Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky Above Clouds III/Above the Clouds III, 1963, Oil on canvas , 48 x 84", Private Collection, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Spring, 1922, Oil on canvas , 35-1/2 x 30-3/8, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, Bequest of Mrs. Arthur Schwab (Edna Bryner, class of 1907), © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Red & Orange Streak, 1919, Oil on canvas , 27 x 23", Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe for the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987, Photograph by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Abstraction White Rose, 1927, Oil on canvas , 36 x 30", Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Gift, The Burnett Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait, 1918, Gelatin silver print , 9-1/2 x 7-3/4", The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 93.XM.25.32, © J. Paul Getty Trust.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Series I, No. 4, 1918, Oil on canvas , 20 x 16", Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Series I, No. 8, 1919, Oil on canvas , 20 x 16", Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Untitled (Abstraction/Portrait of Paul Strand), 1917, Watercolor on paper , 12 x 8-7/8", Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Gift, The Burnett Foundation, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York
212-423-3500
Peter Norton Family Galleries,
third floor
Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction
September 17, 2009-
January 17, 2010

While it is true that O’Keeffe has entered the public imagination as a painter of sensual, feminine subjects, she is nevertheless viewed first and foremost as a painter of places and things. When one thinks of her work it is usually of her magnified images of open flowers and her iconic depictions of animal bones, her Lake George landscapes, her images of stark New Mexican cliffs, and her still lifes of fruit, leaves, shells, rocks, and bones. Even O’Keeffe’s canvasses of architecture, from the skyscrapers of Manhattan to the adobe structures of Abiquiu, come to mind more readily than the numerous works — made throughout her career — that she termed abstract.

The artistic achievement of Georgia O’Keeffe is freshly examined in Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction. While O’Keeffe (1887-1986) has long been recognized as one a central figure in 20th-century art, the radical abstract work she created throughout her long career has remained less well-known than her representational art. By surveying her abstractions, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction repositions O’Keeffe as one of America's first and most daring abstract artists.

Including more than 130 paintings, drawings, watercolors, and sculptures by O'Keeffe as well as selected examples of Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographic portrait series of O’Keeffe, the exhibition has been many years in the making. The curatorial team, led by Whitney curator Barbara Haskell, includes Barbara Buhler Lynes, the curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center; Bruce Robertson, professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Elizabeth Hutton Turner, professor and vice provost for the arts at the University of Virginia and guest curator at The Phillips Collection; and Sasha Nicholas, Whitney curatorial assistant. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by the organizers, selections from the recently unsealed Stieglitz-O’Keeffe correspondence, and a contextual chronology of O’Keeffe’s life and work. Following its Whitney debut, the show travels to The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., February 6-May 9, 2010, and to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, May 28-September 12, 2010.

This exhibition is the first to examine O'Keeffe's achievement as an abstract artist. In 1915, O'Keeffe leaped into the forefront of American modernism with a group of abstract charcoal drawings that were among the most radical creations produced in the United States at that time. A year later, she added color to her repertoire; by 1918, she was expressing the union of abstract form and color in paint. First exhibited in 1923, O’Keeffe’s psychologically charged, brilliantly colored abstract oils garnered immediate critical and public acclaim. For the next decade, abstraction would dominate her attention. Even after 1930, when O’Keeffe’s focus turned increasingly to representational subjects, she never abandoned abstraction, which remained the guiding principle of her art. She returned to abstraction in the mid-1940s with a new, planar vocabulary that provided a precedent for a younger generation of abstractionists.

Abstraction and representation for O’Keeffe were neither binary nor oppositional. She moved freely from one to the other, cognizant that all art is rooted in an underlying abstract formal invention. For O’Keeffe, abstraction offered a way to communicate ineffable thoughts and sensations. As she said in 1976, “The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.” Through her personal language of abstraction, she sought to give visual form (as she confided in a 1916 letter to Alfred Stieglitz) to “things I feel and want to say - [but] havent [sic] words for.” Abstraction allowed her to express intangible experience—be it a quality of light, color, sound, or response to a person or place. As O’Keeffe defined it in 1923, her goal as a painter was to “make the unknown — known. By unknown I mean the thing that means so much to the person that he wants to put it down — clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand.”

This exhibition and catalogue chronicle the trajectory of O'Keeffe's career as an abstract artist, examining the forces impacting the changes in subject matter and style. From her career's start, she was, as critic Henry McBride remarked, “a newspaper personality.” Interpretations of her art were shaped almost exclusively by Alfred Stieglitz, artist, charismatic impresario, dealer, editor, and O’Keeffe’s eventual husband, who presented her work from 1916 to 1946 in the groundbreaking galleries “291”, Anderson Galleries, Intimate Gallery, and An American Place. Stieglitz’s public and private statements about O’Keeffe’s early abstractions and the photographs he took of her, partially clothed or nude, led critics to interpret her work — to her great dismay — as Freudian-tinged, psychological expressions of her sexuality.

Cognizant of the public’s lack of sympathy for abstraction and seeking to direct the critics away from sexualized readings of her work, O’Keeffe self-consciously began to introduce more recognizable images into her repertoire in the mid-1920s. As she wrote to the writer Sherwood Anderson in 1924, “I suppose the reason I got down to an effort to be objective is that I didn’t like the interpretations of my other things [abstractions].” O’Keeffe’s increasing shift to representational subjects, coupled with Stieglitz’s penchant for favoring the exhibition of new, previously unseen work, meant that O’Keeffe’s abstractions rarely figured in the exhibitions Stieglitz mounted of her work after 1930, with the result that her first forays into abstraction virtually disappeared from public view.

In addition to rethinking O'Keeffe's place in American modernism, the book that accompanies thisexhibition reappraises the origin and singular character of her abstract vocabulary and the stylistic shifts which her art underwent over the span of her long career. It adds significant new insight into her art and life, publishing for the first time excerpts of recently unsealed letters written by O’Keeffe to photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, whom she married in 1924. These letters, along with a contextual chronology and other primary documents referenced by the authors, offer an intimate glimpse into her creative method and intentions as an artist.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Early Abstraction, 1915, Charcoal on paper , 24 x 18-5/8", Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation , M1997.189, © Milwaukee Art Museum, Photography by Malcolm Varon.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Jack-in-Pulpit Abstraction – No. 5, 1930, Oil on canvas , 48 x 30", National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1987.58.4, Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Black White and Blue, 1930, Oil on canvas , 48 x 30", Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Abstraction, 1926, Oil on canvas , 30-1/4 x 18-1/16", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 58.43, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. VI, 1930, Oil on canvas , 36 x 18", National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1987.58.5, Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Pink Tulip, 1925, Oil on canvas , 31-3/4 x 12", Collection of Emily Fisher Landau, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Black Door with Red, 1954, Oil on canvas , 48 x 84", Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, Bequest of Walter P. Chrysler Jr., 89.63, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Minneapolis
Institute of Arts
2400 Third Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota
612-870-3131
Target Gallery (admission)
Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction
October 7, 2007-
January 6, 2008

Masterworks by American artist Georgia O’Keeffe will be presented this fall at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The groundbreaking exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction examines for the first time the artist’s distinctive use of the circular motif. O’Keeffe’s unique approach created highly energetic compositions that boldly distinguish her work from that of her Cubist-influenced peers. The forty-four works on display, including drawings, watercolors, paintings, pastels, and sculptures dating from 1915 to the 1970s, track the evolution of O’Keeffe’s use of the circle.

The title of this exhibition, Circling Around Abstraction, refers to the genre of forms that O’Keeffe often painted or sculpted and to which she returned repeatedly during the course of her artistic career: the circle, the oval, and the hypnotic swirl of the spiral. Such forms can be found in her earliest charcoal abstractions of the 1910s and in many of her innovative oil paintings that followed, such as the Red Flower (1919). In the 1920s, working in the more traditional genre of still life, O’Keeffe focused on the rounded forms of fruits and vegetables set within or upon baskets and plates inside cropped and flattened compositions, including Green Apple on Black Plate (1922).

In subsequent years, O’Keeffe expanded her range of subjects drawn from the natural world while continuing to explore new ways of depicting them. This exhibition features a variety of these paintings, many of which have never before been exhibited together. A Piece of Wood (1942), for example, is one of three works included in this exhibition in which O’Keeffe magnified the hypnotic whirls of a knot in wood. In other paintings, she turned her attention to the swirling forms of the clamshell, hidden pools nestled in the woods, and looping strands of fishing line, including Fishhook From Hawaii – No. 1 (1939).

In the 1940s, O’Keeffe produced her haunting series of pelvis paintings. This exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of these works produced in the final decades of her life. Featured among them is Pelvis IV (1944) and Pelvis with the Moon – New Mexico (1943). Also on view are circle-motif abstractions from the 1960s, such as Green, Yellow, and Orange (1960); several works on paper, including Untitled (Abstraction Blue Circle and Line) (1976/77); and two versions of one of her little-known abstraction sculptures, Abstraction (1946).

This exhibition was organized by the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida. National sponsorship has been generously provided by Mrs. Shelby Cullom Davis. Presentation at the MIA is sponsored by Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, L.L.P., and the Friends of the Institute.