeeffe (18871986) was one of the foundational

Illustrating her highly distinctive paintings from well-known

on the occasion of the exhibition Foreword p.6

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Touching the Centre:

Fig.9 Fig.10 Fig.11

This is one of the drawings, purely symbolistic, a sort of allegory in

actually born near

Touching the Centre:

Man Ray a young American painter of ultra modern tendencies and of

Location and Fig.127

Life and Art of

OKeeffes Late Blooms: Fig.166

Landscapes Georgia OKeeffes work was characterised from the very

It is surprising to me how many people separate the objective

While OKeeffes artistic achievement of reduction and

her painting in 1918, and

Linda Nochlins conclusion to her historical survey of women artists points

shores in the persons of a groups

were fascinated with the view

OKeeffe, in Czestochowski (ed.)

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