“Cedar with Lavendar Hills,” Georgia O’Keeffe, 1937. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born November 15, 1887, to Frankand Ida O’Keeffe in Sun Prairie, Wis. As a child, she received herfirst art lessons at home, and as she grew her abilities werequickly recognized and encouraged by teachers throughout the years.When O’Keeffe graduated from high school in 1905, she knew shewanted to be an artist.

That same year, she left her home to attend classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she spent a year studying under John Vanderpoel, 1905-1906. After a serious bout with typhoid, she decided to become an art teacher and attended the Art Students League in New York City, 1907-1908, where she was the pupil of William Merritt Chase. A member of the American Impressionists, Chase emphasized a sense of imitative realism through speed, color and vitality and forced his students to produce one finished painting per week, a work ethic O’Keeffe would carry throughout her later years.

O’Keeffe’s work at the league was skillful but conventional; she had even won the coveted William Merritt Chase prize for her painting “Untitled, Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot,” yet she realized “that a lot of people had done this same kind of painting before I came along. It had been done and I didn’t think I could do it any better, … so I stopped painting for a while.”

Her sabbatical from painting was broken four years later when she attended a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, taught by Alon Bemont of Teachers College, Columbia University. Her encounter with Bemont would alter her life. Bemont introduced O’Keeffe to the then revolutionary ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow, who believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist’s personal ideas and feelings, and that such subject matter was best realized through harmonious arrangements of line, color and notan, the Japanese system of lights and darks. Bemont’s ideas gave O’Keeffe a new sense of freedom and possibility.

It was in the fall of 1915, while teaching in Columbia, S.C., that Dow’s methodology along with reading Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, that O’Keeffe created her first serious abstractions. These same abstractions would then be sent to her friend Anita Pollitzer, shown to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and later exhibited in his Gallery 291. Over the next two years, O’Keeffe would produce approximately 70 abstractions.

However, she produced fewer than 30 true abstractions during the period of 1918 to 1929. In these years, she had moved to New York; become notorious for a nude series of photographs taken by her then lover, Alfred Stieglitz, whom she later married; painted her infamous flower series; and had a breakdown. In 1929, she returned to New Mexico to recuperate, and it is this body of work, produced mainly in the 1930s and 1940s, that the exhibition examines.

Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, found that she could pinpoint where O’Keeffe had positioned herself while painting, and wanted to explore the degree to which O’Keeffe’s paintings were specific to the actual landscape. O’Keeffe frequently wrote letters that often describe where she was painting; aided with these letters, and reproductions of O’Keeffe’s paintings, Buhler discovered more than 60 sites that inspired O’Keeffe’s oeuvre.

Buhler commissioned professional photographers to take photographs of 20 of the sites from the point of view of represented in O’Keeffe’s paintings. From these photographs and the paintings that reflect the locations came the exhibition, “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Sense of Place,” which reveals her subtle continuous use of abstraction.

“Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico: Out Back of Marie’s II” was painted during her second summer visiting New Mexico in 1930. It represents a small section of landscape from a vast panorama of mountains, hills and cliffs to the west of the H. and M. Ranch, where she stayed. Compared to the photograph of Black Mesa, the viewer can see that O’Keeffe almost literally transcribed the contours of the mountains she saw, but also changed their sizes. The photograph also reveals that she placed these forms within a deeply receding space, and manipulated their scale so that the mountains in the foreground occupy the same amount of space as the ones in the background, thus eliminating the idea of spatial recession so often found in realistic landscape painting.

While she stayed at H. and M. Ranch, O’Keeffe made many excursions by car. In Tierra Azul, she found three creamy-colored sand hills that seem to be the inspiration for her “New Mexican Landscape,” 1930. At first glance, the painted hills seem to reflect the actual location exactly, but upon closer inspection, adjustments in size, shape and internal contour reveal myriad adjustments of reality. The painting exhibits O’Keeffe’s interest in reducing and simplifying forms, the abundant vegetation in the photograph is nearly nonexistent in the painting. Instead, she places the focus on the sinuous contour of the hills and the subtle play of light and dark in the muted coloring that compresses the space. Once again, O’Keeffe does not seem interested in accurate spatial recession or volumetric form.

In 1932, Charles Collier, a Taos friend from her stays with Mabel Dodge Luhan, told O’Keeffe about some startling landscape around Ghost Ranch near Abiqui. Ghost Ranch is at the eastern edge of the Jimenez mountain range, and geologically speaking contains a rich and complicated history. It is the geological stratification of the cliffs that provides the landscape with breathtaking color: the Dakota layer is a yellow-brown conglomerate; next is the Morrison layer, red and pink, green, dusty purple and blue gray slopes of variegated mudstones and interbedded sandstones; below this is the pure white Todelito – gypsum layer and the buff, and yellow Entrada – sandstone; the last and oldest is the Chinle, which is composed of high mounds of red, green, gray, chocolate and purple siltstone in a fine powder.

At first O’Keeffe could not find the entrance to the ranch, but she allegedly waylaid an unsuspecting Ghost Ranch driver and demanded directions to the ranch. Once she knew the way, she drove to the ranch and requested a room. After her first night there, another guest’s child took ill and the family vacated a cottage, which O’Keeffe promptly claimed for the summer’s duration. O’Keeffe found what she wanted in these hills: the endless sky, shimmering cliffs, the oblique profile of the Pedernal – what would eventually come to be known as “O’Keeffe country.”

In “Hill, New Mexico,” 1935, O’Keeffe’s painting of the area is almost identical to what one sees today in New Mexico. But once again, with close study of the actual landscape, she has subtly manipulated the forms to create a more animated hill. She has simplified the roughly textured slopes to smooth waves, creating patterns of intensified oranges and whites. The repeating furrows of the hill are exaggerated curving diagonals that suggest movement within the form. The hill seems to swell forward into the viewer’s space as the frosted crest nearly touches the edge of the canvas, alluding to the influence of photography in her work.

Similarly, in “The Cliff Chimneys,” 1938, O’Keeffe has slightly altered the contours of the craggy surfaces in the middle and background, emphasizing, instead, the rhythm of repeating shapes. Furthermore, the right chimney does not just graze the edge of the canvas, but is cropped off – calling attention to the two-dimensional planarity of the canvas’s surface.

Emphasizing repeating shapes is also evident in “Part of the Cliffs,” 1937, where orange and pink wedgelike depressions are outlined with broad bands of grayish-pink, creating forms that read as both positive and negative space. Once again volumetric form is suggested and denied. The thick gray white upper layer of the cliffs seems to press down on the shapes below, which appear convex and concave simultaneously, creating a visual tension that enlivens the painting.

But it is “Lavender Hills,” 1934, where she draws further away from the real landscape in her unique palette choices. O’Keeffe has invented most of the color used in this painting. She has synthesized the hues that could be seen at Ghost Ranch at various times of the days, and created a Fauve-like vision whose actual color could only be characterized as subtle. Shapes are once again ambiguous in character, reading as both solid and void.

O’Keeffe returned to these hills again in 1937 to paint a dead cedar tree and used the lavender hills as a backdrop to showcase this single form. She takes great liberty with the color and shapes of the hills, but the tree’s form and color are quite specific. The interlocking pattern of muted green, gray-blue and orange-pink relates directly to the similar, more intense colors used in the background. The purple hills are amorphous shapes to the left of the tree, but the lavender hills become recognizable on the right due to her inclusion of the rhythmic band of depressions seen in her earlier painting. The end result shows a highly abstracted landscape with spatial recession only alluded to by the relative size of the subtly cropped pinon tree in the foreground, creating a dynamic tension that does not exist in the real landscape.

Cedar tree with lavender hills, chromogenic print.

Furthermore, “Pedernal, New Mexico,” 1936, exemplifiesO’Keeffe’s philosophy of realism – “Nothing is less real thanrealism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, byelimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning ofthings.” In “Pedernal,” detail is denied and she has limited herpalette to pale blue-grays and muted greens with soft pinks. Spaceis flattened and defined by the contour of the Pedernal with onlyits blue-gray shape juxtaposed against the subtle pale blue of thesky, creating an illusion of space.

O’Keeffe grew to love this sacred site and would go on to paint this flint-topped mountain numerous times through the years, making it one of the most recognizable land forms in the Southwest; but to O’Keeffe: “It belongs to me, God told me that if I painted it enough, I could have it.” And O’Keeffe was granted her prayer in 1986, on her death, when her ashes were scattered into the windy landscape that she loved, Ghost Ranch.

The exhibition was organized by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and was made possible by The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum National Advisory Council. A beautifully illustrated book, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Sense of Space, reproduces the exhibition’s 50 paintings and contains essays written by Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator of the exhibition, and authors, Lesley Poling-Kempes and Frederick W. Turner. Lynes discusses the relationship of the artist’s paintings relative to the landscape that inspired them; Poling-Kempes presents a chronicle of O’Keeffe’s years in the region as well as discussing the geological landscape; and Turner offers an essay contrasting O’Keeffe’s aloofness from the art colony in Santa Fe with her closeness to the local landscape.

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery is at 1285 Elmwood Avenue. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Thursday, 10 am to 5 pm; Friday, 10 am to 10 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm. For information 716-882-8700 or www.albrightknox.org.