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4/9

New York, 1917–1925

  • Alexandra Dean, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
Black and white photograph. We look slightly up at O’Keeffe as she stands swathed in a black coat or wrap, wearing a black hat pulled down to just above her brow, against a white, washed-out sky. Shown from the knees up, her body is angled to our right but she turns her face to us. She gazes down her long nose through narrowed eyes, off to our left. Lit from our right, sharp shadow defines the hollow under her high cheekbone on our left. Her lips are set in a line, and she seems to lean a little away from us. Her entire body is hidden behind her black garment. The light gray horizon comes about an eighth of the way up the composition, and the rest of the background is pale sky.
Figure 1. Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe, 1920–22 . Gelatin silver print, 4 1/2 x 3 9/16 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.

In 1927, artist and critic Frances O’Brien visited her friend Georgia O’Keeffe on the 28th floor of the Shelton Hotel. O’Brien observed the painter in her element, working quietly in the apartment she shared with her husband and promoter, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The result of O’Brien’s visit was a richly detailed, if brief, profile of O’Keeffe featured in a series of “Personality Portraits” called Americans We Like for the progressive biweekly magazine The Nation. In the piece, O’Brien noted that “Georgia O’Keeffe has never allowed her life to be one thing and her painting another” and offered up a series of incisive observations about the painter’s looks, clothes, and lifestyle.1

O’Brien’s article was hardly the first to emphasize O’Keeffe’s physical and social identity in addition to her artwork; rather, it reflects a widespread tendency on the part of critics and the public to connect O’Keeffe’s work to other elements of her life, something that permeates much of past and present scholarship on the artist. An avowed individualist, O’Keeffe’s dress, relationships, and style of living set her apart from other women of the time and invited this sort of interpretation. It also contributed to the formation of a cult of personality that fuels her continued mythologization.2 This phenomenon has outlasted O’Keeffe herself—it appears even in more recent retrospectives of the artist: A 2000 exhibition at the Phillips Collection featured massive black-and-white photographs of the artist and her living space in conjunction with paintings of objects in her home. The Brooklyn Museum’s 2017 show Living Modern displayed images of O’Keeffe as well as her personal effects side-by-side with her artworks.3

This cult of personality, a force that has so thoroughly shaped O’Keeffe’s image as an artist, coalesced quite early in her career—as early as 1917 and 1923, the dates of her first and second solo exhibitions. Reviews of her shows, profiles such as O’Brien’s, and public reception of her work combined to bring O’Keeffe a kind of notoriety that would set the tone for the rest of her career. This fame was the result of Stieglitz’s mythmaking, O’Keeffe’s own deliberate forms of self-fashioning, and the various early critical and public response to her emergence as an artistic force, which confounded, and occasionally pleased, both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz.

Stieglitz’s promotion of O’Keeffe began in earnest in 1915, when her friend Anita Pollitzer showed Stieglitz a few of the artist’s drawings. His alleged reaction—“finally, a woman on paper!”—has become part of the mythology of O’Keeffe and of her relationship with Stieglitz.4 Though in recent years the truth of this account has come into question, outlined in the essay by Barbara Buhler Lynes, it persists because it reflects Stieglitz’s future treatment of O’Keeffe’s public persona.5 Acting as mentor, professional manager, and, eventually, romantic partner to O’Keeffe, Stieglitz encouraged both the public and the critics to examine the painter’s work through the lens of her personal identity, with particular focus on two elements: her gender and her nationality.

Painting. Rounded forms in cool mint and laurel green, topaz, and cobalt blue flare outward from a dark blue teardrop shape near the top center of this composition and envelop an inverted teardrop shape, in mauve pink, below the first. The rounded, flaring forms extend off all four sides of the composition. The dark blue teardrop is surrounded by a wide ring of aquamarine blue around the top that lightens to seafoam green below. Bands flare out and up, creating peaks to either side of this ring in the same jewel-toned greens and blues. Two larger forms swell out surround the pink teardrop below. A vertical line extends from the lower teardrop to the bottom edge of the painting, splitting the two forms there. Those forms have smaller lobes above the teardrop and are wider below, like bottom-heavy kidney beans. The areas closest to the pink teardrop are frosty green, darkening to spruce and teal green at the edges. Along the top of the composition, the background deepens from shell pink near the flower to dusky-rose pink at the edge. Darker pink fills in the lower corners. Brushstrokes are visible in some areas and more blended in others.
Figure 2. Georgia O’Keeffe. Series I White & Blue Flower Shapes, 1919. Oil on board, 19 7/8 x 15 3/4 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.

Stieglitz began showing O’Keeffe’s work at his 291 gallery in 1916 and later at Anderson Galleries in New York. The photographer was a self-proclaimed “feminine feminist”—he believed that there were essential and irreconcilable differences between men and women, and that these differences were reflected in their art.6 He had a hyper-idealized concept of woman; in Pollitzer’s words, he was a “composite of the romantic heroines of Wagner and of Goethe . . . and [held] a personal belief in what modern woman could accomplish.”7 O’Keeffe’s early work corresponded with Stieglitz’s notions of womanhood. Her paintings of flowers, a stereotypically feminine subject, evoked the forms of the female body for viewers, critics, and Stieglitz himself (figure 2).

The photographer’s attitudes were also reflected in his approach to marketing O’Keeffe’s exhibitions; the catalogue for her 1923 show at Anderson Galleries included a Stieglitz-approved essay by fellow painter Mardsen Hartley. The piece positioned O’Keeffe as a “sexually obsessed,” distinctly feminine artist whose work was inexorably bound up with her body and self-perception.8 Hartley’s words colored much contemporary criticism regarding O’Keeffe’s work, as did Stieglitz’s decision to exhibit his photographs of the painter in 1921. These included nude images of O’Keeffe as well as photographs of her in front of her work—the curves of her face and body reflected in the organic, abstracted forms of her drawings and paintings (figure 3). These images, in the eyes of critics and the public, underscored Stieglitz’s argument that O’Keeffe’s work reflected her femininity.9

Palladium print. O’Keeffe’s head is at the bottom center of this tall palladium print. In warm tones of golden brown and velvety black, she raises one hand high so it reaches into the upper right corner while the other hand is up near her face, both with palms out. O’Keeffe looks off to our left under dark brows. The outer corners of her eyes and lips turn slightly down. Tendons stand out in her neck, and her long dark hair extends off the bottom edge of the image. Her arm to our left curves up and over her head, dark hair visible in her armpit. That thumb may touch the work of art behind her, which shows a swirling form that grows up the composition in much the same shape as her arm. Her other hand is near her head, palm facing us, with that thumb close to or brushing that ear.
Figure 3. Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918. Palladium print, 9 3/8 x 6 3/8 in. National Gallery of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the NGA website.

In addition to marketing O’Keeffe as a woman painter, Stieglitz did much to promote an image of her as an essentially American artist, and, more broadly, as a quintessential American. In the late 1910s, the photographer, who had long been a champion of modern art, began to narrow his focus to art made in the United States. O’Keeffe, as one of the artists he exhibited most often, necessarily became a part of this project. Tellingly, Stieglitz titled her 1923 exhibition Alfred Stieglitz Presents One Hundred Pictures: Oils, Water-colors, Pastels, Drawings, by Georgia O’Keeffe, American, placing particular emphasis on her nationality. In a group exhibition of 1925, Stieglitz further highlighted the Americanness of both O’Keeffe and the other artists featured at his galleries. His essay in the catalogue for the exhibition asked: “Are the pictures or their makers an integral part of the America of to-day?”.10 Though the other artists included in the exhibition, such as Arthur Dove, Mardsen Hartley, John Marin, and Paul Strand, were more often used as representatives of the American form of modernism Stieglitz hoped to promote, O’Keeffe’s art and personal circumstances were uniquely well-suited to this approach. She was born on a farm in a small town in Wisconsin, and during her youth and early adulthood lived in Virginia, South Carolina, and Texas. Her background in the American West and in the South was used to explain her aesthetic sensibilities, particularly in New York City where her works were first shown.

An additional factor that lent O’Keeffe the appearance of American originality was her lack of experience with and interest in European art. O’Keeffe first visited Europe well into her 60s, having expressed little prior desire for transatlantic travel. Further, unlike most of her male counterparts, she had not seen the Armory Show of 1913, one of the first major exhibitions of work by European modernists in the United States.11 While there is some evidence of European influence in her work, particularly in its modernist flavor (figures 4–5), its smoothness, color palette, and subject matter—much of it features elements of nature unique to the United States—stand in contrast to the work of influential Europeans such as Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque. Stieglitz selected O’Keeffe as exemplary of the evolution of an American style of modernism, referential of—yet distinct from—European trends. This positioning was successful. O’Brien’s profile of the artist argued that O’Keeffe was “an iconoclast to the old European traditions of art and artists,” that she was America’s “own exclusive product.”12

Charcoal drawing. Mostly short horizontal, vertical, and curving black lines interlock to make a mass that runs up the center of the composition, nearly filling the height of this tan-colored paper. A few longer diagonal lines bring the shapes together into an abstracted human form. Some cup-like lines could indicate the person’s head, shoulders, and breasts. Horizontal hatching and smudges fill in or outline the shapes throughout.
Figure 4. Pablo Picasso. Standing Female Nude, 1910. Charcoal on paper, 19 x 12 3/8 in. Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. View on the Met Museum website.
Charcoal drawing. Jagged forms, long, bulb-like shapes, and wavy lines are layered up along the center of this cream-white paper in this vertical drawing. A zig-zagging line to our left is filled in with solid medium gray to make a serrated form. Four tall, finger-like mounds clustered next to it, to our right, are darker, almost black. Some strokes of charcoal are visible, especially on the shape closest to us. Wavy lines create an outline for a form like a river to our right, which is shaded lightly but mostly white. The paper is smudged around the collection of forms.
Figure 5. Georgia O’Keeffe. Drawing XIII, 1915 / No. 13, Special, 1916. Charcoal on paper, 24 3/8 × 18 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the Met Museum website.

While O’Keeffe did not approve of some of Stieglitz’s tactics for promoting her work, his approach was undeniably effective. By presenting O’Keeffe’s work as distinctly Freudian in nature and representative of the attitudes of a sexually liberated woman, Stieglitz situated the artist within the zeitgeist of the 1910s and 1920s. He also attracted visitors to her exhibitions—500 people per day viewed her 1923 show at Anderson Galleries, and it won her fame in the New York art scene.13 Furthermore, O’Keeffe did little to counteract the eroticized and gendered interpretations of her work at the time, possibly because the tactic was so successful or due to the complication that disagreeing with Stieglitz publicly would precipitate. The other prong in Stieglitz’s marketing approach—promoting O’Keeffe as a thoroughly American painter—also helped to advance her new version of modernism. This view of the artist lasted for decades and was complemented by her later life and artistic choices made in New Mexico. Both elements of Stieglitz’s approach contributed to the formation of O’Keeffe’s cult of personality, which emerged with these first Stieglitz-sponsored exhibitions.

O’Keeffe’s cult of personality, while influenced by Stieglitz’s work, also emerged from her capacity for self-determination and individuality. O’Keeffe’s personal and artistic choices attracted attention from her earliest moments on the New York art scene, enhanced by her refusal to align herself with many of the popular political and cultural movements of the day. Though the artist was in close proximity to the bohemian cultural environment of Greenwich Village in the 1910s and 1920s, she stood out from other artists of her generation through her refusal to entirely embrace the aesthetic trappings of this lifestyle. She never bobbed her hair, and her clothing, though influenced by Village styles, was distinctly simpler than the items worn by her peers.14 Her lifestyle also reflected her distinct individualism and her ambivalence towards bohemian culture. While O’Keeffe practiced its “free love” approach by living with Stieglitz out of wedlock, her friend Frances O’Brien was quick to note that she had no interest in smoking, drinking, or other forms of “Bohemianism.”15 O’Keeffe also chose not to live in the Village, but instead had an apartment farther north, in Midtown—a sign of further alienation from elements of this society. These choices set O’Keeffe apart from other aspiring female artists of her social milieu. Yet, her early professional success produced a contingent of admirers from this very group. In his review of O’Keeffe’s 1923 exhibition, critic Henry McBride mockingly addressed O’Keeffe’s popularity with young, artistic women in New York, joking that O’Keeffe should “get herself to a nunnery” to avoid the female admirers she would gain from the successful exhibition.16

O’Keeffe’s attitude toward the feminist movement also reflected her sense of self-determination. While she identified with feminism early in her career, O’Keeffe wished to be viewed as an artist first and foremost, rather than as an avatar for the movement. Due to this, she had a somewhat ambivalent relationship to their cause. While her relationship with Stieglitz reflected her modern attitude toward marriage and monogamy, O’Keeffe never used the word “feminist” to describe herself.17 Later in life, she even rejected the movement outright as she did not recognize herself in the feminism of the 1970s.18 Once, when asked by artist Judy Chicago to participate in an anthology of women artists, she replied that one is either “a good painter or one is not, and that sex is not the basic [sic] of this difference.”19 In her emphasis on parity and freedom of choice, rather than on strict adherence to a code of values, O’Keeffe was ahead of her time—she pioneered a relationship to feminism similar to contemporary attitudes. Nevertheless, in the popular imagination, both her early association with feminism and her determination to become successful in an historically male-dominated sphere led to her identification as a feminist icon in later years.

Painting. Two pieces of vivid green fruit sit in a burgundy-red basket, which hovers over or sits on a doily-like form against a carnation-pink field below. The painting is created with mostly flat areas of color, though there is some shading to create a sense of volume in the fruit and basket. The bottom ends of the shamrock-green pears face upward. They sit side-by-side in a long, narrow basket. The handle curves up from the narrow ends. The outside of the basket is dark red, the inside navy blue. A gray shape to our left could be a shadow cast by the basket. The area behind the basket is cream white but an underlayer of cobalt blue shows through in some of the more thinly painted areas. The doily beneath the basket has a scalloped edge. The pink surface below fills the bottom half of the painting and is mottled with a darker shade of pink in the bottom right corner and to our left of the doily.
Figure 6. Georgia O’Keeffe. Alligator Pear - No. 2, 1920–21. Oil on canvas, 23 1/4 x 18 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.

Certainly the most important opportunity for O’Keeffe to express her individuality was through her art. While she aligned herself with the American modernists, her work was distinct from the paintings of Dove, Hartley, Marin, and others. Her simplified abstractions of nature—including large-scale representations of plant life (figure 6)—contrasted with the visually complex, impressionistic watercolors of John Marin (figure 7) due to their smooth surfaces and bright colors. Critics struggled to find the proper terminology for her art; some called her a “Futurist,” while others claimed she was a “Cubist.”20 The uncategorizable nature of her work allowed her to shake off such labels to conceive a new sort of modernism. Through her refusal to fully identify with bohemianism, feminism, or any other movement of her day, O’Keeffe pioneered new forms of them all.

Watercolor and drawing on paper. Paint is brushed, washed, and scrubbed on the paper in shades of moss and pine green, royal blue, mustard yellow, gray, and brown to create an abstracted view across a grassy ledge onto a body of water beyond. The scene is loosely painted so many details are difficult to make out. An outline of a charcoal-gray square tips into the scene from the bottom right corner, filling most of the paper’s height and width. The grassy hillside closest to us is painted in washes of golden yellow and sage green. It angles down to our left, where another area of peat brown outside the square could be a neighboring hill. A few caramel and tawny brown squiggles in the lower right corner of the watercolor could be an animal. Dark green trees line the hill to our right. Midnight blue, yellow, and brown squiggles to our left on the neighboring hill could be more trees. They are layered over areas of cobalt and topaz blue. The horizon is marked with a coral-red line, and the sky above, in the top fifth of the paper, is washes of pale blue, yellow, and dark gray. The artist signed and dated the bottom right corner, “Marin 22.”
Figure 7. John Marin. From Deer Isle, Maine, 1922. Watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and graphite on wove paper, 16 7/8 x 20 1/16 in. National Gallery of Art, Gift of John Marin Jr. View on the NGA website.

O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s efforts to promote her work plainly influenced critical and public perception of the painter’s life and work, but the pair could not altogether control O’Keeffe’s “image.” Due to her position as an artist who refused artistic and social categorization as well as her explosive popularity, early response to O’Keeffe’s exhibitions also constituted a response to O’Keeffe’s personhood. Profiles of the artist demonstrated the public’s fascination with her identity, particularly regarding her womanhood. As a fashionable and well-connected woman, she came to be seen as a symbol of cultural movements that she alternately rejected and embraced—early feminism, bohemianism, and American Modernism. Public fascination with O’Keeffe has carried through to this day, with the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Living Modern being perhaps the clearest manifestation of this phenomenon. This thoughtful examination of O’Keeffe’s deliberateness in all elements of her life fed the public’s fascination with the artist’s persona and argued that an artist’s work cannot necessarily be separated from their life.21

Whether a close reading of an artist’s personal identity clarifies or muddies our understanding of their work, the critical conflation of O’Keeffe’s own life and work enshrined her as (perhaps) the first modern American celebrity artist. Like her contemporary Frida Kahlo, however, this status as a national icon came at some cost. She gained fame, but not entirely on her own terms. Her images have been coopted to represent any number of identities as well as used to sell products. Nevertheless, during her lifetime O’Keeffe maintained a degree of personal independence, including in matters of personal style and identity that reflected her unwavering individuality—throughout the maelstrom of press she received into old age, she remained true to herself. In an era in which art and life have become integrated as never before, when self-creation and -curation have become mainstays of popular culture, perhaps this is, as much as anything, the great lesson gained from her early critics.

Notes

Note on titles of works: Institutional titles and dates for O’Keeffe’s works sometimes vary from first titles and dates established by Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné (1999), whose entries explain changes. Here institutional titles and dates are listed first followed by those in the Catalogue Raisonné.

  1. Frances O’Brien’s profile “Americans We Like: Georgia O’Keeffe” for the October 1927 edition of The Nation was one of a series of brief profiles of Americans for the magazine. O’Brien was a friend of both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, and her portrayal of the artist reflects a deep knowledge of their ambitions for O’Keeffe’s public image. The profile acknowledges O’Keeffe’s status as an iconic, distinctly American painter, in line with Stieglitz’s wishes, without trading in the Freudian, sexualized interpretations of O’Keeffe’s works that the artist so resented. Frances O’Brien. “Americans We Like: Georgia O’Keeffe. The Fourth in a Series of Personality Portraits.” The Nation, October 12, 1927, 351. ↩︎

  2. See Christopher Knight, “Beyond the O’Keeffe Mystique,” Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-12-ca-7871-story.html. ↩︎

  3. See Wanda M. Corn, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern (New York: Prestel Publishing, 2017), 61. ↩︎

  4. See Anita Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper: Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: Simon & Schuster Books, 1988), 48. This publication misdates the letter Pollitzer wrote O’Keeffe the night of December 31, 1915 to January 1, 1916, which is the postmark on the letter’s envelope rather than the day it was written. ↩︎

  5. See Barbara Buhler Lynes’s essay, Georgia O’Keeffe’s “1946 Museum of Modern Art Exhibition: A Validation of Myth”, in this catalogue. ↩︎

  6. See Linda Grasso, Equal Under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe and Twentieth Century Feminism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017), 55. Grasso examines O’Keeffe’s complex relationship to feminism as well as her outsized role as a contemporary feminist icon. ↩︎

  7. Pollitzer, 164. ↩︎

  8. See Barbara Buhler Lynes, O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, and the Critics, 1916-1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 25. This collection of critical materials analyzes public response to O’Keeffe’s early exhibitions, arguing that Stieglitz encouraged interpretations of the artist’s work that focused on her gender identity and an eroticized, Freudian interpretation of her work. ↩︎

  9. See Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 257. In this section of her book, Robinson explains the possible origins of eroticized interpretations of the painter’s work. ↩︎

  10. Alfred Stieglitz, “Foreword,” Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs, & Things, Recent & Never Before Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Mardsen Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz (New York: Anderson Galleries, 1925), 2. The essay was one of several in the catalogue that positioned these artists as Americans working in a new style, having rejected the influences of European modernism. A piece by Arnold Rönnebeck, titled “Through the Eyes of a European Sculptor” (pp. 5–7), argued that the exhibition represented “nothing less than the discovery of America’s independent role in the History of Art.” Critical response to the exhibition was mixed and colored by what many saw as a pompous collection of essays in the exhibition catalogue. O’Keeffe’s work, however, was almost universally praised. ↩︎

  11. See Pollitzer, XXIV. ↩︎

  12. See O’Brien. ↩︎

  13. See Robinson, 254 ↩︎

  14. See Corn, 61. In this section, the curator offers an extensive analysis of O’Keeffe’s early style and propensity for standing out through her dress. ↩︎

  15. See O’Brien. ↩︎

  16. Henry McBride’s February 4, 1923, review of O’Keeffe’s show for the New York Herald poked fun at eroticized interpretations offered by other critics and emphasized her growing popularity with young women in New York. His tongue-in-cheek, hyperbolic description of the masses of O’Keeffe’s “sisters,” who were hounding her for artistic advice, underscores the emergence of O’Keeffe’s first cult of personality, a microcosm of educated, wealthy, young, female artists in the city. ↩︎

  17. See Grasso, 11. ↩︎

  18. See Barbara Buhler Lynes, “Georgia O’Keeffe and Feminism: A Problem of Position,” in The Expanding Discourse: Art History and Feminism, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 436–49. ↩︎

  19. See Haley Mlotek, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Powerful Personal Style,” The New Yorker, April 6, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/georgia-okeeffes-powerful-personal-style. ↩︎

  20. For the quotes, see “Another ‘Futurist at the Photo-Secession’,” American Art News 15, no. 26 (April 7, 1917); and McBride. ↩︎

  21. See Corn, 283. ↩︎

Thoma Foundation Logo
Typewritten document. The press release heading is printed with red ink. The only legible line there reads, in the largest letters, 'News Release from the Art Institute of Chicago.' Below, a line in black, all caps reads, 'Three important exhibitions,' and then, a little farther down, 'Georgia O'Keeffe comes to Chicago.' Typewriter text fills the rest of the sheet. A 'note' near the top reads, 'A midwinter group of exhibitions opens January 21 in the East Wing Galleries headlined by the largest retrospective showing of Paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe ever held. Also included: Religious Folk Art of the Spanish Southwest: and Recent Acquisitions.' The body of the press release reads, 'Miss O’Keeffe, a former student of the school of the Art Institute, and at present the most famous woman painter in the world, is coming to Chicago to direct the installation of her exhibition and to be present at the opening. This is the first retrospective exhibition of her work to be shown in any museum. Sixty-one different pictures will trace the development of her art chronologically from 1916 until today. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Miss O’Keeffe has lived in Chicago, New York, Texas, and the Southwest. Her painting is noted for its luminous, unconventional color and its simplified imaginative use of form.' A subheading reads, also in all caps, 'O'Keeffe pictures bring extremely high prices.' Text continues, 'Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings command higher prices than those of any other living woman. As much as $10,000 has been paid for one painting by her, and this despite the fact that she is completely independent in her approach to her material. In 1923 she wrote the following: ‘One day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself – I can’t live where I want to – I can’t go where I want to – I can’t do what I want to – I can’t even say what I want to – . I decided I am a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.’' Creases where the sheet had been folded in thirds are visible.
Figure 1. Art Institute of Chicago press release, January 11, 1943.
Black and white photograph. A cleanshaven man wearing a suit and with a rounded face looks just off to our right with dark eyes in this portrait. His shoulders and face are angled to our right. He has a high forehead, low brows, and a rounded nose and chin. Light glints off his short, dark hair. He wears a suit jacket, a striped button-up shirt, and a diamond-patterned tie.
Figure 2. Daniel Catton Rich, 1939.
Handwritten letter. The letterhead at the top center of the sheet shows a rooster standing atop a crest, with three smaller roosters in a row within. Beneath the shield-shaped crest is a banner that reads, 'The Blackstone.' Under that is printed, 'Chicago' O’Keeffe’s pencil-written letter is below. Her writing is a little choppy with pronounced loops for lowercase letters h, l, and d. Text reads, 'Another day gone – it is Friday night I’ve been up most of the day – wanted to go out but didn’t – I even put a dress on – Maria came for an hour this morning and again at 5 – for supper and left a little after 8 – Narcissa came for half an hour with her husband this evening – Maria says there must have been over 400 people there today – they all agree that everyone feels it'.
Figure 3. Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz, January 23, 1943. Letters to Alfred Stieglitz, MS.9. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Watercolor. Two slender lines with tapering, sharply pointed tips extend up from a pool of ink blue in this abstract vertical painting on bone-white paper. A broad smudge of dark blue spans most of the bottom edge of the sheet. The two lines emerge close together from just right of center. The line on the left stretches about two-thirds of the way up the sheet before angling downward, and then back up in a sideways z-shaped zigzag. The vertical line next to it nearly reaches the top edge of the sheet. Both swell and then taper back down near their tips.
Figure 4. Georgia O’Keeffe. Blue Lines X / Blue Lines, 1916. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 25 x 19 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the Met Museum website.
Charcoal drawing. Jagged forms, long, bulb-like shapes, and wavy lines are layered up along the center of this cream-white paper in this vertical drawing. A zig-zagging line to our left is filled in with solid medium gray to make a serrated form. Four tall, finger-like mounds clustered next to it, to our right, are darker, almost black. Some strokes of charcoal are visible, especially on the shape closest to us. Wavy lines create an outline for a form like a river to our right, which is shaded lightly but mostly white. The paper is smudged around the collection of forms.
Figure 5. Georgia O’Keeffe. Drawing XIII, 1915 / No. 13, Special, 1916. Charcoal on paper, 24 3/8 x 18 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the Met Museum website.
Painting. Rust-red, barren hills fill most of this picture. Two dried bones span the bottom edge of the painting close to us, and goldenrod-yellow cliffs fill in the background. A thick, long bone with curved ends sits to our left, just in front of a spine with ten vertebrae. They sit on a low, wine-red hill. The valley leading back to the hill beyond is carpeted in patches of sky blue, white, and pale green. That hill takes up about two-thirds of the picture. Its smooth surface is lined with crevices, and there is a band of lighter orange near the bottom. In the top quarter of the composition, loosely painted strokes of deep yellow, coral pink, lilac purple, terracotta orange, and a few touches of pale turquoise suggest more rocky outcroppings and cliffs.
Figure 6. Georgia O’Keeffe. Red Hills and Bones, 1941. Oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 40 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the PMA website.
Painting. A shiny, round-bellied black vase holds three feathers striped with brown, black, and white, all against a sand-brown background. Light glints off the round body of the vase, which takes up two-thirds the height of this painting. Only the white tip of one feather pokes over the top edge of the vase. More of the light brown and black stripes are visible on the two feathers behind it. A triangular form in the lower right corner and a vertical band running up the canvas, about a quarter of the way in from the right edge, suggest that the vase is tucked into a niche or the corner of a wall.
Figure 7. Georgia O’Keeffe. Turkey Feathers and Indian Pot, 1941. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.
Black and white photograph. Eleven widely spaced paintings line the walls of a long room in this installation view. Through a squared opening at the end of the room opposite us, at least three more doorways telescope into the distance, ending in a flat wall at the far end of the building. The room we are in has a double-sided wooden bench at the center beneath a grid of lights above, which reflects off the shiny dark floor. The paintings show flaring petals or antlers, or layers of geometric shapes.
Figure 8. Exhibition installation photo, Art Institute of Chicago, 1943.
Black and white photograph. We look into the far corner of a gallery space, with nine paintings lining the walls to either side of an opening, near the far corner. The paintings show flame-like petals, an animal skull, or abstracted, geometric shapes. The grid of lights above reflects in the dark, shiny floor below. In this view, we see three wooden benches placed along the perimeter of the room.
Figure 9. Exhibition installation photo, Art Institute of Chicago, 1943.
Black and white photograph. This room has an opening at the far end, and walls angle inward across the corners to either side of it. Ten paintings are hung along a textured wall that appears gray in this photograph. The paintings show abstracted or stylized trees, mountains, skulls, or layered shapes. With the grid of lights above and the dark floor below, we look into at least three more rooms, barely visible to either side of the nested doorways.
Figure 10. Exhibition installation photo, Art Institute of Chicago, 1943.
Black and white newspaper clipping. In this grainy image, O’Keeffe stands looking up at a painting of flame-like, flaring petals. The caption beneath reads, 'Georgia O'Keeffe and her 'Jack-in-the-Pulpit.'' An inset box at the top left reads, 'Dayton Ohio News Sunday February 21 1943.' O’Keeffe wears a black, long-sleeved dress and a black cap that covers her hair. Her features are indistinct in this blurry image but dark brows stand out on her high forehead. She has a long nose, and she smiles slightly. She rests the pinky edge of one hand along the side of the canvas.
Figure 11. Clipping from a Dayton, Ohio newspaper. Sunday, February 21, 1943.
Painting. Most of this picture is taken up by a thick-armed, black cross. A stylized landscape beyond has densely packed, gray and brown hills leading back to a horizon lined with burnt orange and vivid yellow. The crossbeam sits just over the horizon, which comes halfway up the painting. Four round objects, presumably nail heads, are unevenly spaced on the crossing of the beams. The sky above the crossbeam, in the upper corners of the canvas, lightens from powder blue across the top to light yellow above the cross. A white circle near the upper right corner suggests a distant moon or bright star.
Figure 12. Georgia O’Keeffe. Black Cross, New Mexico / Black Cross, 1929. Oil on canvas, 39 x 30 in. Art Institute of Chicago. View on the AIC website.
Black and white photograph. A woman, Georgia O’Keeffe, wears a dark hat and coat as she looks up and to our right, her hands gathered around the button on her high-necked collar at her throat. Her head and hands nearly fill the picture. She has dark eyes, a straight nose with a rounded end, and high cheekbones. Her mouth is closed, and her upper lip is darker than her full lower lip. The hat has a tall crown and short brim, and it comes down to her thick eyebrows and over her ears. The button of her high-collared coat shines as it catches the light. With the hand on our left, she creates an O with her forefinger and thumb as she pinches the button. Her other fingers curl in as her palm turns toward us, so her fingers resemble a cresting wave. The middle finger of that hand also touches the button, and those fingers curve toward her palm, which faces our left. Behind her is an abstract work showing a light-colored, rounded object within a darker field. The round area creates a kind of halo around her head. Her face and hands are slightly out of focus.
Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918. Platinum print, 9 1/4 x 7 1/4 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Black and white photograph. A white wall with Georgia O’Keeffe’s signature scrawled in black, oversized, cursive letters, takes up the left half of this image. The room beyond is hung with two paintings, and the sliver of an opening leading to another space is barely visible along the right edge. The letters of O’Keeffe’s name are rounded, with the lowercase g and f letters making spikes along its length. One painting in the background is lighter and shows stylized, curving forms; the other painting is dark and difficult to make out.
Figure 1. Installation view of the 1946 exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe at the Museum of Modern Art. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN319.1. Photograph by Soichi Sunami. View on the MoMA website.
Typewritten document. The cream-colored sheet has a press release heading typed in underlined all caps: 'Paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe shown in retrospective exhibition at Museum of Modern Art.' The paragraph below is headed with the text in quotation marks, 'Finally a woman on paper.' The paragraph beneath reads, 'These words, spoken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1915, were the actual launching of Georgia O’Keeffe on a career that has led to her recognition as a major American artist. On Wednesday, May 15, a retrospective exhibition of her works will open at the Museum of Modern Art and continue through August 25. The exhibition has been selected and installed by James Johnson Sweeney, Director of the Museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. Mr. Sweeney has also written the book on O’Keeffe which the Museum will publish concurrently with the exhibition.'
Figure 2. Museum of Modern Art press release (detail), 1946. Full version available for download from the MoMA website.
Handwritten letter. Text is written in grayed ink on cream-white paper, except for a line added near the top in what appears to be pencil. Between two inked lines, that added line reads, in quotes, ‘Finally a woman on paper’ – he said.' The visible text of the letter starts and ends mid-sentences. It reads: 'while before his lips opened – Then he smiled at me and yelled ‘Wolkomitz come here’ – Then he said to me ‘Why they’re genuinely fine things – you say a woman did these – she’s an unusual woman – She’s broad-minded, she’s bigger than most women, but she’s got the sensitive emotions – I’d know'.
Figure 3. Anita Pollitzer to Georgia O’Keeffe, December 31, 1915 (detail). Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Black and white photograph. We look slightly up at O’Keeffe as she stands swathed in a black coat or wrap, wearing a black hat pulled down to just above her brow, against a white, washed-out sky. Shown from the knees up, her body is angled to our right but she turns her face to us. She gazes down her long nose through narrowed eyes, off to our left. Lit from our right, sharp shadow defines the hollow under her high cheekbone on our left. Her lips are set in a line, and she seems to lean a little away from us. Her entire body is hidden behind her black garment. The light gray horizon comes about an eighth of the way up the composition, and the rest of the background is pale sky.
Figure 1. Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe, 1920–22 . Gelatin silver print, 4 1/2 x 3 9/16 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Painting. Rounded forms in cool mint and laurel green, topaz, and cobalt blue flare outward from a dark blue teardrop shape near the top center of this composition and envelop an inverted teardrop shape, in mauve pink, below the first. The rounded, flaring forms extend off all four sides of the composition. The dark blue teardrop is surrounded by a wide ring of aquamarine blue around the top that lightens to seafoam green below. Bands flare out and up, creating peaks to either side of this ring in the same jewel-toned greens and blues. Two larger forms swell out surround the pink teardrop below. A vertical line extends from the lower teardrop to the bottom edge of the painting, splitting the two forms there. Those forms have smaller lobes above the teardrop and are wider below, like bottom-heavy kidney beans. The areas closest to the pink teardrop are frosty green, darkening to spruce and teal green at the edges. Along the top of the composition, the background deepens from shell pink near the flower to dusky-rose pink at the edge. Darker pink fills in the lower corners. Brushstrokes are visible in some areas and more blended in others.
Figure 2. Georgia O’Keeffe. Series I White & Blue Flower Shapes, 1919. Oil on board, 19 7/8 x 15 3/4 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Palladium print. O’Keeffe’s head is at the bottom center of this tall palladium print. In warm tones of golden brown and velvety black, she raises one hand high so it reaches into the upper right corner while the other hand is up near her face, both with palms out. O’Keeffe looks off to our left under dark brows. The outer corners of her eyes and lips turn slightly down. Tendons stand out in her neck, and her long dark hair extends off the bottom edge of the image. Her arm to our left curves up and over her head, dark hair visible in her armpit. That thumb may touch the work of art behind her, which shows a swirling form that grows up the composition in much the same shape as her arm. Her other hand is near her head, palm facing us, with that thumb close to or brushing that ear.
Figure 3. Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918. Palladium print, 9 3/8 x 6 3/8 in. National Gallery of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the NGA website.
Charcoal drawing. Mostly short horizontal, vertical, and curving black lines interlock to make a mass that runs up the center of the composition, nearly filling the height of this tan-colored paper. A few longer diagonal lines bring the shapes together into an abstracted human form. Some cup-like lines could indicate the person’s head, shoulders, and breasts. Horizontal hatching and smudges fill in or outline the shapes throughout.
Figure 4. Pablo Picasso. Standing Female Nude, 1910. Charcoal on paper, 19 x 12 3/8 in. Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. View on the Met Museum website.
Charcoal drawing. Jagged forms, long, bulb-like shapes, and wavy lines are layered up along the center of this cream-white paper in this vertical drawing. A zig-zagging line to our left is filled in with solid medium gray to make a serrated form. Four tall, finger-like mounds clustered next to it, to our right, are darker, almost black. Some strokes of charcoal are visible, especially on the shape closest to us. Wavy lines create an outline for a form like a river to our right, which is shaded lightly but mostly white. The paper is smudged around the collection of forms.
Figure 5. Georgia O’Keeffe. Drawing XIII, 1915 / No. 13, Special, 1916. Charcoal on paper, 24 3/8 × 18 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the Met Museum website.
Painting. Two pieces of vivid green fruit sit in a burgundy-red basket, which hovers over or sits on a doily-like form against a carnation-pink field below. The painting is created with mostly flat areas of color, though there is some shading to create a sense of volume in the fruit and basket. The bottom ends of the shamrock-green pears face upward. They sit side-by-side in a long, narrow basket. The handle curves up from the narrow ends. The outside of the basket is dark red, the inside navy blue. A gray shape to our left could be a shadow cast by the basket. The area behind the basket is cream white but an underlayer of cobalt blue shows through in some of the more thinly painted areas. The doily beneath the basket has a scalloped edge. The pink surface below fills the bottom half of the painting and is mottled with a darker shade of pink in the bottom right corner and to our left of the doily.
Figure 6. Georgia O’Keeffe. Alligator Pear - No. 2, 1920–21. Oil on canvas, 23 1/4 x 18 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Watercolor and drawing on paper. Paint is brushed, washed, and scrubbed on the paper in shades of moss and pine green, royal blue, mustard yellow, gray, and brown to create an abstracted view across a grassy ledge onto a body of water beyond. The scene is loosely painted so many details are difficult to make out. An outline of a charcoal-gray square tips into the scene from the bottom right corner, filling most of the paper’s height and width. The grassy hillside closest to us is painted in washes of golden yellow and sage green. It angles down to our left, where another area of peat brown outside the square could be a neighboring hill. A few caramel and tawny brown squiggles in the lower right corner of the watercolor could be an animal. Dark green trees line the hill to our right. Midnight blue, yellow, and brown squiggles to our left on the neighboring hill could be more trees. They are layered over areas of cobalt and topaz blue. The horizon is marked with a coral-red line, and the sky above, in the top fifth of the paper, is washes of pale blue, yellow, and dark gray. The artist signed and dated the bottom right corner, “Marin 22.”
Figure 7. John Marin. From Deer Isle, Maine, 1922. Watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and graphite on wove paper, 16 7/8 x 20 1/16 in. National Gallery of Art, Gift of John Marin Jr. View on the NGA website.
Black and white photograph. O’Keeffe sits on the deep ledge of a window opening and looks at us, one hand raised to the upturned collar of her shirt. The square window opening fills the top three-quarters of the picture, and glass-paned panels open toward us. On our side of the window, O’Keeffe sits on the sill, her crossed legs angled to our right, her back leaning against the left edge of the opening. She turns her oval face to look at us from the corners of her eyes. She pulls her chin back a bit, a faint smile on her lips. Her dark hair is swept loosely up, and it blends with the shadowy room behind her. Her black coat has round buttons down the front and is held loosely in place with a belt. Her long, dark skirt covers her legs to her ankles, above white socks and shoes. Her right hand, to our left and closer to us, rests in her lap. Her other hand is raised to the tall point of her upturned collar, by her left cheek.
Figure 1. Unknown photographer. Georgia O’Keeffe in Texas (detail), between 1912 and 1918. Georgia O’Keeffe Photographs, MS.37. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Painting. Three clusters of ash-brown and charcoal-gray, smooth, stylized tree trunks nearly fill this horizontal canvas. The ground below the trees is eggshell white, and blue sky fills in the top half. The surface of the trunks are smooth and curve gently, like bones. Their rounded bases are near the bottom edge of the canvas, and the trunks extend off the top edge. A cluster of three ash-brown trunks is to our left and a gray pair behind it at the center. One larger brown trunk to our right has a band of the white up the lower center, suggesting drifting snow. There are touches of muted brick red around the bottoms of the trunks.
Figure 2. Georgia O’Keeffe. Bare Tree Trunks with Snow, 1946. Oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 39 1/2 in. Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Art Association Purchase. View on the DMA website.
Painting. A single black line swells and tapers in curves across a white canvas like an uneven capital B. In the top left corner, the small top bulb of the B comes to a rounded tip pointing to our right. The second line takes up the vast majority of the composition. It stretches from near the top left corner all the way across to the center of the right edge. It then swells into a thicker line where it curves back toward the lower left corner.
Figure 3. Georgia O’Keeffe. Winter Road I, 1963. Oil on canvas, 22 x 18 inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the NGA website.
Painting. A stylized landscape is made up of fog-gray, harvest-yellow, and rose-pink hills leading back to a flat-topped, black mesa in this long, horizontal painting. The gray, yellow, and pink hills take up about the bottom third of the composition. The black mesa takes up more than half the height of the canvas, and two crimson-red streaks rise up the right edge. The sky above is paper white.
Figure 4. Georgia O’Keeffe. Dark Mesa with Pink Sky, 1930. Oil on canvas, 16 x 29 7/8 inches. Amon Carter Museum of American Art. View on the Amon Carter website.
Painting. A peanut-brown, flat form spans most of this composition, except for a long, slender white triangle at the top left corner. A tall, narrow black rectangle near the lower left corner suggests a window opening in the side of a building. The brown wall is shaded darker to our left and lightens to tan across the face of the wall to our right. A darker brown strip along the right edge of the canvas suggests the turning of the corner of the building. The sky is washed-out white in the top left.
Figure 5. Georgia O’Keeffe. Black Patio Door, 1955. Oil on Canvas, 40 1/8 x 30 in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art. View on the Amon Carter website.
Watercolor. Washes in shades of blue and green create a curving, rainbow-like form against the beige of the paper in this vertical sheet. A band of sapphire blue across the bottom has a rounded bottom to create a long, cup-like form. A pale, honeydew-green band curves beneath it. Over the blue form, a light green mound creates the interior of the curving bands that then extend up like a rainbow. The bands deepen from pale green to sage, and then deeper, jewel-toned blues as they rise to the top of the sheet. A field of aquamarine-blue fills in the squared top of the sheet. The bands do not touch so the beige of the sheet shows through. Each band is mottled where the watercolor has feathered and pooled.
Figure 6. Georgia O’Keeffe. Light Coming on the Plains No. I, 1917. Watercolor on thin, beige, smooth wove paper and newsprint, 11 7/8 x 8 7/8 in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art. View on the Amon Carter website.
Watercolor. Arching washes of sky, royal, and navy blue blend to create a tall, egg-like shape on beige paper. A shallow, dish-like form of ultramarine blue runs across the bottom of the sheet. Above a narrow gap where the beige paper shows through, the tall form rises up into a dome. A pale glow at the bottom center of that form shifts to arctic blue and then deepens gradually to ultramarine around the top edge. Having worked wet-in-wet, the watercolor blends outward, like the rays of a rising sun. A few darker areas of blue are pooled around the top.
Figure 7. Georgia O’Keeffe. Light Coming on the Plains No. II / No. II Light Coming on the Plains, 1917. Watercolor on thin, beige, smooth wove paper and newsprint, 11 7/8 x 8 7/8 in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art. View on the Amon Carter website.
Watercolor. Here, the arching form of blended bands deepens from pale turquoise at the center to azure blue and then muted plum purple, again on beige-colored paper. The cup-like band across the bottom fades from royal blue to eggplant brown, then mint green. The blue and purple swirl together, especially across the top of the rounded form at the top of the page.
Figure 8. Georgia O’Keeffe. Light Coming on the Plains No. III / No. III Light Coming on the Plains, 1917. Watercolor on thin, beige, smooth wove paper and newsprint, 11 7/8 x 8 7/8 in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art. View on the Amon Carter website.
Watercolor. Warm orange and red rings surround a yellow ring near the upper left corner. The rest of the field is filled with pools of shades of lapis blue. The yellow circle is near the upper left corner. The white of the unpainted paper separates it from the clay-orange ring surrounding it, which is then encircled in a red ring. A tail-like line extends from the outer, red ring to stretch to the right edge of the paper. The blue paint of the sky touches the red ring along the left edge and near the red line so blue and red bleed together in those two areas. The blue areas are especially mottled with wet-on-wet blue pigment.
Figure 9. Georgia O’Keeffe. Evening Star No. V, 1917. Watercolor on paper, 8 5/8 x 11 5/8 in. McNay Art Museum, Bequest of Helen Miller Jones. View on the McNay website.
Watercolor. Clouds of white smoke highlighted with lemon yellow and shaded with delphinium blue billow out of an upside-down teardrop shape that could be a train on a track in this abstracted composition. The cloud takes up most of the top two-thirds of the vertical sheet. The teardrop shape, or train, is dark blue and has a yellow circle, presumably a headlight, is just to our left of center. Three lines emanate from the point of the train and extend to our left. One band is olive green, one is rust orange, and the third is royal blue. Washes of watercolor around the train and cloud lightens from violet across the top to pale slate blue along the bottom edge.
Figure 10. Georgia O’Keeffe. Train Coming in - Canyon, Texas / Train at Night in the Desert, 1916. Watercolor on paper, 9 3/4 x 8 1/4 in. Amarillo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, Amarillo Area Foundation, AMoA Alliance, Fannie Weymouth, Santa Fe Industries Foundation and Mary Fain.
Painting. A jagged, rounded form like a circular saw blade blends from honey and canary yellow to marigold orange and scarlet red in this long, horizontal painting. A band of brown along the bottom edge is topped by narrower bands of flame red and orange. The rest of the canvas is taken up with serrated bands of orange and yellow flaring off of a honey-yellow semicircle along the horizon. The semicircle is mottled with darker areas of pumpkin orange. The upper corners are vivid red.t
Figure 11. Georgia O’Keeffe. From the Plains I / From the Plains, 1953. Oil on canvas, 47 11/16 x 83 5/8 in. McNay Art Museum, Gift of the Estate of Tom Slick. View on the McNay website.
Painting. A white, dry goat’s skull sits on a sandy dune in the lower left corner of this vertical painting. Two dunes rise in the distance beyond, nearly filling the composition. The skull is painted parchment white shaded with pale lavender purple. An undefined, curling tuft near the head could be the remnants of the goat’s skin or fur. The skull is angled to our right, almost in profile. Sun washes the sandy area beyond the skull in golden yellow. The dune that curves up and to our right is darker, army brown. Another sunlit dune fills the top left corner. A sliver of pale pink sky stretches across the top edge of the canvas.
Figure 12. Georgia O’Keeffe. Goat’s Head, 1957. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in. McNay Art Museum, Gift of the Estate of Tom Slick. View on the McNay website.
Painting. Curving forms in pale peach, orange, eucalyptus green, fawn brown, mauve pink, and deep purple intertwine around an ear-like form, ridged and curling, at the bottom center in this abstract painting. At the core, a muted orange band curves around and through a kidney-shaped green form. Other bands curl and loop out from there. The bands intersect and cross each other, like fingers loosely interlocking to make a cage. The space seems to flatten out at the upper right, where the dark purple deepens to nearly black.
Figure 13. Georgia O’Keeffe. Leaf Motif, No. 2, 1924. Oil on canvas, 35 x 18 in. McNay Art Museum, Mary and Sylvan Lang Collection. View on the McNay website.
Painting. A vibrant yellow, egg-shaped form is surrounded in bands of apricot and saffron orange. The egg tips up and to our right. Along the top, left, and bottom edges, it seems cushioned into a field of a darker orange, which is painted with blended strokes to give it a soft look. The orange fades to white at the top right corner and down the right side. In the top left corner, a magenta-pink, bean-shaped form is nestled into a lighter peach area. Two lines of deep pink stretch from the bean form, like blood vessels.
Figure 14. Georgia O’Keeffe. Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow, 1945. Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in. Extended Loan, Private Collection.
Thoma Foundation Logo
Typewritten document. The press release heading is printed with red ink. The only legible line there reads, in the largest letters, 'News Release from the Art Institute of Chicago.' Below, a line in black, all caps reads, 'Three important exhibitions,' and then, a little farther down, 'Georgia O'Keeffe comes to Chicago.' Typewriter text fills the rest of the sheet. A 'note' near the top reads, 'A midwinter group of exhibitions opens January 21 in the East Wing Galleries headlined by the largest retrospective showing of Paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe ever held. Also included: Religious Folk Art of the Spanish Southwest: and Recent Acquisitions.' The body of the press release reads, 'Miss O’Keeffe, a former student of the school of the Art Institute, and at present the most famous woman painter in the world, is coming to Chicago to direct the installation of her exhibition and to be present at the opening. This is the first retrospective exhibition of her work to be shown in any museum. Sixty-one different pictures will trace the development of her art chronologically from 1916 until today. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Miss O’Keeffe has lived in Chicago, New York, Texas, and the Southwest. Her painting is noted for its luminous, unconventional color and its simplified imaginative use of form.' A subheading reads, also in all caps, 'O'Keeffe pictures bring extremely high prices.' Text continues, 'Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings command higher prices than those of any other living woman. As much as $10,000 has been paid for one painting by her, and this despite the fact that she is completely independent in her approach to her material. In 1923 she wrote the following: ‘One day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself – I can’t live where I want to – I can’t go where I want to – I can’t do what I want to – I can’t even say what I want to – . I decided I am a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.’' Creases where the sheet had been folded in thirds are visible.
Figure 1. Art Institute of Chicago press release, January 11, 1943.
Black and white photograph. A cleanshaven man wearing a suit and with a rounded face looks just off to our right with dark eyes in this portrait. His shoulders and face are angled to our right. He has a high forehead, low brows, and a rounded nose and chin. Light glints off his short, dark hair. He wears a suit jacket, a striped button-up shirt, and a diamond-patterned tie.
Figure 2. Daniel Catton Rich, 1939.
Handwritten letter. The letterhead at the top center of the sheet shows a rooster standing atop a crest, with three smaller roosters in a row within. Beneath the shield-shaped crest is a banner that reads, 'The Blackstone.' Under that is printed, 'Chicago' O’Keeffe’s pencil-written letter is below. Her writing is a little choppy with pronounced loops for lowercase letters h, l, and d. Text reads, 'Another day gone – it is Friday night I’ve been up most of the day – wanted to go out but didn’t – I even put a dress on – Maria came for an hour this morning and again at 5 – for supper and left a little after 8 – Narcissa came for half an hour with her husband this evening – Maria says there must have been over 400 people there today – they all agree that everyone feels it'.
Figure 3. Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz, January 23, 1943. Letters to Alfred Stieglitz, MS.9. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Watercolor. Two slender lines with tapering, sharply pointed tips extend up from a pool of ink blue in this abstract vertical painting on bone-white paper. A broad smudge of dark blue spans most of the bottom edge of the sheet. The two lines emerge close together from just right of center. The line on the left stretches about two-thirds of the way up the sheet before angling downward, and then back up in a sideways z-shaped zigzag. The vertical line next to it nearly reaches the top edge of the sheet. Both swell and then taper back down near their tips.
Figure 4. Georgia O’Keeffe. Blue Lines X / Blue Lines, 1916. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 25 x 19 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the Met Museum website.
Charcoal drawing. Jagged forms, long, bulb-like shapes, and wavy lines are layered up along the center of this cream-white paper in this vertical drawing. A zig-zagging line to our left is filled in with solid medium gray to make a serrated form. Four tall, finger-like mounds clustered next to it, to our right, are darker, almost black. Some strokes of charcoal are visible, especially on the shape closest to us. Wavy lines create an outline for a form like a river to our right, which is shaded lightly but mostly white. The paper is smudged around the collection of forms.
Figure 5. Georgia O’Keeffe. Drawing XIII, 1915 / No. 13, Special, 1916. Charcoal on paper, 24 3/8 x 18 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the Met Museum website.
Painting. Rust-red, barren hills fill most of this picture. Two dried bones span the bottom edge of the painting close to us, and goldenrod-yellow cliffs fill in the background. A thick, long bone with curved ends sits to our left, just in front of a spine with ten vertebrae. They sit on a low, wine-red hill. The valley leading back to the hill beyond is carpeted in patches of sky blue, white, and pale green. That hill takes up about two-thirds of the picture. Its smooth surface is lined with crevices, and there is a band of lighter orange near the bottom. In the top quarter of the composition, loosely painted strokes of deep yellow, coral pink, lilac purple, terracotta orange, and a few touches of pale turquoise suggest more rocky outcroppings and cliffs.
Figure 6. Georgia O’Keeffe. Red Hills and Bones, 1941. Oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 40 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the PMA website.
Painting. A shiny, round-bellied black vase holds three feathers striped with brown, black, and white, all against a sand-brown background. Light glints off the round body of the vase, which takes up two-thirds the height of this painting. Only the white tip of one feather pokes over the top edge of the vase. More of the light brown and black stripes are visible on the two feathers behind it. A triangular form in the lower right corner and a vertical band running up the canvas, about a quarter of the way in from the right edge, suggest that the vase is tucked into a niche or the corner of a wall.
Figure 7. Georgia O’Keeffe. Turkey Feathers and Indian Pot, 1941. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.
Black and white photograph. Eleven widely spaced paintings line the walls of a long room in this installation view. Through a squared opening at the end of the room opposite us, at least three more doorways telescope into the distance, ending in a flat wall at the far end of the building. The room we are in has a double-sided wooden bench at the center beneath a grid of lights above, which reflects off the shiny dark floor. The paintings show flaring petals or antlers, or layers of geometric shapes.
Figure 8. Exhibition installation photo, Art Institute of Chicago, 1943.
Black and white photograph. We look into the far corner of a gallery space, with nine paintings lining the walls to either side of an opening, near the far corner. The paintings show flame-like petals, an animal skull, or abstracted, geometric shapes. The grid of lights above reflects in the dark, shiny floor below. In this view, we see three wooden benches placed along the perimeter of the room.
Figure 9. Exhibition installation photo, Art Institute of Chicago, 1943.
Black and white photograph. This room has an opening at the far end, and walls angle inward across the corners to either side of it. Ten paintings are hung along a textured wall that appears gray in this photograph. The paintings show abstracted or stylized trees, mountains, skulls, or layered shapes. With the grid of lights above and the dark floor below, we look into at least three more rooms, barely visible to either side of the nested doorways.
Figure 10. Exhibition installation photo, Art Institute of Chicago, 1943.
Black and white newspaper clipping. In this grainy image, O’Keeffe stands looking up at a painting of flame-like, flaring petals. The caption beneath reads, 'Georgia O'Keeffe and her 'Jack-in-the-Pulpit.'' An inset box at the top left reads, 'Dayton Ohio News Sunday February 21 1943.' O’Keeffe wears a black, long-sleeved dress and a black cap that covers her hair. Her features are indistinct in this blurry image but dark brows stand out on her high forehead. She has a long nose, and she smiles slightly. She rests the pinky edge of one hand along the side of the canvas.
Figure 11. Clipping from a Dayton, Ohio newspaper. Sunday, February 21, 1943.
Painting. Most of this picture is taken up by a thick-armed, black cross. A stylized landscape beyond has densely packed, gray and brown hills leading back to a horizon lined with burnt orange and vivid yellow. The crossbeam sits just over the horizon, which comes halfway up the painting. Four round objects, presumably nail heads, are unevenly spaced on the crossing of the beams. The sky above the crossbeam, in the upper corners of the canvas, lightens from powder blue across the top to light yellow above the cross. A white circle near the upper right corner suggests a distant moon or bright star.
Figure 12. Georgia O’Keeffe. Black Cross, New Mexico / Black Cross, 1929. Oil on canvas, 39 x 30 in. Art Institute of Chicago. View on the AIC website.
Black and white photograph. A woman, Georgia O’Keeffe, wears a dark hat and coat as she looks up and to our right, her hands gathered around the button on her high-necked collar at her throat. Her head and hands nearly fill the picture. She has dark eyes, a straight nose with a rounded end, and high cheekbones. Her mouth is closed, and her upper lip is darker than her full lower lip. The hat has a tall crown and short brim, and it comes down to her thick eyebrows and over her ears. The button of her high-collared coat shines as it catches the light. With the hand on our left, she creates an O with her forefinger and thumb as she pinches the button. Her other fingers curl in as her palm turns toward us, so her fingers resemble a cresting wave. The middle finger of that hand also touches the button, and those fingers curve toward her palm, which faces our left. Behind her is an abstract work showing a light-colored, rounded object within a darker field. The round area creates a kind of halo around her head. Her face and hands are slightly out of focus.
Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918. Platinum print, 9 1/4 x 7 1/4 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Black and white photograph. We look slightly up at O’Keeffe as she stands swathed in a black coat or wrap, wearing a black hat pulled down to just above her brow, against a white, washed-out sky. Shown from the knees up, her body is angled to our right but she turns her face to us. She gazes down her long nose through narrowed eyes, off to our left. Lit from our right, sharp shadow defines the hollow under her high cheekbone on our left. Her lips are set in a line, and she seems to lean a little away from us. Her entire body is hidden behind her black garment. The light gray horizon comes about an eighth of the way up the composition, and the rest of the background is pale sky.
Figure 1. Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe, 1920–22 . Gelatin silver print, 4 1/2 x 3 9/16 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Painting. Rounded forms in cool mint and laurel green, topaz, and cobalt blue flare outward from a dark blue teardrop shape near the top center of this composition and envelop an inverted teardrop shape, in mauve pink, below the first. The rounded, flaring forms extend off all four sides of the composition. The dark blue teardrop is surrounded by a wide ring of aquamarine blue around the top that lightens to seafoam green below. Bands flare out and up, creating peaks to either side of this ring in the same jewel-toned greens and blues. Two larger forms swell out surround the pink teardrop below. A vertical line extends from the lower teardrop to the bottom edge of the painting, splitting the two forms there. Those forms have smaller lobes above the teardrop and are wider below, like bottom-heavy kidney beans. The areas closest to the pink teardrop are frosty green, darkening to spruce and teal green at the edges. Along the top of the composition, the background deepens from shell pink near the flower to dusky-rose pink at the edge. Darker pink fills in the lower corners. Brushstrokes are visible in some areas and more blended in others.
Figure 2. Georgia O’Keeffe. Series I White & Blue Flower Shapes, 1919. Oil on board, 19 7/8 x 15 3/4 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Palladium print. O’Keeffe’s head is at the bottom center of this tall palladium print. In warm tones of golden brown and velvety black, she raises one hand high so it reaches into the upper right corner while the other hand is up near her face, both with palms out. O’Keeffe looks off to our left under dark brows. The outer corners of her eyes and lips turn slightly down. Tendons stand out in her neck, and her long dark hair extends off the bottom edge of the image. Her arm to our left curves up and over her head, dark hair visible in her armpit. That thumb may touch the work of art behind her, which shows a swirling form that grows up the composition in much the same shape as her arm. Her other hand is near her head, palm facing us, with that thumb close to or brushing that ear.
Figure 3. Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918. Palladium print, 9 3/8 x 6 3/8 in. National Gallery of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the NGA website.
Charcoal drawing. Mostly short horizontal, vertical, and curving black lines interlock to make a mass that runs up the center of the composition, nearly filling the height of this tan-colored paper. A few longer diagonal lines bring the shapes together into an abstracted human form. Some cup-like lines could indicate the person’s head, shoulders, and breasts. Horizontal hatching and smudges fill in or outline the shapes throughout.
Figure 4. Pablo Picasso. Standing Female Nude, 1910. Charcoal on paper, 19 x 12 3/8 in. Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. View on the Met Museum website.
Charcoal drawing. Jagged forms, long, bulb-like shapes, and wavy lines are layered up along the center of this cream-white paper in this vertical drawing. A zig-zagging line to our left is filled in with solid medium gray to make a serrated form. Four tall, finger-like mounds clustered next to it, to our right, are darker, almost black. Some strokes of charcoal are visible, especially on the shape closest to us. Wavy lines create an outline for a form like a river to our right, which is shaded lightly but mostly white. The paper is smudged around the collection of forms.
Figure 5. Georgia O’Keeffe. Drawing XIII, 1915 / No. 13, Special, 1916. Charcoal on paper, 24 3/8 × 18 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. View on the Met Museum website.
Painting. Two pieces of vivid green fruit sit in a burgundy-red basket, which hovers over or sits on a doily-like form against a carnation-pink field below. The painting is created with mostly flat areas of color, though there is some shading to create a sense of volume in the fruit and basket. The bottom ends of the shamrock-green pears face upward. They sit side-by-side in a long, narrow basket. The handle curves up from the narrow ends. The outside of the basket is dark red, the inside navy blue. A gray shape to our left could be a shadow cast by the basket. The area behind the basket is cream white but an underlayer of cobalt blue shows through in some of the more thinly painted areas. The doily beneath the basket has a scalloped edge. The pink surface below fills the bottom half of the painting and is mottled with a darker shade of pink in the bottom right corner and to our left of the doily.
Figure 6. Georgia O’Keeffe. Alligator Pear - No. 2, 1920–21. Oil on canvas, 23 1/4 x 18 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Watercolor and drawing on paper. Paint is brushed, washed, and scrubbed on the paper in shades of moss and pine green, royal blue, mustard yellow, gray, and brown to create an abstracted view across a grassy ledge onto a body of water beyond. The scene is loosely painted so many details are difficult to make out. An outline of a charcoal-gray square tips into the scene from the bottom right corner, filling most of the paper’s height and width. The grassy hillside closest to us is painted in washes of golden yellow and sage green. It angles down to our left, where another area of peat brown outside the square could be a neighboring hill. A few caramel and tawny brown squiggles in the lower right corner of the watercolor could be an animal. Dark green trees line the hill to our right. Midnight blue, yellow, and brown squiggles to our left on the neighboring hill could be more trees. They are layered over areas of cobalt and topaz blue. The horizon is marked with a coral-red line, and the sky above, in the top fifth of the paper, is washes of pale blue, yellow, and dark gray. The artist signed and dated the bottom right corner, “Marin 22.”
Figure 7. John Marin. From Deer Isle, Maine, 1922. Watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and graphite on wove paper, 16 7/8 x 20 1/16 in. National Gallery of Art, Gift of John Marin Jr. View on the NGA website.
Black and white photograph. A white wall with Georgia O’Keeffe’s signature scrawled in black, oversized, cursive letters, takes up the left half of this image. The room beyond is hung with two paintings, and the sliver of an opening leading to another space is barely visible along the right edge. The letters of O’Keeffe’s name are rounded, with the lowercase g and f letters making spikes along its length. One painting in the background is lighter and shows stylized, curving forms; the other painting is dark and difficult to make out.
Figure 1. Installation view of the 1946 exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe at the Museum of Modern Art. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN319.1. Photograph by Soichi Sunami. View on the MoMA website.
Typewritten document. The cream-colored sheet has a press release heading typed in underlined all caps: 'Paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe shown in retrospective exhibition at Museum of Modern Art.' The paragraph below is headed with the text in quotation marks, 'Finally a woman on paper.' The paragraph beneath reads, 'These words, spoken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1915, were the actual launching of Georgia O’Keeffe on a career that has led to her recognition as a major American artist. On Wednesday, May 15, a retrospective exhibition of her works will open at the Museum of Modern Art and continue through August 25. The exhibition has been selected and installed by James Johnson Sweeney, Director of the Museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. Mr. Sweeney has also written the book on O’Keeffe which the Museum will publish concurrently with the exhibition.'
Figure 2. Museum of Modern Art press release (detail), 1946. Full version available for download from the MoMA website.
Handwritten letter. Text is written in grayed ink on cream-white paper, except for a line added near the top in what appears to be pencil. Between two inked lines, that added line reads, in quotes, ‘Finally a woman on paper’ – he said.' The visible text of the letter starts and ends mid-sentences. It reads: 'while before his lips opened – Then he smiled at me and yelled ‘Wolkomitz come here’ – Then he said to me ‘Why they’re genuinely fine things – you say a woman did these – she’s an unusual woman – She’s broad-minded, she’s bigger than most women, but she’s got the sensitive emotions – I’d know'.
Figure 3. Anita Pollitzer to Georgia O’Keeffe, December 31, 1915 (detail). Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Black and white photograph. O’Keeffe sits on the deep ledge of a window opening and looks at us, one hand raised to the upturned collar of her shirt. The square window opening fills the top three-quarters of the picture, and glass-paned panels open toward us. On our side of the window, O’Keeffe sits on the sill, her crossed legs angled to our right, her back leaning against the left edge of the opening. She turns her oval face to look at us from the corners of her eyes. She pulls her chin back a bit, a faint smile on her lips. Her dark hair is swept loosely up, and it blends with the shadowy room behind her. Her black coat has round buttons down the front and is held loosely in place with a belt. Her long, dark skirt covers her legs to her ankles, above white socks and shoes. Her right hand, to our left and closer to us, rests in her lap. Her other hand is raised to the tall point of her upturned collar, by her left cheek.
Figure 1. Unknown photographer. Georgia O’Keeffe in Texas (detail), between 1912 and 1918. Georgia O’Keeffe Photographs, MS.37. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. View on the O’Keeffe Museum website.
Painting. Three clusters of ash-brown and charcoal-gray, smooth, stylized tree trunks nearly fill this horizontal canvas. The ground below the trees is eggshell white, and blue sky fills in the top half. The surface of the trunks are smooth and curve gently, like bones. Their rounded bases are near the bottom edge of the canvas, and the trunks extend off the top edge. A cluster of three ash-brown trunks is to our left and a gray pair behind it at the center. One larger brown trunk to our right has a band of the white up the lower center, suggesting drifting snow. There are touches of muted brick red around the bottoms of the trunks.
Figure 2. Georgia O’Keeffe. Bare Tree Trunks with Snow, 1946. Oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 39 1/2 in. Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Art Association Purchase. View on the DMA website.
Painting. A single black line swells and tapers in curves across a white canvas like an uneven capital B. In the top left corner, the small top bulb of the B comes to a rounded tip pointing to our right. The second line takes up the vast majority of the composition. It stretches from near the top left corner all the way across to the center of the right edge. It then swells into a thicker line where it curves back toward the lower left corner.
Figure 3. Georgia O’Keeffe. Winter Road I, 1963. Oil on canvas, 22 x 18 inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. View on the NGA website.
Painting. A stylized landscape is made up of fog-gray, harvest-yellow, and rose-pink hills leading back to a flat-topped, black mesa in this long, horizontal painting. The gray, yellow, and pink hills take up about the bottom third of the composition. The black mesa takes up more than half the height of the canvas, and two crimson-red streaks rise up the right edge. The sky above is paper white.
Figure 4. Georgia O’Keeffe. Dark Mesa with Pink Sky, 1930. Oil on canvas, 16 x 29 7/8 inches. Amon Carter Museum of American Art. View on the Amon Carter website.
Painting. A peanut-brown, flat form spans most of this composition, except for a long, slender white triangle at the top left corner. A tall, narrow black rectangle near the lower left corner suggests a window opening in the side of a building. The brown wall is shaded darker to our left and lightens to tan across the face of the wall to our right. A darker brown strip along the right edge of the canvas suggests the turning of the corner of the building. The sky is washed-out white in the top left.
Figure 5. Georgia O’Keeffe. Black Patio Door, 1955. Oil on Canvas, 40 1/8 x 30 in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art. View on the Amon Carter website.
Watercolor. Washes in shades of blue and green create a curving, rainbow-like form against the beige of the paper in this vertical sheet. A band of sapphire blue across the bottom has a rounded bottom to create a long, cup-like form. A pale, honeydew-green band curves beneath it. Over the blue form, a light green mound creates the interior of the curving bands that then extend up like a rainbow. The bands deepen from pale green to sage, and then deeper, jewel-toned blues as they rise to the top of the sheet. A field of aquamarine-blue fills in the squared top of the sheet. The bands do not touch so the beige of the sheet shows through. Each band is mottled where the watercolor has feathered and pooled.
Figure 6. Georgia O’Keeffe. Light Coming on the Plains No. I, 1917. Watercolor on thin, beige, smooth wove paper and newsprint, 11 7/8 x 8 7/8 in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art. View on the Amon Carter website.
Watercolor. Arching washes of sky, royal, and navy blue blend to create a tall, egg-like shape on beige paper. A shallow, dish-like form of ultramarine blue runs across the bottom of the sheet. Above a narrow gap where the beige paper shows through, the tall form rises up into a dome. A pale glow at the bottom center of that form shifts to arctic blue and then deepens gradually to ultramarine around the top edge. Having worked wet-in-wet, the watercolor blends outward, like the rays of a rising sun. A few darker areas of blue are pooled around the top.
Figure 7. Georgia O’Keeffe. Light Coming on the Plains No. II / No. II Light Coming on the Plains, 1917. Watercolor on thin, beige, smooth wove paper and newsprint, 11 7/8 x 8 7/8 in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art. View on the Amon Carter website.
Watercolor. Here, the arching form of blended bands deepens from pale turquoise at the center to azure blue and then muted plum purple, again on beige-colored paper. The cup-like band across the bottom fades from royal blue to eggplant brown, then mint green. The blue and purple swirl together, especially across the top of the rounded form at the top of the page.
Figure 8. Georgia O’Keeffe. Light Coming on the Plains No. III / No. III Light Coming on the Plains, 1917. Watercolor on thin, beige, smooth wove paper and newsprint, 11 7/8 x 8 7/8 in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art. View on the Amon Carter website.
Watercolor. Warm orange and red rings surround a yellow ring near the upper left corner. The rest of the field is filled with pools of shades of lapis blue. The yellow circle is near the upper left corner. The white of the unpainted paper separates it from the clay-orange ring surrounding it, which is then encircled in a red ring. A tail-like line extends from the outer, red ring to stretch to the right edge of the paper. The blue paint of the sky touches the red ring along the left edge and near the red line so blue and red bleed together in those two areas. The blue areas are especially mottled with wet-on-wet blue pigment.
Figure 9. Georgia O’Keeffe. Evening Star No. V, 1917. Watercolor on paper, 8 5/8 x 11 5/8 in. McNay Art Museum, Bequest of Helen Miller Jones. View on the McNay website.
Watercolor. Clouds of white smoke highlighted with lemon yellow and shaded with delphinium blue billow out of an upside-down teardrop shape that could be a train on a track in this abstracted composition. The cloud takes up most of the top two-thirds of the vertical sheet. The teardrop shape, or train, is dark blue and has a yellow circle, presumably a headlight, is just to our left of center. Three lines emanate from the point of the train and extend to our left. One band is olive green, one is rust orange, and the third is royal blue. Washes of watercolor around the train and cloud lightens from violet across the top to pale slate blue along the bottom edge.
Figure 10. Georgia O’Keeffe. Train Coming in - Canyon, Texas / Train at Night in the Desert, 1916. Watercolor on paper, 9 3/4 x 8 1/4 in. Amarillo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, Amarillo Area Foundation, AMoA Alliance, Fannie Weymouth, Santa Fe Industries Foundation and Mary Fain.
Painting. A jagged, rounded form like a circular saw blade blends from honey and canary yellow to marigold orange and scarlet red in this long, horizontal painting. A band of brown along the bottom edge is topped by narrower bands of flame red and orange. The rest of the canvas is taken up with serrated bands of orange and yellow flaring off of a honey-yellow semicircle along the horizon. The semicircle is mottled with darker areas of pumpkin orange. The upper corners are vivid red.t
Figure 11. Georgia O’Keeffe. From the Plains I / From the Plains, 1953. Oil on canvas, 47 11/16 x 83 5/8 in. McNay Art Museum, Gift of the Estate of Tom Slick. View on the McNay website.
Painting. A white, dry goat’s skull sits on a sandy dune in the lower left corner of this vertical painting. Two dunes rise in the distance beyond, nearly filling the composition. The skull is painted parchment white shaded with pale lavender purple. An undefined, curling tuft near the head could be the remnants of the goat’s skin or fur. The skull is angled to our right, almost in profile. Sun washes the sandy area beyond the skull in golden yellow. The dune that curves up and to our right is darker, army brown. Another sunlit dune fills the top left corner. A sliver of pale pink sky stretches across the top edge of the canvas.
Figure 12. Georgia O’Keeffe. Goat’s Head, 1957. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in. McNay Art Museum, Gift of the Estate of Tom Slick. View on the McNay website.
Painting. Curving forms in pale peach, orange, eucalyptus green, fawn brown, mauve pink, and deep purple intertwine around an ear-like form, ridged and curling, at the bottom center in this abstract painting. At the core, a muted orange band curves around and through a kidney-shaped green form. Other bands curl and loop out from there. The bands intersect and cross each other, like fingers loosely interlocking to make a cage. The space seems to flatten out at the upper right, where the dark purple deepens to nearly black.
Figure 13. Georgia O’Keeffe. Leaf Motif, No. 2, 1924. Oil on canvas, 35 x 18 in. McNay Art Museum, Mary and Sylvan Lang Collection. View on the McNay website.
Painting. A vibrant yellow, egg-shaped form is surrounded in bands of apricot and saffron orange. The egg tips up and to our right. Along the top, left, and bottom edges, it seems cushioned into a field of a darker orange, which is painted with blended strokes to give it a soft look. The orange fades to white at the top right corner and down the right side. In the top left corner, a magenta-pink, bean-shaped form is nestled into a lighter peach area. Two lines of deep pink stretch from the bean form, like blood vessels.
Figure 14. Georgia O’Keeffe. Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow, 1945. Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in. Extended Loan, Private Collection.
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