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7/9

Texas, 1953–1975

  • Amy Von Lintel, PhD, West Texas A&M 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.

Georgia O’Keeffe proved to be the perfect artist for up-and-coming Texas art museums to stake their claims as both regional and national institutions. Though not a native Texan, O’Keeffe was considered “western” and “Texan” enough for these museums to celebrate her regional importance; she had lived and worked in New Mexico from 1929, and she taught art in Texas in the 1910s (figure 1) while producing a vast body of innovative work.1 But O’Keeffe was more than just a “regional” artist. She was nationally renowned and the highest-earning woman artist in the United States for decades (and still is today2). By showing her art, the Texas museums could attest that they, too, were competing on a national stage. For example, while O’Keeffe’s first major retrospectives occurred at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943 and at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1946, her third retrospective was held in 1953 at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art, or DMA)—a show that secured the DMA the acquisition of Bare Tree Trunks with Snow (1946, figure 2).3

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.

This Dallas institution, founded in 1903, began showing O’Keeffe’s work by 1936, launching its grand reopening after renovations of its Fair Park location with a show of O’Keeffe’s work in conjunction with the Texas Centennial.4 And the DMA since then has held no less than 10 exhibitions dedicated to O’Keeffe.5 But the DMA is just one of many Texas museums that have embraced and supported O’Keeffe’s art.6 To be sure, a distinctly reciprocal relationship developed between O’Keeffe and Texas museums in the mid-twentieth century. O’Keeffe received significant attention for her work in Texas, from collectors, museums, and museum visitors, all of whom helped to establish her as a blue-chip American artist. But these museums also drew upon O’Keeffe’s strong reputation to gain their own national recognition as major art institutions.

With the DMA, another Texas museum whose foundational moments became quickly intertwined with O’Keeffe’s was the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. Originally founded in 1961 as the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, the museum always declared a commitment to defining “western art” in terms beyond the typical cowboy images.7 Though the work of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell—arguably the quintessential cowboy artists—were at the heart of the private collecting practices of Amon G. Carter Sr., Ruth Carter Stevenson, Board of Trustees president and daughter of Carter, soon began lobbying for the museum to include modern and contemporary art with diverse connections to the West.8 And in that vein, the museum wasted little time preparing an exhibition of 95 of O’Keeffe’s works that opened in 1966. This exhibition illuminated the widest variety of O’Keeffe’s subjects and styles, including flower pictures, Southwest landscapes, iconic Penitente crosses, animal bones, and nearly pure abstractions.9 O’Keeffe also worked directly with the museum staff for years in preparation for this retrospective, and she attended the opening in person.10

The curator of this O’Keeffe retrospective and the first director of the Amon Carter, Mitchell A. Wilder, was not an O’Keeffe expert, but had a rich understanding of the wide scope of art produced and consumed in the American West.11 Before being hired by the Fort Worth museum, Wilder had become a leading expert on Hispanic colonial art, especially religious folk art of the Southwest, and had served for years as director at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, which housed a large collection of Native American art. Wilder was therefore a bold but ideal choice to organize the Amon Carter’s show of O’Keeffe’s work in a way that was declaratively Texan, Western, and “American” at the same time.12 His team of board members at the Amon Carter included other leading art collectors in Texas, such as John de Menil (later a founder of the Menil Collection in Houston; but also Rene d’Harnoncourt, director of MoMA; Richard F. Brown, the first director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and Philip Johnson, the world-renowned architect who designed the Amon Carter building. Wilder also brought on James Johnson Sweeney to install O’Keeffe’s works at the Amon Carter; a longtime friend of the artist, Sweeney had helped curate her retrospective at MoMA and had by then taken the position of director at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.13 Clearly the new art museum in Fort Worth was thinking beyond Texas and beyond any limited “regional” scope.

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.

The cover of the exhibition catalogue of O’Keeffe’s Amon Carter retrospective was also an interesting choice—one that reveals the museum’s desire to highlight the artist’s latest forays into extreme abstraction, rather than feature her more recognizable subjects. The cover shows the stark design of Winter Road I (1963, figure 3), painted just three years before the opening of the exhibition, where a warm brown, calligraphic line dances in a curve across the space against an open and empty white ground. This minimalist image fits well within the art trends of the 1960s, when abstraction in the United States had shifted from abstract expressionist, rather busy “allover” compositions to more subdued geometric styles.14 Featuring this painting on the catalogue cover—an abstract design based directly on the artist’s view of a road curving around a mesa as seen out of her bedroom window in Abiquiú, New Mexico, which would not have been obvious to many viewers15—demonstrates the curators’ wishes to declare O’Keeffe’s continued modernity and contemporary relevance in a changing art world. And by 1967, the year after the O’Keeffe retrospective, Stevenson publicly declared the Amon Carter’s new mission to expand their purview to focus on “American art” broadly conceived.16 Though it took until 2010 for the museum to officially change its name to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, this expanded mission was arguably catalyzed by the O’Keeffe show in 1966.17

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.

Another intriguing fact about O’Keeffe’s Winter Road I is that the Amon Carter described the painting in 1966 as newly part of its permanent collection, listing it as such in the exhibition catalogue, for instance.18 Along with the major works that the museum acquired by the artist—Dark Mesa with Pink Sky (1930, figure 4), acquired in 1965; and Black Patio Door (1955, figure 5) and the three-part watercolor series Light Coming on the Plains (No. I, No. II, and No. III) (1917, figures 6–8), all acquired in 1966—Winter Road I would have been a major coup for the museum to have in its collection. However, the painting did not stay at the Amon Carter, and since 1995 has been in the National Gallery of Art’s collection in Washington, DC.19

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.

But even without the retention of this boldly abstract piece, the Amon Carter still solidified a premier collection of O’Keeffe works in the context of her 1966 retrospective. In particular, the Amon Carter was among the first institutions to recognize the artist’s Texas period as both unique and significant. Acquiring the Light Coming on the Plains series brought some of the first major Texas works out from the artist’s personal collection and into a public museum. The majority of O’Keeffe’s Texas watercolors remained with the artist until her death, and are now in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.20 And the few Texas pieces by O’Keeffe that have now made their way back to the state—such as an Evening Star at the McNay, acquired in 1985 (figure 9), and the four pieces at the Amarillo Museum of Art, including a beautiful image of a train in the distance (figure 10), acquired in 1982—arrived decades after the Amon Carter acquired their Texas watercolor gems, around the death of O’Keeffe, who passed in 1986.21

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.

The McNay Museum in San Antonio has also long committed to showing and supporting O’Keeffe’s work. The McNay opened its doors in 1954, and by 1958 was featuring several major works by the artist in a show titled American Art in San Antonio.22 Two of these pieces, From the Plains I / From the Plains (1953, figure 11) and Goat’s Head (1957, figure 12), were part of the private collection owned by San Antonio millionaire Tom Slick, an inventor who was the son of one of the most successful Texas oilman “wildcatters,” whose tagline became “slick ideas.”23 According to his niece, who penned his biography, “whether [Tom] was pursuing the Yeti, or a cure for cancer, or a new oil recovery technology, or the best food in town, [he] was passionately awake and present, never numb.”24 That passion for discovery led Slick to invest in innovative modern art, including works by O’Keeffe. Both From the Plains I and Goat’s Head were later donated to the McNay from the Slick Estate in 1973, and today remain in the museum’s permanent collection.25

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.

After its initial decade, the McNay continued to dedicate exhibitions to O’Keeffe’s work, including one in 1960; a solo show of the artist’s work in 1975, which resulted in the museum’s acquisition of the stunning abstraction Leaf Motif, no. 2 (1924, figure 13); and the important O’Keeffe and Texas in 1998, for which leading O’Keeffe scholar Sharyn Udall conducted significant research on the artist’s Texas years and authored an extensive catalogue.26 Unfortunately, this show included more than two dozen of the “Canyon Suite” watercolor series, now shown to be fakes.27 The series had been “discovered” in the town of Canyon just after the death of O’Keeffe, had been bought and sold on the market, and wound up in the collection of Crosby Kemper of Kansas City, who loaned it to the McNay for the 1998 show. Only after the 1999 catalogue raisonné of O’Keeffe’s work was published did the inauthenticity of the watercolors become public, and Kemper demanded a refund from his dealer on his multimillion-dollar purchase of the works.28 This scandal, however, did not stop the McNay from continuing to feature exhibitions of the artist’s work, and in 2022 the museum hosted Georgia O’Keeffe and American Modernism.29

Perhaps one of the collectors most critical to O’Keeffe’s connection to Texas is Anne Marion, the Fort Worth–born heiress of an oil and ranching fortune. Marion became a major benefactor of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in the early 1980s, and then founded the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe in 1997—the first U.S. museum dedicated to a single woman artist.30 But even as early as the 1966 retrospective at the Amon Carter, Marion was loaning O’Keeffe’s art from her private collection to be seen by a Texas public. For instance, she loaned Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow (1945, figure 14) to the Fort Worth museum before later placing it on extended loan to the O’Keeffe Museum. In other words, Marion was utterly instigative in supporting the Texan legacy of O’Keeffe.

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.

According to the Dallas Museum of Art website, “Georgia O'Keeffe was truly an artist of this region, but moreover she was a true American icon and a sure favorite with the public.” This binary of regional and national, Texan and American, was at the heart of O’Keeffe’s Texas exhibitions. Not only was the artist’s reputation significantly enhanced by the attention she received in Texas, but the museums and collectors of Texas have gained national clout in their choice to put O’Keeffe’s art on display again and again.

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. Her life and work in New Mexico has been extensively documented. A good place to start is Barbara Buhler Lynes and Agapita Judy Lopez, Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Houses: Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu (New York: Abrams; Santa Fe, NM: The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2012). On her time in Texas, see especially Amy Von Lintel, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Wartime Texas Letters (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2020); and Georgia O’Keeffe and Amy Von Lintel (text author), Georgia O’Keeffe Watercolors, 1916-1918 (Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2016). ↩︎

  2. See Eileen Kinsella, “O’Keeffe Painting Sells for $44 Million at Sotheby’s, Sets Record for Work by Female Artist,” Artnet, November 20, 2014, https://news.artnet.com/market/okeeffe-painting-sells-for-44-million-at-sothebys-sets-record-for-work-by-female-artist-176413. ↩︎

  3. The name changed to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1984. The majority of the 29 paintings in this 1953 exhibition were lent to the Dallas museum by Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery in New York City, and only included works from 1924 to 1950. In other words, there were no works from her Texas years. Moreover, the biographical summary given in the exhibition catalogue mentioned O’Keeffe’s work as a “high school teacher” in Amarillo but said nothing about her time teaching at West Texas State Normal College (now West Texas A&M University) in Canyon from 1916 to 1918, when she produced dozens of paintings and drawings. Instead, it says she “came to New York in 1915 and lived there until 1949,” misrepresenting how nomadic she actually was in these years. See An Exhibition of Paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, online at the “The Portal to Texas History” as part of the DMA exhibition records: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth183370/m1/3/. ↩︎

  4. On the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition, see the digitized version of the catalogue by Daniel Catton Rich: https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/7588/retrospective-exhibition-of-paintings-by-georgia-o-keeffe. Though no works from Texas were included in the Chicago exhibition, the catalogue includes a section on O’Keeffe’s time in and inspiration from Texas. The MoMA retrospective did not include a catalogue publication, and likewise no Texas works were included. See https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2851.

    On the history of the DMA, see the museum website: https://dma.org/about/museum-history. According to the museum, the Centennial Exposition Art Exhibition drew more than 154,000 visitors to the new building from June 6 to November 26, 1936—visitors who would have viewed O’Keeffe’s works on display there. ↩︎

  5. The exhibitions at the DMA that featured O’Keeffe included, in addition to the 1936 and 1953 shows, a group show on religious art in 1958; Southwestern Art: A Sampling of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, 1960; Dallas Collects, 1963; Georgia O’Keeffe, 1887-1986, 1988, which traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, organized by the DMA and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, in 1999. The 1988 retrospective had a record 205,904 visitors, with 24,000 attending the first week alone. ↩︎

  6. Texas museums not discussed in this essay that also have works by O’Keeffe include the Museum of Texas Tech University, which has Red Hills, Series II-35 (1938); the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, which has Red Landscape (1917); and the Stark Museum of Orange, which has Gerald’s Tree II (1937). The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has three of O’Keeffe’s paintings, all acquired after 1970. ↩︎

  7. The Amon Carter’s early mission statement is worth quoting in full: “The Amon Carter Museum of Western Art was established under the will of the late Amon G. Carter for the study and documentation of westering North America. The program of the Museum is expressed in publications, exhibitions, and permanent collections related to the many aspects of American culture, both historic and contemporary, which find their identification as Western.” See Mitchell A. Wilder, ed., Georgia O’Keeffe: An Exhibition of the Work of the Artist from 1915 to 1966 (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1966), copyright page. ↩︎

  8. See the Amon Carter Museum website: https://www.cartermuseum.org/about/our-story. ↩︎

  9. The catalogue presented a unique but highly effective method of showing this range of production. The text drew from exhibition reviews and writeups across the career of O’Keeffe, beginning with Marsden Hartley’s catalogue foreword in 1935 and ending with Sam Hunter’s catalogue foreword for a show at Brandeis University in 1963. These previously published statements about O’Keeffe’s work highlight everything from her earliest abstractions, to her New York City pictures, to her bone and cross series, to her nature paintings. Though many of them are very stereotypical in their gendered assessment of O’Keeffe and her work, they are also highly illuminating for the ongoing reception of her abstract style, including the 1963 essay by Hunter that argues for O’Keeffe’s unique “experiential” mode of abstraction that places her squarely in minimalist and post-modern trends. ↩︎

  10. Wilder, Georgia O’Keeffe, foreword. ↩︎

  11. Wilder was the director of the Amon Carter Museum in 1966, but he was largely responsible for the organization of the exhibition. Sweeney “installed the exhibition” at the request of O’Keeffe. See Wilder, Georgia O’Keeffe, foreword. The exhibition also traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. ↩︎

  12. On Wilder’s awareness of the particularly layered and complicated role of a curator in a western U.S. museum like the Amon Carter, see Mitchell A. Wilder, “Art in the Southwest,” The Atlantic, March 1951, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1951/03/art-in-the-southwest/639730/. He particularly highlighted the importance and growth of Texas museums. ↩︎

  13. On O’Keeffe’s friendship with Sweeney, see, for instance, Georgia O’Keeffe to Ted Reid, postmarked May 10, 1946, Ted Reid-Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Cornette Library, West Texas A&M University. The letter describes a party that Sweeney was throwing O’Keeffe at his home following the opening of her retrospective at MoMA. She refers to “my friends the Sweeneys.” ↩︎

  14. For a good definition of abstract expressionism, see the MoMA website: https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/abstract-expressionism/. ↩︎

  15. On this view and its relationship to the painting, see the polaroid taken by O’Keeffe (https://collections.okeeffemuseum.org/object/6015/) as well as Lynes and Lopez, O’Keeffe and Her Houses, 242–47. O’Keeffe wrote: “Two walls of my room in the Abiquiu house are glass and from one window I see the road toward Española, Santa Fe, and the world. The road fascinates me with its ups and downs and finally its wide sweep as it speeds toward the wall of my hilltop to go past me.” ↩︎

  16. See the Amon Carter Museum website: https://www.cartermuseum.org/about/our-story. ↩︎

  17. The museum dropped the “of Western Art” designation in its title in 1977 and added “of American Art” in 2010. See https://www.cartermuseum.org/about/our-story. ↩︎

  18. Wilder, Georgia O’Keeffe, copyright page, 30. ↩︎

  19. See https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.91449.html. The reasons why the painting did not remain at the Amon Carter Museum are still unclear, per email correspondence between the author and Jonathan Frembling on August 30, 2022. ↩︎

  20. See Barbara Buhler Lynes and Russell Bowman, O’Keeffe’s O’Keeffes: The Artist’s Collection (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001). ↩︎

  21. Amarillo as a city has long had its eye on O’Keeffe as part of their artistic claims to fame, given that the artist lived and taught school there between 1912 and 1914. In 1968, the Junior League of Amarillo organized an exhibition of the artist’s work held at the Amarillo Civic Center, and then the Amarillo Art Center (now Amarillo Museum of Art, a name change that occurred in 1994) organized a group show in 1985. See Al Kochka et al., Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Contemporaries (Amarillo, TX: Amarillo Art Center, 1985). This show included 24 of O’Keeffe’s works, including early abstractions, Texas watercolors, as well as flower, shell, landscape, and bone paintings. Later acquisitions of O’Keeffe’s work at the Amon Carter include Red Cannas (1927) in 1986; Series I, No. 1 (1918) in 1995; and White Birch (1925) in 1997. See https://www.cartermuseum.org/collection/red-cannas-198611, https://www.cartermuseum.org/collection/series-i-no-i-19958, and https://www.cartermuseum.org/collection/white-birch-19977a. White Birch was featured in the 1966 retrospective at the Amon Carter, on loan from the private collection of Mr. and Mrs. J. Lee Johnson III of Fort Worth. See Wilder, Georgia O’Keeffe, 28. ↩︎

  22. On the history of the McNay, see the museum website: https://www.mcnayart.org/our-mission/. ↩︎

  23. In Texas, a “wildcatter” is someone who drills for oil in places not known to have deposits, in other words, high-risk, exploratory drilling. ↩︎

  24. Elaine Wolff, “In Search of Tom Slick, Art Collector,” San Antonio Current, June 17, 2009, https://www.sacurrent.com/arts/in-search-of-tom-slick-art-collector-2286290. This article was published in the context of an exhibition on the Slick art collection at the McNay. See also Catherine Nixon Cooke, Tom Slick: Mystery Hunter (n.p.: Paraview, 2005); In Search of Tom Slick: Explorer and Visionary, rev. ed. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2020); and Loren Coleman, Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology (Fresno, CA: Craven, 2002); as well as the biographical statement on Slick featured on the Christie’s auction house webpage on O’Keeffe’s Sun Water Maine pastel from 1922, which was in Slick’s collection: https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5631570. ↩︎

  25. From the Plains I was also included in the 1966 retrospective at the Amon Carter. ↩︎

  26. Sharyn Udall, O’Keeffe and Texas (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998). This show also led to the McNay’s acquisition of O’Keeffe’s Pink and Yellow Hollyhawks (1952). See https://collection.mcnayart.org/objects/6199/pink-and-yellow-hollyhocks. ↩︎

  27. The scandal of the “Canyon Suite” fakes was extensively covered in the press in the late 1990s and early 2000s. See, for instance, Jo Ann Lewis, “The Curious Case of the Spurious O’Keeffes,” Washington Post, August 6, 2000; Jo Ann Lewis, “The Art that Went from Boon to Bust,” Washington Post, December 3, 1999, C1; and Gretchen Reynolds, “If It’s Not an O’Keeffe, Exactly What Is It?,” New York Times, March 7, 2000. For more of an assessment of the crime and its context in Canyon, Texas, see Amy Von Lintel, “A Famous Art Fraud Demystified,” Panhandle Art Stories (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, forthcoming). ↩︎

  28. Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1999). Lynes and National Gallery Paper Conservator, Judith C. Walsh, discovered that some of the “Canyon Suite” works were produced after O’Keeffe was teaching at West Texas State Normal College, and none was on the type of paper O’Keeffe used for more than 95% of the watercolor paintings she produced during her tenure there. ↩︎

  29. See https://www.mcnayart.org/exhibition/okeeffe-and-american-modernism/. ↩︎

  30. Anne Burnett Windfohr Marion was born in 1938. Her father Samuel Burk Burnett was the founder of 6666 Ranch in King County and became one of the wealthiest men in Texas. On Marion, see Tessa Solomon, “Anne Marion, Founder of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in New Mexico, Has Died at 81,” ArtNews, February 13, 2020, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/anne-marion-died-at-81-1202677880/; and Katharine Q. Seelye, “Anne Marion, Texas Rancher, Heiress and Arts Patron, Dies at 81,” New York Times, February 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/us/anne-marion-dead.html. ↩︎

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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