The artistic achievement of Georgia O’Keeffe is examined from a fresh perspective in “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction,” an exhibition that recently debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
While O’Keeffe (1887‱986) has long been recognized as one of the central figures in Twentieth Century art, the radical abstract work she created has remained less well-known than her representational art. By surveying her abstractions, the exhibition repositions O’Keeffe as one of America’s first and most daring abstract artists.
The exhibit will remain on view in the Whitney’s third-floor Peter Norton Family Galleries through January 17.
Including more than 130 watercolors, paintings, drawings and sculptures by O’Keeffe, as well as selected examples of Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographic portrait series of O’Keeffe, the exhibition has been many years in the making. The curatorial team, led by Whitney curator Barbara Haskell, includes Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Emily Fisher Landau director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
This exhibition is the first to examine O’Keeffe’s achievement as an abstract artist. In 1915, O’Keeffe leaped into the forefront of American Modernism with a group of abstract charcoal drawings. A year later, she added color to her repertoire; by 1918, she was expressing the union of abstract form and color in paint.
First exhibited in 1923, O’Keeffe’s psychologically charged, brilliantly colored abstract oils garnered immediate critical and public acclaim. For the next decade, abstraction would dominate her attention. Even after 1930, when O’Keeffe’s focus turned increasingly to representational subjects, she never abandoned abstraction, which remained the guiding principle of her art. She returned to abstraction in the mid-1940s with a new, planar vocabulary that provided a precedent for a younger generation of abstractionists.
For O’Keeffe, abstraction offered a way to communicate ineffable thoughts and sensations. Through her personal language of abstraction, she sought to give visual form (as she confided in a 1916 letter to Alfred Stieglitz) to “things I feel and want to say †[but] havent [sic] words for.”
This exhibition and catalog chronicle the trajectory of O’Keeffe’s career as an abstract artist and examine the forces impacting the changes in her subject matter and style. Interpretations of her art were shaped almost exclusively by Stieglitz, who presented her work from 1916 to 1946 at the groundbreaking galleries “291,” the Anderson Galleries, the Intimate Gallery and An American Place.
O’Keeffe’s abstractions rarely figured in the exhibitions Stieglitz mounted of her work after 1930, with the result that her first forays into abstraction virtually disappeared from public view.
In addition to rethinking O’Keeffe’s place in American Modernism, the book that accompanies this exhibition reappraises the origin and singular character of her abstract vocabulary and the stylistic shifts that her art underwent over the span of her long career. It adds significant new insight, publishing for the first time excerpts of recently unsealed letters written by O’Keeffe to Stieglitz.
“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction” was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, N.M.
The Whitney is at 954 Madison Ave at 75th Street. For information, 212-570-3600 or www.whitney.org .
