Georgia OKeeffe (18871986) was one of the foundational

Georgia
figures of American modernism and a pioneering woman
in the arts. Widely acclaimed for her abstractions, flower

Georgia OKeeffe
paintings and Southwest landscapes, this lavish new book
celebrates the seven-decade career of this most prominent
female artist. Coming one hundred years after her debut in
1916, this book also marks a century of OKeeffe.

Illustrating her highly distinctive paintings from well-known

masterpieces including flower paintings and skulls, to less
well-known abstractions, nature studies and New York
City scenes, this illuminating new study surveys OKeeffes
complete oeuvre and dispels many assumptions that persist
about her and her artistic output. New scholarship includes
explorations of the artists personal and aesthetic partnership
with Alfred Stieglitz, feminism and her work, and OKeeffes
relationship with American landscape and identity.
Georgia OKeeffe is the definitive volume for our time on
one of Americas most beloved and influential artists.

30.00
ISBN 978-1-84976-403-2

OKeeffe
Georgia OKeeffe
Georgia
OKeeffe
Edited by Tanya Barson
Tate Publishing
First published 2016 by order of the Tate Trustees
by Tate Publishing, a division of Tate Enterprises Ltd,
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
www.tate.org.uk/publishing

on the occasion of the exhibition Foreword p.6

Georgia OKeeffe
Tate Modern, London OKeeffes Century p.8
6 July 30 October 2016
Tanya Barson
Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien Esoteric Art at 291, 1917 Henry Tyrrell p.48
7 December 2016 26 March 2017

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Touching the Centre:

22 April 30 July 2017 Georgia OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitzs Artistic Dialogue p.50
Tate Enterprises Ltd 2016
Sarah Greenough
To MSS. and Its 33 Subscribers ..., 1922 Georgia OKeeffe p.98
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, Seeing OKeeffe Seeing p.102
including photocopying and recording, or in any information Griselda Pollock
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
The Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe, 1922 Paul Rosenfeld p.138
publishers or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd,
www.cla.co.uk
Location and Dislocation in the Life and Art of Georgia OKeeffe p.144
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
Cody Hartley
White Paint and Good Order, 1926 Waldo Frank p.180
ISBN 978 1 84976 371 4 (hbk)
ISBN 978 1 84976 403 2 (pbk)
OKeeffes Late Blooms: The Abstract Landscapes p.184
Designed by The Studio of Williamson Curran Heike Eipeldauer and Florian Steininger
Colour reproduction by DL Imaging, London
Printed and bound in Italy by Graphicom Review of an Exhibition of Georgia OKeeffe, 1946 Clement Greenberg p.216

Cover: Georgia O'Keeffe, Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1, 1932
The Light One: A Case Study p.218
Measurements of artworks are given in centimetres, Georgiana Uhlyarik
height before width
OKeeffe as I see her, 1993 Susan Hiller p.226

Chronology p.232
Hannah Johnston
Notes p.244
Exhibited Works p.252
Further Reading p.258
Index p.260
Picture Credits p.264
 Georgia OKeeffe
Foreword
A century after Georgia OKeeffes debut at 291 the gallery
of Alfred Stieglitz in New York it seems timely to revisit her
work and explore its richness and complexity anew. It has been
a generation since her last institutional showing in London, at the
Hayward Gallery in 1993, and her work is seen only infrequently
in Europe and Canada. This exhibition therefore affords audiences
in London, Vienna and Toronto a very rare opportunity to
experience OKeeffes work in depth.
Georgia OKeeffe stands out as a pioneering artist not only for
being one of the first women to participate in early modernist
movements, for achieving significant success immediately and
sustaining this over a long career, and for forging the way for
successive generations of artists, but also as an American icon.
Given her status as such, the work itself has often been obscured
by the limited readings placed on it and by the wide dissemination
and overriding fame of a small part of her overall production.
Consequently, with this ambitious exhibition, we aim to return to
the work and give a more reflective, detailed and nuanced
reading of her considerable oeuvre than has often been presented,
spanning the six principal decades of her activity from her early
charcoal abstractions to her late skyscape paintings.
Mounting an exhibition of Georgia OKeeffes work is a
challenging undertaking not least because it means asking
institutions and private individuals to part with some of the most
important and beloved masterpieces in their collections, if only
temporarily, and we are deeply indebted to the generosity of
all the lenders to the exhibition for making this project possible, Museum of Art; Sheena Wagstaff, Leonard A. Lauder Chairman
even where they wish to remain anonymous. The largest group
of works comes from the Georgia OKeeffe Museum in Santa
Fe, New Mexico, and we are especially grateful to their Trustees
as well as to Robert A. Kret, Director, Cody Hartley, Director of
Curatorial Affairs, and Carolyn Kastner, Curator, for lending such Arts, Houston; Sarah Kelly Oehler, Associate Curator of American
a substantial number of significant works, and for their outstanding Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; Gavin Delahunty, Hoffman
expertise, support and enduring collegiality, which has been
crucial to many aspects of the project throughout the time it has
taken to stage it. We are likewise grateful to the wider team at
the museum for their support, particularly to Dale Kronkright,
Head of Conservation, for sharing his considerable knowledge Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. Nathan Ladd, Curatorial Assistant,
of OKeeffes work, and Judith Chiba Smith, Registrar/Collections
Manager. We are also grateful to the National Gallery of Art in
Washington for their generous advice and support, particularly
that of Sarah Greenough, Senior Curator and Head of the
Department of Photographs, and Harry Cooper, Curator and
Head of Modern Art, and for lending both a group of OKeeffes
works and, in addition, a substantial number of prints by Alfred
Stieglitz. We are also delighted to have had a fruitful dialogue
with Rod Bigelow, Director, Margaret C. Conrads, Director of
Curatorial Affairs, and Manuela Well-Off-Man, Curator, at Crystal
Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
We are grateful to have had the support of Juan Hamilton on the
project. Likewise we have benefited from the generous assistance
of Agapita Lopez, Director of Abiqui Historic Properties, in
giving access to OKeeffes houses and sharing her memories of
Miss OKeeffe. Suzanne OLeary of JLH Media has facilitated
valuable connections in New Mexico. We would like to thank
a number of individuals for their assistance with research for the
exhibition and with securing key loans: Christophe Cherix, The
Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints,
Ann Temkin, The Marie-Jose and Henry Kravis Chief Curator
of Painting and Sculpture, Leah Dickerman, the Marlene Hess
Curator of Painting and Sculpture and Cora Rosevear, Associate
Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Timothy Rub, The
George D. Widener Director, and Carlos Basualdo, Keith L. and
Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
for Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art; Adam Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney
Museum of American Art; Josef Helfenstein, formerly Director, The
Menil Collection; Garry Tinterow, Director, the Museum of Fine
Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of
Art; Stephen Lockwood, Collections Manager, University of New
Mexico Art Museum; Barney A. Ebsworth; Jan and Marica Vilcek;
Nicholas Maclean, Eykyn Maclean, London; Nathaniel Owings,
6 7
Foreword
The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe; David Henry, Henry Art, San
Francisco; Andrew L. Schoelkopf, Menconi + Schoelkopf, New
York; Eric Widing, Deputy Chairman, American Art, Christies,
New York; Rebecca Senf, Chief Curator, Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona; Ellen Roberts, Harold and
Anne Berkley Smith Curator of American Art, Norton Museum of
Art; Howard Greenberg, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York;
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; and
Polly Fleury, The Wilson Centre for Photography. Additional
advice has been generously provided by Simon Baker, Senior
Curator, International Art (Photography), and Shoair Mavlian,
Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.
The exhibition has been curated by Tanya Barson, Curator,
International Art, Tate Modern, who has made an intelligent and
visually striking selection of works and has driven this exhibition
to realisation with energy and flair. She has been aided with
exceptional dedication and professionalism by Hannah Johnston,
Tate Modern and Samantha Manton, Exhibitions Administrator,
have provided further instrumental support, while Caroline
McCarthy, Exhibition Registrar, Lucy Fisher, Assistant Registrar,
and Claire Allerton, Assistant Registrar have shepherded the works
with assiduousness. Many thanks are due to Nicholas Serota,
Director, Tate; Chris Dercon, previously Director, Tate Modern;
Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern;
Helen Sainsbury, Head of Programme Realisation; Rachel Kent,
Programme Manager; Phil Monk, Art Installation Manager;
Rhona OBrien, Art Installation Assistant; Jenny Hunter, Senior Art
Handling Technician and the team of technicians at Tate Modern;
Patricia Smithen, Head of Conservation and her colleagues;
Simon Grant at Tate etc; and the teams at Tate Learning, Press
and Marketing, Tate Media, and Visitor Experience.
We are delighted to be sharing this exhibition with our tour
partners, the Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna and the Art Gallery
of Ontario, Toronto. We have been fortunate to work with
Ingried Brugger, Director, Heike Eipeldauer, Curator, and Florian
Steininger, Curator, at the Bank Austria Kunstforum; and with
Matthew Teitelbaum, former Michael and Sonja Koerner Director,
and CEO (prior to his departure to the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston), Stephanie Smith, Chief Curator, Jessica Bright,
Director, Exhibitions, Georgiana Uhlyarik, Associate Curator,
Canadian Art, and Curtis Strilchuk, Exhibition Registrar, at the
Art Gallery of Ontario.
The exhibition is accompanied by this book, whose essay
authors have responded with rich and rewarding new readings
of OKeeffes work. Tanya Barson introduces the scope of the
exhibition, OKeeffes place in history and the dual centuries of
OKeeffes life and that which has elapsed since her debut in
1916; Sarah Greenough addresses the complex relationship
between OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitz and their mutual influence,
pointing to precise instances of aesthetic exchange; Cody
Hartley has written on OKeeffes sense of place and her sensitive
interaction with the various locations in which she lived; Griselda
Pollock deals with the considerable historiography developed
over the past century, paying particular attention to reviewing
gendered and feminist readings; Heike Eipeldauer and Florian
Steininger write about OKeeffes engagement with abstraction
and a spiritual sensibility, drawing connections between the early
and late work; Georgiana Uhlyarik delves in a more focused way
into a single body of work, OKeeffes Patio series, to address
the formal developments she introduces and aspects of seriality
and difference within her treatment of this important late motif;
and Hannah Johnston has compiled a detailed and fascinating
chronology of OKeeffes life. At Tate Publishing thanks go to
Anjali Bulley who worked diligently to accomplish the successful
completion of the publication. We would also like to thank
Caroline Waight for her translation of the German text, Faye
Robson for her copy-editing and Emma Woodiwiss for her work on
the picture research and copyright.
The elegant design of this book is down to Chris Curran and
Geoff Williamson at The Studio of Williamson Curran.
We are especially grateful to Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne
for their generous lead support of the exhibition. Our thanks are
also due to those individuals who join us as part of the Georgia
OKeeffe Exhibition Supporters Group, including Huo Family
Foundation (UK), and our media partner The Times/The Sunday
Times, for their most kind support of the London presentation.
The Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien would like to thank its sponsors
UniCredit Bank Austria, SIGNA, UniCredit Leasing, ERGO,
Schoellerbank, Pioneer Investments, and cardcomplete, as well
as its media partners Die Presse, Falter and 1 for their support of
the Vienna presentation.
Georgia OKeeffe has been made possible by the provision of
insurance through the UK Government Indemnity Scheme.
We would like to thank the Department of Culture, Media and
Sport and Arts Council England for providing and arranging this
indemnity.
Frances Morris,
Director, Tate Modern
Ingried Brugger,
Director, Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien
Stephan Jost, Michael and Sonja Koerner
Director, and CEO, Art Gallery of Ontario
 OKeeffes Century Tanya Barson

OKeeffes Fig.1
Series I From the Plains 1919

Century
Oil paint on canvas
68.6 x 58.4
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe

I dont know what Art is. No one has ever been able
to give me a satisfactory definition.
I have not been in Europe.
I prefer to live in a room as bare as possible.
I have been much photographed.
I paint because color is a significant language to me but I
do not like pictures and I do not like exhibitions of pictures.
However I am very much interested in them.
Georgia OKeeffe, 19221
It is quite easy to show that abstract art like every other
cultural phenomenon reflects the social and other
circumstances of the age in which its creators live, and that
there is nothing inside art itself disconnected from history,
which compels it to go in one direction or another.
Clement Greenberg, 19402
Tanya Barson
A century after her debut in New York at 291, the renowned
gallery of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (18641946), this
exhibition revisits six decades of the work of Georgia OKeeffe.
There are few artists more clearly and resolutely associated with
the United States, and with identifying and embodying what it
means to be both American and Modern, than OKeeffe.3
Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1887, under the first presidential
administration of Grover Cleveland, she died, having lived for the
best part of a century, in 1986, during that of Ronald Reagan.4
In-between, the U.S. endured the Great Depression, two World
Wars, one Cold one, and had no fewer than seventeen Presidents.
OKeeffes career was formed before the U.S. became a modern
superpower and New York the centre of the art world, but it
traversed this complex and transformational era of national history
and thus her work must be considered in the context of the various
times in which she lived and worked; the shifts in aesthetics that
occurred, bound up in the project to create a national art; and the
subsequent years of her ongoing influence.
Like her contemporaries a group of brilliant young men who were
set on placing American culture firmly within modernism and on
a different cultural plane than, as they perceived it, it had occupied
previously OKeeffe came to maturity during the Progressive
Era, lasting from the 1890s to the 1920s. One of their number,
the writer Paul Rosenfeld (18901946), commented: For the
first time, among these modern men and women, I found myself
in an America where it was good to be [Their works] gave me
the happy sense of a new spirit dawning in American life, and
awakened a sense of wealth, of confidence, and of power which
was not there before.5 In the arts, this generation looked towards
one figure in particular as their leader: the photographer, editor and

8 9
 Georgia OKeeffe OKeeffes Century Tanya Barson

kept to themselves.13 Slightly later, the painter Marsden Hartley
(18771943) would comment that the pictures of OKeeffe are
probably as living and shameless private documents as exist, in
painting certainly, and probably in any other art.14 Interpretations
of OKeeffes work however, have been largely defined by three
moments: the formative years of American modernism among
her generation, as outlined above, influenced by Stieglitz; the high
modernist reassessment, and dismissal, of her work led by critic
feeling of dangling her feet in a river,17 or the watercolours of
the endless sky, lit up in a variety of colours as in Sunrise 1916
(fig.23), Sunrise and Little Clouds No. II 1916 and the two series
Light Coming on the Plains IIII 1917 and Evening Star IVII 1917.
It was this rootedness in her environment that she took to New
York, where the memory of landscape impressions, light effects
and sounds inspired her to paint works such as Series I From the
Plains 1919 and Red and Orange Streak 1919 (figs1 and 2).18

Fig.2
Red and Orange Streak 1919
Oil paint on canvas
68.6 x 58.4
Philadelphia Museum of Art
gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. As art historian Wanda Corn has noted,
6
OKeeffes debut in 1916 consisted of the display of a small
this was an era in which the new urban elites became advocates number of abstract drawings in charcoal, which she had sent to
of a kind of cultural nationalism; these elites included Stieglitz, and her friend Anita Pollitzer in New York City (OKeeffe and Pollitzer
others from his circle who frequented both 291 and the Stieglitz studied together at Teachers College, Columbia University, two
family summer residence at Lake George, in upstate New York: years previously). Pollitzer had shown them to Stieglitz, who
White, well-educated, and contentious, these men grew up during promptly put them on display.9 The following year, Stieglitz gave
the Progressive Era and by the time they were young adults had OKeeffe a solo exhibition at the gallery, including both charcoals
ideologically committed themselves to the politics of modernism and watercolours made in Texas it was the last show to be
and to a renaissance in the nations arts and letters.7 OKeeffe held at 291 before its closure due to financial difficulties caused
was to become part of this circle a generation with their roots by the First World War. OKeeffes charcoals are her earliest
in late-nineteenth-century romantic, symbolist and transcendental mature expressions and the basis of her lifelong commitment to
aesthetics, they nevertheless embraced modernism. OKeeffe later abstraction.10 Drawn largely from emotional experience inspired
expressed how she had shared the excitement at the potential for a by music or landscape, they explored the Theosophical concept
new national culture, but also her distance and otherness from this of the thought-form, ideas drawn from Wassily Kandinskys (1866
group (she called them city men gendering the urban context 1944) Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911, translated
in a telling way) and her doubtfulness as regards their dedication into English in 1914), and the compositional principals of
to an America in competition with Europe. She highlighted the gap OKeeffes teacher at Columbia, Arthur Wesley Dow (1857
between their rhetoric and their actual commitment: 1922).11 Their interpretation first by Stieglitz and then OKeeffes
peers in his circle largely set the tone for critical responses to her
As I was working I thought of the city men I had been seeing in work. Stieglitz wrote that Miss OKeeffes drawings besides their
the East. They talked so often of writing the Great American other values were of intense interest from a psycho-analytical [sic]
Novel the Great American Play the Great American point of view. 291 had never before seen woman express herself
Poetry I was excited over our country and I knew that at so frankly on paper.12 Henry Tyrrell, who reviewed her first solo
that time almost any of those great minds would have been show in 1917, wrote there can be no mistaking the essential fact
in Europe if it had been possible for them. They didnt even that Miss OKeeffe, independent of technical abilities quite out of
want to live in New York how was the Great American Thing the common, has found expression in delicately veiled symbolism
going to happen?8 for what every woman knows, but what women heretofore have
Fig.3
Frederic Church
Twilight in the Wilderness 1860
Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 162.6
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Clement Greenberg (which conceals both more positive instances Abstraction and immersion in landscape go hand in hand in
of reception and her influence, particularly from the 1940s to the these works and establish a guiding theme that runs throughout
1960s); and, thirdly, her apparent rediscovery by feminist artists OKeeffes work. These works might be seen as indebted to both
of the 1970s.15 Kandinskys radical fusion of landscape and abstraction (see, for
instance, Cossacks 191011), as well as to nineteenth-century
Synaesthesia: abstraction and the senses American luminism, as exemplified by Frederic Church (1826
In the 1910s, OKeeffe was based in west Texas, teaching first in 1900) and his focus on light effects in the expansive American
Amarillo and then in Canyon. She was deeply impressed by the landscape.19 Church employed these effects as a means to convey
landscape, which was much closer to that of her early youth on the emotional weight, as in his masterpiece Twilight in the Wilderness
farm where she was born than anywhere she had since resided. 1860 (fig.3), painted as a spiritual meditation on the eve of the
She took to the wide-open spaces and massive presence of the Civil War. OKeeffes watercolours equally find a resonance in
sky, to the immersive experience of walking and the changes the context of the First World War; despite her remoteness, both
in weather. OKeeffe was a lifelong hiker, in her element in the from the East Coast and Europe, she was nevertheless deeply
landscape; her early letters to Stieglitz, Pollitzer and others reveal concerned by events.20 However, when her watercolours were
how she would often go tramping at any time of day, or night, shown again during the late 1950s, they also struck a chord
and in all conditions, and are full of impressions of the landscape, with the context of abstraction then dominating American art.21
its colours and weather.16 These works are the beginning, then, of OKeeffes art: they lay
out a foundational interest in abstraction; they introduce the rural
The notion of synaesthesia, the stimulation of one sense by an and expansive western American landscape a landscape that
experience in another, and its use as a way to create images, would become so crucial within her life and art as a source of
underpins much of OKeeffes early work. She employed the inspiration for modernism; and they reveal the ways in which her
concept to respond to her surroundings, whether in the swirling work might be presented as an antecedent to later manifestations
movement of the pastel Special No. 32 1915, inspired by the of American abstraction.

10 11
 Georgia OKeeffe OKeeffes Century Tanya Barson

Woman as Exponent of the Abstract Free without McBride was himself a close ally of Stieglitzs circle, though not
Aid of Freud22 always uncritical. Rosenfeld, much more the disciple of Stieglitz
Once based in New York, OKeeffe turned with greater assurance than McBride was, meanwhile, reflected on the legacy of 291
towards abstraction, shifting more definitively to oil paint as a (meaning Stieglitz) in modernist magazine Dial in 1921, in a way
medium; though she used pastel, she would rarely again employ that appears to refute this tendency:
either charcoal or watercolour to the same extent as she had done
in Virginia and Texas. Her abstract compositions continued to be Here are [Arthur] Dove and [John] Marin and OKeeffe, moved
rooted in the landscape, exploring memories of the Texas plains, by something of the same impulse that moved 291; reflecting
but she also found sources of inspiration in music an art form that something of the same human maturity. All these people, no
held almost as much interest for OKeeffe as the visual arts and, doubt, were affected by what was going on in the gallery. But
famously, flowers. Following the closure of 291, Stieglitz staged none of them was actually created by the place. There must
exhibitions at the Anderson Galleries, including solo shows of have been in them something of 291 before ever they heard of
OKeeffes new work in 1923 and 1924, thus giving her far more it. Otherwise how could they have come into touch with it?28
prominence than other female artists enjoyed at this time. OKeeffes
explanations of her work emphasised their abstract formal qualities: Nevertheless, as Lynes indicates, Stieglitz had also created
I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldnt sayOKeeffe in another way; he had produced such an effective
any other way things I had no words for.23 However, the critical interpretation of OKeeffes work that it was to obscure her art
reaction to these exhibitions continued to be authored largely by for years to come: the OKeeffe perceived by most critics in the
Stieglitz and his associates. They saw in OKeeffes work the essence early years of her career was essentially the invention of Alfred
of womanhood expressed through a modernist abstraction that was Stieglitz, and his ideas about creativity in general and OKeeffes
also, importantly, American. Following Stieglitz, critics advanced creative drive in particular are a key to understanding why she
Freudian interpretations of her abstract and flower imagery, chose to define herself as an artist as she did.29 The way she
connecting these explicitly with her body and gendering her art chose to define herself was in opposition to being categorised as
in ways she found increasingly frustrating. As early as 1922, she a woman artist (and later, to being claimed by feminist artists);
commented, They make me seem like some strange unearthly sort instead, she fiercely asserted her independence and refuted the
of creature floating in the air breathing in clouds for nourishment idea that her art was essentially feminine, while nevertheless being
committed to female equality she was a lifelong member of the
when the truth is that I like beef steak and like it rare at that.24
The text that most revealingly elucidates Stieglitzs position are National Womans Party (NWP).30 By the early 1920s, as Lynes
Fig.4
his remarks on Woman in Art; first published in 1960, the piece has argued,31 OKeeffe had become frustrated by readings of The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. 1926
was, however, written in 1919 and was echoed in contemporary her work and began to change her approach, turning away from Oil paint on canvas
reviews. Stieglitz wrote, Woman feels the World differently than abstraction towards a style closer to precisionism and, perhaps 123.2 x 76.8
Man feels it. And one of the chief generating forces crystallizing ironically, more clearly towards photography and specifically The Art Institute of Chicago
into art is undoubtedly elemental feeling Womans & Mans are its opticality clarity, close-ups, cropping, magnification and
differentiated through the difference in their sex make-up distortion with a range of subjects that included flowers and still
The Woman receives the World through her Womb. That is her lifes, as well as subjects not traditionally associated with women photographing New York City since the 1890s, and, as is the case she said of their reaction: when I wanted to paint New York, the
deepest feeling. Mind comes second.25 urban views of New York City, for example in an effort to shake for several of OKeeffes New York scenes, New York Street with men thought Id lost my mind. But I did it anyway.38 Stieglitz was
off the constrictions of being labelled a woman artist.32 In 1922, Moon acknowledges Stieglitz in its inclusion of a sky dominated among the doubtful and rejected New York Street with Moon from
OKeeffes professional introduction therefore largely came about OKeeffe wrote that [Photography] has been part of my searching by rippling cloud formations, which evoke those in his sky series the exhibition Seven Americans at the Anderson Galleries in 1925.
through the mediation of Stieglitz. The art historian Barbara Buhler and through the searching maybe I am at present prejudiced in Equivalents c.192235. Through these skies, full of incident, the Having praised OKeeffes work largely for its organic qualities
Lynes identifies the double-edged nature of that introduction, favour of photography.33 Indeed, photography would remain natural world and a sense of space enter the New York paintings and femininity, he may have found the New York paintings too
given Stieglitzs contradictory position: by suggesting that there an important reference point for OKeeffes work, and her close in a way that contrasts with the solidity and mass of the buildings. much at odds with his conception of what a female artist ought to
might be equality between the sexes in art, Stieglitz adopted a friendships with photographers are well known, from Stieglitz and Likewise, The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. 1926 (fig.4) includes be. It was a reaction OKeeffe embraced, stating her intention, in
revolutionary position; but by simultaneously calling attention to Paul Strand (18901976), to Ansel Adams (190284) and Eliot photographic lens flare and a series of sunspots caused when, 1927, that her next exhibition be so magnificently vulgar that all
biological differences between men and women, he implicitly Porter (190190), among others. facing into the sun, the diffuse glare disrupts the geometry of the the people who have liked what I have been doing would stop
categorised them as separate and unequal and, thus, neutralised building within its composition. In some works, they shared speaking to me.39 Nevertheless, when New York Street with Moon
the strength of that position.26 Stieglitzs influence is clear in From New York to New Mexico subjects; New York, Night 19289 (fig.73) revisits a view was shown, in 1926, it sold immediately.
much of the early writing on OKeeffes art as in Hartleys or OKeeffes early reception led her, then, to make several further Stieglitz had photographed the year before, but at night time,
Rosenfelds early texts, published between 1921 and 1924, which shifts in her work; in 1925 towards the motifs of urban life, while OKeeffe painted the East River panorama several times OKeeffe painted New York from 1925 to 1929/30, her
stressed Stieglitzs decisive role in forging her career. When the principally skyscrapers, and, after 1929, towards the Southwest.34 before Stieglitz addressed the same subject. In Radiator Building enthusiasm for the subject ending, as Anna C. Chave points out,
critic Henry McBride wrote in 1923, reviewing the second solo In 1915, New York City was already being hailed as a social and Night, New York 1927 (fig.134), a neon sign even spells out with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great
exhibition of OKeeffes work organised by Stieglitz, that [Alfred cultural centre, both as an effect of the war, but also because of Stieglitzs name. Depression, which ended the inter-war period of affluence,
Stieglitz] is responsible for the OKeeffe exhibition in the Anderson its modernity and scale.35 OKeeffes arrival in the city in 1918 utopianism and modernity that was encapsulated by the
Galleries. Miss OKeeffe says so herself, and it is reasonably sure coincided with a building boom that would see the city, and the Although OKeeffe had admired the images of New York by burgeoning skylines of American cities such as New York and
that he is responsible for Miss OKeeffe, the artist, he emphasised modes of living within it, transformed.36 In 1925, OKeeffe and John Marin (18701953), particularly his watercolours of the Chicago.40 The financial crash called a halt to the optimism of the
how Stieglitz as impresario, agent, critic and advocate-in-chief of Stieglitz, recently married, moved to the newly completed and Woolworth building, she declared, [when] I began talking about Progressive-era metropolitans and OKeeffe turned towards the
modernism facilitated the careers of the artists he supported to such ultra-modern Shelton Hotel. It was also the year of her first painting trying to paint New York ... I was told that it was an impossible Southwest. Her relocation enabled her to develop more fully her
an extent that they were considered, in large part, his creations.27 of the city, New York Street with Moon (fig.71). Stieglitz had been idea even the men hadnt done too well with it.37 Elsewhere, personal project to produce the great American thing, to find a

12 13
 Georgia OKeeffe OKeeffes Century Tanya Barson

Fig.5 Fig.6
John Gast Grey Hill Forms 1936
American Progress 1872 Oil paint on canvas
Oil paint on canvas 54.3 x 79.7
29.2 x 40 University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque
Autry National Center, Los Angeles

unique way to embody the nation culturally and artistically. The enlargement of the U.S. and which featured in both paintings to change the paradigm [used to describe her] from woman aspects of the locale that she could turn more easily towards
focus of OKeeffes incorporation of European-inflected modernist and collections of memorabilia that were themselves a way to painter to regional painter the objects that inspired her to paint abstraction, and nowhere in her work is this clearer than in her
abstraction into a new and American mode of modernism became construct an image of American identity, a mythic image of the animal bones, crosses, masks, Indian blankets and the way repeated and evolving representations of the area she called
the landscape as Wanda Corn has observed, the circle around once Wild West.44 Even in John Gasts well-known and widely she configured them were deeply tied to a rich regional culture or, the Black Place.
Stieglitz utilised the term American more than any other to describe reproduced image American Progress 1872 (fig.5), depicting the to be more accurate, to the multiple cultures of the Southwest.46
their work and American in their lexicon meant, among other westward expansion, a pile of bones appears in the middle of the Through her work, OKeeffe negotiated and eschewed the The Black Place paintings
things, a sense of place.41 Uniting abstraction with the American painting suggesting an indigenous loss. Unlike Gasts allegory of substantial and successive artistic traditions of American landscape OKeeffe first visited the area of Bisti Badlands, 240 kilometres
landscape, be it urban or rural, provided a way for Americans to Manifest Destiny, however, in which progress personified floats painting and their concomitant construction of the West; she west of Ghost Ranch, in 1935; returning to paint it the following
contribute in a unique way to modernism and to make modernism above a Midwestern scene, in OKeeffe canvases such as From rejected the urban as a focus of modernism and responded instead year, she was preoccupied with it until 1949 and made, in total,
relevant to Americans, for whom the landscape had always been the Faraway, Nearby 1937 (fig.126), the bleached skulls float to a broader contemporary need to root identity in landscape fourteen paintings, along with one large pastel drawing.50 Its
a principal touchstone of identity. In the history of the nation- above Southwestern desert in a way that in aesthetic terms evokes and place. As Corn has stressed: In taking herself and her art to relative remoteness meant that she needed to camp on site and
formation of the U.S., from Manifest Destiny onwards, but surrealism, without OKeeffes actually adhering to the principles New Mexico, OKeeffe shared in the Regionalists revolt against did so in different seasons, in often difficult weather conditions.51
particularly in the wake of the Civil War, the landscape played a of that movement, to describe the Dust Bowl, which itself caused Manhattan she responded most decisively to the depression OKeeffe called this area of dark grey hills the Black Place
key role in the construction of an American sense of nationhood.42 another westward migration. Bones summarise succinctly the eras intensified rhetoric of place and America. She took and described it as looking like a mile of elephants.52 In this
Corn has remarked that, when OKeeffe left the architectural resilience and individualism of the pioneer, and simultaneously modernism further from Manhattan than any other member of the place, she found an area that was marked by its exceptional
canyons of Manhattan for the God-given deserts of New Mexico signal the presence (and disappearance) of native inhabitants. second [Stieglitz] circle and artistically engaged a region where characteristics, not typical even in the context of the extraordinary
and put aside paintings of skyscrapers for those of bones, it was the past was stronger than the present.47 geological formations of the Southwestern states. By focusing on
both a private affair and a public announcement that modern A lesser-known body of work indicates OKeeffes deeper interest this exception, it is clear she was interested in something other
America could be found far west of the Hudson, not just on in the cultural complexity of the American Southwest. From the OKeeffes work in the Southwest falls into different stages: first, than representing the essence of a region in a straightforward
Wall Street, at Lake George, or on the New England Coast.43 moment she arrived in New Mexico in 1929, she became aware her initial contact in 192931, during which time she focused manner, as perhaps many other Southwestern or Western artists
of and interested in its layered native cultures. While the crosses, on learning about the new locale, its layered cultural references had done, and as she had come closer to during her own early
The paintings of bleached animal skulls that OKeeffe made during adobe churches and moradas (chapels) of the Penitentes sect, a and unfamiliar landscape forms; then, after a period of ill-health, forays into depicting New Mexico. Instead, she found an area
the 1930s offer a motif that synthesises various meanings and community dating from the Spanish colonial era, could be worked and a hiatus in her visits between 1932 and 1933, she returned that interested her aesthetically and that allowed her to push her
shows how OKeeffe constructed complex, layered allegories into her landscape representations, the Native American adobe and re-engaged with the area, this time with a clearer sense of work further towards abstraction by virtue of its already seeming a
of nationhood and identity, simultaneously reflecting both her structure became the focus of her architectural rendition of Taos those aspects that interested her. She began to truly develop her natural abstraction. OKeeffes Black Place paintings reveal the
personal aims as an artist and the predicament of the times. The Pueblo 1929/34 (fig.141) although this early work has a touch language following the discovery of Ghost Ranch in 1934 and her nature of this negotiation of landscape and abstraction, indicating
skulls that she gathered following an exceptional drought in 1930 of the touristic vista, more typical of her initial approaches to the acquisition of a house there in 1940. Then, in a later stage, from her concern with aspects of aesthetics that were also of interest
were a way to address the Great Depression and Dust Bowl (a region. Alongside these subjects, she painted a number of images the early 1940s to her final representations of the New Mexico to a new generation of artists working in New York, and point
period of drought and severe dust storms in the 1930s) without of Kachina dolls, representations of spirit beings that are sacred landscape in 1953,48 she concentrated for the most part on serial towards wider concerns that are not often discussed in relation to
illustrating them directly (as they would be in John Steinbecks objects for the Native American populations of the area. These representations of specific motifs cottonwood trees, pelvis bones OKeeffes work.
1939 realist novel The Grapes of Wrath and John Fords 1940 figurines clearly held a fascination for OKeeffe, since she made against the landscape or sky and, of course, her patio door. 49
film adaptation, for example). The resulting works call on a paintings of them repeatedly over a period of ten years.45 From the outset, however, one aspect seems consistent, and that In the years preceding and overlapping with the beginnings of
motif used to signify the West and the effects of the westward As Corn remarks, in New Mexico OKeeffe consciously worked is her eye for eccentric or unusual landscape configurations the Black Place series, OKeeffe, as we have seen, had been

14 15
 Georgia OKeeffe OKeeffes Century Tanya Barson

Fig.7
The Black Place III 1945
Pastel on paper
70.5 x 111.1
Private collection, courtesy
The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe
preoccupied with depictions of animal skulls against distant
landscapes, culminating with the emblematic From the Faraway,
Nearby, in which she explored her concept of the faraway and the
nature of space in the Southwestern landscape. The series of skull
paintings had begun with an allegory of the U.S. Cows Skull: Red,
White, and Blue 1931 (fig.135) and ended with this icon of the
vast and harsh territory, an image of the context for the formation
of American identity.53 In contrast, her paintings of the Black Place
begin with relative naturalism. Although OKeeffe was always
editing, simplifying, accentuating and transforming the landscapes
she painted,54 it is possible to identify the particular locations she
depicted within the actual landscape. One of her first paintings of
the area was Grey Hill Forms 1936 (fig.6), which concentrates on
the strange softness and distinctive morphology of the landscape,
bounded below by a sandy arroyo (dry creek) and sage bushes,
and above by the high horizon, leaving room for a narrow passage
of blue sky. These naturalistic features also characterise a painting
titled Black Hills with Cedar 19412 (fig.159), which features a
cedar bush within the central gully, and an accentuated pink in
the flanking hill forms. OKeeffe often proceeded by learning the
landscape, becoming intimate with its minute features, only later to
decide what to use and what was superfluous in the image. These
early representations are marked by a faithful naturalism that is
nevertheless guided by a concern with form, which itself evokes the
way in which modernist photographers were intent on looking and
abstracting by identifying strangeness within the observed world.
Later, in 1943, she wrote to Stieglitz, describing:
the long formations of black hills sometimes long lines of very
dark purple in them it is so unbelievable the color the heat of
the sun on it the rain and the moonlight oddly When I see
the country in its silvery beauty and forbidding blackness in my
memory Those black hills have something of a photograph
about them.55
The oscillation between the flatness of the canvas and the sense black area, a chromatic fissure. The composition is only legible
of recession, between all-over abstract design and its rootedness as landscape to those who understand its origins, and not
in landscape, is held in balance, with the work poised between easily understood as such by those unfamiliar with this singular
abstraction and figuration. In the last of the series, Black Place No. location; it is an imaginative, emotive response to landscape.
IV (fig.163), the landscape is largely divested of naturalistic tones Such works encapsulate and summarise all that OKeeffe had
and is rendered in a fiery palette of red, orange and yellow previously explored in relation to synaesthesia in her early
non-naturalistic colours that OKeeffe would later employ in other works, foregrounding an immersive experience of landscape
paintings.58 The slightest suggestion of sky and cloud, thus horizon, and the sensations it inspired connecting emotion, abstraction
however returns here and provides a reference to the observed and environment and touch on the reflections on nationhood,
landscape. Nevertheless, this painting was done from memory national spirit and identity familiar from the skull paintings, as
on OKeeffes return to Ghost Ranch. In it, the ravine becomes well as her connection to particular, specially-chosen locations.
a jagged zig-zag, bolting through the centre of the canvas. It is Moreover, these Black Place paintings perform a level of
shocking in its drama and violent transformation of the gentle formal, painterly abstraction that OKeeffe had practiced only
landscape. In subsequent paintings and a large-scale drawing occasionally in her work in the decades since the late 1910s
in pastel made in 1945 (fig.7), again from memory, OKeeffe and 1920s.
returned to a concern with the locations soft morphology and
grey tones. The year 1944 thus represents a rupture in her OKeeffes skull paintings reveal her concern with issues of national
rendition of this landscape region. The changing treatment seems and cultural identity in relation to the practice of modernism. They
to have been primarily an interpretation of the violent weather show how she related her work to a contemporary social and
conditions she experienced on a number of camping trips made historical context in sometimes subtle and oblique but unmistakable
to the Black Place with companion and aspiring writer Maria ways. Her Black Place paintings, similarly, address a wider
Chabot;59 in 1945 she went with a different companion and context. The transformation of her visual language in relation
described the experience as smooth and pleasant.60 to the Black Place came following the publication of Clement
As OKeeffe continued the Black Place landscapes, she made Greenbergs essay advocating abstract art as the realisation of
them progressively more abstract. Between the late 1930s and One of OKeeffes final paintings of the Black Place, and the an unavoidable historical trajectory and arguing for the purity
1940, OKeeffe was not able to return to the Black Place, but most abstract Black Place Green was made in 1949 (fig.165); of specific art forms Towards a Newer Laocon in 1940, and
resumed her series again from 1941. In the early 1940s, she was the composition is at its flattest; the undulating hills are now the United States entry into the Second World War in 1941.61
also preoccupied by the Plaza Blanca, or White Place, a site in areas of grey punctuated by diffuse stripes of pink and white It occurred in the context of debates concerning art as a form
the Chama River Valley composed of vertical white cliffs that are representing the geological strata, and dominated by a central of escapism from, or reflection on, the war, and amid a further
partially visible in the distance from her house at Abiqui. She had
known of it since 1931, but it was not until the 1940s that she began
to paint it repeatedly, and these paintings compliment and contrast
with those of the Black Place.56
A series of four works painted in 1944 shows how OKeeffe
transformed her apprehension of the Black Place. They take as
their subject a ravine, situated centrally on the canvas, either side
of which are the convex, rounded hill forms that recede into the
near distance but do not resolve into a horizon and sky. These
were features usually required for pictorial illusion but were
eschewed by artists beginning with Claude Monet (18401926)
whose late paintings would influence American abstract painters
when they were exhibited in post-war New York and acquired
by the Museum of Modern Art in 1955.57 The first in the series,
Black Place I (fig.160), is naturalistic in the way that her earliest
works of the area had been, concentrating on the soft undulations
of the hills. In the second canvas, a slightly smaller work, Black
Place II (fig.161), she radically reimagines the configuration of the
location and the coloration becomes stronger, more assertive. The
softly rolling forms and tonalities of grey are replaced by starkly
simplified shapes in more abrupt areas of black, grey and white, Fig.8
the suggestion of pink proceeding horizontally across the middle The Lawrence Tree 1929
of the rock formation has become a lower border of burgundy. Oil paint on canvas
78.8 x 101.6
The pale base of the ravine has been transformed into a lightning
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford
bolt that forms a roughly serrated vertical zip running through
the centre of the composition. Scaled-up for her next painting,
Black Place III (fig.162), these changes become more determined.

16 17
 Georgia OKeeffe
Fig.9
Emily Carr
Untitled 192931
Charcoal on paper
91.8 x 47.7
Vancouver Art Gallery
impetus to reflect on American culture as distinct from that of
the war-torn Old World. OKeeffe found solace in the land. In
1941, she wrote about her early, transformational experience of
flying how it impacted on her view of the landscape, seen as
abstraction and related this to the troubling times: It is breath-
taking as one rises up over the world It is very handsome way
off into the level distance, fantastically handsome like some
marvellous rug patterns of maybe Abstract Paintings the
world all simplified and beautiful and clear-cut in patterns like time
and history will simplify and straighten out these times of ours.62
Even though OKeeffe frequently articulated a sense of distance
and detachment from her friends and associates in metropolitan
centres on the East Coast during the 1940s, evidently she was not
unconcerned about the times, and, when the war was at its height,
painted her darkest, desolate and arguably most violent images of
the landscape.63 OKeeffe repeatedly employed landscape as a
measure of her state of mind and her paintings from the war years
are no different.64
OKeeffe first exhibited two of her 1944 Black Place paintings
at her retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, in 1946; the works included were Black Place I and
Black Place III. Greenberg published a review of this show in The
Nation,65 in which he attacked the Germanising leanings of the
Fig.10
Dead Tree, Bear Lake, Taos 1929
Oil paint on canvas
81.3 x 43.1
Private collection
early modernists through OKeeffes work (naming also Stieglitz
attacked for his messianism Marsden Hartley and Arthur
Dove (18801946)) less than a year after the end of the war
and a little less than a month before Stieglitzs death. He criticised
the preceding generation of modernists tendency towards the
esoteric and mystical and, through OKeeffe, the prematurity of
their engagement with abstraction, seemingly rejecting her work
for being rooted in a time before American painters could properly
be expected to cope with abstract art, and for its subsequent
return to realism. Greenbergs conclusion that OKeeffes work
amounted to little more than tinted photography66 likewise
recalls his argument in Towards a Newer Laocon that art forms
should remain distinct, but also implies a further critique of Stieglitz
himself. In order to assert his own primacy, and that of the artists he
championed, as the first true and timely group of American artists,
Greenberg first had to discredit the preceding, and previously
dominant, claimants to that position, an Oedipal act of erasure
that also impacted on OKeeffe. Thus, the review can be seen to
be less a comment on OKeeffe than a not-so-thinly-veiled attack
on Stieglitz through his most prominent and successful protg,
his wife. Nevertheless, Greenberg adopted the same project as
Stieglitz a quest to define and promote a generation of uniquely
American artists, though one that excluded OKeeffe and her
colleagues; he did so both for the audience at home but also for
18
OKeeffes Century Tanya Barson
Fig.11
Mary Beth Edelson
O'Kevelson 1973
Photograph, gelatin silver print with china
marker
76.2 x 40.6
Courtesy of the artist
that abroad and succeeded in superseding Stieglitz by becoming Following her encounter with OKeeffe, Carrs work took on a new
internationally recognised as embodying the foremost American expressive freedom; she began using charcoal to make drawings
art, in the new pre-eminent art centre, New York City. Mid-century, in a manner similar to the American artist, and likewise aimed to
then, OKeeffe became a target not merely for what her own work find formal equivalents for the natural world.67 Thus the drawing
aimed towards, but because it had been too closely associated Untitled 192931 (fig.9) echoes both OKeeffes early charcoals
with Stieglitz. In 1949, OKeeffe relocated to New Mexico as well as her darkly hieratic painting Dead Tree, Bear Lake, Taos
permanently, maintaining her distance from the centres of the art 1929 (fig.10). While Carr became more deeply involved in the
world, including New York, and it was not until her exhibition at the representation of indigenous cultures during the 1930s, she did
Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, and her rediscovery not go as far towards abstracting from them as OKeeffe did,
by the feminist artists of that decade, that her work would gain in paintings like Grey Blue & Black Pink Circle 1929 (fig.33),
the same sense of widely acknowledged currency as it had in the inspired by Hopi dances, and At the Rodeo, New Mexico 1929,
1920s and 1930s. drawn from a headdress. Like Carr, OKeeffes employment of
indigenous cultural subjects was motivated in part by a search
OKeeffes influence for symbols of an authentic cultural nationality, divorced from
OKeeffe began influencing her contemporaries early on, both European models. The demand to find a uniquely American brand
within the Stieglitz circle and beyond its narrow confines. In 1930, of painting, in which abstraction played a central role, however,
the Canadian painter Emily Carr (18711945) visited New was never far from OKeeffes consciousness.
York, meeting OKeeffe at Stieglitzs final gallery, An American
Place, and viewing an exhibition of her works, completed during While OKeeffe was excluded from the Greenbergian narrative
OKeeffes first prolonged visit to New Mexico. They discussed of American abstraction as pseudo-modern, it was recognised
OKeeffes work, in particular her painting The Lawrence Tree by critics such as Barbara Rose and John Canaday, if sometimes
1929 (fig.8) and its relation to D.H. Lawrences poetry and the belatedly, that within the context of 1940s to 1960s New York,
importance of tree-motifs for them; OKeeffe preferred Waldo art-historical narratives addressing the era should take account of
Franks portrayal of her as a tree to other early writings about her. those artists who were influenced by her. In the New York Times
19
 Georgia OKeeffe
Fig.12
Elizabeth Peyton
Georgia O'Keeffe after Stieglitz 1918 2006
Oil paint on canvas
76.5 x 58.7
Private collection/courtesy the artist and
Sadie Coles HQ, London
obituary for OKeeffe, Edith Evans Asbury wrote of Canadays late Red Lines 1923, Grey Line with Lavender and Yellow c.1923,
recognition of OKeeffe as an antecedent of post-war American Line and Curve 1927 (fig.37) and Abstraction Blue 1927 (fig.30),
art, particularly abstraction: Strolling through the Whitney that could also be identified as sources. Each of these paintings,
show, one could think Miss OKeeffe had made some very neat but particularly the latter, disclose a close formal proximity to
adaptations of various successful styles of the 1950s and 1960s in the work Newman made in the mid-1940s. The central angular
her own highly refined and slightly removed manner, wrote John divide in Abstraction Blue, narrowing as it reaches the bottom of
Canaday, art critic of The New York Times. He described apparent the canvas, is mirrored both in Newmans Untitled (The Break)
similarities to Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, 1946 and The Word I 1946, while his Moment 1946, The Name
Ad Reinhardt and Andrew Wyeth. But the paintings that seemed to I 1949, Eve 1950 and Adam 1951/52 could be compared with
reflect those styles were done by Miss OKeeffe in 1920 or earlier, Pink Moon and Blue Lines and Red Lines, and the later Cows Skull:
Mr. Canaday pointed out.68 If OKeeffes 1946 retrospective Red, White, and Blue, the flag-like vertical lines in which were
caused Greenberg indignation, this in-depth institutional show may inspired by the bands on Navajo blankets. Newman became close
nevertheless have provided an opportunity for artists in the newly- friends with the Cuban-American abstractionist Carmen Herrera
ascendant centre of the art world to encounter OKeeffes work. (b.1915), who was herself in New York in the 1940s, studying from
Barnett Newman (190570), born and raised in New York, had 1943 to 1947 at the Art Students League, where Newman had
ample opportunity from his days as a student in the 1920s to see studied intermittently from 1922, along with many of the abstract
OKeeffes many solo shows they were staged almost annually expressionists, and where OKeeffe had been a student in 19078.
through the 1920s and 1930s, and his work of the mid-1940s, Permanently relocating to New York from 1954, Herrera would
specifically the development of his trademark zip motifs, could later comment on the importance OKeeffe had for her, in contrast
have a possible genesis within OKeeffes symmetrically arranged to another Greenbergian abstractionist, Ad Reinhardt (191367),
canvases, including her Black Place paintings. Earlier exhibitions thereby illustrating the sharp division of opinion OKeeffe inspired:
had included paintings such as Pink Moon and Blue Lines 1923, Like a lot of artists at that time, [Reinhardt] had a thing against
20
OKeeffes Century Tanya Barson
Georgia OKeeffe. But I admired her no end when I first came to
America. She was one of my gods. But Reinhardt, he hated her.69
Herreras work was transformed in the 1950s from her earlier,
more organic, European-derived abstraction to a harder-edged,
colour field painting. It is conceivable that looking at OKeeffes
later work, especially her Patio series, may have played a role in
that development. Moreover, Herreras paintings of the 1950s and
1960s, such as Red with White Triangle 1961 and Blanco y Verde
19667, explore pared-down compositions with sharp, triangle
forms, which evoke OKeeffes centralised angular divisions.70
In dealing with the delayed influence of OKeeffes work on post-
war American abstraction, we might also note the influence of her
early watercolours, as shown by Edith Halpert at The Downtown
Gallery in New York in 1958 juxtaposing, in particular, Evening
Star III 1917, as well as works on canvas including Grey Line
with Lavender and Yellow and Grey Lines with Black, Blue and
Yellow (both c.1923) with Morris Louiss (191262) poured
Veil paintings of 19589, or his While and Where (both 1960),
and later Unfurled and Stripe paintings of 19602.71 Still
later, artists such as Lynda Benglis (b.1941) have acknowledged
OKeeffes importance as both a source of inspiration and as a
precursor. Bengliss floor painting Fling, Dribble, and Drip 1970,
executed at Rhode Island School of Art, Providence and featured
in Life magazine in the year of OKeeffes Whitney retrospective,
may also look to OKeeffes use of colour and pigment. Benglis
is as interested as OKeeffe was in the ways that form might
portray emotion, but more readily embraced the psychological
implications of this as a means of regression to the womb than
did OKeeffe, who rejected the libidinal and bodily, though the
attribution of these aspects to her work may also be seen as a
source of her influence on feminist artists such as Benglis. Benglis,
along with Judy Chicago (b.1939), forms the nexus of OKeeffes
influence on work that spans abstraction and feminist art.
In Mary Beth Edelsons (b.1933) controversial re-envisioning
of Leonardo da Vincis The Last Supper 14947, Some Living
American Women Artists 1972, made as part of her poster
series to highlight the relative invisibility of women in the arts,
OKeeffe is given priority within the female artistic pantheon
her face superimposed over Christs at the centre of the table. In
1970, Edelson transformed herself into OKeeffe and American
sculptor Louise Nevelson (18991988) in OKevelson 1973
(fig.11), paying homage to the two senior artists and revealing
her understanding of OKeeffes complex image-construction
(as well as her complicity in its presentation in photography from
Stieglitzs extended photographic portrait onwards). Chicago
would echo Edelsons placement of OKeeffe in a position of
prominence in her The Dinner Party 19749, in which OKeeffe
is given the last place-setting at the greatest height, representing
her measure of liberation and success reinforcing her primacy
in the feminist genealogy. For Chicago, OKeeffe was pivotal in modernity and individualism and is now recognised as having
the development of an authentically female iconography.72 By
representing OKeeffe as a not-so-abstract arrangement of labia,
evoking the reading Chicago and Miriam Schapiro (19232015)
had given OKeeffes Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow
c.1923 (fig.34) in an essay of 1973, however, Chicagos work
reinstated the Freudian and bodily interpretations imposed on
OKeeffes work as an essence of the feminine and the association
of her works with representations of wombs.73 It was for this
reason, as well as for the inequality implied by being labelled a
woman artist, that OKeeffe repudiated the claim of feminist artists
on her work.
OKeeffe, as role model and pioneer an exemplar of
the contradictions of being a woman in modernism, and of
uncompromising commitment to her work has an ongoing
relevance to artists. Early in his career, land artist James Turrell
(b.1943) had a fascination with OKeeffe and travelled to visit
her in New Mexico.74 Though the encounter was only brief, it
left a powerful impression and we might discern the influence
of OKeeffes Pelvis series, in which bones become apertures
framing blue sky, in Turrells installations such as the Roden Crater,
begun in 1979, in Arizona, that likewise frames the Southwestern
sky as well as a similar obsession with, on the one hand, the
Cerro Pedernal mountain and, on the other, the extinct volcano.
Agnes Martin (19122004), OKeeffes neighbour in New
Mexico, kept a poster of her work prominently displayed, and
comparisons have been drawn between her restrained minimalist
bands and the pale tones and horizontal formats of OKeeffes
skull paintings, as well as her later works such as Sky Above the
Clouds III/Above the Clouds III 1963 (fig.204). In 1993, at the
time of the last OKeeffe retrospective exhibition in London, Susan
Hiller (b.1940) wrote of her personal relationship to OKeeffe
(reproduced in this publication). Latterly, OKeeffes influence
has hardly diminished. New generations of artists continue
to cite her as an influence on and within their work. Elizabeth
Peytons (b.1965) portrait Georgia OKeeffe after Stieglitz 1918
2006 (fig.12), based on one of the early portraits by Stieglitz,
acknowledges her status as a popular, feminist and aesthetic
icon and also the role that photography played in her painting
emulating the interrelation of these media in OKeeffes own work.
OKeeffes influence traverses both hard-edged and post-painterly
abstraction, as well as feminist art and diverse forms of figuration.
If her influence has most consistently been on artists from North
America it seems that this might stem from her own concern with
forging an imagery appropriate to expressing what it meant to be
American and Modern with manifesting the Great American
Thing and expressing her sense of rootedness and her connection
to the national history through a turbulent era. OKeeffe was
born of Irish and Dutch-Hungarian immigrant stock into a farming
community in the Midwest; how she became an artist of global
fame is a story of acute intelligence and artistic talent combined
with determination. When Henry Tyrrell wrote a review of
OKeeffes first solo exhibition at 291 in 1917, he referred to the
interesting but little-known personality of the artist.75 By the later
decades of her career, OKeeffe had become an icon of American
made a crucially important aesthetic contribution influencing
successive generations of artists.
21
 Fig.13 Fig.14
Early Abstraction 1915 Early No. 2 1915
Charcoal on paper Charcoal on paper
61 x 47.3 61 x 47
Milwaukee Art Museum The Menil Collection, Houston

22 23
 Fig.15 Fig.16
Abstraction 1916 Special No. 9 1915
Charcoal and wash on paper Charcoal on paper
63.2 x 48.3 63.5 x 48.6
Greenville County Museum of Art The Menil Collection, Houston

24 25
 Fig.17 Fig.18
No. 12 Special 1916 No. 14 Special 1916
Charcoal on paper Charcoal on paper
61 x 48.3 62.9 x 47.6
The Museum of Modern Art, New York National Gallery of Art, Washington

26 27
 Fig.19 Fig.20
Black Lines 1916 No. 15 Special 191617
Watercolour on paper Charcoal on paper
62.2 x 47 47.9 x 61.9
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Philadelphia Museum of Art

28 29
 Fig.21 Fig.22
Pink and Blue Mountain 1916 Blue Hill No. II 1916
Watercolour on paper Watercolour on paper
22.3 x 30.3 22.5 x 30.3
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

30 31
 Fig.23 Fig.24
Sunrise 1916 Abstraction 1916, cast 197980
Watercolour on paper Lacquered bronze
22.5 x 30.5 25.4 x 12.7 x 12.7
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth Number 6 in of an edition of 10
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

32 33
 Fig.25 Fig.26
No. 17 Special 1919 Black Lines 1919
Charcoal on paper Charcoal on paper
50.2 x 32.4 62.6 x 47.6
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Addison Gallery of American Art,
Phillips Academy, Andover

34 35
 Fig.27 Fig.28
Music Pink and Blue No. I 1918 Blue and Green Music 1919/21
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
88.9 x 73.7 58.4 x 48.3
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth. The Art Institute of Chicago
Partial and promised gift to Seattle Art Museum

36 37
 Fig.29
Flower Abstraction 1924
Oil paint on canvas
122.2 x 76.2
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Fig.30
Abstraction Blue 1927
Oil paint on canvas
102.1 x 76
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

38 39
 Fig.31 Fig.32
Abstraction White Rose 1927 Abstraction Alexius 1928
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 76.2 92.1 x 76.5
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Private collection, Switzerland

40 41
 Fig.33
Grey Blue & Black Pink Circle 1929
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 121.9
Dallas Museum of Art
42
Fig.34
Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow c.1923
Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 76.2
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
43
 Fig.35 Fig.36
New York Night (Madison Avenue) 1926 Abstraction 1926
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
81.3 x 30.5 76.7 x 46.4
Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

44 45
 Fig.37 Fig.38
Line and Curve 1927 Black, White and Blue 1930
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
81.2 x 41.2 121.9 x 76.2
National Gallery of Art, Washington Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth.
Partial and promised gift to National Gallery of Art, Washington

46 47
 Georgia OKeeffe Esoteric Art at 291 Henry Tyrrell

side, straight and slender, though their fluid lines undulate in unconscious
Esoteric Art at 291 rhythmic sympathy, as they act and react upon one another: There is a

another self I long to meet, / Without which life, my life is incomplete.
Henry Tyrrell
But as the mans line broadens or thickens, with worldly growth, the
The Christian Science Monitor
womans becomes finer as it aspires spiritually upward, until it faints and
4 May 1917
falls off sharplynot to break, however, but to recover firmness and resume
its growth, straight heavenward as before, farther apart from the other self,
and though never wholly sundered, yet never actually joined.

This is one of the drawings, purely symbolistic, a sort of allegory in

The recent work, in oil, water color and charcoal of Miss Georgia OKeeffe
of Canyon, Tex., speaks for itself at that jumping-off place of modern art,
the little gallery of the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth Avenue. The work has
to speak for itself, as it is not numbered, catalogued, labeled, lettered or
identified in any wayin fact, it is not even signed. The interesting but
little-known personality of the artist, who has exhibited here once before,
is perhaps the only real key, and even that would not open all the chambers
No editorial interventions
have been made in original,
historical texts,
Georgia OKeeffe, 291, New York, 3 April 14 May 1917], The Christian Science Monitor, 4 May 1917,
with the exception of
correcting artist names,
where they appear,
sensitized line. More directly appealing to the material beauty-sense are two
oil paintings of lovely but singularly disquieting color tonality, which may
be interpretively called The Embrace, and Loneliness; also a water-color
impression of an approaching railway train rushing steaming out of space
across the limitless prairie, like a vision-bearing cloud in the skies of heaven.
Henry Tyrrell, New York Art Exhibition and Gallery Notes: Esoteric Art at 291 [review of the exhibition
p.10. Reprinted in Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 19161929, Ann Arbor, MI,
1989, pp.1678.

of the haunted palace which is a gifted womans heart. There is an appeal for reasons of consistency
and ease of use.
to sympathy, intuition, sensibility and faith in certain new ideals to which
her sex aspires. For there can be no mistaking the essential fact that Miss
OKeeffe, independently of technical abilities quite out of the common, has
found expression in delicately veiled symbolism for what every woman
knows, but what women heretofore have kept to themselves, either
instinctively or through a universal conspiracy of silence. Marie Bashkirtseff,
the little Tartar of a Russian, who was a fellow art-student in Paris with
Bastien-Lepage, wrote many audacious hints and intimate self-revelations
in her famous diary; but she did it more or less unconsciously, and in any
case she was a temperamental variant from the average femininity. Georgia
OKeeffe, offspring of an Irish father and a Levantine mother, was born
in Virginia, and has grown up in the vast provincial solitudes of Texas. OKeeffe was

actually born near

Whatever her natural temperament may be, the loneliness and privation Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
which her emotional nature must have suffered put their impress on
everything she does. Her strange art affects people variously, and some not
at all; but many feel its pathos, some its poignancy, and artists especially
wonder at its technical resourcefulness for dealing with what hitherto has
been deemed the inexpressiblein visual form, at least.

But new aspirations, and yearnings until now suppressed or concealed, find
their medium in the new manifestation which is one with the impulse of
an age occupied with eager inquiry and unrest. Style is the man, declared
Georges-Louis Leclerc,
Bouffon the biologist, with fine truth in his time. Now, perhaps for the first Comte de Buffon, an
eighteenth-century naturalist.
time in arts history, the style is the woman.

Two Lives, a mans and a womans, distinct yet invisibly joined together by
mutual attraction, grow out of the earth like two graceful saplings, side by

48 49
 Touching the Centre: Georgia OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitzs Artistic Dialogue Sarah Greenough

Touching the Centre:

Georgia OKeeffe
and Alfred Stieglitzs Fig.39
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe 1918

Artistic Dialogue
Photograph, palladium print on paper
24.3 x 19.4
National Gallery of Art, Washington

In April 1929, Georgia OKeeffe left New York to spend the
summer in New Mexico. Although she and her husband, Alfred
Stieglitz (18641946), were still deeply in love, they found that
as the 1920s progressed the question of practical daily living,
as Stieglitz wrote in 1928, had become problematic.1 Eager to
travel and find new inspiration for her art, OKeeffe had become
increasingly torn between the desire she had to carry the thing I
do further so that people are surprised again and the obligation
she felt to care for Stieglitz and his family at their summer home
in Lake George, New York.2 When she arrived in New Mexico,
she was quickly entranced by its landscape, people, and culture,
writing to Stieglitz that she felt like flying like turning the world
Sarah Greenough over again like I used to feel.3 Even more telling, she also
candidly admitted that she realised she had probably fallen into
something from which there is no return.4 Alone at his familys
home in Lake George, Stieglitz found no such comfort. As he grew
increasingly distraught and even psychologically unbalanced, he
wrote to her three, four, five times a day, letters up to forty pages
in length. Lamenting that I live in a land of ghosts I sleep in a
bed of [a] ghost, he bewailed the fact that he was lonely beyond
words, questioned how her new behaviour of gay clothes &
hilariousness smoking & drinking could lead to any significant
painting, and even recounted his erotic dreams of making love
with her.5 He also noted that their roles had shifted: Without you
I am nothing. Without me you go right ahead Will be Georgia
OKeeffe.6 Yet he was most distressed by the possible severance of
their creative union. He lashed out that he had been canonizing
her day & night for thirteen years as no woman living or in
the past was ever canonized, but in the last few years, she had
showed no interest in his photography and didnt help him at
all.7 Linking his own creative efforts to her presence, he wrote I
see no work ahead for me. Not even photography I had many
things I wanted to photograph but the opportunity has been taken
away.8 Defining the essence of his faith as a creative woman a
creative man joined in a perfect union, he saw their Togetherness
if not physically & spiritually at least spiritually as critical to their
continued work.9
Stieglitz was right: their roles had shifted, not only from mentor
and muse to dealer and star artist, but also from devoted lovers,

50 51
 Georgia OKeeffe
collaborators and champions to competitors and occasional
combatants. From the time they met in the spring of 1916 until
Stieglitzs death thirty years later in 1946, their relationship was as
complex and mutable as it was passionate, tempestuous and even
deeply destructive. Although they were immediately attracted
to one another, they were very different people from dissimilar
backgrounds. The adored son of German-Jewish immigrants,
Stieglitz was cultured, affluent, and well connected. Born in
Hoboken, New Jersey, raised in New York City, and educated in
Berlin, he was charismatic, articulate, intellectually voracious and
endowed with a remarkable ability to establish a deep rapport
Fig.40
Alfred Stieglitz
Snapshot In the New York Central Yards 1903, printed 1907
From the journal Camera Work
Photogravure on paper
19.2 x 15.6
Philadelphia Museum of Art
with those around him. Yet he was also controlling, egotistical and
melodramatic, and he craved both an audience and adoration.
OKeeffes background was far less comfortable. Born on a dairy
farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, she was one of seven children
of second-generation Irish and Dutch-Hungarian immigrants, who
were far from prosperous. More intuitive than intellectual, more
of a loner, she possessed a sharp wit, feisty sense of humour, and
headstrong nature. Disarmingly frank and willing to take bold
actions, yet often startled by their consequences, she had learned
to rely on her clear sense of herself and her innate independence.
In 1916, they were also at disparate points in their lives. Fifty-two
years old, Stieglitz was the most important person in the American
art world. His groundbreaking exhibitions of modern European art
by Auguste Rodin, Paul Czanne, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse
and Constantin Brancusi held at his New York City gallery,
known as 291, had introduced Americans to the most advanced
painting and sculpture of the time, while his support of American
52
modernists Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and John Marin
had allowed a radically new kind of art to flourish in a country
that was not always hospitable to cultural innovations. In addition,
through his own highly acclaimed photographs and his ceaseless
advocacy he had raised the profile of the art of photography.
At twenty-eight, OKeeffe was all but unknown an art student,
whose work had never been exhibited, and a schoolteacher who
had passed much of her life far removed from Americas cultural
centres. Yet, despite these differences, they each touched the
center of the other, as they both avowed, not only emotionally,
physically and spiritually, but also artistically.10 As Stieglitz
recognised in the summer of 1929, from the time they met they
had played a game of artistic leapfrog each absorbing,
modifying and expanding the others ideas, then bounding
forward with new insights and innovations, only to have the other
follow in quick pursuit. The sustained dialogue they constructed
between their respective mediums painting and photography
was among the most original of the era and radically changed the
course of American art.
Fig.41
Train at Night in the Desert 1916
Watercolour and graphite on paper
30.3 x 22.5
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
OKeeffe was at a formative stage in her development in 1916
when she first seriously looked at photography, especially
Stieglitzs photographs and those of his protg, Paul Strand
(18901976). With an eclectic nature, she had already
absorbed aspects of symbolism and art nouveau and, through
her study of Arthur Wesley Dow (18571922) and Wassily
Kandinsky (18661944), she had embraced the modernist idea
that art should not imitate nature but instead express the artists
feelings and ideas. In addition, she was liberated by Dows
and Kandinskys belief that music, as Dow stated, was the key
to the other fine arts, since its essence is pure beauty, and by
Touching the Centre: Georgia OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitzs Artistic Dialogue Sarah Greenough
synaesthesia the stimulation of one sense by another.11 These
ideas, especially that music could be translated into something
for the eye,12 as OKeeffe later said, gave her license to express
feelings through abstraction that she could not otherwise articulate
and sparked the creation of her first major work in 1915 a series
of a dozen charcoal drawings (see Early Abstraction, fig.13; Early
No. 2, fig.14; and Special No. 9, fig.16).13 But, just as important,
these concepts also prompted her to recognise that ideas inherent
in one medium could be utilised in another.
Fig.42
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe c.1918
Photograph, palladium print on paper
18 x 23.2
National Gallery of Art, Washington
She first drew on this insight in the fall of 1916, when she arrived
in Canyon, Texas, to assume a new teaching position. Although
she and Stieglitz had first met several months earlier in New York
City, they grew much closer that fall as their correspondence
escalated markedly, becoming more personal, intimate and
unfiltered. She frequently wrote to Stieglitz, noting how the raw
beauty and vast emptiness of the west Texas plains staggered
her, provoking a strong emotional and physical response.
Repeatedly relating herself to the landscape, she exclaimed to
Stieglitz the day after she arrived: The plains the wonderful
great big sky makes me want to breathe so deep that Ill break
There is so much of it I want to get outside of it all I would if I
could even if it killed me.14 As she sought a way to express the
profound visceral exhilaration the landscape evoked in her, she
turned to photography, an art firmly rooted in the visible world,
for pictorial sources and strategies.15 Using Stieglitzs publication
Camera Work almost as a primer, she studied reproductions of his
photographs as well as those by others he supported. Since she
had arrived in Texas, the weather of the region its violent storms,
brilliantly coloured skies and massive clouds had fascinated
her.16 When she saw Stieglitzs photographs, she focused on his
use of weather rain, snow, steam and mist and emulated his
approach as she sought to capture the experience of hearing and
watching the trains that passed through Canyon. She noted that
he had used both snow and smoke in his photograph Snapshot
In the New York Central Yards 1903 to eliminate extraneous
53
details in the foreground and the background, focusing attention
instead on the brute strength of the engine as it sped along its
preordained path (fig.40).17 Working first in charcoal, and then
in watercolour, she made a picture stripped of all but the most
essential elements steam, railroad tracks and a light on an
approaching engine to speak of both the loneliness and sense
of anticipation produced by the sight and sound of a train in the
barren landscape (fig.41).
Fig.43
Constantin Brancusi
Sleeping Muse I 190910
Marble
17.2 x 27.6 x 21.2
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington
It was not just Stieglitzs work that showed her how photography
could serve her art at this time. When she saw the photographs
of Anne Brigman in Camera Work, she recognised a kindred
spirit, who also had a powerful physical reaction to the natural
world, which she sought to depict by showing the union of the
body and nature.18 Strands photographs, which she saw both in
Camera Work and when she went to New York for a brief visit in
the summer of 1917 and spent time with him and Stieglitz, also
deeply impressed her. Writing that she had been making Strand
photographs for myself in my head, she confided to Strand in
June 1917 that she was looking at things and seeing them as I
thought you might have photographed them.19 In photographs
such as The White Fence 1916 and Abstraction, Bowls, Twin
Lakes, Connecticut 1916, printed 1917. Strand showed OKeeffe
how the camera could lovingly describe the natural world while
simultaneously compressing, flattening and layering space, thus
transforming objects into abstract forms as queer in shapes as
Picassos drawings, as she wrote.20 OKeeffe responded to these
photographs in 1917 in watercolours such as Evening Star Nos
IVII and Pink and Green Mountains IV, where she, too, distilled
forms and layered space.21 She also echoed Strands use of
strong linear shapes, punctuated by deep shadows, in works such
as Figures under Rooftop, House with Picket Fence and Tree and
Picket Fence (all 1918), where she interspersed bands of bright
red with deep blue and black.22
 Georgia OKeeffe Touching the Centre: Georgia OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitzs Artistic Dialogue Sarah Greenough

Fig.44 Fig.45
Alfred Stieglitz Tree with Cut Limb 1920
The Dying Chestnut 1919 Oil paint on canvas
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 50.8 x 43.2
24.3 x 19.3 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
National Gallery of Art, Washington

OKeeffe and Stieglitzs artistic dialogue did not begin in earnest,
however, until the summer of 1918, when OKeeffe left Texas
and the two began living together in New York City. Her great
beauty and youth, coupled with her blossoming delight in her own
sexuality, inspired in Stieglitz a creative energy that he had never
known before: in the first six months they lived together, he made
more than 125 finished portraits of her, a staggering number
for an artist who had only made some 470 finished pictures
between 1884 and 1917.23 Embracing the modernist idea of the
fractured, ever-changing self, Stieglitz for many years had wanted
to create a composite portrait, a visual diary of someones life,
photographing them from birth to death. With OKeeffe he had
an ever-present and, at least initially, highly willing model. At first
he depicted her in front of her drawings, much as he had done
with other 291 artists, but as their intimacy quickly grew, so too
did his ability to conjoin the art and the artist. Radically cropping
his compositions, he positioned her head, arms and hands in front
of her works, merging her with her creations to suggest that her
art sprang out of her body (fig.39). He also repeatedly derived
poses and compositions from the art he had exhibited, collected
and lived with for many years. He looked to Peter Paul Rubens
(15771640) Hle`ne Fourment 16368, a reproduction of
which he had owned for many years, and the watercolours by
Rodin (18401917) that he had reproduced in Camera Work,
when he posed OKeeffe in her kimono in front of a window
(Georgia OKeeffe Torso 1918).24 He alluded to The Sin (Die
Snde) c.1908 by Franz von Stuck (18631928), another work
he had owned in reproduction, when he recorded OKeeffe in a
erect stance with half-lowered eyes and bare breasts (Georgia
OKeeffe 1918); he mimicked Matisses lithographs, shown at
291, when he posed OKeeffe as a full-frontal nude with bare
breasts and pubic hair (Georgia OKeeffe Torso 1918); he
looked to both the sculpture of Brancusi and the African masks
he had shown at 291 when he depicted the clean, sharp outlines
of her face (figs 42, 43); and he turned to Cezanne's studies of
his wife, Marie-Hortense, when he sought to describe OKeeffes
childlike innocence (Georgia OKeeffe 1918).25
Not only were his sources different from any he had employed
before, so too was his method of working. For many of his pictures
of her, he used a cumbersome 8 x 10 inch view camera, mounted
on a tripod and with umbrellas to reflect the light. Yet he moved
in much closer to the body than he had done in almost any of his
previous portraits of other people, rendering hands, arms, feet
and torsos not as parts of a larger whole but as independent
abstract forms (fig.60). With the aperture of his lens open wide,
he created a limited depth of field so that he focused most clearly
on OKeeffes body, suppressing the details of her dress or
surroundings (figs 58, 60). His exposures were long up to four
minutes allowing the slight movement of the body caused by
breathing to add a softness and sense of three-dimensionality
(fig.56).26 He printed most of his early negatives of her onto the
smoothest palladium paper he could obtain, because he preferred
its sepia-to-chocolate tonal range for rendering the texture and
feel of her skin. Beginning in 1919, he also made his palladium
prints on days when the humidity was low, because he knew
that under those conditions it would solarise, causing a reversal
of tones in the darkest areas, further intensifying the abstract
vibrancy of the image. Also, he occasionally rotated his pictures
when he mounted them, turning them 90 or 180 degrees from the
orientation in which they had been taken, further divorcing them
from reality. The result was a series of photographs that was unlike
anything ever made before.
When Stieglitz exhibited these photographs in 1921, he
grouped them under a larger section of pictures devoted to A
Demonstration of Portraiture, showing them in thematic clusters
devoted to hands, feet, torsos, and hands and breasts, along
with twenty-six titled A Woman [One Portrait]. But even though
he identified the subjects of his other portraits, he never named
OKeeffe. As Stieglitz made clear in his titles, his objective was not
to describe her character, but his understanding of the archetypal
woman: the creative artist; the sexually liberated being; the strong,
even androgynous individual; the child in need of comfort and
protection; and the nurturing mother. His pictures, as he told
Brigman at the time, were clean-cut sharp heartfelt mentally
digested bits of universality in the shape of a woman and, he
assured her, they were new ideas all.27 OKeeffe, whose letters
show a woman very different from the intense, controlled and
serious person we see in Stieglitzs portrait, also recognised that
he was not representing her personality. Remembering that she
was told exactly how to pose, she stated: you had to collaborate
[with Stieglitz]. You had to sit there and do what you were told.28
Stieglitz, she concluded, was always photographing himself.29
What did OKeeffe learn from this experience about photography
and her own art? On a most basic level, she discovered that
photographs were not neutral, objective records of reality but
could express the ideas, feelings and even the visceral being of
the artist. This understanding reinforced her lifelong quest to find
forms in the natural world that expressed her emotions: I seem to
be hunting for something of myself out there, she wrote in 1929,
something in myself that will give me a symbol for all this a
symbol for the sense of life I get out here.30 She also became
fascinated with the way in which photography articulated not
only space, but form. When she first saw Stieglitzs pictures of
her in 1917, she exclaimed, I love myself. She then clarified
her remarks, noting that she was not responding to them in a
conventional way not judging whether she looked beautiful
or alluring, for example but that she was intrigued by how he
had extracted parts of her body to construct a dynamic picture:
I believe I like the one with my neck and hands best the hands
against me It makes me laugh that I like myself so much Like
myself as you make me.31 Dow and Strand had shown her how,
by moving in close to an object and radically cropping it, she
could turn reality into an abstraction; Stieglitz now showed her
how a part of an object could be expressive of both the whole
and the artist herself. As she looked more closely at Stieglitzs

54 55
 Georgia OKeeffe Touching the Centre: Georgia OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitzs Artistic Dialogue Sarah Greenough

Fig.46 Fig.47
Alfred Stieglitz Untitled (Self-portrait, Torso) c.1919
Georgia OKeeffe Breasts 1919 Oil paint on canvas
Photograph, palladium print on paper 31.1 x 25.7
22.5 x 19.1 Private collection
National Gallery of Art, Washington

photographs over the next few years, she also became entranced
with how he used light to mould objects, often highlighting areas
to articulate their shape while simultaneously stripping them of
their specific details to emphasise their supple, sensuous forms.
She explored these ideas in the late 1910s and early 1920s,
when she first translated one of Stieglitzs nude photographs of
her into paint (figs 46, 47) and then further transformed those
shapes into a picture of alligator pears.32
OKeeffes art changed markedly in the first few years the two
artists lived together, in no small measure due to Stieglitzs
photographs and her growing appreciation of photography.
By the early 1920s, she had moved away from pure abstraction,
preferring instead to derive her subjects from the visual world
she shared with Stieglitz, especially the landscape at Lake
George. She also abandoned watercolour, which she had
used extensively in Texas, and embraced oil paint. At first her
brushstrokes were loose and feathery like those she had learned
from William Merritt Chase (18491916) her teacher at the
Art Students League, New York City but as she grew more
enamoured of photographys clean surfaces and sharp lines, her
handling of paint became more measured and precise, making
her forms smoother, their outlines crisper. As she moved in closer
to her subjects, she, too, used a limited depth of field, allowing
background elements to fall away. She even embraced the scale
of photography, making a remarkable number of pictures in the
early 1920s that are approximately 8 x 10 inches, just the size
of Stieglitzs prints.33 And, when she wished to loosen the links
between her pictures and the visual world, there is evidence that
she may even have rotated her paintings 90 or 180 degrees from
the view that had inspired them (see Abstraction Blue 1927, fig.30;
Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow c.1923, fig.34).34
Stieglitzs art also changed in the early 1920s. He slowly turned
his attention away from photographing OKeeffe and, for the first
time in his career, embraced the landscape at Lake George, no
doubt influenced by OKeeffes own paintings of the area. Of far
greater importance, however, he also began to move towards an
art that was more intuitive and experiential, less analytical than the
photographs he had made before the First World War. In much the
same way that OKeeffe, as he wrote in 1921, put her experience
into paint, so too did he strive to put his feelings into form.35 As he
sought to capture the essence of the moment, he did not think,
he told the author Sherwood Anderson, I just feel.36
They shared many subjects in the early 1920s especially the
apples, barns and trees at Lake George yet, where OKeeffe
infused these forms with animate life, Stieglitz searched for their
symbolic or spiritual meaning. In 1919 and 1920, they both
recorded an old chestnut tree that was near the familys farmhouse,
each emphasising a spot on the tree where a branch had recently
been cut (figs 44, 45). Eliminating the details of its bark and
leaves, Stieglitz depicted the majestic old fellow, as he wrote
to John Marin, as if it was a massive trident soaring up from the
ground, releasing a cry of the Human Soul alone unheard.37
OKeeffe, on the other hand, presented a seemingly much
younger tree, endowing its sinewy trunk and branches with a
supple, anthropomorphic form, as if they were the arms and legs
of a person frolicking in the wind. Not to be outdone, Stieglitz
made his own photographs of The Dancing Trees in 1922.38
Two extraordinary letters written on 25 September 1923, when
OKeeffe was in York Beach, Maine, and Stieglitz was at Lake
George, reveal their symbiotic relationship and their shared
fascination with similar subjects. Describing the moon he had seen
the night before, Stieglitz wrote that he never saw any night quite
like it none more beautiful. It was
a marvelous night. A white moonlight night Nothing stirred.
Even the moon full & round seemed not to wish to disturb
the stillness The hills were not hills they were something
bathed in an untouchable spirit of light the line produced
where this spirit met the sky spirit was of rarest subtle beauty.
After watching the scene throughout the night, he wrote: When
finally the stars light had disappeared into the light of day I felt
as if I had witnessed a marvelous burial alone of what I dont
know maybe myself But I have no idea what that means or
is.39 That same day, OKeeffe told Stieglitz how she had walked
on the beach at sunset and seen a pink moon grow out of the
gray over the green sea. The moon, she wrote:
grew hotter and hotter and the path on the water brighter
and brighter till it burned so that I didnt want to look any
more Later we went out and the streak on the water was
glistening white and the moonlight glistening the waves
pound me and terrify me at night Then we came in, went to
bed I tried to write you I sat in my bed thinking of you pen
and paper in front of me and I felt utterly helpless Finally
put out the light and went to sleep feeling you close and
warm within me as you have always been and will always be
All of me seeming to cry out to you for you to give to you
and to take from you to give all that I have to give you all
that you can take and to receive in return notice the [sense]
of give and take but a perfect coming and going like the
waves body and spirit souls touching flowing together
all of me yours till I disappear.40
Although each revealed their profound love of the natural world,
the differences between their depictions are telling. Describing the
view in black and white, as a photographer, Stieglitz made clear
the conceptual, even metaphysical excitement he derived from the
landscape, while OKeeffe, painting a colourful picture in words,
once again related the vision to the body, seeing it as evocative
of the union of a man and a woman, and the landscape itself as a
site of intense physical, visceral exhilaration.
1923 marked a turning point in their relationship. The differences
in their age, background, temperament and lifestyle, which had
once seemed so attractive, began to cause friction. In addition,
OKeeffe, stung by the overtly sexual criticism of her work in
the press, was disturbed to find that Stieglitz promoted these

56 57
 Georgia OKeeffe Touching the Centre: Georgia OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitzs Artistic Dialogue Sarah Greenough

Fig.48 Fig.49
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz
From my Window at An American Place, Southwest 1932 From my Window at An American Place, Southwest 1932
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
19.3 x 24.1 24.1 x 19
National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington

interpretations.41 As she began to assert her independence, their
relationship became more fraught. They still drew inspiration
from each others art but each often competitively pushed his
or her work down paths the other could not follow. In 1925,
when they moved to rooms high up in the Shelton Hotel in New
York, OKeeffe started to paint the city, a subject that Stieglitz
had explored extensively decades earlier. Of course, I was
told that it was an impossible idea, she recalled, years later,
even the men hadnt done too well with it.42 As in The Shelton
with Sunspots, N.Y. (fig.4) and City Night, both 1926, and East
River No. 1 19278, she employed many of photographys
optical phenomena (lens flair, convergence and halation), its
reduced palette of colours (black, white and grey) and even its
emphasis on negative space. Yet her reductive paintings, almost
caricatures in their stylised simplicity, were dramatically different
from Stieglitzs earlier, more detailed, loving views of the city.
Challenged to reclaim his subject, Stieglitz responded first in 1927
and then more conclusively in the early 1930s, depicting New
York in a way a painter never could. Placing the camera in the
same spot, he utilised photographys serial capabilities and made
several sequences of photographs, recording the same view from
his windows at the Shelton Hotel and his gallery, An American
Place, over many weeks to show the relentless growth of the city
(figs 48, 49).
They continued this repartee for the next few years, with each
appropriating the others subjects, yet striving to make it entirely
their own. In July 1931, for example, OKeeffe shipped a barrel
of bones from New Mexico to Lake George. Before she could
use them in her own art, Stieglitz photographed her holding them,
her wary expression bespeaking the tension between them.43
OKeeffe responded in a series of pictures that were an intentional
retort, as she said, to the city men who sought to create the
great American work of art.44 In Cows Skull: Red, White and
Blue 1931 (fig.135), she used saturated reds, whites and blues
and provocatively hung the skull on a black post so that its antlers
formed a cross. In others, such as Horses Skull with Pink Rose
and Cows Skull with Calico Roses, both 1931 (figs 119, 121),
she stuck flowers in the skulls empty eye-sockets and mouths a
whimsical, surrealist gambit that the more sober and lofty Stieglitz
would never have pursued.
In the early 1930s, as OKeeffes attention turned increasing to
New Mexico and Stieglitzs to his much-younger new confidante
and mistress, Dorothy Norman, their artistic exchange diminished.
While they remained devoted to one another until Stieglitzs
death, they sought to construct a different kind of relationship: one
that allowed OKeeffe the independence she craved and Stieglitz
the companionship and affirmation he required. They succeeded
in doing so but, no longer fueled by their passionate love, the
fertile artistic dialogue that they had constructed ceased. In the
summer of 1929, when Stieglitz was so distressed by OKeeffes
absence, she tried to explain why this separation was necessary:
You see I have not really had my way of life for many years
When I felt very close to you that there was a home for me
really within you I could live I will say your way as much
as it was possible for me to live another way But when that
seemed gone there is much life in me when it was checked
in moving toward you I realised it would die if it could not
move toward something
And I chose coming away because here at least I feel good
and it makes me feel I am growing very tall and straight inside
and very still Maybe you will not love me for it but for me
it seems to be the best thing I can do for you
A kiss Little Boy
I have not wanted to be anything but kind to you but there
is nothing to be kind to you if I cannot be me And me is
something that reaches very far out into the world and all
around and kisses you a very warm cool loving kiss.45

58 59
 Fig.50 Fig.51
Lake George, Coat and Red 1919 Mask with Golden Apple 1923
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
69.6 x 59 22.9 x 40.6
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

60 61
 Fig.52 Fig.53 Fig.54 Fig.55
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe at 291 1917 Georgia OKeeffe 1918 Georgia OKeeffe 1918 Georgia OKeeffe 1918
Photograph, platinum print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
23.3 x 19 23.5 x 18.4 11.7 x 8.9 11.2 x 9.1
National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington

62 63
 Fig.56
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe Torso 1918
Photograph, palladium print on paper
22.9 x 18.8
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Fig.57
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe 1918
Photograph, platinum print on paper
24.2 x 19.2
National Gallery of Art, Washington

64 65
 Fig.58
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe 1918
Photograph, palladium print on paper
24.8 x 20.3
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Fig.59
Alfred Stieglitz
Interpretation 1919
Photograph, palladium print on paper
23 x 19.1
National Gallery of Art, Washington

66 67
 Fig.60
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe Hands 1919
Photograph, palladium print on paper
23.8 x 19
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
Fig.61
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe 1920
Photograph, platinum print on paper
24.5 x 19.5
George Eastman Museum, New York

68 69
 Fig.62 Fig.63 Fig.64 Fig.65
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz
Paul Strand 1919 Paul Rosenfeld 1920 John Marin 1921/2 Marsden Hartley 191315
Photograph, palladium print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, platinum print on paper
24.5 x 19.5 23.3 x 18.6 23.2 x 18.5 25 x 20.3
National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia OKeeffe Archive, Yale Collection of National Gallery of Art, Washington The Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum
American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

70 71
 Fig.66
Alfred Stieglitz
Portrait of Georgia, No. 1 1923
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
11.7 x 9.1
George Eastman Museum, New York
Fig.67
Alfred Stieglitz
Portrait of Georgia, No. 2 1923
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
9.2 x 11.9
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Fig.68
Alfred Stieglitz
Portrait of Georgia, No. 3 1923
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
9.2 x 11.4
Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

72 73
 Fig.69 Fig.70
A Celebration 1924 Untitled (New York) c.192530
Oil paint on canvas Charcoal on paper
88.6 x 45.7 62.3 x 47.6
Seattle Art Museum Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

74 75
 Fig.71 Fig.72 Fig.73
New York Street with Moon 1925 Ritz Tower, Night 1928 New York, Night 19289
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
122 x 77 102.2 x 35.6 101.9 x 48.7
Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Private collection Sheldon Museum of Art, University of NebraskaLincoln
on loan at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

76 77
 Fig.74 Above Fig.75 Below left Fig.76 Below right Fig.77
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel 1928
From the Shelton, New York, Looking East 1926/7 From the Back-Window 291 1915 New York from An American Place 1931 Oil paint on canvas
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, platinum print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 76.2 x 122.2
9 x 11.7 24.1 x 19.1 24.2 x 19.2 New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut
National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington

78 79
 Fig.78 Fig.79
Lake George 1922 Pool in the Woods, Lake George 1922
Oil paint on canvas Pastel on paper
41.3 x 55.9 43.2 x 69.9
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem

80 81
 Fig.80 Fig.81
Alfred Stieglitz Apple Family 2 c.1920
Barn & Snow 1923 Oil paint on canvas
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper 20.3 x 25.7
24.5 x 19.2 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
National Gallery of Art, Washington

82 83
 Fig.82 Fig.83
From the Lake No. 1 1924 From the Lake, No. 3 1924
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 76.2 91.4 x 76.2
Des Moines Art Center Philadelphia Museum of Art

84 85
 Fig.84 Fig.85
Autumn Trees The Maple 1924 Grey Tree, Lake George 1925
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 76.2 91.4 x 76.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

86 87
 Fig.86
Lake George Barns 1926
Oil paint on canvas
53.8 x 81.4
Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Fig.87
Autumn Leaves Lake George, N.Y. 1924
Oil paint on canvas
51.4 x 41.3
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

88 89
 Fig.88 Fig.89
Oak Leaves, Pink and Grey 1929 Farmhouse Window and Door 1929
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
84.1 x 45.7 101.6 x 76.2
The Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum The Museum of Modern Art, New York
at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

90 91
 Fig.90
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe 1920
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
23.7 x 18.4
National Gallery of Art, Washington
92
Fig.91 Fig.92
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz
Apples and Gable, Lake George 1922 House and Grape Leaves 1934
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
11.4 x 9.1 24.4 x 19.2
George Eastman Museum, New York The Cleveland Museum of Art
93
 Fig.93 Fig.94 Fig.95
Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz Paul Strand
Lake George 1922/3 Lake George 1926 Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George, New York 1929
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
23.7 x 19 9.1 x 11.9 20.3 x 21.7
National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

94 95
 Fig.96 Fig.97
Shell No. 2 1928 Nature Forms Gasp 1932
Oil paint on board Oil paint on canvas
23.5 x 18.4 26 x 61
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Private collection

96 97
 Georgia OKeeffe
To MSS. and Its 33 Subscribers ...
Georgia OKeeffe
MSS., no.4
December 1922
I studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Art Students League
of New York, at Teachers College, Columbia University, at the University
of Virginia.
I even studied with Chase and Bellows and Professor Dow. I am sorry to
say that I missed Henri.
I am guilty of having tried to teach Art for four summers in a university
summer school and for two years in a state normal but I dont know what
Art is. No one has ever been able to give me a satisfactory definition.
I have not been in Europe.
I prefer to live in a room as bare as possible.
I have been much photographed.
I paint because color is a significant language to me but I do
not like pictures and I do not like exhibitions of pictures.
However I am very much interested in them.
Not being satisfied with the definitions, ideas, of what is Art the approach
to photography has been fairly unprejudiced. It has been part of my
searching and through the searching maybe I am at present prejudiced in
favor of photography.
I feel that some of the photography being done in America today is
more living, more vital, than the painting and I know that there are other
painters who agree with me. Compared to the painter the photographer
has no established tradition to live on. Photographys only tradition of
worth is the early daguerrotype and the work of Hill and Mrs. Cameron.
The painter as soon as he begins to paint almost unconsciously assumes
himself the honored or unappreciated present representative of a glorious
past tradition. He has a respected past even if he has no standing as a
respected citizen today. The photographer has no great tradition. He must
gain all the respect he is to have by what he himself can actually do.
I have looked with great interest through rafts of photographs done before
the war by Steichen, De Meyer, Coburn, Holland Day, White, Kuehn, Frank
Eugene, Craig Annan, Demachy and many others. I dont know what they
98
To MSS. and Its 33 Subscribers Georgia OKeeffe
are doing now. I dont even hear any one talk of them with interest. As
many of these men were painters or had tried to be, it was natural that
they should try to make their photographs look like paintings etching
drawing anything but just a photograph. They did not distinctly separate
the medium photography from other mediums. In the 50 numbers of
Camera Work Stieglitz records the logical development of photography,
the work of these men and many others beginning with Hill through 1916
excepting Charles Sheeler and Stieglitzs own work.
Alfred Stieglitz has furnished most of the faith and enthusiasm during the
past forty years that makes photography of enough interest to force this
number of MSS. He also has faith in the painters and the writers and the
plumbers and all the other fools. He seems to be the only man I know
who has a real spiritual faith in human beings. I often wonder what would
have happened to painting if he had been a painter. Maybe it is because
he has faith in all people that he dares and is able to record what some
feel the possibly too intimate and significant moments.
Photography is able to flatter or embarrass the humans ego by registering
the fleeting expression of a moment. But psychological records registered
in this way have nothing to do with aesthetic significance as it seems
to be understood today. May be through psychology psychoanalysis
photography and other tendencies toward self knowledge the ideas
of aesthetics may change. To me Stieglitzs portraits repeat in a more
recognizable form what he expresses with the photographs of trees,
streets, room interiors, horses, houses, buildings, etcetera. Devoid of all
mannerism and of all formula they express his vision, his feeling for the
world, for life. They are aesthetically, spiritually significant in that I can
return to them, day after day, have done so almost daily for a period of
four years with always a feeling of wonder and excitement akin to that
David Octavius Hill aroused in me by the Chinese, the Egyptians, Negro Art, Picasso, Henri
(180270) and Julia Rousseau, Seurat, etcetera, even including modern plumbing or a fine
Margaret Cameron
(181579). piece of machinery.
If a Stieglitz photograph of a well to do Mid-Victorian parlor filled with all
sorts of horrible atrocities jumbled together makes me forget that it is a
photograph, and creates a music that is more than music when viewed
The photographers listed
here are Edward Steichen right side up or upside down or sideways, it is Art to me. Possibly I feel
(18791973), Baron it is Art because I am not clogged with too much knowledge. Or is it
Adolph de Meyer (1868 Stieglitz? Paul Strand has added to photography in that he has bewildered
1946), Alvin Langdon
Coburn (18821966), the observer into considering shapes, in an obvious manner, for their
F. Holland Day (1864 own inherent value. Surely bolts and belts and ball bearings and pieces of
1933), Clarence H. White all sorts of things that one does not recognize readily because of their
(18711925), Heinrich
Kuhn (18661944), Frank unfamiliarity, or because of distortion, when organized and put together
Eugene (18651936), as Strand has put them together arrest ones attention. He makes more
James Craig Annan obvious the fact that subject matter, as subject matter, has nothing to
(18641946) and Robert
Demachy (18591936). do with the aesthetic significance of a photograph any more than with
a painting. Charles Sheeler, one of Americas most distinguished young
99
 Georgia OKeeffe

modern painters (this includes all under 60) also photographs. No one
considering his work questions his paintings and drawings as ranking
amongst the most interesting of their type in America today. To me
his photographs are of equal importance. He is always an artist. He has
done things with photography that he could not do with painting and
vice versa. However the object that is Art must be a unity of expression
so complete that the medium becomes unimportant, is only noticed or
remembered as an after thought.

Man Ray a young American painter of ultra modern tendencies and of

varied experiments seems to be photographing. I have not seen anything
but reproductions of his work with the camera so have no definite idea
of it excepting the fact that he seems to be broadening the field of work
that can be done with it.

I can only agree with Remy de Gourmonts Antiphilos that there are An English translation

as many philosophies (I add ideas on Art) as there are temperaments of Lettres d'un Satyre,
by French symbolist
and personalities.
poet and critic Remy
de Gourmont, was
Georgia OKeeffe, To MSS. and Its 33 Subscribers and Others Who Read and Dont Subscribe! [letter to
the editor], MSS., no.4, December 1922, pp.1718. Reprinted in Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, Stieglitz
published in New
and the Critics, 1916-1929, Ann Arbor, MI, 1989, pp.1824. York in 1922 as Mr
Antiphilos, Satyr.

100
 Seeing O'Keeffe Seeing Griselda Pollock

Seeing
OKeeffe Fig.98
Ralph Looney
OKeeffe in Her Studio 1962

Seeing
Photograph
The Albuquerque Museum of Art and History

Georgia OKeeffe was one of the ways to be a woman and
an artist, and it seems important to see her life as a mold,
a pattern that determines form, defining a way to live.
The circumstances of her life are not the example. It is the
abstracting as with the flowers, bones, the simplicity that
should be the example, the abstract continuity of unseen
patterns and clues, culled in perhaps unrecognizable form at
first, but revealing when examined, a simple clarity, wholeness
... Her example is as simple as the evidence: it is that she
cared intensely about what she did each moment and, most
important, that she allowed that caring to show.
Christine Taylor Patten, 20131
Griselda Pollock In this subtle and illuminating tribute from one American artist to
another, Christine Taylor Patten (b.1940) identifies the abstract
core of the ethical stance towards all of the world she painted that
Patten recognised in fellow artist Georgia OKeeffe. Not focusing
on her life as a story, but on her life as an artist, on an artistic
practice as a life, Pattens memoir of her encounter with OKeeffe
during the last decade of the artists long life forms one of the
diverse ways that OKeeffes life and work intersected with a new
consciousness amongst women artists and art historians alike
that was articulated through artistic practices and that demanded
a new kind of art history after 1970.
What makes the comment cited above so valuable is one artists
recognition of the ethos that underlies anothers life of work in
ways that speak to, and counter, our usual art-historical methods
for making sense of a career and an oeuvre. Art history typically
wants to know what kind of artist the artist is/was, where s/he
fits within a historical story based either on movement, style or
formal innovation. The retrospective exhibition reproduces, as a
pathway in space, a story of development including deviation
and change of direction or stasis. What happens when instead
we ask: what is/was the artist trying to see?
Indeed a dialectic of visible/invisible/brought-into-the-visible
might be said to underlie the modernist project. Another question,
therefore, is: for what was the artist seeking to find forms? And
what if the answer were something like the abstract continuity of
unseen patterns and clues, culled in perhaps unrecognizable form
at first, but revealing when examined, a simple clarity, wholeness?

102 103
 Georgia OKeeffe
I want to set this astute and structural reading of a lifelong artistic
project, sustained by a singular artistic ethos addressed to both
self and the world, against the history of various moments of
reception and interpretation of OKeeffes art that have perhaps
made her work invisible to us, even in its overexposure. The
dominant theme of that reception at the beginning and at the end
of her career was that she is a woman artist, rather than an artist
who is a woman. Is there a difference, you may ask? I hope to
show that there is and why.
A personal note
For reasons of my initial induction into art history, c.1970, through
the prevailing conceptual turn, the paintings of OKeeffe were not
on my immediate agenda for study. I was also not a twentieth-
century specialist at that time. Then being celebrated as part of the
American feminist reclamation of women artists of which more
shortly I could not OKeeffes work. It was opaque to me.
By chance, during the later 1990s, I was invited to Sante Fe,
New Mexico, and, by equal chance, was offered a ride and a
private visit to OKeeffes former home at Abiqui. That space and
place were a revelation. It was only when I was inside this house,
tracing through every room and detail the consistent aesthetic
that permeated all its spaces and objects, that I began to get the
OKeeffe project (fig.98). Standing at the vast picture window of
the artists studio, looking out onto a vista that was almost a view
the spaces and forms of New Mexico terrain resist the conventions
we learnt from European taming of the world as landscape I
also sensed the challenges and risks perpetually confronted by
this painter in choosing painting as her life-work and in locating so
much of its later phases in this part of the world, where the earth
itself revealed its skeleton, its joints and bones, its radical, non-
human otherness.2
I had entered the field of art history in 1970, at the same moment
that I joined the project we then named the Womens Liberation
Movement. The latter, at that point, had little time for art and
saw no point in artists except as potential designers of posters
and other agitational material. Those of us who found ourselves
stranded in an arcane discipline such as art history were in a
field that apparently offered little to our emerging consciousness
and pride as women, because the story of art we diligently
studied told us there were no women artists of any merit or
historical significance. Undernourished, we set out to find some
sustenance by diving into the archives. Of course, with very
little digging, and just by looking around ourselves then and
there, we discovered the rich world of many artists who were
women in the history of all art, but notably, influentially and
excitingly, those who were numerous in the record of modern
art of the twentieth century.
We confronted a paradox, however. So many of the women who
had made modernism that we had thus dug up were actually
still alive at this point, at which highly-educated art historians like
me were being taught nothing about them at all. As I personally
encountered the question of gender in art and art history around
1970, all of these artists, contemporaries of OKeeffe, were
making art or had just died: Berenice Abbott (18981991),
Eileen Agar (18991991), Anni Albers (18991994), Louise
Bourgeois (19112010), Margaret Bourke-White (1904
71), Marianne Brandt (18931983), Leonora Carrington
(19172011), Imogen Cunningham (18831976), Louise
Dahl-Wolfe (18951989), Sonia Delaunay (18851979),
Leonor Fini (190796), Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877
1968), Gluck (18951978), Barbara Hepworth (190375),
Hannah Hch (18891978), Lois Mailou Jones (190598),
Lee Krasner (190884), Dorothea Lange (18951965), Dora
Maar (190797), Lee Miller (190777), Louise Nevelson
(18991988), Meret Oppenheim (191385), Irene Rice
Pereira (190271), Carol Rama (19182015), Hedda Sterne
(19102011), Dorothea Tanning (19102012), Lenore Tawney
(19072007), Alma Thomas (18911978), Maria Helena
Vieira da Silva (190892) and the list could go on. None were
on our curriculum; few were on show in the museums or major
exhibitions. The point I wish to stress is that this continuing erasure
was the actual product of modernist art history and the modernist
museum in the twentieth century. Both, in effect, by this twentieth-
century exclusiveness, failed to be modern enough.3
It was as a result of this radical skewing of the still-recent history of
modern art by the official modernist art historians who were these
womens contemporaries knew them, visited their studios and then
installed and wrote a history of modern art without the women who
co-created modernism that my generation of emerging feminist art
historians fell prey to a particular affliction: the search for the unique
or the heroic exception. A partial and internally blinded recovery
initially found and celebrated just a few isolated icons. Mexican
artist Frida Kahlo (190754) and OKeeffe were among the
handful of artists who were women who were most easily available
to counter the myth of womens lack in the field of art. The tragedy is
that we can now see, in retrospect, how these important, intelligent
and remarkable artists, grounded in the historical and geopolitical
specificity of their place and in their moment, well-populated with
many women artists, were propelled from relative (that can include
sexist misrepresentational) oblivion to notoriety and commercial
celebrity, bypassing the station of serious art-historical analysis.
This handful of exceptions became the subject of sensational
biographical hype, coupled with the destructive hyper-visibility of
their works, superficially promoted on calendars and postcards.
Almost too well-known now, for wrong and usually trivialising
reasons, the encounter with such artists as artists is too often
distorted by this extraordinary phenomenon of banalising fame.
False renown refuses women their part in the shared making of a
modern modernism (one that understands gender transformation as
central to the modern) just as much as the totally un-benign neglect
that was the fate of so many modernist women at the hands of the
curators and narrators of the official story of modern art.
After 1970, therefore, many modernist women became the
topic of an emergent field of feminist analysis within art history.
Programmatic in our attempt to right a wrong, what I named
feminist interventions in the Histories of Art (insisting that feminism
is not a subset of the real thing, and that the histories of art are
plural and perhaps even contested) then appeared to the official
104
Seeing O'Keeffe Seeing Griselda Pollock
custodians like trouble-making mixing politics and art when,
according to their exclusionist script, modernism was defined as a
practice and exhibited in a space set apart from the dirty business
of politics and the mess of ideology. I am paraphrasing Clement
Greenberg here explaining modern arts necessary retreat.4
Within the space of feminist-inflected histories of art, we were not,
however, making programmes. We were just asking questions.
We were also asking the same questions that the artists who were
modernist women had asked themselves through their practice.
Becoming Woman: Fate or Question
What does it mean to make art from the complex situation of
being a woman, when being a woman is, as Simone de Beauvoir
brilliantly revealed in 1949 in her magisterial study, The Second
Sex, a matter of becoming the figure that the human female
presents in society? De Beauvoirs two-volume tome showed
that this figure, Woman (in French lternel fminin) this documented this discursive creation of OKeeffe by assembling
intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is
called feminine is a figure fabricated by myth, convention,
politics, science, ideology and cultural representation.5 If we
become women and indeed inhabit this complex configuration of
body and the fantasies projected onto it, and if Modernity can be
characterised as giving rise to a profound challenge to this concept
of Woman, the making of modern art by modernist women is a
remaking of both what woman can be and how to exist beyond its
definitions but not outside of ones gender, in the world.
The epoch of modernity had both extended that construction of
the feminine in various ways, while, as a result of new ideologies
of gender, also stimulating the desire amongst creative women
to challenge the myth of the feminine, politically (womens rights)
and culturally (the New Woman). What did it mean for women,
as artists, however, to join in the modernist aesthetic project, itself
still so infused with the mythic woman in either prostitutional,
child-woman or maternal guise think of works by Pablo Picasso
(18811973), Henri Matisse (18691954), Pierre-Auguste
Renoir (18411919), Aristide Maillol (18611944), Andr
Breton (18961966) or Willem de Kooning (190497), which
fill our modernist galleries while also offering novel aesthetic
tools and material-formal resources to invent something entirely
new: modern women and a modern art articulated from a
questioning and radical perspective? Rather than judging women
modernists for where they do or do not fit into the exclusive, and
thus partial, story of modern art built around privileged men and
their fantasies of Woman, we are asked to see the distinctive
novelties produced by women as they engaged artistically with
new possibilities opened by the uncharted aesthetic space of
modernist practice, materials, processes, gestures, forms.6
This profound and modernist intersection between the
radicalisation of artistic processes and meanings that would, at
its most dramatic, be named non-objective or abstract, and the
radicalisation of gender relations and sexed subjectivities, poses
rich and challenging questions for art-historical study of the art
and culture of the twentieth century, but only if art history is itself
radicalised and finally modernised by recognising the decisive
conjuncture of modernity and gender transformation on the terrain
of aesthetics and form. It is on that terrain that OKeeffe began to
work and remained at work for over seventy years.
Becoming OKeeffe: Modern Woman c.1920
OKeeffe was, of course, never forgotten during the twentieth
century. She acquired substantial renown during the 1920s,
however, because of a carefully crafted campaign for making
her work visible that solicited a powerful response from critics,
who wrote extensively on her annual exhibitions. Shaped in the
manner Alfred Stieglitz strategically planned, and the men in his
circle rehearsed, in a shared vocabulary, a largely Freudian and
highly sexualised reception and interpretation of her work as
a Woman was put in place. For this group of men, OKeeffe as
Woman was hailed for speaking herself and her body directly
and spontaneously through the forms created by her paintings
and drawings. Art historian Barbara Buhler Lynes has carefully
the whole archive of such impassioned writings about woman
speaking her own sexual truth for the first time in history.7 Let
me just quote briefly from one very serious critic who wrote
extensively and thoughtfully on OKeeffes early exhibitions in
New York. In 1922, Paul Rosenfeld had written in Vanity Fair: It
is female, this art, only as is the person of a woman when dense,
quivering, endless life is felt through her body, when long tresses
exhale the aromatic warmth of unknown primaeval submarine
forests, and the dawn and the planets glint in the spaces between
cheeks and brows.8 In 1924, Rosenfeld wrote that her painting
derived from
the nature of woman, from an American girls implicit trust
in her senses, from an American girls utter belief, not in
masculinity or unsexedness, but in womanhood. Georgia
OKeeffe gives her perceptions utterly immediate, quivering
and warm. She gives the world as it is known to woman.
No man could feel as Georgia OKeeffe and utter himself
precisely in such curves and colors; for in those curves and
spots and prismatic color there is a woman referring the
universe to her own frame rendering in her picture of things
her bodys subconscious knowledge of itself What men
have always wanted to know and women to hide, this girl sets
forth. Essence of Womanhood impregnates colour and mass,
giving proof of the truthfulness of a life.9
In a shorter study of critical responses and OKeeffes reactions
across the decade of the 1920s, Lynes notes a significant shift
from such fulsome attribution of emotion and unconscious self-
exposure as Woman to a counter-stress on the works intellectual
quality and even its mystical introspection, terms that aligned
OKeeffes work with qualities more conventionally considered by
gendered critical discourse as masculine.10
For the American critics of the 1920s, longing for a distinctive
American modernism, the work of Georgia OKeeffe, particularly
on paper, offered what seemed like a direct, spontaneous, almost
unconscious, revelation of a distinct concept of true womanhood,
quite different from that which had prevailed during the preceding
era of Victorian bourgeois culture. For the first time, it was possible
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 Georgia OKeeffe
to conjugate ideas of the New Woman woman modernised
with sexual experience as the grounds for a new autonomy and
self-expression. In contrast to the Victorian ideal of pure, sexless
Woman, these new women were being considered as sexual
yet still within a contradictory, phallocentric perspective. The
enthusiasm of some of the advanced critics for OKeeffes work
as symptom of this paradoxical notion of womans unconsciously,
almost naturally sexual nature hence the floral association
was additionally shaped by then-current American involvement
with Freuds radical theories of sexuality, disseminated
following his lectures in the U.S. in 1909.11 Arts patron Mabel
Dodges salon at 23 Fifth Avenue was a major channel for the
dissemination of Freudian ideas in the 1910s: there was no
warmer, quiet and more intensely thoughtful conversations at
Mabel Dodges than those on Freud and his implications.12
Thus we might have to acknowledge that OKeeffes work after
1917 did inscribe within the visual field of American modernist
practice something so visually shocking that only the radical sex-
talk of the new Freudian discourse could begin to articulate what
it seemed to touch upon: a woman as the enunciator of her own
sexuality in a manner so radically
distinct from the existing representations of sexuality that it
offered the intimations unknown and unknowable to its
author of a sensualised and corporeal subjectivity that was
differently sexuated.
Such framing of the work as the very emanation of a gendered
essence, resulting from a reductive reading of Freuds very radical,
but still gender-bound, writing on sexuality and dreams which
profoundly influenced sections of the New York avant-garde,
following the English translation of The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900) in 1913 and the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905) in 1910, with a powerfully phallocentric concept of
Woman as unconsciously speaking her sexual body, a sexual
body full of oceanic sensation and grounded in her womb (hence
her reproductive rather than her sexual organs) made OKeeffe
dramatically modern as woman-artist in that climate of the early
American avant-gardes embrace of Freud-talk. It left her, however,
relatively invisible as a modernist artist who was a woman.
Becoming OKeeffe c.1970: Being reclaimed
If we now jump from the decades of her becoming OKeeffe in
the hot criticism of the 1920s, while she systematically continued
to paint and seek out new subjects and new spaces (ultimately
New Mexico) in which she could make her art, to a second
phase of high visibility (the intervening years included many
retrospectives, including one in 1946 at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York, and the one I first encountered at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in 1970), we arrive at another moment
of contested, sexualised interpretation in and around 1970.
Some American feminist readings embraced both the artists
gender and her works heady associations with a female sexual
body, notably via the floral analogue, as the key to OKeeffes
feminist relevance. With the major show at the Whitney in 1970,
American art critics and historians like Cindy Nemser, artists
like Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro associated with and
influenced by burgeoning womens consciousness and rage at the
dire histories of art they had been given looked upon the work
of OKeeffe and imposed precisely a kind of homogenisation on
her work as a woman. Ironically, they saw literal difference in the
anatomical rather than in the psycho-symbolic. Thus, for a while,
American feminist art critics toyed with the idea that, across the
largely abstract work made by artists who were women over the
twentieth century, they could detect a recurring formal tendency
to create works around cores, volumes, circular shapes. The
hypothesis was exploded as fast as it was advanced.
We know that, as a lifelong feminist, OKeeffe, nonetheless,
repudiated the appropriation of her work by artists such as Judy
Chicago more openly than she had resisted the Stieglitz sell
and the critics orgy of Freudian fantasy projected onto her
paintings in the 1920s. She did not want to be Judy Chicagos
Woman any more than she wanted to be the mens in the 1920s.
It is easy to understand.13
The problem is that any reading of her paintings as image of
even the invisible sexuality of women claims her work for
iconography. Her paintings are then read as direct or veiled
images of that which now, on the basis of this iconographic
reading, has an image. This is very different from suggesting that,
as an artist of that specific Euro-American modernist turn towards
the non-objective, OKeeffe was engaged in finding forms for
sensations that remain unknown without formulation.
Thus, amongst the challenges we currently face when
encountering the work of OKeeffe through the prism of the
many who have written about her work, we encounter both the
historical evidence of a powerful Freudian discourse on gender
and art during the 1920s, and a late-twentieth-century critical
return to these questions about the ways in which gendered
bodies and sexed subjectivities inflect an artists work. Neither
is, however, entirely ungrounded. For these critics, this tendency
was the confident assertion of a distinctively feminine embodiment
to which modernist art languages gave new forms. The flower
paintings of OKeeffe were above all susceptible to such a
reading because of the legacy of modernism itself: these paintings
were not images of flowers, but evocations through the grammar
of a floral morphology of folds, interiors, depths, layers etc., of
that which had, so far, had no image in art: female sexuality.
Followed through with a reductive literalness, Chicago would take
this lesson to her logical conclusion, visually identifying female
sexuality with a specific genital iconography, even while seeking
to find a formal artistic language for it in her own abstract prints
and paintings. But linking visual forms with sexual forms tended to
project onto the paintings only anatomical references, however
shocking and even liberating. The more theoretical legacy of
Freudian thought should have reminded them that sexuality
may have a morphology, but it is in the mind. Psychologically,
sexuality is an effect of powerful fantasies built on fractured sites
of bodily investment: touch and sight, movement, rhythm and
sensation, not on the physiology of organs.
106
Seeing O'Keeffe Seeing Griselda Pollock
It is also important to read this first moment in feminist criticism in linking OKeeffes interest in colour and shape with younger
the 1970s, which embraced OKeeffe, in terms of the narcissistic fellow Americans such as Mark Rothko (190370), Kenneth
wound inflicted on women psychologically and socially by the Noland (19242010) and Ellsworth Kelly (19232015).14
absence of any analogical evocation of the female body as
a site of active pleasure or autonomous sexuality. Given the A new group of feminist studies soon appeared to deal more
persistence of the Greek modelling of a female nude without any critically with the historical writings that had sexualized
outward signs of her gendered sexuality; given the discourse of OKeeffe under a projected masculine gaze. Anna Chave
sexuality pedalled since 1953 by Playboy and widely distributed wished not to disown the force of what we see in OKeeffes
pornography, of female sexuality as anticipatory and passively paintings but to explain it differently, acknowledging the import
receptive to masculine desire, we can well understand why of sexual difference:
Fig.99
In the Patio No. IV 1948
Oil paint on canvas
35.6 x 76.5
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
OKeeffes astonishing paintings, like her experimental design The problem with all these accounts is not that her pictures
work, the Specials of the 1910s (figs 1618, 20, 25) and are not sexual, but that the difficult exercise she set herself,
her abstract paintings, such Music Pink and Blue No. I 1918 and the now-muted, now-declamatory visual poetry it
(fig.27) looked and felt so distinctively erotic, as if offering a yielded, was crudely translated into fulsome, clichd prose.
totally new grammar for imagining the female sexual body and Her art was described not as the vision of someone
its sexual sensibility. Yet these are relatively rare in her oeuvre, with real, deeply felt desires, but as the vision of that
which consistently uses art to apply a kind of analytical looking to depersonalized, essentialized Woman who obligingly stands
structures in the natural world to their order, their strangeness, for Nature and Truth.15
and their foreignness to the human form.
The phrase the sexualization of Georgia OKeeffe heads a
Interestingly, in the first surveys of women artists by feminist chapter by Vivien Green Fryd in her book Art and the Crisis of
scholars, the authors insistently played down the notion of a Marriage (2003). Fryd approaches OKeeffe through parallel
female iconography in favour of more formal analyses. In the analyses of two couples: Edward Hopper (18821967)
benchmark exhibition Women Artists: 1550-1950, curated by and his wife and model, the artist Josephine Nivison Hopper
Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin in 1976, the entry on (18831968), and Stieglitz and OKeeffe. Both OKeeffe and
OKeeffe focused on very different critical terms, used of her New Nivison Hopper became models for their husbands work,
Mexico paintings: vast, lucid, epic, spartan, austere, healthy, offering an indirect way of reading the cultural stakes involved
clean-cut, unsentimental. Nochlin focused on the solitary painter in such exchanges. Fryd situates the complex relations within
as a contemporary model for freedom of thought and action, these famous artistic partnerships in relation to the novel cultural
107
 Georgia OKeeffe
Fig.100
Blue I 1916
Watercolour on paper
78.4 x 56.5
Private collection, courtesy Christie's,
New York
developments in the U.S. in the same period, around the relations This framing is richly explored in another major study of the larger
between men and women signified by marriage. Fryd writes: context in which OKeeffe was written by Stieglitz into American
art. Americanist art and cultural historian Kathleen Pyne argues
Passion had come of age in the United States. Stieglitz that we need to situate OKeeffe and the clearly significant
contributed to this atmosphere through his sexualisation partnership with Stieglitz, after 1917, in the context of an extended
of OKeeffes art and of her body. OKeeffe also played a circle of creative women modernists already working around
role in this greater awareness of female eroticism through Stieglitz included in his journal of photography Camera Work
her participation in the creation of Stieglitzs nude and in exhibitions at 291. Such an extended history included her
photographs of her and through her non-objective predecessors: the Pictorialist photographer Gertrude Ksebier
charcoals and paintings of flowers that embody her feelings (18521934) and the independent Californian photographer
about specific relationships.16 Anne Brigman (18691950), both of whom were exploring
new languages of modernist image making, in the latter case
108
Seeing O'Keeffe Seeing Griselda Pollock
using her own nude body in relation to the drama of the Western
landscape. Pyne, furthermore, focuses on artist Katharine Rhoades
(?18851965), whom Stieglitz also sought to fashion as his
idea of the woman modernist through his embrace of the semi-
spiritualist and vitalist ideas of French philosopher Henri Bergson,
extracts from whose influential text Creative Evolution (1907;
translated 1911) Stieglitz printed in Camera Work between 1911
and 1912. Bergson explored a philosophical understanding of the
problem of continuity and discontinuity in life: how things evolve.
He posited the existence of a vital impulse in all living things
lan vital, a creative force which challenged predominantly
mechanical ideas about change. He also countered the primacy
of rational intelligence as generating knowledge of life, proposing
instead intuition as key to understanding. The creative process
releases intuition and brings us back into contact with the vital
impulse that is the source of both continuity and transformative
discontinuity; this is creative evolution. Bergson lectured in New
York City in January 1913, and, following an admiring article
in the New York Times, the numerous visitors going to Columbia
University to hear the philosopher speak caused the first ever
traffic jam on Broadway such was the interest in and reputation
of this thinker.
Pyne also traces the links between the search for modernist
authenticity truth to a new, living, creative self and the key
figures: the unconscious woman and the untutored child. Titled
Modernism and the Feminine Voice, Pynes book lays out the
intellectual and philosophical ground on which the New York
avant-gardes pre-surrealist search for its emblematic child-woman
artist was built.
As it turned out offered Stieglitz a dress rehearsal for
OKeeffe. Through struggling to make Rhoades the voice of
female sexuality, he invented the figure of the woman-child,
the female partner required for the modernist theatre of
New York Rhoades story is an important one in relation
to OKeeffes because it allows us to discover the way in
which the woman-child opened up the possibility of a
feminine voice in modernism, even as the woman-child drew
boundaries around that possibility.17
Beautifully documenting the forming of Stieglitzs aesthetic
vocabulary in the images made by, and of, women in the
preceding decades, which he would replay across the three
hundred photographs that comprise the Portrait of Georgia
OKeeffe (191737), Pyne finely tunes the relation of these earlier
images to the influential ideas shaping the New York avant-garde
into which OKeeffe stepped in 1917. Pyne indicates, however,
that OKeeffe was not just the object of Stieglitzs vision. She had
to, and did, negotiate what this framework offered to her, while
ultimately having to escape its potential enclosure of her own
artistic project. Thus the critical focus on woman, body, sexuality,
life, new forms, escape from the known and conventional, was
indeed an opening. Onto what?
A different strand in feminist discourse has sought to articulate a
creative and theorised but less fantasised relationship between
embodiment, sexual difference and art-making. Instead of
imaging OKeeffes work in Stieglitz-ian fashion as the un-thought
emanation of her womans body thus identifying the woman
as her body, which speaks itself through art contemporary
feminist critical analysis is interested in how we might read the art
created by embodied, gendered, situated and sexuated subjects
knowingly making art as a way of being in the world, while
insisting that art is made with materials and resources that are
crucially determined by time and place, by history and situation,
by what the cultural codes of that moment decree as possible.
Every artwork is an experiment handling the sometimes-contesting
urgencies of situation and desire. The very last thing that feminist
studies aim to do is to separate women from their place as
historically grounded co-creators of art and culture. But to
understand the specificity of what each woman, in her singularity
as an artist, introduces into culture, there may be a tactical
necessity to focus on her difference, the better to see her genius.
By that word I do not mean to reinsert the genius theory of art.
I am using the term as French literary theorist Julia Kristeva has
used it, drawing from the medieval European writer John Duns
Scotus, who postulates the singularity of each person. Instead of
asking what she is the answer might be she is a woman, i.e. a
member of a category whose meaning depends on ideology and
standpoint we should always address the question of who she
is.18 Who is a work of a lifetimes making.
Writing in one of the great works of feminist aesthetic polemic in
1974, the French writer Hlne Cixous articulated a post-1968
feminist position in which she called women to the writing of the
body, and thus to the creation of a relation between language (in
our case, art; existing, resisting, but also creative structures) and
the embodied, sexually different, individual subject. Claiming that
women have been violently driven away from their bodies by
phallocentric language and its stories of womens bodies, Cixous
called, knowing the double entendre of her phrasing, for women
to come to writing without, however, assuming any homogeneity
among the women who would then write new stories. She writes,
therefore, against exactly the kind of generalisation of Woman
Stieglitz practised and de Beauvoir analysed in culture.
What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me
is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions; you
cannot talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous
classifiable into codes Womens imaginary is inexhaustible,
like music, like painting, like writing.19
So, the challenge is to acknowledge that gender, sexual
difference and the bodies we inhabit can matter in the making
of art, while recognising that this is not predetermined. As an
opening up of the space of art-making to that which is not
previously decreed, modernism allowed women to come to
art in greater numbers and with creative freedom. Formally, it
also opened an uncharted space for their singular explorations
of what had been rendered, culturally, a dark continent: their
own subjectivities. This is precisely the tension that critical
writing on OKeeffe has to maintain. Her work was conceived
109
 Georgia OKeeffe Seeing O'Keeffe Seeing Griselda Pollock

etc.) actually rested on and drew from serious ideas: some
philosophical, others in the now-obscure realm of intersecting
revolutionary ideas, anti-materialism and a corresponding non-
religious spiritual yearning that could turn visionary, or occult, or
aesthetically creative; or all three.
We know, for instance, that OKeeffe developed her distinctive
aesthetic breakthrough because of her deep study of Arthur
Wesley Dows teachings, drawn from the turn among an earlier
generation of modernist artists towards medieval, folk, Japanese
and other Asian aesthetics, and which, expressed also at the time
in terms of symbolist theory, looked to music as the paradigm
for finding new ways of sustaining the visual arts. We also know
that Wassily Kandinskys ber das Geistige in der Kunst (1911)
translated as The Art of Spiritual Harmony by Michael T.H.
Sadler in 1914 came across OKeeffes horizon in that critical
decade after 1910. Like so many of his generation, Kandinsky
engaged with the writings of leading Theosophists, including an
influential publication by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater,
Thought-Forms (1901).20 In this circle, spiritual signified an
inner phenomenon, a kind of imaginative and transformative
subjective interiority and communion with sensation and affect
that challenged the hollowed-out materialist world, without losing
touch with life or with the social and political order of the world.
We cannot here enter into the debate about how the Protestant
reading of modern art advanced by a deeply spiritual man such
as art historian and museum director Alfred H. Barr minimised
the role of these social-political-spiritual-occult roots of modernist
Fig.101
Cliffs Beyond Abiqui, Dry Waterfall 1943 abstraction, which richly informed a range of early modernists like
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 40.6
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Piet Mondrian (18721944), Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp
(18871968).21 The embarrassment felt by a rationalist thinker
like Barr has served to foreclose our recognition of the challenging
but interesting pathway via thought-forms that allows us to make
sense of the turn to abstraction, without Barrs laconic account
that artists got tired of representing things: The most adventurous
and original artists had grown bored with painting facts.22 The
point I wish to make is that OKeeffe, working in the specifically-
American context of the teacher training institution at Columbia
University; seeing work by European modernists like Rodin,
Matisse and Picasso at the gallery 291 in New York; working then
in Columbia, North Carolina and in Texas in the art department
of a college, was part of this phenomenon. Appreciating the
widespread influence of the spiritualist conception of art has
lately allowed us to undo the unwarranted forgetting of the
Swedish pioneer of abstract art Hilma af Klint (18621944),
whose abstract paintings from around 1896 predate the first
abstractions by Kandinsky.23 It is through this much-less studied
dimension of modernisms becoming that a notion of interiority
that is not sexual is on offer, shaping a different understanding of
the self that art-making might explore and for which non-objective
forms, colours, shape and effects might become a suggestive
grammar of thought-forms.
OKeeffe in conversation
So, the challenge for feminist writers is then to negotiate both the
historical and recent evidence of sexualised reading of a selection
of OKeeffes paintings and the demand posed to all art history to
understand who this painter was in terms of what she did within a
historical frame (while exceeding its limits), because it has another

as an exploration of self and world in a theosophically and
psychoanalytically modernist language all the rage in her artistic
circle. That group was imagining art as a search for a new truth
both beyond the visible and inside it. It is not enough to disown
all reference to her being an artist and a woman, distancing us
from the Freud-talk of the 1920s or the feminist flower-body-talk
of the 1970s. We cannot replace the modernist engagement
with sexual bodies and imaginaries with merely formal concerns,
dividing the work by theme and chronology.
It is easy to deal with this challenge by following the chronology,
however, and it is always important in art history to track what the
artist does: seeing where each work leads, noting the ruptures
of continuity, the exhaustion of a theme, the displacement of the
working space. Thus we are made to witness a lifetime of work
the daily practice of this profession that is a constant investigation,
research and refinement, of dead-ends and new beginnings.
We may ultimately discover unexpected and deeper structuring
continuities that unfolded across different projects and even
alternating modes.
Another approach offered by art-historical tradition is to focus
on genres or topics or subjects: abstractions, flowers, bones,
houses, barns, patios, mountains, skies, clouds, skulls, shells.
Yet again we can try and create a context, either on the basis
of shared interests (Calla Lilies in American Art, for instance)
or reciprocal approaches to common themes, such as we find
between photographer Stieglitz and painter OKeeffe. These
most often imagine authorised contexts, placing the woman in
relation to her contemporaries, who are men. Thus the illusion of
her exceptionality veils the import of her singularity; for the latter,
the artist must be seen in a full context of modernisms co-made by
women and men side by side.
This includes taking in one other aspect of that context. If we
were to accept the banalised version of modernist art theory as
merely the substitution of arts traditional subservience to literature,
religion, myth or ideology, with its autonomous embrace of its
own processes as an end in itself, we would miss the complexity
of what that formalist turn did for art and artists as a position from Fig.102
which to make art in early modernism. We would also fail to Alfred Stieglitz
recognise that the formalist proposition that art is answerable to Georgia O'Keeffe After Return from New Mexico
Equivalent O1 1929
and created by a fidelity to its materialities, mediums and formal
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
potentiality (colour, space, light, surface, mark, line, gesture, 7.9 x 11.7
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

110 111
 Georgia OKeeffe Seeing O'Keeffe Seeing Griselda Pollock

Fig.103 Fig.104
Nude Series VII 1917 Nude Series 1917
Watercolour on paper Watercolour on paper
45.1 x 34.3 30.5 x 22.5
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

story to tell. In one radically important text by art historian Sharyn
Rohlfsen Udall, who also curated an exhibition on the same
theme, OKeeffe is placed in conversation with Frida Kahlo,
whom OKeeffe met on a visit to Mexico in 1932, and the
Canadian artist Emily Carr (18711945), whom OKeeffe met
in New York in 1930, and who also set herself apart by working
in British Columbia and seeking to bend her own modernism to
engage with the aesthetics of First Nations art and culture in the
forests of the Western Pacific Region. Udall defines the ground for
bringing together three artists otherwise unconnected in terms that
reflect a move beyond the formal/iconographic split in order to
locate artistic practice in major questions of modernity: Yet these
artists shared fundamental commonalities a professional stature,
an attachment to place and nationality, an intense connection
to nature, and a strong interest in indigenous cultures that link
them both as artists and as women, and form a starting point for
an investigation into the place of the woman artist in the
twentieth century.24
In another subtle and intelligent grouping of three modernist
artists, the American art historian Anne Wagner created this trio
for her analysis of modernism and sexual difference: Eva Hesse
(193670), Lee Krasner and Georgia OKeeffe. She writes:
OKeeffes art and career also serve to demonstrate that
at least earlier in the century, for a woman to represent
the body at all is to give herself over to her interpreters; to
become hostage to their limited notions of a womans world
as simply and only an extension of her bodily feeling ... I think
she continued to see these new pictures [Wagner is referring
to OKeeffes destabilizing play between abstraction and
figuration] as stemming from her long-standing effort to find
a space both within and outside the body, to conceive of a
body both within and outside gender.25
Wagners contribution is to resist either/or approaches and to
embrace the historical but also the psycho-symbolic instability
of all of us. We are, in part, captured and constructed by
cultural norms and terms, but never entirely trapped. In order to
explain the paradox at the heart of the artistic project we call
Georgia OKeeffe, in which the flower has mistakenly come to
stand for the displaced sex and body, Wagner invokes French
phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who
provides an alternative way to frame an artist who never fully
recognised the freight her imagery carried, yet always sought to
make her mark lie between its sexuality and its negation. Wagner
quotes this difficult phrase from Merleau-Ponty: There is no
transcending of sexuality any more than there is any sexuality
enclosed within itself. No one is saved, and no one is totally lost.26
Wagner uses this delicately balanced paradox to encourage
us to see OKeeffes artistic project in similar terms: risking and
refusing in the same gesture, being abstract and objective in the
same work, being at once suggestively sexual and austerely
analytical, offering the effect of luscious forms with paint applied
in such a way as to minimise the equation with flesh. We look at
her work and its sometimes striking colours make us anticipate the
Titian-esque gorgeousness associated with oil painting. But the
paint is applied dry and flat, refusing its distinctive delights all
the better to make us look at the curious structures of the things of
the world that scale and detail make strange. Rather than blame
the artist for our disappointment in the lack of correspondence
between texture and imagined corporality, Wagner suggests that
we recognise a different ambition:
What would it be like to overturn, by sheer power of ones
painting the (un)comfortable decorum governing ones own
place in the world? To elect painting as the site of that upset is
to ensure that it occurs in a space simultaneously public and
personal; it is to make the upset an effect of fantasy, ones own
and that of the viewer.27
Inspired by the growing body of critical feminist thinking that
engaged with the challenge that OKeeffes work poses still,
in my own work on OKeeffe I created an exhibition, in my
Virtual Feminist Museum (2007), in order to propose a series

112 113
 Georgia OKeeffe
of provocative encounters rather than commonalities between
women artists of the 1920s, under the rubric Visions of Sex.28
My starting point was the exception, in the oeuvre of an artist
who would come to be so known for sexuality and her sexualised
image, of the most conventional sign and site of Western arts
concept of female body and sex the female nude.
Feminist art historians had long been asking: how could
representations of the female body signify creative agency when
the tradition was that the female body was merely the matter of art
and its representation as the nude the sign of masculine creativity,
driven by its own, culturally authorised desire and fantasy? Given
that the nude also became the emblematic image of modernist
art, the terrain on which the male modernists laid claim to each
innovation in the bid for leadership of the avant-gardes, how
incredibly risky was it for women modernists to take on this topic?
I was thus fascinated by the suite of watercolours of a naked
woman drawing herself, made by OKeeffe in Texas in 1917 (on
the cusp of her departure for New York, namely just after she
had begun the Specials (see above) that had so set Stieglitz on
this path to making OKeeffe the woman modernist he had been
searching to create (figs 103, 104).29 The fluid washes with which
the body is evoked on paper present a body at work making art
without identifying facial features. These images are themselves
powerful shifters of the delineated or grotesque female nude
created repeatedly by modernist masculinity.
What struck me most of all was the hand that is drawing. The artists
own body is posed to be seen by her own analytical rather than
contemplative gaze. It is this hand as the displaced signifier of
the artist at work, but also of a self-exploration, and, at the same
time, the distanced and formal rendering of a body in colour on
paper that interrupts the lineage of the female nude that this artist
inherited. Agency as self-analysis invited a conversation with works
of and by OKeeffes modernist women contemporaries, who were
represented in the nude by themselves and others, and who also
explored varied forms of the female body, or who were known for
their sexuality, or who also explored the powerful formal imagery
of the flower that has so often been considered analogous for
femininity and female sexuality. Thus, my virtual exhibition included
photographs and paintings by and of Tina Modotti, Imogen
Cunningham, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kthe Kollwitz, Gluck, Pan
Yuliang, Virginia Woolf and Josephine Baker.30
Such a line-up breaches all the conventions of art history, mixing
photographers with dancers, writers with printmakers, American,
British, Chinese and German, straight and queer, politically
engaged and not. I shaped these unexpected encounters under the
rubric of the interplay of modernity, femininity and representation.
In reading OKeeffes transgressive and extraordinary
watercolours of a painting body, I drew on British film theorist Laura
Mulveys re-reading of the Greek myth of Pandora. Pandora
meaning the all-gifted is the Greek equivalent of the Christian
interpretation of Eve because she is blamed for releasing upon
the world all evils, through her untamed curiosity to know. She
looked into the box she was given. Mulvey wished to reverse the
cultural condemnation of Pandora and rescue her as the figure of a
necessary, political curiosity epistemophilia, a love of knowledge.
OKeeffes curiosity: art as knowledge
For Mulvey, the myth of Pandora encodes three key phallocentric
myths: femininity as enigma; the female body as an inside and an
outside, the beautiful surface of the latter hiding the dangerous
horror of the former; female curiosity and desire for knowledge
as transgressive and endangering. Mulvey proposes a feminist
counter-reading. Pandoras curiosity does indeed act out a
feminine desire to know a doubled self, surface and interior, with
the latter being identified with the image of a box or the calyx
of a flower. Feminist curiosity, however, transforms the negative
topography of the woman as box by exposing the idea as a
masculine psychosexual anxiety that has been projected onto
woman. By offering other ways of representing femininities, critical
feminist curiosity can, in turn, become a creative drive to know
bodies and genders differently.31
So I want to return to where I began this study of the attempts
to see and define the work of Georgia OKeeffe between the
1920s and the 1970s. The historical evidence situates OKeeffes
practice in the heady spaces of emergent discourses of American
cultural modernism, which clearly overstated the sexualisation
of her art works in a manner that was evidently masculinist but
not entirely sexist. The feminist reconsideration after 1970 of that
historical representation of OKeeffe, written through the prism of
a new, theoretically expanded consideration of similar questions
art, bodies, forms, difference has given us both a critique
of the discourse of the 1920s and varied reassessments of the
unfinished business of understanding modernisms engagement
with the world, infused with potentially eroticised or psycho-
symbolic intensities by means of its preoccupations with materials,
forms and processes of making. By refusing the earlier model of
self-expression, and by reminding ourselves that making any art
is a negotiation with a range of conventions, tropes, systems and
ideologies, as well as with materialities, I suggest we arrive at
the proposition of art-making as a desire for knowledge: a desire
to see by means of making, not paintings of things in the world,
but painting as a way to be in the world, a world constantly
presenting its formal challenges, which cannot be disentangled
from our deeply subjective investments and fantasies. Between
the two points of critical reception that have bound OKeeffe
to her body and its imagined sex or gender, lies the woman
who drove cars vast distances alone across the central U.S.
and settled far away from urban centres, walking the canyons
of New Mexico and fashioning a way of living expressed in
every detail of her home, dress, collection and way of life. While
repeated exhibitions seem to generate a rash of critical writing
that anticipates the icon and then hates the celebrity and thus must
crush both, always ready to find fault, it is time to try and see what
OKeeffe was herself trying to see in such a diversity of things of
the world: the abstract continuity of unseen patterns and clues,
culled in perhaps unrecognizable form at first, but revealing when
examined, a simple clarity, wholeness. To wrench that from what
modernist art and theory offered this artist was indeed a Pandoran
gesture in the feminist sense; it was a desire for knowledge.
114
 Fig.105
Calla Lily in Tall Glass No. 2 1923
Oil paint on board
81.6 x 30.5
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
Fig.106
Calla Lilies on Red 1928
Oil paint on canvas
81.6 x 43.5
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

116 117
 Fig.107 Fig.108
The Eggplant 1924 Alligator Pear 1923
Oil paint on canvas Pastel on paper
81.5 x 30.5 30.5 x 25.4
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Private collection

118 119
 Fig.109 Fig.110
Oriental Poppies 1927 Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 1932
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 101.9 121.9 x 101.6
The Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

120 121
 Fig.111 Fig.112 Fig.113
Dark Iris No.1 1927 Petunia and Glass Bottle 1924 Black Iris 1926
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
81.3 x 30.5 50.8 x 25.4 91.4 x 75.9
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center Denver Art Museum The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

122 123
 Fig.114 Fig.115
Red Amaryllis 1937 White Iris 1930
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
30.5 x 25.7 101.6 x 76.2
Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

124 125
 Fig.116 Fig.117
Two Calla Lilies on Pink 1928 Jimson Weed 1936
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 76.2 177.8 x 212.1
Philadelphia Museum of Art Indianapolis Museum of Art

126 127
 Fig.118
Horses Skull on Blue 1931
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 40.6
Collection of Arizona State University Art Museum
Fig.119
Horses Skull with Pink Rose 1931
Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 76.2
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

128 129
 Fig.120
White Calico Flower 1931
Oil paint on canvas
76.7 x 91.9
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Fig.121
Cows Skull with Calico Roses 1931
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 61
The Art Institute of Chicago

130 131
 Fig.122 Fig.123
Rams Head, White Hollyhock-Hills Mules Skull with Pink Poinsettia 1936
(Rams Head and White Hollyhock, New Mexico) 1935 Oil paint on canvas
Oil paint on canvas 101.9 x 76.2
76.2 x 91.5 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
Brooklyn Museum, New York

132 133
 Fig.124
Summer Days 1936
Oil paint on canvas
91.8 x 76.5
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Fig.125
Deers Skull with Pedernal 1936
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 76.5
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

134 135
 Fig.126
From the Faraway, Nearby 1937
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 101.9
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

136 137
 Georgia OKeeffe
The Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe
Paul Rosenfeld
Vanity Fair, no.19
October 1922
The art of Georgia OKeeffe combines amazingly exquisite subtleties of
statement with tremendous boldness of feeling. Fused in her paintings
there exist tenderest, rose-petal gradations and widest, most robust
oppositions of color. The most complexly varied contraries of tone are
juxtaposed with a breathtaking freshness. Chords of complementary colors
are made to abut their flames directly upon one another, filling with
delicate and forceful thrust and counterthrust the spaces of her canvases.
Through this Virginian, the polyharmonies of the compositions of
Stravinsky and of Leo Ornstein seem to have begotten sisters in the sister
art of painting.
Her work exhibits passage upon passage comparable to nothing more
justly than to the powerfully resistant planes of close intricate harmony
characteristic of some of the modern music. She appears to have a
power like the composers, of creating deft, subtle, intricate chords and of
concentrating two such complexes with all the appositional power of two
simple complementary colors. And the modern music is no more removed
from both the polyphony of the madrigalists and the predominantly
homophonic effects of the romantic composers, than this painting from
both the ruggedly but simply interplaying areas of the renaissance, and the
close, gentle, melting harmonies of the impressionists.
Her use of opposites
For Georgia OKeeffes seems to be the power of feeling simultaneously
the profoundest oppositions. Here is not the single-tracked mind, with
the capacity for feeling only a single principle at a time. She seems never
conscious of a single principle without simultaneously being aware of the
contrary that gives it life. And she seems aware of the opposites with a
definiteness, a clearness, a condensation that is marvellous. Close upon
each other in her vision there lie the greatest extremes, the greatest
distances, far and near, hot and cold, sweet and bitter; two halves of any
truth. Her art is a swift sounding of the abysses of the spectrum, and an
immediate relation of every color to every other.
Many modern painters have perceived the relativity of all color; have
felt that every hue implies the presence in some form or other of its
138
The Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe Paul Rosenfeld
complement, its ideal opponent that gives it force; and have expressed
those complements in their works. But few have dared place a sharp triad
based on red in as close juxtaposition to one equally sharp based on green
as has this American. She lays them close upon each other, point against
point, flame upon flame. For her, the complementariness of these two sets
of colors is as natural as the process of breathing.
Other painters have recognized the relation of all colors to pure white
since pure white contains them all; few have had it in them to dare abut
hardest piercing white between baking scarlets and the green of age-old
glaciers, and been able to make ecstatically lyrical the combination. Other
painters have felt the gamut from intensest cold to intensest heat within
the limits of a single color, and have registered it in their gradations; few,
it seems, have been able to race the entire scale with such breathless
rapidity, to proceed in one small area of green from the luxuriant
Amazonian heat of green mottled with dusty yellow, to the bitter antarctic
cold of green-blue.
Orange-red and blue-green
But it is with subtlety that these tremendous oppositions are stated. They
OKeeffe was actually
are more often implied than baldly set down. It may be a chord of burning
born in Wisconsin.
Her family moved green that is felt against one of incandescent red; a chord of intensest
to Virginia in 1902. blue against ripe orange. But most often the greens and the blues will be
represented by unusual, subtle shades. They will be implied rather more
than definitely stressed; the green felt through a kindred shade of blue,
the blue through a kindred green. A major triad of full rose, orange and
violet will be played against one on green in which the yellow and the
blue will be scarcely more than shadowed forth in yellowish green and
bluish green. Besides, OKeeffe does not play the obvious complements
of hot and cold against each other. It is more often the two warm tones in
the two triads that will be found juxtaposed in her compositions, and the
two cold. Warm orange-red of the calla is fronted with dissolving tropical
yellow-green; acid frozen blue-green with cool violet. Oblique, close, tart
harmonies are found throughout her work; to them are due much of its
curious, biting, pungent savor. It is the latitude between proximate tones,
between shades of the same color, that is most often stressed by this artist.
Dazzling white is set directly against tones of pearl; arctic green against
the hues of tropical vegetation; violet abuts upon fruity tomato-orange. It
is as though OKeeffe felt the same great width between minor seconds
that Leo Ornstein, say, perceives. And although she manages to run the
entire gamut between heat and coolth of a tone, within a diminutive area,
her scale makes no sacrifice of subtleties. The most delicious gradations
remain distinct and pure. Hence, tiny forms have the distinct rotundity
which many other painters manage to obtain only in bulkier masses.
OKeeffes Forms
A combination of boldness and subtlety like the one which exists in the
color of OKeeffe exists also in the shapes born in her mind with her
139
 Georgia OKeeffe
color-schemes, and expressed by them. Precisely as in her harmonies,
the widest plunges and the tenderest gradations play against each other,
and fuse marvellously, so do severe, almost harsh forms combine with
strangest, most sensitive flower-like shapes. In these masses there lives the
same subtlety in bold strokes, the same profound effects in daintiness.
Rigid, hard-edged forms traverse her canvases like swords through cringing
flesh. Great rectangular menhirs plow through veil-like textures; lie in the
midst of diaphanous color like stones in quivering membranes. Sharp,
straight lines, hard as though they had been ruled, divide swimming color
from color. Rounds are described as by the scratching point of a compass.
But, intertwined with these naked spires thrusting upward like Alp
pin[n]acles, there lie the strangest, unfurling, blossom-delicate forms.
Shapes as tender and sensitive as trembling lips, seem slowly, ecstatically
to unfold before the eye. It is as though one had been given to see the
mysterious parting movement of petals under the rays of sudden fierce
heat; or the scarcely perceptible twist of a leaf in a breath of air; of the
tremulous throbbing of a diminutive bird-breast. Lines as sinuous and
softly breathing as melodies for the chromatic flute climb tendril-like
[beside] the severe.
And in the definition of these flower-movements, these tremblingly
unfurling corollas, what precision, what jewel-like firmness! The color of
OKeeffe has an edge that is like a lines. Here, for almost the first time,
one seems to see pigment used with the exquisite definiteness, the sharp
presence, of linear markings. There are certain of these streaks of pigment
which appear licked on with the point of the tongue, so vibrant and lyrical
are they. The painter appears able to move with the utmost composure
and awareness amid sensations so intense they are well nigh insupportable,
and so rare and evanescent the mind faints in seeking to hold them; and,
here, in the regions of the spirit where the light is low on the horizon
and the very flames darkling, to see clearly as in fullest noon, and to
sever with the delicacy and swiftness of the great surgeon aplunge in the
entrails of a patient.
Her vast distances
The sense of vasty distances imparted by even the smaller of these
curiously passionate and yet crystallinely pure paintings flows directly
from the rapidly and unfalteringly executed decisions of the artist. The
tremendous oppositions felt between near-lying colors, the exquisite
differentiations perceived between graded shades of a single hue; and the
extreme delicacy and unflagging sureness with which they are registered,
carry one down into profound abysses and out through cloud-spaces and
to interstellar lands that appear to have scarce any rapport with the little
rectangles of canvas through which they are glimpsed. One falls from a
single blue to another down gulfs of the empyrean. The small intense
volumes take on the bulk of protagonists in some cosmic drama. Tart,
gnarled apples, smooth, naked treetrunks, strange abstract forms that
140
The Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe Paul Rosenfeld
are like the shapes of sails and curtains and cloaks billowed by sea-winds;
all her masses are each in some magical fashion informed by the ruthless
Titan elements that toss the earth like a baseball in their play.
There are canvases of OKeeffes that make one to feel life in the dim
regions where human and animal and plant are one, indistinguishable,
and where the state of existence is blind pressure and dumb unfolding.
There are spots in this work wherein the artist seems to bring before one
the outline of a whole universe, an entire course of life, mysterious cycles
of birth and reproduction and death, expressed through the terms of a
womans body. For, there is no stroke laid by her brush, whatever it is she
may paint, that is not curiously, arrestingly female in quality. Essence of
very womanhood permeates her pictures. Whether it be the blue lines of
mountains reflecting themse[l]ves in the morning stillnesses of lakewater,
or the polyphony of severe imagined shapes she represents; whether it be
deep-toned, lustrous, gaping tulips or wicked, regardful alligator-pears;
it is always as though the quality of the forms of a womans body, the
essence of the grand white surfaces had been approached to the eye,
and the elusive scent of unbound hair. Yet, it is female, this art, only as is
the person of a woman when dense, quivering, endless life is felt through
her body; when long tresses exhale the aromatic warmth of unknown
primaeval submarine forests, and the dawn and the planets glint in the
spaces between cheeks and brows. It speaks to one ever as do those high
moments when the very stuff of external nature in mountain-sides and
fullbreasted clouds, in blue expanse of roving water and rolling treetops,
seems enveloped, as by a membrane, by the mysterious brooding principle
of womans being; and never, not ever, as speak profaner others.
The woman in the paintings
It is to a singularly conscious and singularly integrated personality that
these canvases refer us. Beside the tremendous decisions that constitute
this art, one sees the interplay of an intense consciousness of the
elements of ordinary life and an absolute obedience to the promptings
of the inward voice; and the simple truthfulness of living becoming the
truthfulness of art, and the art in turn sharpening consciousness and trust
in the intuitions. We glimpse on the plane of practical existence a woman
singularly whole, moving from choice to choice with uttermost heartiness
and simplicity. We see a woman who herself sees deeply into ordinary
living; perceives beside good, evil; beside love, hatred; beside life-giving,
destruction; beside birth, death; and who, for all her intense awareness of
the way life leads, of the implications of a single choice, of the possible
results of any action, nevertheless, accepts black with white in serene and
relaxed composure, and for the sake of the ineffable boon of life, makes
her decisions. And what she is within herself, that, because of her [artists]
orientation, becomes visible to her in external objects.
Because she feels clearly where she is woman most; because she decides
in life as though her consciousness were seated beneath her heart where
141
 Georgia OKeeffe

the race begins; she, the painter, moves with like profundity into external
nature. There is no piercing the rind of nature at any point that is not a
simultaneous piercing at many points. There is no manner of deepened
intercourse for the artist that does not become a corresponding
approfundization of his sense of his material. There is nothing really
experienced that does not become for him aesthetics. So outside herself,
Georgia OKeeffe perceives as few others have perceived, the refractions
of light on solids, the relativity of color; and registers them into unswerving
faithfulness. In rocks and trees, in flowers and skies, she feels the secret
life. She feels in them the thing that is the same with something within
herself. Through them her soul becomes visible to her.

She is one of those persons of the hour who, like Lawrence, show[s]
D.H. Lawrence
(18851930),
an insight into the facts of life of an order well nigh intenser than we
English writer.
have known. She is one of those who seem the forerunners of a more
biologically evolved humanity. Of that more richly evolved humanity she
may not be as perfect an expression as certain other artists in the world
today of their own station in evolution. Her career is very young; and to
place her work beside that of some of her contemporaries is to be aware
that the greater quickness, the greater juiciness, for all the subtlety and
vast scope of her spirit, is not always in her canvases. But her base seems
to lie high up the line of progress. Her consciousness is akin to something
that one feels stirring blindly and anguishedly in the newest men and
women all through the land. And in that fact there lies the cause of her
high importance.

Paul Rosenfeld, The Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe: The Work of the Young Artist Whose Canvases Are
to Be Exhibited in Bulk for the First Time This Winter, Vanity Fair, no.19, October 1922, pp.56, 112, 114.
Reprinted in Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929, Ann Arbor, MI, 1989,
pp.1759.

142
 Location and Dislocation in the Life and Art of Georgia OKeeffe Cody Hartley

Location and Fig.127

The House I Live In 1937

Dislocation in the
Oil paint on canvas
35.6 x 76.2
Donald Clifford Gallup papers
Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Life and Art of

Where I was born and where and how I have lived is But this is not the only place that shaped OKeeffe and held
unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been significance for the artist. OKeeffe, in fact, lived in many
that should be of interest. locations across the U.S. before permanently moving to New
Georgia OKeeffe, 19761 Mexico in 1949, when she was in her early sixties. Moreover,

Georgia OKeeffe
If you dont know where you are, you dont know who you are.
Wendell Berry, 19812
Georgia OKeeffe and northern New Mexico are inextricably
linked in the minds of many. The region is frequently referred to
as OKeeffe Country, much to the chagrin of the Pueblo Indians
and other Native American residents, whose forebears called this
land home for millennia, and the more recently arrived Hispanic
population, which traces its origins to the Spanish conquest
of New Mexico in the seventeenth century. OKeeffe herself
would probably have been the first to dismiss the idea. One
imagines that OKeeffe, who masterfully integrated herself into
the community as a respectful and decent neighbour, rather than
imposing herself as the great and famous celebrity artist, would
have been annoyed at the very notion of granting naming rights to
Cody Hartley an individual who only moved permanently to the area in 1949.
Still, for many living outside New Mexico, OKeeffes paintings of
the dramatic landscape are emblematic of the region. Her nearly
mythical reputation as a staunchly independent woman living
alone in the remote high desert can overshadow all else about this
complicated place known as New Mexico, and the association
between OKeeffe and the land that she portrayed is enduring.
she was intrepid exploring her immediate environment and
enthusiastically travelling to more distant destinations. Even when
nominally settled in a given location, OKeeffe was constantly
moving: on foot, on horseback, by car, train or aeroplane.
Considering OKeeffes relationship to place or rather, to many
places over her long lifetime offers a rewarding and productive
set of contradictions to explore. What follows is a consideration of
the importance, not just of place, but of the intentional disruptions
and transitions created by travel, as essential influences on
OKeeffes art and life.
Like the hardy crops on the farmlands surrounding her childhood
home in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, OKeeffe established roots
wherever she made her home. She also, however, thrived upon
frequent transplantations, adapting to regular and radical
changes in geography and climate. The contrasts between
the various regions of the U.S. in which she lived including
the Midwest, the Southeast, West Texas, New York and New
Mexico could not be more stark. This was not merely a matter
of different scenery, or the difference between urban and rural
areas. In meaningful ways, everything about these places was
different, and she took something productive from each.

144 145
 Georgia OKeeffe Location and Dislocation in the Life and Art of Georgia OKeeffe Cody Hartley

OKeeffes early life and career comprised a series of moves,
punctuated by personal and career disruptions and familial
tragedies. Already, by her thirteenth birthday, she was living
about 24 kilometres away from her familys farm as a boarding
student at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin. By
the time she moved to New York City in 1918 to live with Alfred
Stieglitz, at age thirty, she had lived in more than a dozen
locations, from large cities like Chicago and New York to smaller
communities in Virginia and South Carolina, and as far west as
the Texas panhandle. Moreover, she had moved back and forth
between various communities several times, to pursue educational
opportunities or work, including short-term teaching assignments.
Her family was unable to support her financially and, being
unmarried, she was entirely self-reliant during her twenties. She
managed, also, to travel to Colorado, via New Mexico, to see the
Rocky Mountains in 1917, giving her a first glimpse of the region
that would come to absorb her attention in subsequent decades.
on an isolated desert plain at the base of colourful sandstone
cliffs. With little water and alkaline soil, only sagebrush and scrub
can thrive. Abiqui is an ancient village, on a bluff overlooking
the lush fields and green ribbon of trees that trace the route of the
Chama River as it flows towards the Rio Grande.
The hints of a seasonal existence had begun to emerge in the
1910s, as OKeeffe pursued teaching opportunities and adapted
her life to the academic calendar; this migratory pattern was
then firmly established as part of her life with Stieglitz. After her
rediscovery of New Mexico in 1929, OKeeffe defined her own
seasonal pattern, spending most summers in New Mexico and
returning to New York for the winter, until permanently relocating
to New Mexico in 1949, three years after Stieglitzs death. Even
then, she split her time between her two homes in New Mexico,
frequently travelling the 24 kilometres between Abiqui and
Ghost Ranch.
road trip on todays well-maintained highways. In 1937, a few
years after discovering the house she would eventually purchase
at Ghost Ranch, she again explored Colorado, Utah and Arizona,
now driving her own Ford motor-car and travelling with a small
group that included photographer Ansel Adams (190284).4 The
following year she travelled with this same group to California,
to spend more than two weeks backpacking deep into Yosemite
National Park (fig.133). In these years, she would also frequently
make the 240-kilometre trip west from her home in New Mexico
to the isolated Black Place a dramatic lunar landscape of
black and grey hills to camp and paint, regardless of the
freezing storms or blistering heat.
While she made her home in New Mexico for the last 37 years
of her life, OKeeffe continued to explore near and far, travelling
in travel boxes she created to hold souvenirs (fig.131). Alongside
these global forays, OKeeffe was also travelling back and
forth to New York and other cities to oversee exhibitions of
her work. Throughout the rest of the 1960s, she continued to
travel internationally, while also making several trips to raft the
Colorado River, her last being in 1970 at the age of eighty-two.
This impressive catalogue of destinations and the constant motion
and travel of this supremely peripatetic life might seem at odds
with an artist whose work has become so strongly associated with
just a few key locations: West Texas, New York (both New York
City and Lake George) and New Mexico.
Many of the modernist artists associated with Stieglitz expressed

OKeeffes time in New York and New Mexico, and her traversing Interspersed among stays at these many, semi-permanent
between these two poles, is the best known, in part because the residencies, there were constant travels and movements. New
journey has become a geographic proxy for her relationship with York summers in the 1920s were broken up by trips up and down
Alfred Stieglitz. However, even New York and New Mexico are

Fig.128
House on the Hill, Lake George 1922/4
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
11.4 x 9.1
Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library
not singular locations, but represent a series of different homes,
networks and geographies, enjoyed across a seasonal rhythm.
There were, over the years between 1918 and 1949, three
apartments in New York City, and the sprawling rural retreat of
Lake George, where OKeeffe and Stieglitz spent their summers
and often stayed long into the autumn. The site housed a number
of buildings, as well as gardens, orchards and access to paths
for exploring the surrounding woods and mountains (fig.128). In
New Mexico, OKeeffe spent her first few visits, between 1929
and 1936, staying with various friends, before establishing a first
home, in 1936, at Ghost Ranch, followed by a second at Abiqui,
creating what would effectively become summer and winter
homes, only a short distance apart but offering distinctly different
environments. Ghost Ranch is arid and dry, dramatically situated
Fig.129
My Shanty, Lake George 1922
Oil paint on canvas
50.8 x 68.9
The Phillips Collection, Washington
the eastern seaboard, to Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Occasionally, trips took her further afield to Canada, Bermuda
and Hawaii, for example, in the 1930s. Even after making
the long journey from New York to New Mexico; once there,
OKeeffe immediately took to exploring the region. Her New
Mexico summers were punctuated by trips across the West.
During her first, in 1929, she went west into Arizona to see the
Grand Canyon taking roads she described as terrible, across
cruel cruel country and north to Bryce Canyon in Utah, then
east to Colorado Springs, before looping back to the town of
Taos, where she was visiting Mabel Dodge Luhan.3 Covering a
distance greater than 2,400 kilometres, this would be a trying
Fig.130
Georgia OKeeffe at Friday mosque, Esfahn 1959
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
7.6 x 10.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
frequently across the U.S. and internationally. In the late 1940s,
she travelled to Arizona to see Frank Lloyd Wrights winter
home in Arizona, Taliesin West, and to Nashville, to oversee the
installation of the Stieglitz collection given to Fisk University. In
the 1950s, she made her first international trip since the 1930s,
driving to Mexico City to visit fellow artists Diego Rivera (1886
1957), Frida Kahlo and Miguel Covarrubias (190457), and
tour the Yucatn Peninsula. Subsequent international trips included
visits to France and Spain, Peru and Oaxaca. She joined a small
group of travelers for a three-and-a-half-month world tour in 1959,
which took her across India, on to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore,
Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Pakistan, and then to Iran
(fig.130), Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, before concluding
in Rome. She claimed that she should have seen enough to years; even when she did speak of these locations, some of her
satisfy me for the rest of my life, but clearly it was not enough. comments were understood as disparaging conflating her
Just a year later, in 1960, she was travelling again, visiting Japan,
Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Cambodia and the Pacific
islands on a six-week leisure trip.5 These trips were memorialised
Fig.131
Georgia O'Keeffe's India travel box and ephemera c.1950s60s
Various materials
7.62 x 22.9 x 29.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
a particular interest in understanding and conveying the distinctive
character of a given region, capturing what has been referred
to as a sense of place.6 Painter and poet Marsden Hartley had
Maine and Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Arthur Dove created
poetic visual symphonies based upon his experience of Long
Island, New York. But perhaps none have been linked with
specific American landscapes and places as strongly as OKeeffe.
In part, this is an accident of autobiography and art-historical
interpretation. OKeeffe herself, in her later years, emphasised her
life in New Mexico and spoke less of the Texas or Lake George
complicated relationship with Alfred Stieglitz (and his family) with
her time in Lake George and reducing it to a string of annoyances
and frustrations. Comments made about enduring the green, and

146 147
 Georgia OKeeffe Location and Dislocation in the Life and Art of Georgia OKeeffe Cody Hartley

artist. Her New Mexico houses exhibited other shared features,
including large plate-glass windows (unusual in homes in the
1940s, particularly those with unreinforced adobe construction)
and corner windows in her bedrooms, which afforded sweeping
vistas to the north-west and north-east, at Ghost Ranch and
Abiqui respectively.
represented distinctly different cultural values. There were also
enough Easterners artists and writers, along with wealthy tourists
or part-time residents that one might enjoy an evening of urbane
discussion the equal of any to be had in New York, if so desired.9
Wealthy patron of the arts Mabel Dodge Luhan, escaping New
York City to find a utopian alternative in the town of Taos, did
nothing so well as recreate her Greenwich Village salon in the

Fig.132
My Backyard 1937
Oil paint on canvas
50.8 x 91.4
New Orleans Museum of Art

a statement made in the 1970s, asserting that Lake George was
not really painting country, seem to have further encouraged
scholars and biographers to reduce the entire Lake George
experience to a trial to be endured before OKeeffe ultimately
found her place in New Mexico.7
In opening her 1976 autobiography, OKeeffe explicitly
dismissed the importance of where and how she had lived
(see opening quote, above). It seems that many OKeeffe
biographers and scholars took her at her word, but this
conventional wisdom is being reconsidered by a new generation
of writers. As the research of curator Erin B. Coe, in her recent
exhibition and catalogue Modern Nature, has demonstrated
by returning to the documentary evidence OKeeffes letters,
and comments made during the 1920s while at Lake George
and the visual evidence of the work produced during those
years, it is clear that OKeeffe found the region of the Adirondack
mountains incredibly stimulating and artistically productive.8
Art historian Amy Von Lintel has questioned the long-standing
assumption that OKeeffes time in Texas, where she taught
art in several communities between 1912 and 1918, was
merely a detour before she met Stieglitz and her career could
really begin. By returning, like Coe, to documentary evidence,
Von Lintel has revealed the full, glowing energy of OKeeffes
time in Texas, discovering a confident, energetic young OKeeffe,
who immersed herself in the landscape and in her teaching
career, developed deep and meaningful relationships (some
romantic), and who was, by all accounts, a vibrant
and enthusiastic member of the communities in which she
lived and worked.
OKeeffes dismissal of the importance of where and how
she lived also seems at odds with the substantial energy and
thought invested by the artist in her homes. From her boarding-
house rooms in Texas to her New York City apartments; from the
Shanty (her studio) at Lake George, through Ghost Ranch and
Abiqui, we see an evolution and perfection of specific ideas
about how to live, how to work and how to structure ones home
to facilitate an artistic practice. As nearly 10,000 visitors a year
discover on visiting her home in Abiqui, OKeeffes houses were
as much expressions of her creativity and modernist aesthetic as
her artworks. She used a minimalist colour palette of white and
other neutral tones a practice started at least as early as 1917,
when she painted the walls of a room in which she was staying
in Canyon, Texas. In her New York apartments in the 1920s and
1930s, furnishings were spare, often covered in white slip covers.
Nothing frivolous appeared (a strong repudiation of the Victorian
tastes popular during her youth), and this spartan aesthetic was
continued in her New Mexico homes.
At Lake George, she established her studio in a former barn
(fig.129), away from the main Stieglitz family home. This separate
space served her well and established a lifelong preference for
segregating her working space from the main house. At Ghost
Ranch, she closed off a doorway disrupting the original floor
plan of an interconnected circuit of rooms to isolate her studio
and bedroom from the main living spaces. With that change,
it became necessary to go outdoors in order to access her
studio and bedroom. She went further at Abiqui putting her
studio and bedroom in a separate building entirely, completely
detached from the rest of her home, where guests and staff
could go about their daily activities without interrupting the
Fig.133
Ansel Adams
Untitled (David McAlpin, Al Rhode, Godfrey
Rockefeller, O'Keeffe and Helen Rockefeller) 1938
Photograph
11.4 x 14.6
Collection Center for Creative Photography
University of Arizona
Her own words aside, where and how OKeeffe lived is important. desert. And if one wished to escape such conversations, it was
OKeeffe did not live just anywhere and the places in which she easy enough to completely avoid that crowd driving off into the
spent most of her time shaped her career and identity. Beyond dust, removing to a place like Ghost Ranch.
the numerous places she lived in during her teens and early
twenties the selection of which was driven first and foremost by Everywhere she lived, OKeeffe interacted with diverse peoples,
educational and career opportunities, and secondarily by family enjoying varied cultural traditions, culinary to linguistic, while
considerations the poles of her adult existence were New York also having an impact on those she met. Repeatedly, one finds
and the Southwest. recollections of how distinctive OKeeffes personality and
style were, but also about the positive impact she had as a
One was the undisputed cultural and artistic capital of the U.S., teacher, a friend or a neighbour. OKeeffe navigated both New
home to the collectors, galleries and museums most significant for York and New Mexico society with dexterity. She handled
establishing and sustaining a professional artistic career. The other wealthy collectors and patrons with aplomb; there are amusing
was still, in many ways, a frontier: a remote, vast and dramatic anecdotes recording the way OKeeffe would manage (and
landscape, largely undeveloped and un-peopled. It had a vitality subtly manipulate) visiting collectors by offering only a few works,
and energy quite different from that of the urban metropolis: wild sometimes suggesting that a particular artwork was not really
and windy, rough and remote. Both Texas and New Mexico available, then slowly but certainly heightening desire until she
retained some of the features of the romanticised, mythical West: relented and sold the unavailable work for a higher price. There
cowboys and cattle-drives, booms and busts, prairie, desert are also, however, accounts of deep, lasting friendships with
and rock. In New Mexico, those people who did occupy the collectors that far surpass the bounds of commercial transaction.
land both indigenous and Hispanic interested OKeeffe and

148 149
 Georgia OKeeffe Location and Dislocation in the Life and Art of Georgia OKeeffe Cody Hartley

New York and New Mexico represented two distinct poles within
a contemporary dialogue about national culture. During the
1920s and 1930s, as OKeeffe came to prominence, modern
artists in the U.S. were deeply concerned with identifying
something authentic and distinct upon which they could build a
national culture. They sought subjects that conveyed the energy
of modern life and the civic ambitions of the American people,
from skyscrapers to the advanced industrial plants churning out
new consumer goods like Ford motor-cars. They also looked to
individual regions, where the people and landscape expressed
something unique and original that might distinguish the U.S.
from other nations. This search for a national art was occurring
in many nations. Particularly for former colonies, which had long
was a compelling image, which, reinforced by her emphatically
modern, American depiction of subjects such as New York City
skyscrapers, played into the generalised hunger for a national art.
It was in New Mexico, however, that OKeeffe made her most
distinct contribution to visually defining a national culture.
OKeeffe was not the first modern artist to paint New Mexico.
In fact, it was already a destination for artists from the East
Coast, modern or otherwise, and had been since the end of the
nineteenth century, when the Taos Society of Artists first began
creating their highly romanticised paintings of Native American
life and the New Mexican landscape. Prior to OKeeffes arrival,
important modern artists including Marsden Hartley and Stuart

Fig.134
Radiator Building Night, New York 1927
Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 76.2
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, co-owned by Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee
and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

At the same time, she exhibited great savvy and cultural
understanding as she negotiated the complicated social politics
of the village of Abiqui, where residents trace their lineage (and
land-ownership) back to the sixty families originally named when
the land was granted by the Spanish governor in 1754. She was
a gracious host to her guests, be they museum directors such as
Daniel Catton Rich of The Art Institute of Chicago, or a group of
neighbourhood kids.
New York and New Mexico, each allowed OKeeffe to define
a certain personal and professional identity while developing
different aspects of her artistic practice. In the 1920s, with her
time split seasonally between New York City and Lake George,
OKeeffe developed and honed her subject matter, her approach
to painting and her professional identity. It is this decade in which
she most closely collaborated with Stieglitz (see Greenough in
this publication), masterfully launching exhibitions of her work and
managing critics and the press an activity best done in New
York City. She painted dramatic views of the city skyline, a leitmotif
for many of the modernists expressing the confidence of the
modern city and distinctive as the single most recognisable visual
characteristic of North American cities like New York and Chicago,
as opposed to older European cities. Looking out across the city
from her apartment or capturing the looming skyscrapers rising into
the sky, she employed thoroughly modern compositional strategies
to convey the energy and dynamism of the city (fig.134). It was at
Lake George, however, that she found the subjects that brought her
widespread critical and popular acclaim. From the hill overlooking
the lake and the surrounding gardens, orchards and woods, she
found the flowers, trees, leaves and landscapes that dominate her
output in the 1920s (figs 789, 828). To be clear, it was not the
subject matter that brought her recognition her subjects could
not have been more conventional. Rather, it is what she did with
that material: coming to terms with abstraction, incorporating a
modern sense of spiritualism based in the experience of the natural
world, and developing a powerfully modern sense of composition,
which played with scale and successfully overturned formulas
for cohesive compositions. The magnified flowers spilling across
and beyond the canvases (see Abstraction White Rose 1927,
fig.31) reflected a new and different sensibility, which had more in
common with avant-garde photography than traditional painting.
This is not surprising, considering that the important work done at
Lake George was often completed in dialogue with Stieglitz. The
release and publication in 2011 of their correspondence shed fresh
light on their complicated relationship, making it clear that, despite
many frustrations, they had an abiding love that was grounded and
sustained by their shared artistic, creative and intellectual pursuits.10
Her work in the 1920s also reflects deep knowledge of the latest
ideas in art, in both Europe and the U.S., while reflecting a specific
and unique individual style.
Fig.135
Cows Skull: Red, White, and Blue 1931
Oil paint on canvas
101.3 x 91.1
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
lived in the shadow of European artistic culture, the desire to Davis (18921964) had visited and worked in New Mexico,
differentiate and establish a valid national culture was strongly mostly at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan. John Marin
felt. Stieglitz was a foremost proponent of cultural nationalism (18701953) was also in residence at Luhans compound during
and, in OKeeffe, he found an artist who seemed to have OKeeffes first summer visit in 1929. Already, when OKeeffe
unparalleled qualifications as an authentic American. She had arrived, the Southwest had been identified as a region with
been raised on a Midwestern farm, trained only in American potential for invigorating American culture and defining an art
schools, and she was living and working in west Texas when they distinct from European precedents. In a series of essays published
first corresponded. He could conceive of her as being free of the between 1918 and 1922, Marsden Hartley proposed that Native
influence of European training. In truth, OKeeffes intellectual American culture could provide the inspiration for establishing an
curiosity and ambition ensured that she was fully aware of authentic national culture and resolving the perceived spiritual
the latest ideas emerging from the artistic centres of Europe. and aesthetic poverty of the U.S.11
Nonetheless, the idea of a woman artist emerging from native soil

150 151
 Georgia OKeeffe Location and Dislocation in the Life and Art of Georgia OKeeffe Cody Hartley

Fig.137
View from OKeeffes Abiqui House in Winter 1964
Photograph, diffusion transfer print on paper
Fig.136 8.9 x 11.4
Winter Road I 1963 Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
Oil paint on canvas
55.9 x 45.7
National Gallery of Art, Washington

Yet it was arguably OKeeffes unique vision of the New Mexico
landscape and her innovative and unusual incorporation of bones
in her paintings that most firmly established New Mexico and the
Southwest in the public imagination. She was aware that she was
responding, almost in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, to the yearning
for a nationalist artwork. Much later, in her 1976 autobiography,
she recalled the anxiety expressed by artists and writers about
creating what she called the Great American Thing (be it the
Great American Novel, the Great American Play, or the Great
American Painting), which seemed ironic to her, given how
focused so many were on Europe:
Czanne was so much in the air that I think the Great
American Painting didnt even seem a possible dream I had
driven across the country many times. I was quite excited
over our country and knew that at that time almost any one
of those great minds would have been living in Europe if it had
been possible for them. They didnt even want to live in New
York how was the Great American Thing going to happen?12
Her answer was to paint a blatantly patriotic image: a cows skull
against a red, white and blue backdrop (fig.135).
The use of bones was unexpected and, as handled by OKeeffe, constant as motion throughout her life is her drawing practice,
completely original. The depiction of skulls in artworks had a
long history within the tradition of the memento mori of course, but
the artist denied such historical references and dismissed morbid
associations with death. Instead, these were abstract objects,
described by her as as beautiful as anything I know.13 During her
first summer in New Mexico, OKeeffe became fascinated with
the bleached white bones she found scattered about the desert.
She shipped some of them back to New York as a souvenir of the
region that had inspired one of her best years in painting. In fact,
many of the best-known paintings of bones the very works that
seem so iconically New Mexican were painted in New York
City during the long winter months. This includes Cows Skull:
Red, White, and Blue 1931. The same is true for many of the New
Mexico landscapes. Conceived of during the summer, many of
these paintings were actually finished in New York, from sketches
completed on location.
The idea of Georgia OKeeffe painting her iconic New Mexico
subjects from her New York City apartment seems a fitting vision
of an individual whose existence and comprehension of her
world was based upon a productive balance of rootedness and
disruption, location and dislocation. The only thing that seems as
and it is not accidental that the two were often done in tandem.
Travel and exploration, like sketching, were key to OKeeffes
way of knowing both place and self, of observing and belonging.
Through more than 700 sketches and drawings housed at the
Georgia OKeeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, it becomes
clear that sketching was OKeeffes primary way of familiarising
herself with the visual character of a place. While she carefully
maintained and preserved these sketchbooks throughout her life,
there is little sense of chronological or geographic organisation
within the bound volumes. It appears that she simply grabbed
the nearest sketchbook, opened to an unused page and started
drawing. Studying them is a bit like travelling with OKeeffe:
familiar places emerge and recur, interrupted occasionally by
something new and different. In these sketches, as in the finished
works (which can often be linked back to particular drawings),
OKeeffe began the process of making a place her own, giving it
meaning through her distinct vision. In so doing, she made these
places visible and knowable in profound ways.
For many visitors to the OKeeffe home in Abiqui, this point is
made explicit as they stand at the north-east corner of the house,
where her bedroom looks out across the Chama River Valley and
towards the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east. A highway
runs along the base of a hill beneath her home. To most, it is just
a highway. To OKeeffe, who saw the abstract visual line of the
road clearly, it was much more (figs 1367). 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 I began drawing
and painting it as a new shape.14 Once we have seen it through
OKeeffes artwork, it is impossible to ever see or experience the
view the same way again. The road is forever after seen as a
flowing calligraphic line across the land.
OKeeffe saw her surroundings with remarkable clarity and a
perception honed by experience and a disciplined practice a
practice of looking and making artworks, naturally, but also a
practice of exploration and travel. Intentional dislocation provided
essential creative stimulation. Her abiding ability to understand
and convey the very essence of place, of a specific location, was
equalled and sustained by her intrepid spirit. Helping us see our
world differently, with a fresh perspective, is one of the gifts great
artists offer. Georgia OKeeffes understanding of place, of many
places, was hard-won and it is part of her lasting legacy and gift.

152 153
 Fig.138 Fig.139
Ranchos Church, New Mexico 19301 Black Cross with Stars and Blue 1929
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
62.2 x 91.4 101.6 x 76.2
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas Private collection

154 155
 Fig.140
Soft Gray, Alcalde Hill 192930
Oil paint on canvas
25.5 x 61.2
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington
156
Fig.141
Taos Pueblo 1929/34
Oil paint on canvas
61.6 x 102.2
Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians
and Western Art, Indianapolis
157
 Fig.142
Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico /
Out Back of Maries II 1930
Oil paint on canvas
61.6 x 92.1
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe
Fig.143
The Mountain, New Mexico 1931
Oil paint on canvas
76.4 x 91.8
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

158 159
 Fig.144 Fig.145 Fig.146
Pauls Kachina 1931 Kachina 1934 Rust Red Hills 1930
Oil paint on board Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
21.4 diameter 55.9 x 30.5 40.6 x 76.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Private collection Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University

160 161
 Fig.147 Fig.148
Purple Hills 1935 Pedernal with Red Hills 1936
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
40.6 x 76.2 50.2 x 75.6
The San Diego Museum of Art Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art

162 163
 Fig.149
Another Church, Hernandez, New Mexico 1931
Oil paint on canvas
25.4 x 60.6
The American Museum of Western Art
The Anschutz Collection, Denver
Fig.150
Chama River, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico 1937
Oil paint on canvas
77.5 x 41.9
Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art

164 165
 Fig.151 Fig.152
Horn and Feathers 1937 Red and Yellow Cliffs 1940
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
51 x 61.4 61 x 91.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

166 167
 Fig.153 Fig.154
My Front Yard, Summer 1941 Red Hills and Bones 1941
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
50.9 x 76.5 75.6 x 101.6
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Philadelphia Museum of Art

168 169
 Fig.155 Fig.156 Fig.157
Kachina 1938 A Man from the Desert 1941 Dead Pion Tree 1943
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
17.8 x 17.8 43 x 18 101.6 x 76.2
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

170 171
 Fig.158 Fig.159
Blue Sky 1941 Black Hills with Cedar 19412
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
91.8 x 40.8 40 x 76
Worcester Art Museum Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington

172 173
 Fig.160 Fig.161
Black Place I 1944 Black Place II 1944
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
66 x 76.5 60.8 x 76.1
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

174 175
 Fig.162 Fig.163
Black Place III 1944 Black Place No. IV 1944
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
91.9 x 101.9 76.2 x 91.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Private collection

176 177
 Fig.164 Fig.165
Black Place II 1945 Black Place Green 1949
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
61 x 76.2 94.6 x 117.5
The Vilcek Foundation, New York Private collection

178 179
 Georgia OKeeffe
White Paint and Good Order
~ a single harmony of peace. This is the secret of her paintings. Arabesques
Waldo Frank
Time-Exposures, by Search-Light,
1926
She is a woman who has fused the dark desires of her life into a simplicity
so clear that to most of her friends she is invisible. The smile on her face
half nuns, half Nornsis due to this. She has fame as a painter: the name of
Georgia OKeeffe is known wherever people care for lovely things on canvas.
But she is a woman. She dislikes this invisibility of hers. She wants to be seen.
So much love around her that does not touch her! So much ecstatic praise
that warms her about as much as would fireworks in the air of a winter night.
In the old days when she was a teacher of art in a Texas country school,
she got used to solitudes. She dreamed not of fame then, but of a New York
welcoming and appreciative. She did not guess that in this Manhattan vortex
of artists, amateurs and critics she was to find a spiritual silence beside
which the Texas prairies shouted with understanding.
So OKeeffe smiles. It is a simple, kindling smile: it lights the face with a
maternal splendor. But the confused men and women who behold it, will
not have it so. They insist that her smile, like her pictures, is mysterious.
The girls work, they argue, is Kabala. The girl herself is the Sphinx. Really,
OKeeffe, despite her gifts and her benevolent spirit, has not had a chance.
Look at her. In her black dress, the body is subtly warm. The hands have
a slow grace, as if their natural cleverness had all been turned into such
arts as nursing and caressing. Her voice is like her hands. Her face is very
dark and the eyes are deep: but theres a twinkle in them, both intelligent
and humorous. Does a peasant want to be aloof ? Does a woman want
to be worshiped? Dont you believe it. Its far more fun to be seen and
to be understood. OKeeffes years have deepened, not complicated her.
If this town were a bit simpler, a bit less impure, it might be at home with
her simple purity. If it were less daft on polysyllables, it might hear her
monosyllabic speech. If it were less noisy in its great affairs, it might hear
her chuckle.
For OKeeffe is a peasant a glorified American peasant. Like a peasant, she
is full of loamy hungers of the flesh. Like a peasant, she is full of stardreams.
She is a strong-hipped creature. She has Celt eyes, she has a quiet body. And
as to her esoteric Wisdom, I suspect that it comes down to this: OKeeffe has
180
White Paint and Good Order Waldo Frank
learned, walking through an autumn wood, how the seeming war of shapes
and colors the red and yellow leaves, the shrilling moods of sky melts into
of branch, form-fugues of fruit and leaf, aspirant trees, shouting skyscrapers
of the cityshe resolves them all into a sort of whiteness: she soothes the
delirious colors of the world into a peaceful whiteness.
And then, along came the experts. And they prated mystic symbols: or
Freudian symbols. How could you expect New York to admit that what it
likes in OKeeffe is precisely the fact that she is clear as water? cool as water?
New York is sure, it is too sophisticated to care for anything but cocktails.
What a blow to our pride, to confess that it is neither more nor less than
the well-water deepness of OKeeffe which holds us! Better pour the simple
stuff of her art into cunningly wrought goblets of interpretation. Better talk
of mystic figures of womanhood, of Sumerian entrail-symbols, of womb-
dark hieroglyphics. Doubtless, all this would make the woman tired if she
could not smile.
She was born in a town, prettily named Sun Prairie, in Wisconsin. She liked
William Merritt Chase painting so much that even her visit to New York, where she studied with
(18491916), OKeeffes Chase and at Teachers College, did not turn her off. Then she proceeded
teacher at the Art Students south and got her living by teaching clumsy boys in Texas how to make
League of New York
(19078). pictures of vases and oranges and sunsets. The War drove her north. You
wonder why: and if you understand, you will begin to know the woman.
OKeeffe knew nothing about international events, and she cared even less.
She had no desire to enlist; she was not aching to be a nurse in France. The
War, quite simply, interfered with her teaching art to boys in Texas. OKeeffe
taught art by linking it with life chiefly, by linking it with careless talks about
all kinds of matters. And now she found that there was a subject she must
steer clear of: she could no longer say she did not like bloodshed and empty
rhetoric and lies since a whole particular set of these had become sacred
and patriotic. They got in the way of the lines of the vase with roses she had
set up for her pupils.
Before her, to the north, had come certain charcoal drawings. OKeeffe
had a girl chum in New York. In lieu of letters, ever since 1915, she had
been sending these sketches. And the girl friend, despite OKeeffes stern
forbiddance, had shown the things to Alfred Stieglitz. And Alfred Stieglitz,
after forty years in comradeship with art, said he had been waiting for just
these particular modest drawings. So when the famous gallery at 291 Fifth
Avenue gave its farewell show (the War having put a stop to it) OKeeffes
things were on the walls.
You will observe the woman in all this. No conquering New York with shrewd
ambition. She was quite ready to stay on in Texas. The south was quiet, and
indolent. OKeeffe got on right well with the big boys until the War turns
them loose. Then Alfred Stieglitz draws her northward. Now, it just happens
that Stieglitz is a man who must live in a whirlwind. Wherever the man is,
181
 Georgia OKeeffe

there a whirlwind must foregather. And OKeeffe who is the spirit of quiet
and of peace finds her haven in this whirlwind world of Stieglitz. It is always
hushed and still at the vortex of a maelstrom. If you dont believe it, look at
Georgia OKeeffe.

This genius for quiet is the woman. It is the essence of her. From her pioneer
fathers, wandering west, she has her ability to pitch her camp in any country
and in any season. But the capacity for quiet is older: it is a deep, a peasant
virtue of her mothers.

OKeeffe is very like a tree. Her arms and her head stir like branches in a
gentle breeze. (Her ears are pointed like a fauns and her voice, like leaves,
has a subtle susurration.) She is almost as quiet as a tree, and almost as
instinctive. If a tree thinks, it thinks not with a brain but with every part of
it. So OKeeffe. If a tree speaks or smiles, it is with all its body. So OKeeffe
whose paintings are but the leaves and flowers of herself. If a tree moves,
you dont notice it. And when you find this woman moving through the
wordy whirlwind that ever rages round the rooms of Alfred Stieglitz, you
have the effect of silence.

This silence of hers, this deep peasant stuff of both her mind and body will
explain why Georgia OKeeffe is of so great a value in Babylonian New York.
Neither in Texas nor in Wisconsin did they need her half so much as we.
You know where to find the writings of our granite-marble city? In The New
Yorker. Well, OKeeffes work is the script of the landsideof its loam and of
its lowly hut.

Perhaps such script is Scripture. Well let the critics decide. This much is
sure: to see her is to be minded of some Scriptural wife tilling the soil and
homing with her husband under the storms and sunbeams of Jehovah.
And so to see her is to understand her, and to know her place in Manhattan.

[Waldo Frank], White Paint and Good Order [illustrated with a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz: Georgia
OKeeffe: A Portrait Head 1920], in [Waldo Frank], Time-Exposures by Search-Light, New York 1926,
pp.315. Reprinted in Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 19161929, Ann Arbor,
MI, 1989, pp.2535.

182
 OKeeffes Late Blooms: The Abstract Landscapes - Heike Eipeldauer and Florian Steininger

OKeeffes Late Blooms: Fig.166

The Abstract
Evening Star No. VI 1917
Watercolour on paper
22.5 x 30.5
George OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

Landscapes Georgia OKeeffes work was characterised from the very

Heike Eipeldauer and Florian Steininger
beginning by a complex interrelationship between abstraction
and an affinity for nature between a subjective and an
emotional approach. Her fellow painter Oscar Bluemner (1867
1938) described her art as the kind that springs from within,
while that which is caused from without is imitation Whatever
inner impulse we address towards nature is abstract.1 Nature, in
OKeeffes work, is on the one hand organic, structural, elemental;
an inwards gaze. On the other, it is manifested in landscapes that
open outwards, oscillating between the Romantic sublime and
spiritual infinity.
Organic nature
Georgia OKeeffe, together with Wassily Kandinsky (1866
1944), Arthur Dove (18801946) and Frantiek Kupka
(18711957), might be considered the key proponents of an
abstract movement in the 1910s that focused on the relationship
between nature and the spirit. Kandinskys Improvisations and,
above all, his 1911 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art
excerpts from which OKeeffes husband the photographer Alfred
Stieglitz (18641946) reproduced in 1912 in the journal Camera
Work influenced OKeeffe in her early years:2 The artist with his
free spirit is above nature, and can bend it to his higher purposes.
The artist wishes to address the world through a single whole.3
Kandinskys rejection of the external world of appearances
signified a turn towards an inner, spiritual state based on the
notion of unity between subject and cosmos. The universal rhythm
of life is given abstract form, and colour is transposed into musical
resonance: sound as the vibrating soul of art.4 Dove, who like
OKeeffe was part of the close circle around Stieglitzs New
York gallery, 291, represented for her spiritual art rooted in the
universality of nature: Dove is the only American painter who is
of the earth , she wrote.5 From around 1916, her work evinces
a kind of organic, spiritual abstraction: Blue I 1916 (fig.100) is
a representative example, the broad, unrestrained brushstrokes
forming a spiral shape around an embryonic form. Some stylistic
elements from her symbolist-decorative phase, as manifested in
her charcoal drawings, are still evident. OKeeffe, like Kupka,
would go on to analyse nature on an elemental level. Though she
did not have direct contact with Kupka and his work, it is possible
to observe a consistent stylistic and thematic affinity. The inner
workings of flowers mutate into a cosmic, painterly world, as in
Kupkas Tale of Pistils and Stamens I 1919 (fig.167), for instance,
or numerous floral images by OKeeffe from the same period. Her
synaesthetic paintings, such as Music Pink and Blue No. I 1918
(fig.27), illustrate the emphatic way she cut through the surface
to the inner world beneath. I had to create an equivalent for
what I felt about what I was looking at not copy it.6 There are

184 185
 Georgia OKeeffe
shades of Kandinsky here, too: Only through feeling, especially
at the beginning of ones path, is it possible to achieve what is
artistically right.7 The canvas becomes a membrane, affording
a view through to an inner landscape. Meanwhile, Stieglitz read
OKeeffes vegetable forms in the paintings as sexualised symbols
of fertilisation. Reacting against this sexualised, gender-based
reception, OKeeffe responded in the early 1920s with more
conventional, objective still lifes.
Fig.167
Frantiek Kupka
Tale of Pistils and Stamens I 1919
Oil paint on canvas
85 x 73
Pompidou Centre, National Museum of Modern Art, Paris
From Georgia OKeeffes early work in the 1910s onwards
and particularly the watercolours of 191617 landscape
painting assumed great importance in her work, something
that was reflected in the relative quantity that she produced.
Her landscapes had an ambivalent structure that combined
abstraction and references to nature, across a spectrum ranging
from representational and topographically concrete works to the
symbolically charged and the purely abstract. Broad expanses of
space afforded manifold opportunities for free artistic expression,
something particularly apparent in her late work, which depicted
rivers, roads, sea and sky, and the wide, barren landscapes of
New Mexico.8
Proto colour field painting
Following an intensive phase of drawing, the years 1916 to 1917
saw OKeeffe produce a corpus of small-scale watercolours that
would prove both groundbreaking and profoundly influential
for American post-war abstraction: OKeeffes work anticipates
186
numerous aspects of the movement, including colour field painting
and post-painterly abstraction. It was these developments,
and the discourse that accompanied them, which enabled a
new assessment in the 1950s of OKeeffes early abstracts. In
1958, Edith Halpert, OKeeffes primary gallerist after the death
of Alfred Stieglitz, exhibited the watercolours.9 The art critic
Fairfield Porter recognised in them and also in the abstract
Patio images dating from the late 1940s onwards a kinship
with the monumental colour fields of the abstract expressionists
Mark Rothko (190370; fig.168) and Barnett Newman
(190570; fig.170):10 pulsating chromatic shades, broad fields
and washes of colour as the breathing membrane of painterly
space. OKeeffe ascribed colour great autonomy in her work,
considering it a living organism: [T]he Color just lives by it self
[sic] its like watching a person breath [sic] when they are
asleep.11 Art historian Robert Rosenblum has highlighted the
simplicity and concentration of her early images, as well as the
way OKeeffe would treat a single subject throughout a series,
noting a connection with the painting cycles of Claude Monet
(18401926) and Rothkos colour modulations.12 In her essay
OKeeffes Originality, art historian and critic Barbara Rose
describes the innovative power of these subtle watercolours,
stressing their significance in terms of the post-painterly
abstraction of Helen Frankenthaler (19282011) and Jules Olitski
(19222007).13
Fig.168
Mark Rothko
Untitled (White, Pink and Mustard) 1954
Oil paint on canvas
234 x 168.5
Museum Folkwang, Essen
OKeeffes Late Blooms: The Abstract Landscapes - Heike Eipeldauer and Florian Steininger
Unlike the colour field painters, OKeeffe was working on a small
scale, preserving the intimate relationship between artist and
painting, viewer and work. In her watercolours, colour washes
freely across the paper, permeating it, yet is guided by traces
of the desire to depict an image, by an intuitive, emotion-based
translation of reality. In Blue Hill No. II 1916 (fig.22), and Pink
and Blue Mountain 1916 (fig.21), for instance, OKeeffe reduces
the rolling landscapes to broad swathes of colour that shimmer
atmospherically where they overlap. Contour and plasticity are
de-emphasised in favour of pure colour. The first version of her
watercolour series, Evening Star, dating from 1917 (fig.166),
consists of bands of diluted colour stacked one on top of the
other; the gradation from light to dark creates the sense of a
landscape with a distant horizon. In the last two iterations, the
moment depicted gives way to the purely atmospheric, though the
reference to the seen and experienced remains.14 OKeeffe never
saw herself as a purely abstract artist, although many phases
of her painting touched upon non-representational art, from the
early, obscure charcoal drawings in an organic-decorative style
to her abstracted floral subjects to the Patio colour fields and the
empty landscapes that stretch towards an infinite horizon.
Fig.169
Ellsworth Kelly
Jersey 1958
Oil paint on canvas
152.4 x 184.2
Private collection, New York
OKeeffes influence on later generations and, above all, on
minimal art was highlighted by the curator Eugene C. Goossen
at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1968, when he
showed some of her selected works in the context of post-war
abstraction. In the exhibition The Art of the Real, Goossen was
particularly interested in artistic originality in the capacity for
independent creation, which he saw as reaffirming the identity
of American art against that of Europe. He accorded OKeeffe
a leading role in this process.15 Goossen illustrated OKeeffes
significance by hanging her Farmhouse Window and Door 1929
(fig.89), opposite Window 1949, by Ellsworth Kelly (1923
2015).16 Despite its opacity, the titular window is immediately
recognisable as such. Even Kelly, a pioneering minimal artist,
generally derived his pared-down configurations of form and
colour from reality. OKeeffes depiction of the bend in the
road leading to her house in Abiqui against a monochromatic
background, in which the curving road (fig.136) provided the
impetus for the work, appears nearly abstract. In her Pelvis
series, 19437, where the gaps in white pelvic bones reveal an
endless blue sky beyond, OKeeffe pushed legibility to its limits:
here, even still lifes take on the dimensions of landscapes. These
works reached a degree of minimalism that approached Kellys
hard-edge paintings (fig.169), produced around the same time.
OKeeffe herself noted the resemblance: You know every time I
see that mans work, I think I did it.17
Fig.170
Barnett Newman
Vir Heroicus Sublimis 19501
Oil paint on canvas
242.2 x 541.7
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
OKeeffes paintings of the late 1950s, inspired by landscapes
seen from airplanes,18 are a monumental echo of her
watercolours, which, as discussed earlier, were considered
forerunners of colour field painting. Rivers branch off into
shimmering areas of soft, subtly nuanced colour; the images
appear to be seen head-on, unfolded onto a flat plane. Visually
they recall Frankenthalers lyrical pourings, though OKeeffes
were painted with highly controlled brushstrokes. A photograph
of her atelier, taken in 1963, shows one of the river paintings,
From the River Pale 1959 (fig.200), immediately next to a
branch, evidently placed there as a model for the river. OKeeffes
observations of structural similitude in nature resulted in a hybrid
of representation and pure painting and, in terms of her manner of
painting, she did not differentiate between realistic subjects and
neutral planes of colour. In contrast to the proponents of colour
field painting, who often physically applied paint to canvases
spread out on the floor, OKeeffe remained faithful to classic,
vertical easel painting, although in later works, such as the river
paintings, their orientation appears flat and horizontal.
The Romantic sublime
In OKeeffes landscapes we encounter, again and again,
instances of what might be interpreted as romanticism, as in
187
 Georgia OKeeffe OKeeffes Late Blooms: The Abstract Landscapes - Heike Eipeldauer and Florian Steininger

Fig.171
Wave, Night 1928 Fig.172 Fig.173
Oil paint on canvas The Beyond 1972 Josef Albers
76.2 x 91.4 Oil paint on canvas Variant/Adobe, Red, Blue, Violet around Light Red 1947
Addison Gallery of Modern Art, 76.2 x 101.6 Oil paint on masonite
Philips Academy, Andover Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe 39.4 x 54.3
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut

Wave, Night 1928 (fig.171), for instance, a night-time seascape
she painted of the Atlantic during a stay in Maine. A white dot on
the horizon appears to be the source of light, lending the work a
sense of depth that draws the viewer in. The characteristic breadth
of the space can be read as an expression of loneliness. In
Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich
to Rothko (1975), Robert Rosenblum situated OKeeffes sublime
landscapes within the Romantic tradition of European landscape
painting.19 He convincingly analysed her work, along with that
of Augustus Vincent Tack (18701949), as a connecting link
between American landscape painting of the late nineteenth
century such as that of Albert Bierstadt (18301902) or Albert
Pinkham Ryder (18471917), for example and the sublime
expanses of colour found in abstract expressionism, tracing it all
back to European Romanticism.20
In OKeeffes pastel drawing A Storm 1922, a crystalline bolt
of lightning splits the landscape, producing an awe-inspiring
symmetry in the emptied image.21 Her dramatic series of Black
Place works from 19445 similarly thematises the discharging
of metaphysical energy. In 1972 OKeeffe produced The Beyond
(fig.172), one of the last of her landscapes shot through with this
dark Romanticism. A broad, pitch-black horizontal strip borders
the upper area of the painting, which consists of finely gradated
shades of blue: is it a gloomy sea or simply a dark band of
colour? A dazzling white line bisects the sky. The title references
transcendent or otherworldly experiential states painting as
emotional experience, as visual drama. The sublime, according
to the philosopher Edmund Burke (172997), was a quality
inextricably bound up with the terrifying power of nature. In
abstract expressionism, it was ultimately manifested as spiritual
significance the painting itself became the source of the sublime.
While initially, in her depictions of nature unchained, OKeeffe
merely captured the sublime motivically, as in A Storm, her later,
large-format series themselves evoke the sublime quality of infinity.
In 1949, three years after the death of Stieglitz, OKeeffe finally
decided to retreat to the total seclusion of New Mexico, where for
two decades she had already been spending the summer months.
The move represents one of the most important milestones in
OKeeffes artistic development. It was her intense experiences of
the boundless, unspoiled expanses of New Mexico where the
nothingness is several sizes larger than in Texas22 that inspired
OKeeffe to make the sublime, large-scale series found in her
late work. The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel
the world is big far beyond my understanding to understand
maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity
on the horizon line or just over the next hill.23 This resulted in the
pared-down, geometric images of the Patio series, paintings of
rivers and clouds seen from an aerial perspective, and the cycle
From a Day with Juan (fig.178) works with an unresolved,
transcendental quality that reveal OKeeffes attempts to find
equivalents in painting to the endless, light-flooded space of her
surroundings, something which became a central theme in this late
period of creativity.
Abstract colour fields or the curse of the door
The extensive Patio series originated with OKeeffes adobe
house in Abiqui. Situated on a hill overlooking the Chama River
Valley, this was where she spent every winter and spring from
1949 for the rest of her life. She was fascinated by the door cut
into the long adobe wall of the central patio, producing a total
of twenty-three paintings and drawings of it between 1946 and
1960, as well as black-and-white photographs, in which she
explored the relationship between the orthogonal door and the
wall.24 The view through the open door onto a series of receding
rectangles, as in her earliest drawing of 1946, quickly gave
way to views of a flat, abstract shape in green or black, slight
tonal variations generating a sense of ambivalence between
opacity and transparency. With this monochromatic concentration
on basic, two-dimensional architectonic forms, OKeeffe
recalled earlier compositions like Farmhouse Window and Door.
Taken as a whole, her Patio series plays with variation through
repetition a strategy with which she had already experimented,
and which, from the 1940s onwards, became her method for
artistically appropriating what she saw: I have a single-track
mind. I work on an idea for a long time. Its like getting
acquainted with a person and I dont get acquainted easily.25
OKeeffes ide fixe seems to be rooted in the exercise she
inspired by the compositional ideas of her teacher Arthur Wesley
Dow (18571922) had once assigned to her own students
in Texas: Draw a square and put a door in it somewhere
anything to start them thinking about how to divide a space.26
Between 1947 and 1955, around the same time that OKeeffe
was working on her Patios, Josef Albers (18881976) was
creating his Variants or Adobes (fig.173); nested, differently sized
rectangles of unmixed paint. Both New Mexico and Mexico
inspired his interest in the interaction between colours, Albers
referring to the latter in a letter to Kandinsky as the promised land
of abstract art.27 This interest gave rise to work characterised by
ambivalent spatial and planar relationships, eventually leading to
his autonomous series of paintings Homage to the Square. While
Albers was strict in his renunciation of the painterly, mapping
out his Adobe images on graph paper, even the strictest of the
Patio variants, with their soft geometry, indicate that OKeeffe
was aiming not for rigid minimalism, but for subtle irregularity.
These anomalies serve to draw the viewers attention as much to
the createdness of the image as to the warm, hand-finished clay
surface of the adobe house.
In her three monumental, over two-metre-wide paintings My Last
Door 19524 (fig.209), Black Door with Red 1954 (fig.208) and
White Patio with Red Door 1960 (fig.174) OKeeffe took this
artistic process of paring down colour and form to the essentials
even further. In them she reached a maximum degree of reduction,
recalling the nature-derived abstraction of her early creative years,
while formal innovations like flatness, frontality, horizontality,
geometric purism, the open fields of colour and the large scale
clearly refer to contemporary currents in abstract expressionism.
She also anticipated the minimalist movements of the 1960s.
These monumental paintings are defined by a horizontal field
of pure colour that seems to stretch beyond the edges of the
image, broken only by the rectangle of the door at the centre
of the composition and a horizontal row of smaller rectangles
(a reference to paving stones along a path). The naturalistic
colours of the early iterations of Patio have given way to three
autonomous colour schemes: austere greyish blue, powerful red
and yellow, and meditative, airy pale pink. Two narrower bands
of colour border the image, like strata in a now horizontally
orientated field. The paintings are no longer organised according
to classical rules of composition, in the sense of fleshing out the
image by placing forms against a background, but rather achieve
a clear division of the surface into abstract planes of colour.
The connection to colour field painting is palpable here, as a
comparison with, for example, Barnett Newmans Zip paintings
illustrates (fig.170).28 In these monumental, metaphysically
inflected canvases, which override all expressive texture in favour
of a flat, unmodulated expanse of colour cut through with vertical
lines or zips, Newman developed a heightened sense of the
sublime or more applicable to OKeeffe the infinite. This he
achieved not by perpetuating traditional sublime subjects, but
by making the moment of aesthetic perception of his expansive,
present canvases an overwhelming emotional sensation.

188 189
 Georgia OKeeffe OKeeffes Late Blooms: The Abstract Landscapes - Heike Eipeldauer and Florian Steininger

contrast to OKeeffes decidedly non-representational paintings
nonetheless contain structural references to nature in their
repetitive horizontal lines, faded pastel tones and inner glow.
Martin explained, My work is non-objective, like that of the
Abstract Expressionists. But I want people, when they look at my
paintings, to have the same feelings they experience when they
look at landscape. But its really about the feeling of beauty and
freedom, that you experience in landscape My response to
nature is really a response to beauty.33
Fig.174
White Patio with Red Door 1960
Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 213.4
Myron Kunin Collection of American Art, Minneapolis
alone with the earth and sky a feeling of something in me going
off in every direction into the unknown of infinity means more to
me than anything any organized religion gives me.35
Abstraction: The most definite form for the intangible
thing in myself
Barbara Rose, who recognized early on the pioneering
significance of OKeeffes abstract work, long overshadowed by
her flower paintings, has suggested that it is more appropriate to
speak of a spiritual than of a stylistic development in the artists
oeuvre.36 Since her art refused to conform to a linear logic of
development, it is difficult to pin down a stylistic evolution, in
the conventional sense, across her 800 works. Her emphasis
on spirituality and on dissolving boundaries, as embodied in
the series of her later years, always remained bound to the
here and now, to a specific kind of groundedness. Thus, even
works like From a Day with Juan III are rooted in an empirical,
phenomenological experience of the world, specifically in
OKeeffes perception by this time already clouded by macular
degeneration of the Washington Monument, which she visited
with her assistant Juan Hamilton.

In her last work in the series, the ethereal, light-flooded White
Patio with Red Door, OKeeffe transformed the patio wall motif
into an intangible, metaphysical vision. The composition is
ambivalent, situated between abstraction and figuration, daily
reality and something beyond it, the near-monochromatic white
surface suggesting an otherworldly realm of infinite space. The
unresolved geometric forms have an almost hieratic frontality.
More than in the other two paintings, OKeeffe was concerned
with differentiating between values of light and colour to create
atmospheric transitions: she introduces nuances into the pale
white colour field, transforming it into a surface that glows as if
lit from within, and replaces the opaque black patio door of the
earlier work with a transparent plane in gradated, pinkish-red
tones that, as with the other pink elements, evokes the impression
of a luminous void, opening onto an endless space beyond. The
Feeling of Infinity
On the numerous aeroplane flights she took to and from New
Mexico, OKeeffe eventually found a subject that encapsulated
her enthusiasm for limitless expanses, resulting in her cloud
paintings from 1960 onwards (fig.176): One day when I was
flying back to New Mexico, the sky below was a most beautiful
solid white. It looked so secure that I thought I could walk right
on it to the horizon if the door opened. The sky beyond was a
light clear blue. It was so wonderful that I couldnt wait to be
home to paint it.29 This view from the plane is an essentially
modern and, in terms of the history of painting, original one,
marking a re-orientation of seeing, from the terrestrial horizon
to the immeasurable dimensions of the cosmos. Paradoxically,
this resulted in another horizontal division of the painting: six
of the eight works in the 1965 series Sky Above the Clouds,
are radically minimalist compositions featuring just two main
areas of pale colour: the lower one full of white clouds and
covering nearly three quarters of the paintings surface, and the
atmosphere above. The unattainable, the expansion of space into
boundlessness, the feeling of weightlessness during flight all
become immediate and palpable. Believing that the process of
reduction revealed the essence of things, as OKeeffe had already
described it as far back as 1922, she took figurative painting to
the threshold of renunciation and dissolution, but without taking the
final step into radical abstraction: Nothing is less real than realism.
Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by
emphasis that we get to the real meaning of things.30
The silent, contemplative experience (of nature), to which
OKeeffes delicate, emptied images from the 1950s onwards
testify, renounces dramatic space, heroic gesture or any claim to
absoluteness that one might perceive in Newmans or Rothkos
work. The visual effect of these images recalls the pared-down,
light-flooded abstraction of Agnes Martin (19122004), a key
figure between abstract expressionism and minimal art, who
knew how to combine the antagonistic qualities of feeling and
coolness in a way that was charged with tension. Unlike Rothko,
for instance, who spoke rather disparagingly of OKeeffe,31
Martin recognised in her a precursor, and they had more in
common than just their retreat to the isolation of New Mexico or
the passion for the horizontal that they both discovered there.32
Martins works, such as Happy Holiday1999 (fig.175) in
Fig.175
Agnes Martin
Happy Holiday 1999
Acrylic paint and graphite on canvas
152.5 x 152.5
Tate
The light-suffused voids that characterise OKeeffes last great
series, From a Day with Juan, 19767, more clearly invoke a
metaphysical experience than her other late works. The centre of
the image is dominated by an imposing vertical trapezoid, which
recalling the metaphor of Jacobs ladder extends upwards
from the ground, tapering towards the top. Martin, too, in her later
years, turned to the shape of the trapezoid in Homage to Life,
2003 though in dark, sombre colours creating a connection
with an early drawing, Mountain 1960 (fig.177). It is part of a
small, atypical last series of works that Martin herself referred
to as scary and that art historian Briony Fer described, not as
late works but delayed recurrences, which will always remain
incomplete.34 The atmospheric radiance of the white shape set
against a blue, sky-like background, gradually dimming as it
climbs, diffuses past the edges of the painting, so that the viewer is
confronted with the experience of a boundless, infinite vision. The
deeply spiritual dimension that OKeeffe sensed in her constant
search for the feeling of infinity in nature, and in her artistic
transformation, she described in 1952 as follows: When I stand
Fig.176
Sky with Moon, 1966
Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 213.4
Private collection, Switzerland
Over the course of her decades-long career, OKeeffe traced
a link between European modernism and American post-war
abstraction through her constant negotiation between references
to nature and abstraction, the organic and the geometric, and
feeling and depersonalisation. She caused a good deal of
consternation among those who were committed to the idea of
evolutionary artistic development chief among them Clement
Greenberg. His paternalistic review of her 1946 MoMA
retrospective was tantamount to an excommunication; he saw
in her art the antithesis of the purity he favoured in American
formalism. He referred to OKeeffes work as a mixture of
scatology and hygiene a pathologizing assessment that also
encompassed her pseudo-modernity.37 OKeeffes decision to
exhibit abstract works in the 1950s can be read as a response to

190 191
 Georgia OKeeffe

this.38 Moreover, her return to abstraction in New Mexico, having the artist summarised her view of the essential inseparability of
gained the necessary distance from New York, can probably only representation and abstraction:
be understood in the context of the burgeoning contemporary
discourse around abstraction in American art, which was
dominated by the Greenbergian paradigm of flat, self-referential
painting. The emptiness and austerity of the desert landscape
in New Mexico, which made it possible to capture abstraction
in the object itself, as it were, became a catalyst for OKeeffe to
construct a new, pared-down formal language; this language
transformed the abstract-symbolic formal vocabulary of her
early work both in dialogue and in contrast with contemporary
movements in American art, whether abstract expressionism,
colour field painting, hard-edge painting or minimalism. Art
historian Peter J. Schneemanns remark that OKeeffes art
contained no direct, verbally reflected attempts to come to
terms with the important currents of avant-garde American art
after 194539 needs reassessment in light of the monumental late
series, which constitute a kind of artistic response to them. The
title My Last Door (fig.209) for OKeeffes most abstract, but by
no means final, iteration in the Patio series is reminiscent of the
then oft-invoked rhetoric of the last image as the endpoint of
the inevitable development towards abstraction in art a finality
inherent in Greenbergs modernist conception of history.40

Fig.178
Untitled (From a Day with Juan III) 1976/7
Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 91.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

It is surprising to me how many people separate the objective

from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting
unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot
make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines
and color put together so that they say something. For me
that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the
Fig.177 most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can
Agnes Martin clarify in paint.41
Mountain 1960
Ink and graphite on canvas
24 x 30.3
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

While OKeeffes artistic achievement of reduction and

concentration was progressive, she retained a heightened
sensitivity to the simplest details: a sprinkling of snowflakes or
leaves, a rising moon or the sudden emergence of an armada
of cotton-wool clouds might well find their way into her emptied
visual world. Should we see this as a sense of wonder over the
small miracles of nature? As opposition to the purism propagated
by Greenberg? A declaration of her belief in artistic beauty?
Unconventional and hybrid, OKeeffes artistic stance has
proved groundbreaking. In 1976, at the age of eighty-nine,

192
 Fig.179 Fig.180
Pelvis I 1944 Pedernal 1945
Oil paint on canvas Pastel on paper
91.4 x 76.2 54.6 x 109.9
Milwaukee Art Museum Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

194 195
 Fig.181
Pelvis Series 1947
Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 121.9
Private collection, courtesy Eykyn Maclean
Fig.182
Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow 1945
Oil paint on canvas
91.8 x 122.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

196 197
 Fig.183
Spring Tree No. 1 1945
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 91.4
Collecion of the New Mexico Museum of Art
Fig.184
Winter Trees, Abiqui, III 1950
Oil paint on canvas
64.5 x 78.7
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

198 199
 Fig.185 Fig.186
Winter Cottonwoods East V 1954 Cottonwoods c.1952
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 91.6 76.2 x 91.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

200 201
 Fig.187 Fig.188 Fig.189 Fig.190
Paul Strand Ansel Adams Alfred Stieglitz Alfred Stieglitz
St Francis Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico 1931 Church at Ranchos de Taos (Built in 1772) 192930 Georgia OKeeffe 1931 Georgia OKeeffe Hands and Horse Skull 1931
Photograph, palladium print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
19.9 x 24.5 15.2 x 21.3 23.8 x 18.6 19.4 x 24.1
Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona National Gallery of Art, Washington The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

202 203
 Fig.191 Fig.192
Ansel Adams Ansel Adams
Ghost Ranch Hills, Chama Valley, Northern New Mexico 1937 Georgia OKeeffe in the Southwest 1937
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
35.1 x 48.9 29.7 x 18.7
Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

204 205
 Fig.193 Fig.194 Fig.195 Fig.196
Eagle Claw and Bean Necklace 1934 Kachina 1934 Abiqui Mesa I c.19445 Untitled (Patio Door) c.1946
Charcoal on paper Charcoal on paper Graphite on paper Graphite on paper
48.5 x 63.9 60 x 48.3 14.3 x 44.5 43.2 x 35.6
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

206 207
 Fig.197 Fig.198
Blue I 1958 Blue II 1958
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
76.5 x 66.4 76.2 x 66
Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Indiana Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

208 209
 Fig.199 Fig.200
Blue B 1959 From the River Pale 1959
Oil paint on canvas Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 91.4 105.4 x 79.7
Milwaukee Art Museum Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

210 211
 Fig.201 Fig.202
It Was Blue and Green 1960 Drawing III 1959
Oil paint on canvas Charcoal on paper
76.5 x 101.6 47.3 x 62.9
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Philadelphia Museum of Art

212 213
 Fig.203
Sky with Flat White Cloud 1962
Oil paint on canvas
152.4 x 203.2
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Fig.204
Sky Above the Clouds III / Above the Clouds III 1963
Oil paint on canvas
122 x 213.4
Private collection, Texas

214 215
 Georgia OKeeffe
Review of an Exhibition
of Georgia OKeeffe
Clement Greenberg
The Nation
15 June 1946
Georgia OKeeffes retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art
confirms an impression left by the Pioneers of Modern Art in America
exhibition at the Whitney Museum last monthnamely, that the first
American practitioners of modern art showed an almost constant
disposition to deflect the influences received from twentieth-century
Paris painting in the direction of German expressionism. This tendency
was more obvious and general in the period that saw Miss OKeeffes debut
(1915) than it has been since, but it survives even today.
The first American modernists mistook cubism for an applied style; or,
like many German artists, they saw the entire point of post-impressionist
painting in fauve coloror else they addressed themselves directly to
German expressionist art as a version of the modern which they found
more sympathetic and understandable than that of the School of Paris.
In any case they read a certain amount of esotericism into the new art.
Picassos and Matisses break with nature, the outcome of an absorption in
the physical aspect of painting and, underneath everything, a reflection of
the profoundest essence of contemporary society, seemed to them, rightly
or wrongly, the signal for a new kind of hermetic literature with mystical
overtones and a messagepantheism and pan-love and the repudiation of
technics and rationalism, which were identified with the philistine economic
world against which the early American avant-garde was so much in revolt.
Alfred Stieglitzwho became Miss OKeeffes husbandincarnated, and still
incarnates, the messianism which in the America of that time was identified
with ultra modern art.
It was this misconception of non-naturalist art as a vehicle for an esoteric
message that encouraged Miss OKeeffe, along with Arthur Dove, Marsden
Hartley, and others, to proceed to abstract art so immediately upon her
first acquaintance with the modern. (It should not be forgotten, however,
that the period in question was one that in general hastened to draw
radical conclusions even when it did not understand them.) Conscious
or unconscious esotericism also accounts largely for the resemblances
between much of these artists work and that of Kandinsky in his first phase;
this being less a matter of direct influence than of an a priori community of
spirit and cultural bias.
216
Pioneers of Modern Art in
America, Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York,
(9 April 19 May 1946).
This seems to be an error.
OKeeffes debut was her
1916 showing at 291 in
a group context, but her
first solo exhibition was the
following year in New York
(3 April 14 May 1917).
Stieglitz passed away
on 13 July 1946, less than a
month after the publication
of this article.
Review of an Exhibition of Georgia OKeeffe, 1946 Clement Greenberg
Later on, in the twenties, almost all these painters, including Miss OKeeffe,
renounced abstract painting and returned to representation, as if
acknowledging that they had been premature and had skipped essential
intermediate stages. It turned out that there was more to the new art than
the mere abandonment of fidelity to nature; even more important was the
fact that Matisse and the cubists had evolved a new treatment of the picture
plane, a new perspective that could not be exploited without a stricter and
more physical discipline than these pioneers had originally bargained for.
A period of assimilation of French painting then set in that has led American
artists to a more integral understanding of what is involved in modern
art. But the cost has been a certain loss of originality and independence.
Today the more hopeful members of the latest generation of American
artists again show Germanizing or expressionist tendencies; and these,
whether they stem from Klee, surrealism, or anything else, seem to remain
indispensable to the originality of our art, even though they offer a serious
handicap to the formation of a solid, painterly tradition.
The importance of Georgia OKeeffes pseudo-modern art is almost entirely
historical and symptomatic. The errors it exhibits are significant because
of the time and place and context in which they were made. Otherwise her
art has very little inherent value. The deftness and precision of her brush
and the neatness with which she places a picture inside its frame exert
a certain inevitable charm which may explain her popularity; and some
of her architectural subjects may have even more than charmbut the
greatest part of her work adds up to little more than tinted photography.
The lapidarian patience she has expended in trimming, breathing upon, and
polishing these bits of opaque cellophane betrays a concern that has less
to do with art than with private worship and the embellishment of private
fetishes with secret and arbitrary meanings.
That an institution as influential as the Museum of Modern Art should
dignify this arty manifestation with a large-scale exhibition is a bad sign.
I know that many experts some of them on the museums own staff
identify the opposed extremes of hygiene and scatology with modern art,
but the particular experts at the museum should have had at least enough
sophistication to keep them apart.
Clement Greenberg, Review of an Exhibition of Georgia OKeeffe [Museum of Modern Art, New York,
14 May 25 August 1946], The Nation, 15 June 1946, pp.7278. Reprinted in Clement Greenberg, The
Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 19451949, John OBrian (ed.), 2nd ed.,
Chicago 1988, pp.857.
Copyright Clement Greenberg 1949, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited
217
 The Light One: A Case Study Georgiana Uhlyarik

The
Light One:
A Case Fig.205

Study
Black Patio Door 1955
Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 76.2
Amon Carter Museum of American Art,
Fort Worth, Texas

In 1952, at the age of sixty-four, Georgia OKeeffe created
one of her most simplified and distilled paintings. The light one,
as she once referred to it, is essentially a painting of soft-edged
rectangles a geometric composition of distinct fields of black
and grey on an expansive white ground, painted even whiter
a few years later.1 The artist exhibited it only once during her
lifetime. For some time after, the painting hung beside her bed
Georgiana Uhlyarik at Ghost Ranch, in New Mexico, taking up most of the wide
wall that separated the bedroom from her studio.2 My Last Door,
as she titled it, had been painted there, in her summer studio
at the Ranch.3
My Last Door 19524 (fig.209) is a remarkable painting
in OKeeffes long career, inventive in its formal simplicity,
planar arrangement of shapes and restricted palette. It might
be described as minimal, in anticipation of the new direction
of abstraction brewing in New York City in the late 1950s.
As OKeeffe quipped in 1973, Ive actually looked at one of
[Ellsworth] Kellys pictures and thought for a moment that Id
done it.4
Not since her visionary charcoal drawings and watercolours of
the 1910s had the artist restricted her palette and her composition
so intensely. These early, intuitive abstractions may, at first glance,
have little in common formally with her ambitious, late canvas.
However, the two are linked by the way in which they reveal her
continuous uncompromising experiments in the relations of a few
simple forms and colours.5 There is a consistency and a unity
throughout OKeeffes career that is rare in the art of a painter
who has continued to grow and evolve as she has, remarked

218 219
 Georgia OKeeffe
critic Barbara Rose, connecting the early and late works in her
review of the artists 1970 retrospective at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York.6 My Last Door opens up for OKeeffe
a new area of experimentation in abstraction, one that she further
develops in the last years of her career.
The paintings descriptive title signals, inevitably, the specificity of
the thing it references. As OKeeffe said of the series of twenty or
so related works painted between 1946 and 1960, Im always
trying to paint that door I never quite get it. Its a curse the
way I feel I must continually go on with that door.7 She later
wrote: That wall with a door in it was something I had to have
and ... was painted many times.8 Yet there is something in My
Last Door that surpasses its assigned frame of reference and the
repeated assertion, by the artist and then by scholars, that it is first
and foremost about a real thing and thus realistic.9 The wall with
the door in it is only part of the paintings content.
The primacy given to the subjects from the natural world, which
inspired OKeeffes late abstractions, while both accurate
and highly revealing, has limited the discussion of her work
as being grounded in the visual environment, with scholars
concluding that her uneasy peace with abstraction has made her
contribution to art in the United States less profound.10 However,
as art historian and OKeeffe specialist Wanda Corn points out:
It is in the gap between the colloquial story and the
transcendent work of art that we experience OKeeffes
theoretical predilections, particularly her deeply modernist
belief in the autonomy of the individual work of art It is
OKeeffe the person who has the quotidian experience, but
it is OKeeffe the painter who transforms it into a timeless
work of art.11
George Kubler, art historian and theoretician, argues in his
influential 1962 book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History
of Things that a work of art transmits a kind of behaviour by the
artist, and it also serves, like a relay, as the point of departure
for impulses that often attain extraordinary magnitudes in later
transmissions.12 As Kubler further asserts, the picture is the
resolution in actual experience of the problem that confronted
the painter.13 It is the viewers direct and primary encounter with
the work itself that makes possible the paintings full transformative
power, however subjective or individual this experience might be.
Significantly, it was the colour field artists of the 1960s who first
responded to the impulse they sensed in the formal brilliance
and arresting originality of OKeeffes late paintings.14, 15 My Last
Door belongs to this group.
The painting is anchored by a black rectangle, taller than it is
wide, placed just below the centre of the canvas. Along the
top edge is a thin band of grey, accentuating the paintings
horizontality and its remarkable size (it measures 122.5 x 213.8).
At the bottom edge is a grey band twice as thick, extending from
the left only partially across, to just past the black rectangle.
This break opens up the white field to extend beyond the picture
plane and challenges the simple containment of the composition.
The Light One: A Case Study Georgiana Uhlyarik
Between the black shape and the bottom grey band is a row
of eleven light grey rectangles fading from white to grey and
dissolving once more into white as they traverse the length of the
canvas. Their faint gradations add a subtle pulse to the painting,
further enhanced by their rhythmical repetition and spacing at
regular intervals. They imbue it with a dynamism, held in tension
with the solidity of the black. They are precisely placed so that the
right edge of the black aligns with the small grey rectangle just
below. The right edge of the bottom grey band is similarly aligned
with a rectangle above. These are the only vertical arrangements
in the composition, suggesting the presence of an internal logic, a
self-generating dynamic.
The black rectangle orients and acknowledges the viewers
body it acts as both a vestige, and in defiance of, one-point
perspective. In many of OKeeffes paintings, there is no middle
ground; rather, foreground and background are collapsed and
yet still read as distinct. However, here, the illusion of space is
entirely denied. Instead, the binary planes of black and white
offer at once an absence of space and a view into infinity. This
impossible space, so eloquently evoked through simple contrasts
and geometry, speaks to Kublers description of the existential
value of the work of art, as a declaration about being.16 In My
Last Door, OKeeffe achieves a resolution in actual experience
of her problem that is to say her cursed fascination with the
wall with the door in it.
Fig.206
OKeeffes home in Abiqui has an enclosed courtyard with a In the Patio V 1948
double door in the centre of its long south wall, sometimes called Oil paint on canvas
the salita door.17 The artist often stated that this door was the 61 x 101.6
National Institute of Fine Arts;
reason she bought the property: I bought the house because it Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum
had that door in the patio, the one Ive painted so often. I had no
peace until I bought the house.18 The patio is a kind of central
cortex of the property, with several doors and passageways are connected by the blue sky visible at the top and again seen detail and reduced to planes of colour. Each includes a thin band
leading off it, including the main entrance to the house. And through the central aperture of the painting a rectangular of blue sky, the undulating shadow of the wall cast on the ground
yet the space feels contained, singular. It stands apart as a portal that speaks to OKeeffes interest in views of the sky below, and, in the centre, the door as a stout rectangle of dark
rectangular prism of light surrounded on its perimeter by sheltered through animal pelvic bones, which preoccupied her at the time. colour. Light is the active agent that leads OKeeffe to simplify
spaces. As the artist stated, The patio is quite wonderful in itself. Between 1943 and 1947, she produced a series of sophisticatedly these new compositions. In number II and its more colourfully
Youre in a square box; you see the sky over you, the ground abstracted paintings of this void as form, which she reformulates pronounced variation, number III, the deep shadow cast by the
beneath.19 The salita door feels both very close and very far in this first patio work as an interlocking series of rectangular strong, desert light obscures the edge where the adobe wall meets
away. The intense light of the New Mexico high desert casts long, black and white shapes. This ambiguous space, which alternates the ground, flattening space into a continuous field of colour. The
pronounced shadows. In OKeeffes photographs of the patio, the between here and there, is placed in the centre of a series of blurred bottom edge of the dark rectangle is the only remnant of a
deeply recessed door appears as a solid black rectangle with a nested rectangles shaped by the solidity of the adobe walls and fold in space.
strong diagonal shadow, cast by the adjoining wall, bisecting the the formlessness of light. It is reminiscent in approach of OKeeffes
wall.20 It is the combination of these essential elements of the patio early painting of her temporary studio apartment 59th St. Once I had the idea of making the door larger and the picture
that OKeeffe explored in the series of works produced over a Studio 1919.22 A dark doorway, framed within an irregular and smaller, but then the wall, the whole surface of that wonderful
period of a decade and a half, starting the year after she bought unstable lit room, contains a paneled door. Painted soon after wall, would have been lost, OKeeffe said.24 This suggests
the house in Abiqui.21 she moved to New York City, this is one of her first works inspired that she was deeply interested in the proportional relationship
by architecture. Renovations at Abiqui lasted over three years; between these two rectangles as an active source of content. The
Interestingly, OKeeffe did not begin by painting the south wall. OKeeffe moved there permanently in June 1949. While the artist wall and the door define each other they complete one another.
She purchased the nearly 1.6-hectare property and the cluster said I rarely paint anything I dont know very well, these two This unique proportion is maintained even when the composition
of buildings on it, many in need of repair, in December 1945. works suggest that she got to know a new place by painting it.23 is vertical, as in her 1955 canvas Green Patio Door (see also note
She visited in June 1946 and drew the north patio corridor 25). Indeed, this very particular sense of scale, which allows the
(fig.196). Her first painting of the space relates to these drawings. There are nine paintings titled In the Patio, numbered I to IX. picture plane to be nearly filled by the surface of the adobe wall,
In the Patio I 1946 is a large work in oil paint on paper and OKeeffe painted four, numbered II to V, in 1948 for the first is first developed in her long and narrow paintings of Canadian
the only composition in the series to suggest passage, across time taking on the subject of the wall and the door. They are barns, made in the early 1930s. In the Patio No. IV (fig.99), the
a dark threshold, between two light-filled spaces. The spaces frontal portraits of the wall with the door in it, nearly devoid of smallest of the four 1948 works, and nearly the same size as
220 221
 Georgia OKeeffe The Light One: A Case Study Georgiana Uhlyarik

Fig.208
Fig.207 Black Door with Red 1954
In the Patio No. IX 1950 Oil paint on canvas
Oil paint on canvas 121.9 x 213.4
76.2 x 101.6 Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia
Collection of Jan T. and Marica Vilcek, promised gift
to The Vilcek Foundation

White Canadian Barn II 1932, is the most detailed of the set.
It is the only one that suggests the three dimensionality of the
patio, with a wedge of light wall protruding into the top-right edge
of the image, implying the continuity of the walled-in perimeter.
The flat wall is punctured twice, featuring both the salita door and
the entry to the south passage of the patio, with its beam structure.
These representational details are eliminated after this painting.
In her first big painting of the series, In the Patio V (fig.206),
OKeeffe intensifies the reddish-brown colour of the diagonal
shadow that slices through the door, rendering the rectangle
green in the shade and black in the light. A fine edge delineates
the wall from the ground and the sharp shapes of the wall contrast
with the softly contoured ones on the ground. The colours are
more strident, the geometry of the composition more pronounced.
However, the sky is filled with clouds, announcing the next area of
interest in this group of paintings.
Looking up from the square box, OKeeffe turns her attention to
the sky in two smaller works from 1950. The vertical orientation
of In the Patio VI and VIII further accentuates the upward view,
with more than half of each of the canvasses dedicated to stylised
clouds pulsating above. (In number VI, she extends the painting
by continuing the composition on the frame, a feature she repeats
in some of the 1955 vertical compositions).25 The world opens
up above the patio into a patterned sky. OKeeffe places the
hard-edged geometry of the bottom register in contrast with the soft
white forms floating in a uniform blue. The two radically different
spaces meet at the top of her adobe patio wall. OKeeffe zooms in
to this top edge in a corner of the patio to create a highly abstract
composition in the largest painting of the nine, In the Patio No. IX,
also from 1950 (fig.207). The horizontal canvas is bifurcated by
a black chevron delineating the patio walls from the sky. Dynamic
and commanding, it is today the only painting in the series that
does not feature a door.26 (In her 1976 publication, OKeeffe
includes a reproduction of this painting and titles it Black Bird
Series.)27
OKeeffe exhibited the In the Patio paintings in her solo exhibition
at An American Place in 1950 the last before she permanently resonated with OKeeffe over the years.31 It seems appropriate
closed the gallery.28 Among the many other subjects on view
trees, flowers and the Brooklyn Bridge her final pelvis painting
was also in this show.29
In 1951, when the artist again takes on the subject of the wall
with a door in it, she returns to the horizontal composition and
geometrical arrangement of In the Patio V, this time employing
strong combinations of colour. Patio Door Green Red 1951 is a
rather small painting that uses the bright yellow and orange-
reds characteristic of OKeeffes intense explorations of colour
throughout her career. The Green Red in the title references the
colour of the door and wall in bright light the reverse of the way
light was working in the earlier painting. Very little in this small,
intense canvas anticipates the serenity and restraint, and size, of
her next composition.
My Last Door is as big as Manhattan, a painting commissioned
in 1932 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as part of an
exhibition meant to showcase mural painting.30 The paintings
dimensions were set by the museum; its proportions seem to have
artist after the exhibition, as she requested. Despite the finality
that in order to push herself further in her preoccupation with
her wonderful wall, OKeeffe takes on a mural-size canvas.
Black Door with Red (fig.208) is the same size and, although it
is formally dated 1954, it was likely painted around the same
time as My Last Door.32 In Black Door with Red, OKeeffe blows
up the modest Patio Door Green Red, removing the diagonal
shadow, and thus the green, and retaining only the bright yellow
and the deep red. The hues are intense and explosive. The black
rectangle is overwhelmed by colour. She introduces a new
element: a row of horizontal, light-red rectangles that cross the
bottom length of the painting. Below, the yellow band is now
interrupted by the field of red that spills out of the lower right-hand
corner of the painting. Black Door with Red is the extreme, colour
version of My Last Door.
These two large paintings were included in a group show at The
Downtown Gallery in New York in October 1955 and were
highly admired.33 Black Door with Red was often exhibited in the
1950s and 1960s, and then owned by various private collectors
during OKeeffes lifetime. My Last Door was returned to the
implied by the title, OKeeffe was not done with the door. In 1955
and 1956, she painted ten more, very different, wall-and-door

222 223
 Georgia OKeeffe The Light One: A Case Study Georgiana Uhlyarik

Fig.210
Fig.209 Wall with Green Door 1953
My Last Door 19524 Oil paint on canvas
Oil paint on canvas 76.2 x 121.6
122.5 x 213.8 National Gallery of Art, Washington
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe

canvases. They are smaller and, with one exception, vertical
compositions (see, for example, Black Patio Door 1955;
fig.205). In most, the view is from the side, thus skewing the scale;
sometimes there is snow, and the wall is always adobe-colour.
After a pause of four years, OKeeffe painted the final work in the
series. It is a return to the light one. The ghost of My Last Door is
resurrected in pinkish-red and white in White Patio with Red Door
1960 (fig.174).
OKeeffe approached the motif of the wall with a door in it
differently than she had her previous subjects. For example, in her
Jack-in-the-Pulpit series of 1930, there is a gradual zooming in
from the full flower in the first painting to an increasingly abstract
depiction of its pistil in the last. She treats the combination of
desert bones and sky in a similar way; the journey from From the
Faraway, Nearby 1937 (fig.126) to the void of Pelvis Series 1947
(fig.181), is similarly telescopic. The patio does not lend itself
comfortably to this strategy. Instead, OKeeffes explorations of
the subject take an indirect route. She comes at it from a number
of vantage points and even seasons, exploring variations and then
returning to push some of these further. Although there is a sense of
a gradual progression from one painting to the next, it is limited to
a few, linked paintings. Each advances an element, be it inclusion
of representational detail, overall composition, or use of colour,
and then she seems to start all over again. This continual search
offered both creative stimulation and frustration. In the Patio series
OKeeffe sought her way through perception, not through logic.
OKeeffe culled from her artistic experimentations across time,
much as she travelled intrepidly throughout her life in search
of creative stimulus. In this way, she continued to challenge
herself in each new series, seeking new directions and further
experimenting with pictorial space. Her time in New Mexico,
while still living in New York, triggered an intense desire to paint
the bigness of the place. The Abiqui house offered the special
challenge of painting expanse. Unlike her house at Ghost
Ranch, which was open to the sky and offered huge vistas to her
perennial Cerro Pedernal, the patios view is focused inward
capped by the sky that opens above. In her Pelvis series, the
distillation of the bone and sky motif to a simple blue oval held
within an ivory-white edge reveals a search for ways to contain
vastness. Taken as a group, the Patio paintings explore various
ways of making containment infinite.
What did OKeeffe mean when she titled the light one My Last
Door? I hope it is my last door, she writes to her dealer in 1952.
You can call the light picture My Last Door.34 There are the
practical implications, but there is a further truth made implicit. My
Last Door opened up for OKeeffe a whole new state of being.
She had to continually go on with that wall not only because
she lived with it, but because it kept her engaged and fascinated.
The ever-changing light and the ever-changing weather offered
limitless ways to perceive it. It is akin to John Constable studying
clouds. The wall with a door in it was an ongoing, active
problem to be addressed. If you have an empty wall, you can
think on it better. I like a space to think in if you can call what I
do thinking, she said.35
It is unlikely that many knew or saw My Last Door until it was
included in OKeeffes memorial retrospective at the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, in 1987.36 Barbara Rose had singled
out White Patio with Red Door for lengthy discussion in her
review of the Whitney Museum retrospective in 1970, praising its
introduction of the theme of the infinite, likely unaware that it was
a reworking of its predecessor from 1952.37 OKeeffes innovative
abstraction, distilled beyond reference in My Last Door, led to the
imagining of the ribbon of road seen out her bedroom window
(Winter Road I 1963; fig.136) and into the endless horizon of the
sky above the clouds (Sky Above the Clouds III 1963; fig.204).
Above all, My Last Door opened up OKeeffes view into infinity
a compelling totality of meaning and existence.

224 225
 Georgia OKeeffe
OKeeffe as I see her
Susan Hiller
frieze, no.11
JuneAugust 1993
To begin with, she was always old. I thought I had discovered her for myself
when I scissored a photograph of her from a magazine and pinned it up in
my college bedroom in 1960 or thereabouts.
She was old, she was famous, I was 17 maybe 18 and bored with Eleanor
Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, Helen Keller and other worthy role models. Four
years later, after graduation, when I had to dismantle my college room with
its wall of hundreds of massed images, what impulse, what motive, made
me save only this one? I really cant remember now, but was it because the
artist still intrigued me? Or was it because I liked this particular photograph
so much? Or was it because I, too, wanted to live in New Mexico and
wear Navajo jewellery? Or was it because I admired the luminous abstract
painting from the Pelvis Series?
How can I remember what exactly made me put this cut-out photograph
away so carefully, like a flower commemorating a special day, pressed
between two of the 600 large pages of the book I still think is the very best
history of American art, Oliver Larkins Art and Life in America? Preserved like
a secret in the midst of this vast expanse, the photograph came with me to
England inside the book, completely unremembered. I didnt look at either
of them again for years.
By 1985, when I was asked to discuss my personal heroines for a book of
the same title, I had been looking for a long time into the life and work of
Georgia OKeeffe. Curiously perhaps, like so many others, I had always been
looking at her in isolation, not as part of any history of art. I proposed her as
one of my heroines.
My existence as an artist requires absolute honesty about my sources of
inspiration. No degree of potential historical or social embarrassment could
prevent my saying that undoubtedly, I would not have been able to be an
artist of the kind I am, without having leaned on her Or, rather, on my
image of her.
And I dont even like her work that much, aside from the early vivid
watercolours which I find very exciting and certain of the more abstract
pieces from other periods of her life. I am in general agreement with
226
OKeeffe as I see her - Susan Hiller
1. Marya Mannes, who wrote in 1928 that, despite the works frequent and
Marya Mannes, Gallery
unprecedented beauty it is somehow bodiless.1
Notes: Intimate Gallery,
Creative Art, no.2,
February 1928. But I was an ignorant child, and she was the only artist who was female,
whom Id ever heard positively praised. Without her, I might have gone
for longer imagining that art was an exclusively male game, like American
football. Artemisia Gentileschi, Rosa Bonheur, Judith Leyster, had been
forgotten. Artists I heard about, like Mary Cassatt, Marie Laurencin,
Berthe Morisot, Meret Oppenheim, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Helen
Frankenthaler, Sonia Delaunay, Alice Neel were belittled or denigrated.
People said they were all second-rate
I didnt have the good luck to mistakenly believe when I was young that
Czanne was a woman, as one artist friend of mine did. She grew up
thinking that, like Marianne or Joanne, Czanne was clearly female, as well
as the greatest modern artist in the world. By the time my friend discovered
her mistake, she had internalised the notion that she, too, might someday
be the greatest modern artist in the world, since it would be only natural for
one woman to follow another in that position.
But speaking personally, it took effort and it took time to figure out why I
was having certain doubts, certain depressions, certain complications. In
the 70s I struggled to define in words the implications of my ambiguous
placement in language and culture as a woman and an artist. Thinking
This is the work
about these things was discouraging thinking about these things was
reproduced as Pelvis encouraging there were debates, polemics, theories. I made work, I
Series, Red with Yellow thought about work, I thought about making work.
1945 (fig.182). See also
ill., p.242. Still, I hadnt looked at Art and Life in America for years and years. The book
remained unopened until recently, when I loaned it to an English art critic
who had been, I felt, expressing rather too freely his views on American art
without knowing anything at all about its history. As I handed the book to
him, the photograph fell out. I realised I had been looking at OKeeffe as
though peering into a mirror to get a glimpse of myself, trying to see some
of the contradictory aspects of her importance for me, and for so many
other artists.
If I cant see myself except through looking at the other, what does
looking at OKeeffe show me? For one thing, it shows me that the frame
of this mirror is too constricting, the reflection of OKeeffe takes up the
whole surface, its too binary, just me and her, with no space for background
or context.
When I pinned the photograph on my wall, I must have already seen many
reproductions of Stieglitzs photos representing the hands, the face, the
naked torso of Georgia OKeeffe. (In fact, some of these images were so
familiar that my college friends and I sometimes referred sarcastically to our
own inky or paint-stained hands as the hands of Georgia OKeeffe, which
struck us as hilariously funny.)
227
 Georgia OKeeffe
This photograph is not by Stieglitz. It is an image of an old woman looking
at a medium-sized abstract painting. It is her painting, she painted it.
And she is showing it to the photographer and to us, rather artificially
its clear, on a large studio easel transported out to the desert probably
just to display this painting, which, being abstract, does not seem to me
to benefit from being literally placed back in the landscape. In fact, this
now makes me very uneasy. I know how posed this image must be, I have
posed for some similar ones myself. Still, it is a fairly conventional portrayal
of the artist with one of her works. I must have been very glad, so many
years ago, to come across, among all the remarkable images of her that
exist, this one relatively straightforward picture of OKeeffe standing by her
work in an ordinary way.
Did no one ever photograph OKeeffe actually working, painting? Did she
refuse this? Was it too private? Or did she simply co-operate with various
photographers, none of whom, for whatever reason, wanted to picture
her at work? If so, her function in other peoples work that is, in their
photographs is that of an artists model, providing a vehicle for the vision,
fantasies, or projections of others. In which case, hardly any photograph
of her can tell us much about her. They are all constructions, quite clearly.
These images of OKeeffe do not display her subjectivity, but rather the
constitutive forces of desire in the men who photographed her. And though
they may well be art, and useful, too, in showing a range of fantasies and
projections our culture allows as legitimate in respect to the female body,
I care for them much less than I care for OKeeffes paintings.
Stieglitz showed her hands sewing, but never painting. Her hands caress a
skull or a bit of gnarled wood, they are oddly folded or peculiarly posed in
relation to her breasts, her neck, etc. In his photograph of her hands with
a large pelvis-like watercolour, Stieglitz poses the hands at the perimeter
of the pelvis shape as though fondling it languidly. By implication, these
hands and this suggestive void are parts of one body. There is no separation
between the artist and the work, her painting replaces a specific area
of her body, and her hands end at the wrist. We are witnesses to the
representation of the artists work as an intimate part of her own anatomy.
In several related photographs, OKeeffe is shown gesturing provocatively,
oddly echoing the arrangement of certain forms in her abstract paintings,
which are displayed only as backgrounds, not as autonomous works. In
another image, which features the juxtaposition of two artworks without
any human presence, Stieglitz placed a small phallus-shaped sculpture in
front of the large void at the centre of Music Pink and Blue No. I (1919),
documenting his own fantasy of a sexual relationship between the abstract
forms of the two works.
In looking at these photographs, we are truly participating in a private
view not just witnessing the traditional relationship of a photographer
to a beloved model but being invited to share in the revelation that
228
Stieglitz photographed
her painting in 1918, and
Ansel Adams in 1937.
This is the work
reproduced as Music
Pink and Blue No. I 1918
(fig.27) in this catalogue.
See Interpretation 1919
(fig.59) for Stieglitzs work.
of conscious creation, as art. I do not wish to consume these photographs
work, her desire. Or of mine.
2.
Paul Rosenfeld, American
Painting, The Dial,
December 1921, no.71,
pp.64970.
There is no reason, having heard it, not to understand it as a message or
This is the work
reproduced as The Shelton
with Sunspots, N.Y. 1926
(fig.4) in this catalogue. flowers, which are said to represent body, female body. In my experience,
while it is possible in art to evoke body, this is not what is communicated
OKeeffe as I see her - Susan Hiller
the artworks produced by her are available for the same kind of erotic
delectation and scrutiny as her body. This is complicated.
Insofar as this is a womans body, the female onlooker, willingly or not,
entirely or partially, is identified with the body under observation. It happens
to be that of Georgia OKeeffe, artist. Her art is shown as part of her body.
In his portraits of her with her work, Stieglitz illustrates his belief that
what he had found in her work, to quote his famous words, was Finally, a
woman on paper. Is there some way of looking at her work, or some kind of
interpretation by means of which we could exempt ourselves from seeing
as if in collusion with the great artist, her husband, photographing her?
Here the dimension of desire appears, since we are not really in the image
we see: I desire to see OKeeffes work as separate from her body, as an act
as the photographer intended me to; I do desire to see his intention as an
artefact of his own desire, as his representation, not as a reading of her
How might I function so as not to be fixed in my pose as the embodiment
of the desire of another? This is urgent, for the future. Reading the body as
the sole sign of identity is how patriarchy regulates the bodies of women.
Herself as her body. Her body as a site of natural reproduction, not cultural
production. Her femaleness reduced to her sexuality. To have to endure,
as OKeeffe did, having this said of ones lifes work that it registered the
manner of perception anchored in the constitution of the woman. The
organs that differentiate the sex speak. Women always feel, when they feel
strongly, through the womb.2 No wonder she hated being called a woman
artist; she couldnt speak as a woman, since her sexual organs did.
The artists terrible struggle to locate, define, and represent her own
subjectivity is conveyed by OKeeffe in her work. But subjectivity, a sense
of identity, doesnt reside in the body you can see your own or anothers.
Re-presenting the body as a sign, identifying self with a sexuality defined by
and for the other, re-inscribing woman as flower, is like rattling the chains
of your prison. Without showing a way out, it signals the desire to escape.
In OKeeffes work, the signal is loud and clear, sustained and courageous.
statement lucidly analysing a situation, a predicament.
One of OKeeffes strategies in painting was to undermine or destabilise
the notion of the female body by eliminating its traces in her work.
Her paintings are always images, never objects. In this they seem to be
talking back to photography. This is implied in her adroit references to
photographic artefacts, in The Shelton with Sunspots (1923), for example, or in
the extreme closeups of flowers for which she is famous. Her refusal to
evoke body has especially interesting implications in those works, like the
229
 Georgia OKeeffe OKeeffe as I see her - Susan Hiller

through representation. Intimacy is a blur, a smear, a stain, not a clinical studio. In fact, it now occurs to me, my image of OKeeffe is based on a
sharpness. There is nothing in her works content to justify its reception by photograph cut from a magazine long ago, that may well be the only one
viewers as living and shameless private documents.3 3. showing the artist as an unfetishised, full-bodied individual, alongside her
Ibid.
work Was it his idea? Or did she, for once, suggest the idea for her pose
I read content in the rhythms, contrasts, flows and gaps of the material [This quotation is incorrectly
attributed to Rosenfeld. to the photographer?
practice of painting, not in its subject matter. (To confuse subject matter
See Tanya Barson,
with content is literary.) Aside from early watercolours, her technique is OKeeffes Century, n.14,
coolly detached. No texture. Everything is surface, as in a mirror or through in this catalogue.] Susan Hiller, OKeeffe as I see her, frieze, issue 11, JuneAugust 1993, pp.246
(Reproduced with the note: This text was originally given as a talk for Birkbeck College,
a lens. One might well say that it implied a kind of visual efficiency that University of London at the South Bank Centre.)
could be taken as a symbol of intellectual honesty.4 That was how she dealt 4.
Oliver Larkin, Art and Life
with the issue of subjectivity for most of her life.
in America, revised and
enlarged ed., New York
As Gertrude Stein insisted, A rose is a rose is a rose. It is not part of a
1960, p.390.
womans body, nor is a woman a flower. In an important way, much of
OKeeffes work is as ungendered as the work of most American artists of
her generation. To do justice to OKeeffe in an historical context we need
to look very hard at the other artists who emerged in the United States
during the same period. She was in touch with many of them, and this set
of connections ought to be visible to us. OKeeffes New York paintings
need to be seen alongside, say, Charles Sheelers Church Street El [1920].
Her early and late abstractions are related to those of her close friend
Arthur Dove, for instance his Snow Thaw [1930]. Her approach to landscape
ought to be viewed in relation to the work of those of her contemporaries
with whom she had personal connections, like John Marin or the now-
forgotten Louis Eilshemius, and the better-known Charles Demuth.
Otherwise, she will continue to be seen as an isolated figure, an aberration,
a sport, a freak of nature.

Linda Nochlins conclusion to her historical survey of women artists points

out that, In every instance, women artists would seem to be closer to other
artists and writers of their own period than they are to each other. This is
an anti-essentialist refusal to see all women as woman, mans other. The
artist who is a woman is a speaking subject whose work represents her time
as much as her place, her world view as well as herself, her mind as well
as her body. OKeeffes work, more than most, exemplifies this dialectical
sequence of terms. And in addition, it implies something more, something
for the future. In 1925, in a letter to Mabel Dodge, she wrote: What the men
cant what I want written I do not know I have no definite idea of what it
should be but a woman who has lived many things and who sees lines and
colours as an expression of living might say something that a man cant I
feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can
explore the men have done all they can do about it.5 5.
Georgia OKeeffe, letter to
There is one very early Stieglitz photograph of her in a long dress holding a Mabel Dodge Luhan, 1925,
saw in her hand, beside a man on a ladder trimming trees but I have never in Katherine Hoffmann,
An Enduring Spirit: The
seen an image of her holding in her hand a paintbrush or a pencil. There are Art of Georgia OKeeffe,
pictures of her looking at rocks, bones, sticks; standing at social gatherings; Metuchen, NJ, 1984, p.21.
and sitting in the desert. There are no photographs of her at work in the

230 231
 Georgia OKeeffe Chronology Hannah Johnston

1887
1887
Georgia Totto OKeeffe is born on 15
November to Francis Calyxtus and Ida
Totto OKeeffe at the familys dairy
farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin,
the eldest daughter and the second
of seven children including: Francis
Calyxtus (18851959); Ida Ten Eyck
(18891961); Anita Natalie (1891
1985); Alexis Wyckoff 1 (18921930);
Catherine Blanche (18951987); and
Claudia Ruth (18991984). Within
living memory of the Civil War, she is
born under the presidency of Grover
Cleveland, the first Democrat elected
following the conflict.
18921900
OKeeffe begins her education at Town
Hall School, a one-room primary school
in Sun Prairie. She receives weekly
drawing lessons at home with her
Georgia OKeeffe 1903 sisters, Ida and Anita, and later studies
with local watercolourist, Sarah Mann.
1901
OKeeffe enrols as a boarding student
at Sacred Heart Academy, a convent
school in Madison, Wisconsin,
where she receives her first formal art
instruction from Sister Angelique.
1902
When the family move to Williamsburg,
Virginia, OKeeffe stays behind to
attend Madison High School. She and
her elder brother live with their maternal
aunt, Leonore (Lola) Totto.
19035
OKeeffe re-joins her family in
Williamsburg in the spring and, in the
autumn, enrols as a boarding student at
Chatham Episcopal Institute. Supported
by her art teacher and headmistress,
Elizabeth May Willis, she edits the
schools yearbook in her final year.
1905
Again taking up residence with family
her uncle and aunt, Charles and Alletta
Totto OKeeffe begins studies at the
School of The Art Institute of Chicago,
Illinois, under John Vanderpoel.
1906
OKeeffe contracts typhoid fever
in the summer, and begins a long
convalescence at home, where she
remains until the following year.
It is the first of a number of spells of
ill health that recur periodically
throughout her life.
19078
OKeeffe resumes her studies in
September at the Art Students League
of New York, where she is taught by
William Merritt Chase. Photographer
Alfred Stieglitz (born 1864 in Hoboken,
New Jersey, to German-Jewish
immigrants) shows nude figurative
drawings by Auguste Rodin at his New
York gallery the Little Galleries of
the Photo-Secession, known as 291
after its Fifth Avenue address in the
first of many pioneering exhibitions of
avant-garde European artists. OKeeffe
visits with classmates and returns to
Rufus W. Holsinger
Miss Georgia OKeeffe 1915
Claudia O'Keeffe
Georgia OKeeffe in Canyon, Texas 1917
the gallery often to see other shows.
As the recipient of the Chase Award
scholarship, she participates in the
Leagues outdoor summer school at
Lake George, in upstate New York.
190810
With a downturn in her fathers business
fortunes, OKeeffe returns to the Tottos
in Chicago and undertakes freelance
commercial artwork until eyesight
problems caused by a bout of measles
force her to give up. She returns to
her family, who have relocated to
Charlottesville, Virginia, following her
mothers contracting tuberculosis. The
disease is unrelenting in its impact on
the family, having already claimed the
lives of OKeeffes grandfather and
three paternal uncles.
1911
OKeeffe takes up her first teaching post
in the autumn, acting as a substitute
for Elizabeth May Willis at Chatham
Episcopal Institute.
1912
During the summer, OKeeffe attends
a drawing class at the University
of Virginia, Charlottesville, run by
Alon Bement from Teachers College,
Columbia University, New York.
An introduction to the principles
of Bements colleague, Arthur
Wesley Dow the head of the art
department at Teachers College, who
emphasises freedom of expression and
compositional harmony in opposition to
an imitation of nature is revelatory for
1914
OKeeffe, renewing her ambitions as an
artist, and will have a lifelong impact
on her ideas. In August, she moves to
Amarillo, Texas, to take up a two-year
position as head of the art department
of the citys public school.
1913
OKeeffe returns to the University of
Virginia for the summer as Bements
teaching assistant a position she holds
until 1916.
1914
On 28 July, the First World War
begins. OKeeffe reads the translation
of Wassily Kandinskys The Art of
Spiritual Harmony (1911) with Bements
encouragement and enrols at Teachers
College in the autumn, where she
studies with Dow for the first time.2
She develops a friendship with
classmate Anita Pollitzer, with whom
she visits an exhibition of the work of
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque at
291 in December.

232 233
 Georgia OKeeffe
1915
1915
OKeeffe begins a one-year position as
an art teacher at Columbia College,
South Carolina, in September.
Correspondence with Pollitzer is a
vital link to the political and artistic
happenings in New York and is
enriched by copies of Stieglitzs
periodicals, Camera Work (190317)
and 291 (191516), which she requests
Alfred Stieglitz from the gallery. A series of charcoal
Main Room Wall, Next to Door, Right 1917
abstractions, partly indebted to Dows
teachings, are begun in October and
posted to Pollitzer before Christmas.
1916
On 1 January, Pollitzer shows
the charcoals to Stieglitz. His
enthusiastic interest initiates a fervent
correspondence, which encourages
the artist to send packages of her work
as she completes it. OKeeffe receives
her professional, public debut on 23
May when Stieglitz includes ten of
the charcoals in a group exhibition
at 291. Whilst it has been widely
suggested that the work was hung
without her permission, research into
the correspondence confirms that
O'Keeffe knew that Stieglitz intended
to exhibit it.3 OKeeffe returns to
Texas in September as head of the art
department at West Texas State Normal
College in Canyon, and is immediately
Alfred Stieglitz inspired by the vastness of the Texas
Georgia OKeeffe c.1919 Panhandle. Following the death of her
mother from tuberculosis on 1 May,
OKeeffe assumes responsibility for her
youngest sister, Claudia, who moves to
live with her in October.
234
1917
Stieglitz opens OKeeffes first solo
exhibition at 291 on 3 April; it is the
last before the gallerys closure in the
summer due to financial difficulties. As
the show has already been dismantled
by the time OKeeffe arrives in New
York in May, Stieglitz re-hangs it for
her to view and photographs her for
the first time, both with and without her
works. OKeeffe meets members of
Stieglitzs circle, including photographer
Paul Strand, with whom she begins
a correspondence on her return to
Canyon. For encouraging her students
to finish their studies rather than
enlisting in the war effort she is labelled
unpatriotic.4 During a holiday to
Colorado with sister Claudia in August,
OKeeffes train passes through
New Mexico and she is captivated by
the landscape.5
1918
Taken ill in January as strains of flu
spread across the country later
resulting in the Great Pandemic
OKeeffe takes a leave of absence
from West Texas State and relocates to
the home of a friend in Waring, Texas,
to avoid catching influenza. Stieglitz
is increasingly concerned about her
health and, in May, sends Strand from
New York to persuade her to return
with him to the city. She is met at the
train station in New York on 10 June.
OKeeffe takes up residence in a studio
apartment at 114 East 59th Street
belonging to Stieglitzs niece, Elizabeth,
and is joined by the photographer in
Chronology Hannah Johnston
July, when he leaves his wife Emmeline
(ne Obermeyer) after twenty-five
years of marriage. OKeeffe accepts
Stieglitzs offer of a years financial
support and resigns from her position
in Texas to concentrate on painting.
Stieglitz photographs her intensely and
intimately over the summer and takes
her to his familys summer residence at
Lake George for the first time in August.
OKeeffes father dies on 6 November
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe with watercolour paint box 1918 in Petersburg, Virginia, but the news
does not reach her until the armistice on
11 November.
1919
OKeeffe and Stieglitz spend the
summer at Lake George they travel
there from New York City seasonally for
the next decade.
1920
Seeking respite from a frantic New
York and distractions at Lake George,
OKeeffe makes her first journey to
York Beach, Maine, in March. After
a long fight for womens suffrage, the
right to vote is granted on 18 August
with the ratification of the Nineteenth
Amendment of the United States
Constitution. The victory is celebrated
by the National Womans Party
(NWP) which OKeeffe had joined
in 1914, remaining a member until its
Alfred Stieglitz
dissolution in the 1970s. OKeeffe and
Georgia OKeeffe 1922
Stieglitz move into his brother Leopolds
apartment at 60 East 65th Street, where
they live until 1924.
235
1922
1921
A retrospective of Stieglitzs
photographs, including forty-five
portraits of OKeeffe (some nudes),
opens to huge popular interest at the
Anderson Galleries, New York, on
7 February. In the year that follows,
artist Marsden Hartley and critic Paul
Rosenfeld, amongst others, publish
articles that lay the foundations for
psychoanalytical interpretations of her
work.6 They draw on Stieglitzs views
he first portrays her art as an expression
of her female sexuality, with recourse
to Sigmund Freud, in the October 1916
issue of Camera Work as well as the
way his own compositions conflated her
work and body.7
1922
In February, OKeeffe designs a
typographic logo for Manuscripts
(MSS.), a new periodical published
by Stieglitz and several collaborators.
She contributes an essay to a special
issue in December that explores the
question: Can a photograph have the
significance of art?8

1923
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe probably1924
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe 1930s
Georgia OKeeffe
1923
Stieglitz opens a second solo exhibition
of OKeeffes work on 29 January
at the Anderson Galleries, which is
again reviewed in Freudian terms.
Following a period of postnatal
depression, Stieglitzs daughter Kitty
(Katherine, b.1898) is diagnosed with
schizophrenia in June and permanently
institutionalised. At this time Stieglitz
makes clear he will not agree to have
children with OKeeffe. Undoubtedly
scarred by personal experience,
Stieglitz ends discussions on the
matter, fearing parenthood would
be a distraction from OKeeffes work,
a risk to her health and a burden for
all concerned.
1924
Simultaneous exhibitions of OKeeffes
and Stieglitzs work open at the
Anderson Galleries in March.
Attempting to control what has become
an undesirably sexualised public
profile, OKeeffe withholds her early
abstractions and includes a statement
in the catalogue that proclaims her
intention to clarify the issues written
of by the critics.9 Stieglitz is granted
a divorce six years after separating
from Emmeline and marries OKeeffe
in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, on
11 December. George Engelhard
(Stieglitzs brother-in-law) and artist
John Marin are witnesses. OKeeffe
keeps her maiden name.
236
1925
On 9 March, Stieglitz opens Seven
Americans at the Anderson Galleries.
The exhibition features 159 works by
Marin, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth,
Hartley, Strand, OKeeffe and himself
a group he upholds as authentically
American and OKeeffe first shows
her large-scale flower paintings to great
acclaim. OKeeffe and Stieglitz move
into an apartment in the 34-storey
Shelton Hotel on Lexington Avenue
in November. In December, Stieglitz
opens his second gallery, the Intimate
Gallery, in the Anderson Galleries
building and OKeeffe assumes a key
role in exhibition installation.
1926
OKeeffes first solo exhibition opens
in February at the Intimate Gallery,
where she shows annually until 1929.
Later that month, OKeeffe speaks at the
NWP dinner in Washington, D.C.
1927
The artists first museum exhibition (a
small retrospective of fifteen paintings)
opens at the Brooklyn Museum, New
York, in June. Over the same period,
OKeeffe develops, and undergoes
surgeries for, two successive (benign)
breast tumours from which her recovery
is lengthy. Dorothy Norman, the twenty-
two-year-old wife of an heir to the
Sears, Roebuck & Co. department store
fortune, first visits the Intimate Gallery in
the autumn. Enthralled by Stieglitz, she
returns frequently.
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe near The Pink House,
Taos, New Mexico 1929
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe 1931
Chronology Hannah Johnston
1928
In April, Stieglitzs announcement of his
sale of six OKeeffe calla lily paintings
for $25,000 is widely publicised.
Although the transaction ultimately falls
through, it confirms the artists economic
independence and importance to the
gallerys commercial stability. OKeeffe
journeys to the Midwest in the summer
to visit her family.
1929
In place of Lake George, OKeeffe
departs for New Mexico in April with
Strands wife, Rebecca, spending four
months as the guest of arts patron and
writer, Mabel Dodge Luhan (married
to Pueblo Indian Tony Luhan), in Taos.
Whilst it has been suggested that
her visit was prompted by Stieglitzs
intensifying relationship with Norman,
research into the correspondence
confirms that he remained focused
on O'Keeffe this summer.10 She meets
photographer Ansel Adams, who
becomes a lifelong friend, and is
rejuvenated by the artistic possibilities of
the landscape. OKeeffe learns to drive
and purchases a Ford car. She makes
excursions to Navajo sites in Arizona,
Colorado and Utah and attends Native
American dances. The Intimate Gallery
closes in June with the demolition of the
building, and Norman and the Strands
campaign to secure and underwrite a
new space; Stieglitz opens An American
Place, his final gallery, at 509 Madison
Avenue on 15 December. The New York
stock market crashes on 24 October,
triggering the Great Depression.
237
1931
1930
On 7 January, OKeeffes brother
Alexius dies from injuries to his heart
and lungs originally sustained through
gas exposure on the Western Front.
OKeeffes first exhibition at An
American Place, where she shows
annually until 1946, opens in February.
She returns for a second summer
as Dodge Luhans guest in Taos,
establishing her independent seasonal
pilgrimage to New Mexico.
1931
OKeeffe rents a property on the H&M
Ranch at Alcalde, New Mexico, in
April. In May, she first discovers the
Plaza Blanca or White Place near
Abiqui in the Chama River Valley
a limestone rock formation that she
revisits often. Having long been a
collector of stones, shells and other
small souvenirs from her tramping
through the landscape, OKeeffe picks
up sun-bleached animal bones from
the desert throughout the summer and
ships a container of them back to Lake
George. Before she can integrate them
into her work, Stieglitz photographs her
with them.11

1932
Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia OKeeffe 1933
Charles Peterson
Elizabeth Arden and Georgia OKeeffe
at the opening of the New School
(with OKeeffes Jimson Weed) 1936
Georgia OKeeffe
1932
OKeeffe accepts a $1,500 commission
to paint a mural for the powder room
of Radio City Music Hall, New York, in
April without consulting Stieglitz. In spite
of his disapproval (largely on financial
grounds), she spends the summer at
Lake George working on the project
until technical difficulties become
insurmountable in the autumn. OKeeffe
leaves the U.S. for the first time in
June, visiting the Gasp Peninsula in
Canada with Stieglitzs niece, Georgia
Engelhard. Norman spearheads
the renewal of An American Places
lease following its expiration in the
summer and Stieglitz registers the new
paperwork in her name. OKeeffe
moves into her sister Anitas apartment
on Park Avenue in late December as
Stieglitzs affair with Norman continues.
1933
In February, OKeeffe is diagnosed
with psychoneurosis. She spends two
months at Doctors Hospital, New York,
before convalescing with friends in
Bermuda. The profoundly traumatic
experience leaves her unable to paint
for thirteen months.
1934
OKeeffe spends the summer in New
Mexico for the first time in three years,
again based at the H&M Ranch. In
August, she first visits Ghost Ranch a
dude ranch north of Abiqui, owned
by Arthur Pack and returns often to
paint the spectacularly-coloured rock
formations of the surrounding
238
landscape. Norman publishes America
& Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait
on the occasion of Stieglitzs seventieth
birthday.12 OKeeffe declines to
contribute to the publication.
1935
The artist returns to New Mexico in the
summer, detouring through Texas to
collect works she left in Canyon on her
sudden departure in 1918. Demuth dies
in the autumn and names OKeeffe as
the beneficiary of his works on canvas.
1936
In April, OKeeffe and Stieglitz relocate
from the Shelton Hotel to an apartment
at 405 East 54th Street. OKeeffe
spends the summer at a rented adobe
house on Ghost Ranch called Rancho de
los Burros, which she would later own.
Its patio offers expansive views of the
Cerro Pedernal, a flat-topped mountain
that she claimed God would give to her
if she painted it enough.13 In September,
OKeeffe receives a $10,000
commission from Elizabeth Arden to
make a large-scale flower painting for
her New York exercise salon.
1937
From Ghost Ranch, OKeeffe continues
her excursions into the dramatic
landscapes of Arizona, Colorado
and Utah: with writer Spud Johnson
in September; and with Adams and
collector David McAlpin in October. At
the end of the year, poor health forces
Stieglitz to end his six-decade-long
photographic career.
Arnold Newman
Portrait of Georgia OKeeffe and her husband,
photographer Alfred Stieglitz, New York 1944
Maria Chabot
Georgia OKeeffe, The Black Place 1944
Chronology Hannah Johnston
1938
Stieglitzs second heart attack, in April,
delays OKeeffes customary summer
departure for New Mexico. In May, she
travels to receive an honorary Doctorate
in Fine Arts from the College of William
and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia
the first of many such distinctions. Again
accompanied by Adams and McAlpin,
OKeeffe visits California and the Sierra
Nevada for the first time in August.
1939
OKeeffe travels to Hawaii in February
with a commission to produce work
for a Dole Food Company promotion.
Having unsuccessfully submitted
paintings of other subjects, she
grudgingly delivers the requested
pineapple in April. In the same month,
the futuristic New York Worlds Fair
opens at Flushing Meadows-Corona
Park. OKeeffe is celebrated by the
committee as one of the twelve most
notable women of the past fifty years.
1940
OKeeffe purchases Rancho de los
Burros, her first property, in October.
In the same month, she meets budding
writer Maria Chabot, who becomes a
close associate.
1941
For the first time, in May, OKeeffe
makes the journey to New Mexico
by aeroplane from Chicago. On 7
December the Japanese strike Pearl
Harbor and the U.S. enters the Second
World War.
239
1944
1942
While in Madison to receive an
honorary degree from the University
of Wisconsin, OKeeffe meets architect
Frank Lloyd Wright for the first time, at
his Spring Green home, Taliesin East.
She and an ageing Stieglitz move to a
new apartment in December, one block
away from An American Place at 59
East 54th Street.
1943
In January, OKeeffe oversees the
installation of her first full-scale
retrospective at The Art Institute
of Chicago.
1944
Accompanied by Chabot, OKeeffe
makes multiple camping excursions to
a site she calls the Black Place, an
area of the Bisti Badlands in Navajo
Country, approximately 240 kilometres
west of Ghost Ranch, that she first
visited in 1936. The distinctive black
and grey hills prove captivating and act
as the inspiration for one of the artists
most radically progressive series of
abstractions (Black Place IIV 1944,
figs 1603). In September, Rosalind
Irvine from the Whitney Museum of
American Arts Art Research Council
begins a conversation with Stieglitz
about producing a catalogue of
OKeeffes work.
 Georgia OKeeffe
1945
1945
Following the detonation of two atomic
bombs in August weapons that had
been tested at Los Alamos in the New
Mexico desert in July the Second
World War ends on 2 September. In
December, OKeeffe purchases from
the Catholic Archdiocese a ruined
adobe haienda in Abiqui that she
had first sought in 1940, and appoints
Chabot to oversee its renovation over
the next three years. Her organic
garden eventually feeds the household
year-round.
1946
In February, Stieglitz opens his last
exhibition of OKeeffes work at An
Ansel Adams American Place. Three months later,
Alfred Stieglitz and Painting by Georgia OKeeffe, her second retrospective (and the
An American Place, New York City 1944 institutions first solo exhibition devoted
to a woman artist) opens at the Museum
of Modern Art, New York. Stieglitz
suffers a stroke on 10 July, which
leaves him in a coma. OKeeffe returns
immediately from New Mexico and is
with him when he dies on 13 July, aged
eighty-two. As Stieglitzs principal heir
and sole executor, OKeeffe dismisses
Norman and assumes managerial
responsibility for An American Place.
She employs Doris Bry in the autumn to
help organise Stieglitzs papers.
19479
Over two years, OKeeffe works with
Bry to settle Stieglitzs estate. His art
Philippe Halsman collection is distributed among seven
Georgia OKeeffe at Ghost Ranch, Abiqui,
public institutions and his papers sent
New Mexico 1948
to the Beinecke Rare Book and
240
Manuscript Library, Yale University.14 In
June 1949, OKeeffe leaves New York
to live permanently in New Mexico,
where she divides her time seasonally
between Abiqui (winter and spring)
and Ghost Ranch (summer and autumn).
August sees her election to the illustrious
National Institute of Arts and Letters.
1950
In June, Pollitzer begins a biography
that the artist will later underwrite.
It is the first of many such records
of OKeeffes life that are produced
with and without her endorsement.
OKeeffes exhibition at An American
Place between October and November
marks its closure. She appoints Edith
Halpert at The Downtown Gallery as
her new gallerist.
1951
Initiating an extensive schedule of
international travel over the next
thirty years, OKeeffe drives to
Mexico in February with Johnson and
photographer Eliot Porter. She visits
artists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and
Miguel Covarrubias (who she had
met in Taos in 1929) as well as the
Mayan ruins in Yucatn. In September,
she climbs the Cerro Pedernal for the
first time.
1952
OKeeffe receives her first solo
exhibition at The Downtown Gallery
in February. A second (1955) and
third (1958) will follow, before her
last in 1961
.
Chronology Hannah Johnston
1962
1953 1960
OKeeffes third retrospective, organised The artists fourth retrospective
by The Downtown Gallery, opens opens at the Worcester Art Museum,
at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, Massachusetts, in October. The same
in February. The artist visits Europe month, OKeeffe returns to Asia and
for the first time in the spring, making journeys on to the Pacific Islands.
excursions to France and Spain. In
August, Cold War fears are amplified 1961
by the news that the Soviet Union has OKeeffe makes a rafting trip down the
tested its first hydrogen bomb. OKeeffe Colorado River (290 kilometres in seven
installs a fallout shelter at Abiqui. days) with Porter and photographer
Todd Webb in late July. She repeats the
1956 expedition in 1969 and 1970.
In the spring, OKeeffe spends three
months in Peru. She is unhappy with the 1962
Yousuf Karsh
first draft of Pollitzers biography and In December, OKeeffe is elected to the
Georgia OKeeffe 1956 ceases financial support.15 American Academy of Arts and Letters.
1959
OKeeffe embarks on a lengthy period
of travel, visiting East and Southeast
Asia and the Near and Middle East,
as well as India, Pakistan and Italy. It
inspires work that synthesises her view
of clouds and landscape formations
from the air a novel experience for
most Americans in the early stages of
the Jet Age.
Todd Webb
OKeeffe Walking in the White Place, Abiqui,
New Mexico 1957
241
 Georgia OKeeffe
1963
1963
OKeeffe visits Greece, Egypt and the
Near East in the spring. In August, she
ends her relationship with Halpert and
appoints Bry as her new agent.
1965
Aged seventy-seven, the artist paints the
largest work of her career: Sky Above
Clouds IV (243.8 x 731.5 cm).
Tony Vaccaro
Georgia OKeeffe with painting in the desert,
New Mexico 1960 1966
A career survey opens in March at the
Amon Carter Museum of American Art
in Fort Worth, Texas. OKeeffe visits
England and Austria in September.
1970
OKeeffe is awarded the Gold Medal
for Painting by the National Institute of
Arts and Letters in May. In the autumn,
a major retrospective opens at the
Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York and later travels to The and
San Francisco Museum of Art (now
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).
OKeeffe is heralded as a figurehead
by a new generation of feminist
artists, whose sexualised readings and
essentialist understanding of her work
she nonetheless continues to refute,
and receives fresh admiration from the
general public nationwide.
242
Chronology Hannah Johnston
1986
Postscript
19712 1978
To celebrate the artists centennial, a
OKeeffe gradually loses her central OKeeffe writes the catalogue
major retrospective was staged at the
vision due to macular degeneration introduction for Georgia OKeeffe:
National Gallery of Art, Washington,
and is left only with peripheral eyesight. A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz at The
in 1987 and subsequently toured
While she continues to paint until the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
nationwide. The Georgia OKeeffe
late 1970s, she produces her last York. The exhibition reintroduces
Foundation was established in 1989
unassisted work in this medium in 1972. nudes not seen since the early 1920s
to sustain the artists legacy and, in
to the public.
1997, the Georgia OKeeffe Museum
1973
was opened in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
Potter-sculptor Juan Hamilton visits 1983
through the generosity of Anne and
OKeeffe at Abiqui. He becomes her A visit to Costa Rica in November
John Marion. Following the dissolution
assistant and close friend, facilitating marks the end of the artists
of the Foundation in 2006, OKeeffes
exhibitions, publications and travel, as international travel.
estate is now held by the museum. The
well as teaching her to work with clay.
OKeeffe-Stieglitz correspondence at
1984
the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
1974 After a career spanning seven decades
Todd Webb Library, Yale University which had
A book of reproductions of a 1968 and in declining health OKeeffe
Georgia OKeeffe on the portal at the been sealed by the artist until twenty
portfolio of OKeeffes work on paper makes her final drawing. She takes up
Ghost Ranch 1963 years after her death was opened
from 1915 to 1963, with a text by the residence with Hamilton and his family
in 2006 for public view. On 20
artist, Some Memories of Drawings, is in Santa Fe in the spring, in need of
November 2014, the financial success
produced in collaboration with Bry.16 greater proximity to medical facilities.
enjoyed by OKeeffe throughout her life
was surpassed with the sale of Jimson
1976 1985
Weed/White Flower No. 1 1932
Viking Press, New York, publishes the OKeeffe receives the prestigious
(fig.110) at Sothebys, New York, for
first monograph of the artists work. National Medal of Arts from President
$44.4 million. It is the highest value
Ronald Reagan.
work of art ever sold at auction by an
1977
artist who was a woman.
In January, OKeeffe is presented with 1986
the Presidential Medal of Freedom the On 6 March, OKeeffe dies in Santa Fe
United States highest civilian award at the age of 98. Following
by President Gerald Ford. She dismisses her wishes, no memorial service is held
Bry in the spring and appoints Hamilton and her ashes are scattered from the
as her new representative. Lengthy Cerro Pedernal.
lawsuits and countersuits follow and
continue for eight years.
Ansel Adams
Georgia OKeeffe, Carmel, California 1976
243

OKeeffes Century
Tanya Barson
1. Georgia OKeeffe, To MSS.
and Its 33 Subscribers and Others
Who Read and Dont Subscribe!
[letter to the editor], MSS., no.4,
December 1922, pp.1718. Reprinted
in Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe,
Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929,
Ann Arbor, MI, 1989, p.182, and in
this volume, p.98.
2. Clement Greenberg, Towards
a Newer Laocon (1940), in
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood
(eds.), Art in Theory 1900-1990,
Oxford 1992, p.554.
3. The reasons for this are perhaps attitudes, were grounded in the
threefold: her designation as such nineteenth century and his early
by Alfred Stieglitz; her personal
image and her biographical
conformity to notions of pioneer
spirit; and her work. Stieglitzs
claiming of the term American,
the reinforcement of this by his
second circle, and the context of
others use of the term has been
examined in depth by Wanda
Corn in The Great American Thing: 1974, p.49.
Modern Art and National Identity
19151935, Berkeley, Los Angeles,
and London, 1999. See especially
the introduction, Spiritual
America, and chapter five, The
Great American Thing. The last
OKeeffe exhibition in the UK was
curated by Charles C. Eldredge
at the Hayward Gallery, London,
in 1993 and was titled Georgia
OKeeffe: American and Modern.
4. Grover Cleveland was the
22nd and 24th President of the
United States, in 18859 and 18937
respectively; Ronald Reagan was
the 40th, from 1981 to 1989.
5. Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New
York, Urbana, IL, 1961 [1924],
Georgia OKeeffe
Notes
pp.12. See also Wanda Corns
examination of this text in Corn
1999, pp.440.
6. Alfred Stieglitz was highly
influential as both a photographer
and a tireless promoter of modern
art in the U.S. He and OKeeffe
would live together from 1918, and
were married from 1924 until his
death. His influence on the story
of modernism in the U.S. can
hardly be exaggerated; his impact
on OKeeffes career, however,
while significant, is more complex
to estimate. Twenty-three years
older than OKeeffe, his aesthetic
formation, and a number of his
training in Germany.
7. Corn 1999, p.4
8. Ibid., p.1, quoting Georgia
OKeeffe, Georgia OKeeffe, New
York 1976, unpaginated. However
an earlier version of this account
appeared in Calvin Tomkins,
The Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty
Fine, New Yorker, issue 50, 4 March
9. Her work was shown alongside
that of Masson C. Duncan and
Rn Lafferty at 291, from 23 May
to 5 July 1916.
10. Barbara Haskells exhibition
Georgia OKeeffe: Abstraction
at the Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York in 2009
is perhaps the most detailed
examination of the importance
of OKeeffes commitment and
contribution to abstract art,
recognising a previously under-
appreciated yet significant aspect
of OKeeffes career.
11. Theosophist Annie Besant
originally published the book, with
Charles Leadbeater, Thought-
Forms in 1901 and Kandinsky also
drew on these ideas in his text,
which was initially translated
into English with the title The Art
of Spiritual Harmony. Dow was
an influential arts educator, as
well as a painter, printmaker and
photographer. He was Professor
of Fine Arts at Teachers College,
Columbia University. OKeeffe
studied at the University of Virginia
with Alon Bement of Teachers
College, in 1912, and he first
Id like great buckets of color like
introduced her to both Kandinskys
text and to Dows ideas. OKeeffe
later studied at Teachers College
in 191415 and 1916. Dows book
Composition: A Series of Exercises
in Art Structure for the Use of
Students and Teachers (1899), was
an important foundational text;
this and his teaching provided an
important grounding for OKeeffes
approach to abstract composition.
12. Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia
OKeeffe - C. Duncan - Rn snow spotted bare mountain the
Lafferty, Camera Work, no.48,
October 1916, pp.1213. Reprinted in brilliant flowers brilliant red
Lynes 1989, p.166.
13. Henry Tyrrell, New York Art
Exhibition and Gallery Notes:
Esoteric Art at 291 [review of the slushy at the edge of the lake
exhibition Georgia OKeeffe, 291,
New York, 3 April 14 May 1917], The loving you blue-green on the
Christian Science Monitor, 4 May
1917, p.10. Reprinted in Lynes 1989,
p.168, and in this volume pp.489.
14. Marsden Hartley, Georgia
OKeeffe, in Marsden Hartley,
Adventures in the Arts: Informal
Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville,
and Poets, New York 1921.
Reprinted in Lynes 1989, p.170.
15. More analysis of this
historiography follows, and it
is also examined in depth by
Griselda Pollock and others in this and have only been accessible to
244
publication. In contrast to these
readings, Wanda Corns The Great
American Thing (1999), titled after
OKeeffes statement, remains one
of the most detailed analyses of
her work in relation to cultural
politics and national identity.
16. See, for example, Georgia
OKeeffe, letters to Alfred Stieglitz
on 4 November 1916 from Canyon,
Texas: Tonight Id like to paint the
world with a broom and I think
Hartleys to start at it with lots of
red vermillion and I dont want
to be careful of the floor I just
want to splash; 10 December 1916
from Canyon, Texas: Wonderful
distances colors all kinds; 2
July 1917 from Canyon, Texas: Sun
is out a little wonderful streaks
of color on the plains; 21? August
1917, from Ward, Colorado: It was
wonderful so bare and lonesome
looking over the lake at the
ground underfoot covered with
deepest blue light blue lavender
purple yellow every color
it seemed yellow-green grass
and the tall dark pines friendly
edges deepest black in the center
Repeatedly, OKeeffe expresses
her enthusiasm for the outdoors
in terms of colour and similarly her
love for Stieglitz. Sarah Greenough
(ed.), My Faraway One: Selected
Letters of Georgia OKeeffe and
Alfred Stieglitz, Volume One,
19151933, New Haven 2011, pp.58, 87,
171 and 182 respectively. OKeeffe
and Stieglitzs letters, of which
there are over 5,000, were sealed
for twenty years after her death,
Notes
researchers for the last ten ties were with Germany, where Herald, 4 February 1923. Reprinted 27. McBride in Lynes 1989, p.187.
years. They continue to yield he studied (at Berlins Technische in Lynes 1989, pp.1879. McBride 28. Rosenfeld in Lynes 1989, p.174.
new information. Hochschule) as a young man. commented that all OKeeffes
29. Lynes in Broude and Garrard
17. OKeeffe refers to this in a As an early gift to OKeeffe in inhibitions had been removed
(eds.) 1992, pp.4389.
letter to Anita Pollitzer in October Texas, he sent his favourite book, before Freud had reached across
30. OKeeffes friend Anita Pollitzer
1915, where she describes a swirling Johann Wolfgang von Goethes the Atlantic, but that another
Faust (1808). Later, in the 1940s, Stieglitz had taken the place would become chairman of the
form as representing herself and
Clement Greenberg would critique of Freud. NWP in 1945.
a companion, Arthur Macmahon,
dabbling our feet in the water the Germanizing tendencies of 23. Georgia OKeeffe, Statement, 31. Lynes identifies 1922 as the
and later, in 1977, to a private this earlier modernist generation, in Alfred Stieglitz Presents One pivotal year when OKeeffe
collector, these abstractions were in the wake of the Second World Hundred Pictures: Oils, Water- introduced her own voice into the
done after sitting on the edge of War, of which more below. In colors, Pastels, Drawings, by criticism, which demonstrated her
a river, and having a conversation a letter to Alfred Stieglitz on 1 Georgia OKeeffe, American, exh. fundamental disagreement with
with a friend about abstractions July 1917, OKeeffe refers to her brochure, The Anderson Galleries, how she had been promoted. See
from nature. Imade two experiences of teaching children 29 January 10 February 1923, Lynes 1989, p.53.
pastels to illustrate to him what to paint and how it related to war: New York 1923. Reprinted in Lynes 32. This turn to photographic
I meant. See Clive Giboire (ed.), One youngster explained that 1989, p.184. clarity is ironic given that it might
Lovingly Georgia: The Complete bright colored spots all mixed
24. OKeeffe in Corn 1999, again be seen as owing to the
Correspondence of Georgia up sort of like a sunset was war
pp.2434. influence of Stieglitz. Some still
OKeeffe & Anita Pollitzer, New clouds in Europe. Also see Georgia
lifes might be seen as a form of
25. Alfred Stieglitz in Dorothy
York 1990, p.48, and Barbara Buhler OKeeffe to Alfred Stieglitz, 24 object-portrait, as, for instance,
Lynes, Georgia OKeeffe: Catalogue April 1917: Whats the use of Art
if there is war and 27 April 1917:
Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An
American Seer, New York
Mask with Golden Apple 1923
Raisonne, New Haven 1999, (fig.51). Gertrude Stein developed
I cannot clap and wave a flag, in 1990 [1960], pp.1202. Stieglitz,
vol.1, CR 57, p.57. the written-portrait in texts on
Greenough (ed.) 2011, pp.170, 139 at the time, published only
18. This would happen most Picasso and Matisse, published
and 140 respectively. short passages on OKeeffes
famously later, with her by Stieglitz in August 1912, in
work in Camera Work, but his
development of her skull and 21. In 1958 (25 February 22 March), Camera Work, and these inspired
influence depended on his
bone paintings in the early 1930s. Edith Halpert staged an exhibition object-portraits such as Charles
verbal explanations, which were
However, this early period also of fifty-three of OKeeffes early Demuth would make of OKeeffe,
conveyed to anyone visiting
augmented her love of flora watercolours from 191617 at The also in 1923, as well as of others
his galleries, from 291 onwards.
and her horticultural-farming Downtown Gallery: The bold, in Stieglitzs circle. In OKeeffes
His thinking on women artists
knowledge; among the many saturated colors, the simplified painting, the African mask and
was formed in relation to
publications dealing with flowers, shapes, and the atmosphere apple might be considered
OKeeffes art. Writing in a letter
organic gardening, botany or of dreamlike intensity in these signifiers of modernism in art,
to OKeeffe in 1917, he described
natural history that belong to created a strong parallel to the but also, more specifically, stand
a blue watercolour (CR 119) as
OKeeffes library at Abiqui is work of the color-field artists. in for Stieglitz; the African mask
representing the world all thats
the relatively early but beautifully When critics suggested that reflecting the modernist interest
wonderful in the making in a
illustrated book by Margaret OKeeffe had simply been trying in such objects (Stieglitz had
womans womb. Stieglitz, letter
Armstrong, Field Book of Western to fall into step with recent art, organised an exhibition of African
to OKeeffe, 10 March 1917 from
Wild Flowers (1915). Halpert gleefully told them to look sculpture at 291 in 1914), and the
New York, in Greenough (ed.) 2011,
at the dates. Roxana Robinson, apple, a signifier of both American
19. Luminism also frequently p.119. While his most substantial
Georgia OKeeffe: A Life, London identity and the apples of Paul
employed an aerial perspective, text on women as artists remained
1997, p.498. The works indeed have Czanne (again, an artist exhibited
which might be considered unpublished until 1960, its
an incredible similarity to the use by Stieglitz in 1910 and 1911).
an influence on OKeeffes late message, and some of its phrases,
and effects of thin washes of paint
paintings of the 1950s and 60s, found their way into a text on 33. OKeeffe in Lynes 1989, p.182,
on a surface that characterises
showing views from aeroplanes. OKeeffe by his close associate Paul and in this publication, p.98.
colour-field painting. They were
20. Based as she was in a Rosenfeld: Her art is gloriously 34. Wanda Corn has analysed
mistaken for works that were
small community in Canyon, female. Her great painful and the importance of New York City
derivative of contemporary
Texas, during the years of the ecstatic climaxes make us at last in the work of what she calls the
abstraction until the dates of their
U.S. participation in the First to know something that man has second Stieglitz circle namely,
execution, nearly half a century
World War, OKeeffe found always wanted to know. For here, those American artists and writers
earlier, were pointed out. See also
herself at odds with this society in painting, there is registered the whom Stieglitz gathered during
The Downtown Gallery Records
culturally and politically. She manner of perception anchored the First World War and after,
in the Archives of American Art,
was a committed pacifist and in the constitution of the woman. including OKeeffe, John Marin,
Artist Files, OKeeffe, Georgia
sympathetic to German culture The organs that differentiate the Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove,
1958-61, available at http://www.
an attitude she shared with sex speak. Women, one would and the writers Paul Rosenfeld,
aaa.si.edu/collections/container/
Stieglitz. From 1917 she had judge, always feel, when they feel Waldo Frank and Sherwood
viewer/O-Keeffe-Georgia--196939.
further cause for concern as her strongly, through the womb. Paul Anderson. She does so through
22. Henry McBride reviewed
favourite brother Alexis joined up Rosenfeld, American Painting, analysis of Rosenfelds text Port
OKeeffes exhibition at The
and fought in France. It was the Dial, no.71, December 1921 in Lynes of New York (1924, see note 5) a
Andersen Galleries in 1923 under
discomfort of being out of step 1989, pp.1712. collection of essays on artists
the title Art News and Reviews
with her Texan community, as well 26. Barbara Buhler Lynes, and figures of the progressive
Woman as Exponent of the
as concerns regarding her health, Georgia OKeeffe and Feminism: generation, many of whom were
Abstract: Curious Responses
that eventually compelled her to A Problem of Position, in Norma also among Stieglitzs circle.
to Work of Miss OKeefe [sic]
leave and relocate to New York, Broude and Mary D. Garrard 35. Anna C. Chave cites a
on Others; Free without Aid of
on Stieglitzs invitation he sent (eds.), The Expanding Discourse: 1915 New-York Tribune article,
Freud, She Now Says Anything
photographer Paul Strand to fetch Feminism and Art History, announcing that for the first time
She Wants to Say Much Color-
her. Stieglitzs strongest European New York 1992, p.440. Europe seeks inspiration at our
Music in Her Pictures, New York
245

shores in the persons of a groups
of modernist French artists, who
find Europe impossible because
of its war-drenched atmosphere.
Anna C. Chave, Who Will Paint
New York?: The Worlds New
Art Center and the Skyscraper
Paintings of Georgia OKeeffe,
in Christopher Merrill and Ellen
Bradbury (eds.), From the Faraway
Nearby: Georgia OKeeffe as
Icon, Albuquerque 1992, p.65.
Artists from overseas confirmed
the change in New York Citys
status. One painting reveals the
complexities of this shift. British
artist C.R.W. Nevinsons 1920 work
reflecting his admiration of the
citys architecture and combining
elements of pre-war cubism and
vorticism, painted between 1919
and his return to New York for
an exhibition at Frederick Keppel
& Co. in late 1920, was exhibited
first as New York an Abstraction
and then renamed, after the poor
reception of this exhibition, as The
Soul of the Soulless City (T07448).
36. For a detailed analysis of
OKeeffes New York paintings, see inflection. Objects that denote the
Chave in Ibid., pp.6582. era of Westward expansion were
37. Ibid., p.73.
38. Quoted from Mary Lynn Kotz,
A Day with Georgia OKeeffe/
Georgia OKeeffe at 90, ARTnews,
vol. 76, no. 10, December 1977, in
Robinson 1997, p.293.
39. OKeeffe, letter to Waldo
Frank, 10 January 1927, in Jack
Cowart, Juan Hamilton and
Sarah Greenough (eds.), Georgia
OKeeffe: Art and Letters, exh.
cat., National Gallery of Art,
Washington 1987, p.185.
40. Chave in Merrill and Bradbury culture and those for whom it
(eds.) 1992, p.76.
41. Corn 1999, p.31.
42. Manifest Destiny was a term
much used in the nineteenth
century to describe a widespread
belief in the predestination of the
westward expansion of the U.S.,
as an embodiment of civilisation
and progress.
43. Corn 1999, p.245. One aspect
of OKeeffes move south-west
less often commented on is the
association of this region with
health. That OKeeffe worried modernism from the metropolis
about her health is not surprising towards regionalism and
given the multiple deaths resulting alternative community practices.
from tubercular conditions in
her family, including those of her
mother, her paternal grandfather
and three paternal uncles. The
dry air of the high desert was
ideal for recovery from such
Georgia OKeeffe
conditions. Once she owned
her house at Abiqui, with its
precious water rights, OKeeffe
maintained an organic garden that
fed the household year-round.
Another aspect of its safety and
security was the introduction of
a subterranean fallout shelter
kept well stocked in the garden
directly below her panoramic
studio window. Los Alamos (which
means The Cottonwoods),
established in 1943 as the base
for the Manhattan Project, was
relatively nearby and had hindered
the restoration of the house
OKeeffe frequently complained
it had taken up all the local
building supplies.
44. See Wanda Corns discussion
of Cows Skull: Red, White, and
Blue 1931 (fig.135) in chapter five of
Corn 1999, pp.23991, especially
her discussion of art-historical and
collection precedents. The display
of skulls as part of the dcor
across the West was something
OKeeffe herself adopted and to
which she gave her own minimal
the focus of collectors, some of
them turn-of-the-century Western
artists specialising in genre scenes,
exh. cat., National Cowgirl Museum
but also soon became the source
and Hall of Fame, Fort Worth, and
of touristic memorabilia, stocked
by Fred Harveys souvenir shops
along the railways.
45. Corn has explained: the
Southwest, and especially Native
American culture, became another the hybrid symbolism of Cows
divide, like jazz, skyscrapers, or
advertising, separating those
for whom art spiritually healed
the wounds inflicted by modern
forced an honest confrontation
with modern life At stake were
not only ideological positions for
emphasis
or against modernity but also
the centrality of Manhattan in
American artistic culture and the
place of cultures that abided by
laws of behaviour different from
those of fast-paced city-dwellers Subjective Aspect of Her Work,
The emergence of New Mexico as New York Sun, 5 December 1922,
a site for making modern art raised see Lynes 1989, p.180.
new questions about national
identity and for some artists
turned the quest for an indigenous
Corn 1999, p.253.
46. Ibid., pp.2489.
47. Ibid., pp.28990.
48. Barbara Buhler Lynes and
Carolyn Kastner, Georgia OKeeffe than the Black Place she only
246
in New Mexico: Architecture,
Katsinam, and the Land, exh.cat.,
made five paintings. They bear a
formal relation to the later Pelvis
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa series paintings in their use of
Fe 2012, p.10. bleached white forms framing
49. See Uhlyarik in this publication. monochromatic blue sky.
50. Seriality was to become a 57. OKeeffe had first employed
more central feature of OKeeffes such an eradication of horizon and
work in the 1940s and 1950s and sky in representing the cliffs at
these landscapes, which originate Ghost Ranch, in works such as Red
and Yellow Cliffs 1940 (fig.152) and
this tendency, might be thought
Red Hills and Bones 1941 (fig.154).
of as a picture of place, in an
extended series that in one sense 58. Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow
parallels Stieglitzs extended 1945 (fig.182); From the Plains II
photographic portrait of OKeeffe 1954 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza,
across multiple images. This Madrid; CR 1274); and Black Door
indicates perhaps another way with Red 1954 (fig.208).
in which photography inflected 59. I certainly take a beating from
OKeeffes practice. the country and the weather It
51. Maria Chabot was OKeeffes was cold and it was hot. It poured
principal camping companion rain and there was a hard hail
from 1941 to 1944. OKeeffe gave storm then a couple of hours
her room and board and, in return, after rain and hail while the
among other duties, Chabot ground very wet is like soft
organised the elaborate camping butter under a thin layer of dry
preparations needed for work at sand the dust is blowing a fine
such a distance. They would rise white sand Difficult very but
before dawn and OKeeffe would so beautiful too. OKeeffe, letter
work long hours, almost until dark. to Ettie and Carrie Stettheimer, 10
See Valerie Ann Leeds, Georgia June 1944, in Cowart, Hamilton and
OKeeffe and the Faraway: Her Greenough (eds.) 1987, p.239.
Art and Life and the New Mexico 60. Leeds 2010, pp.2931.
Landscape, in Georgia OKeeffe
61. Charles Harrison made the
and the Faraway: Nature and Image,
connection between OKeeffe and
Greenbergs Towards a Newer
and Laocon, but in a discussion
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa
of Red and Yellow Cliffs 1940, ends
Fe 2010, pp.289.
by comparing it to the flesh of the
52. Quoted in Ibid., p.27
human vulva, once again returning
53. For an in-depth discussion of to the defaut image evoked in
relation to OKeeffes work, which
Skull: Red, White, and Blue 1931, he considers virtually inescapable
see chapter five of Corn 1999, even if ideologically normative
pp.23991. in his essay, The Effects of
Language. In W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.),
54. Georgia OKeeffe believed
direct transcription was Landscape and Power, University
purposeless; she said it was only of Chicago Press, Chicago and
London 1994, p.219.
by selection, by elimination, by
that an artist could 62. OKeeffe, letter to Maria
approach the real meaning Chabot, In the Air, November
of things. OKeeffe quoted in 1941, in Cowart, Hamilton and
anonymous text I Cant Sing, So Greenough (eds.) 1987, p.231.
I Paint! Says Ultra Realistic Artist
63. Alongside the Black Place
... Miss Georgia OKeeffe Explains
paintings, OKeeffe was also
preoccupied by painting her
Pelvis series a continuation
and development of her earlier
55. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, skull paintings. She commented,
28 August 1943 in Leeds 2010, p.29. Sun-bleached bones were most
OKeeffes perception seems wonderful against the blue that
to have been premonitory, since blue that will always be there as
the photographer Eliot Porter it is now after all mans destruction
would later accompany her is finished. Catalogue statement
and photograph the site in 1945, for her show at An American
and he thereafter photographed Place in 1944, quoted in Laurie
it repeatedly. Lisle, Portrait of an Artist: A
56. OKeeffe painted this site less Biography of Georgia OKeeffe,
New York 1997, p.322.
64. It had been a tradition rooted
in the romanticism that had been
central to American painting of the
previous century, in the work of
painters such as Albert Bierstadt
and Frederic Church. As Robert
Hughes has written: One of the
great themes of nineteenth-
century romantic painting was
the interplay between the world
and spirit: the search for images
of those states of mind, embodied
in nature, that exist beyond or
below our conscious control.
Hughes argues that this aspect
of romanticism was to inform
modernism via Vincent Van
Gogh; Edvard Munch and German
expressionism and eventually
abstract expressionism. Robert
Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art
and the Century of Change, London
1991, p.269.
65. Reproduced in full in this
publication, pp.21617.
66. Ibid., p.219.
67. Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr,
OKeeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their
Own, New Haven 2000, pp.1479.
68. Edith Evans Asbury, Georgia
OKeeffe Dead at 98; Shaper of
Modern Art in U.S., New York
Times, 7 March 1986, http://www.
nytimes.com/learning/general/
onthisday/bday/1115.html, accessed
20 February 2016.
69. David Batchelor, interview
with Carmen Herrera, 'The Whole
Thing', frieze, issue 152, January
February 2013, pp.269.
70. Carmen Julia and Juan
Ledezma, Carmen Herrera, exh.
cat., Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
2009, pp.33, 37.
71. See note 21.
72. Judy Chicago, The Dinner
Party, New York 1981, p.155.
73. Judy Chicago and Miriam
Schapiro, Female Imagery
Womanspace Journal 1, Summer
1973, pp.11, 13. The painting is
described by Chicago and
Schapiro as being 'constructed
like the labia of the vagina'.
See also Lynes in Broude and
Garrard 1992, p.437.
74. Nancy J. Scott, Georgia
OKeeffe, Critical Lives, London
2015, pp.1978. I am grateful to
Simon Grant for pointing out
this connection.
75. Tyrrell in Lynes 1989, pp.1678,
and pp.489 in this publication.
Touching the
Centre:
Georgia OKeeffe
and Alfred Stieglitzs
Artistic Dialogue
Sarah Greenough
1. Alfred Stieglitz, letter to
OKeeffe, 13 July 1928, as quoted in
Sarah Greenough (ed.), My Faraway
One: Selected Letters of Georgia
OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitz,
Volume One, 19151933, New Haven
2011, p.314.
2. OKeeffe, quoted in Lillian
Sabine, Record Price for Living
Artist, Brooklyn Sunday Eagle
Magazine, 27 May 1928, p.11.
3. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz,
10 May 1929, in Greenough (ed.)
2011, p.420.
4. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz,
4 May 1929, in Greenough (ed.)
2011, p.416.
5. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe,
6 July 1929, in Greenough (ed.) 2011,
pp.460, 457.
6. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe,
6 July 1929, in Greenough (ed.)
2011, p.460.
7. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe,
6 July 1929, in Greenough (ed.)
2011, p.459.
8. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe,
5 July 1929, in Greenough (ed.)
2011, p.456.
9. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe,
6 July 1929, in Greenough (ed.)
2011, p.462.
10. See, for example, OKeeffe,
letter to Stieglitz, 11 July 1929, in
Greenough (ed.) 2011, p.472.
11. Arthur Wesley Dow,
Composition: A Series of Exercises
in Art Structure for the Use of
Students and Teachers, 20th ed.,
revised and enlarged, Garden City,
New York, 1938 [1899], p.5.
12. OKeeffe, quoted in Bob
Groves, Georgia OKeeffe and
the Color of Music: For More than
a Decade, Santa Fe Chamber
Music Festival Performers and
the Famous Artist Gave Each
Other the Gift of Art, Impact:
Albuquerque Journal Magazine,
28 July 1987, p.5.
13. OKeeffe wrote that Special
No. 9 was the drawing of a
headache, Georgia OKeeffe, Some
Memories of Drawings, New York
1974, unpaginated. She also told
Stieglitz that these drawings were
Notes
made to tell her friend, political
scientist Arthur MacMahon,
of Rubens, Hle `ne Fourment;
Rodin, Hell c.190008; Brancusi,
things. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, Sleeping Muse; and unknown
31 October 1916, in Greenough (ed.) artist, Mask, The Guro People.
2011, p.57. For Matisses lithographs and
14. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, Cezannes drawings shown at
291, see Sarah Greenough (ed.),
3 September 1916, in Greenough
(ed.) 2011, p.26. Modern Art and America: Alfred
Stieglitz and His New York Galleries,
15. Sarah Whitaker Peters was
exh. cat., National Gallery of Art,
the first person to systematically
Washington 2001, pp.97, 114; see
examine the influence of
also, for illustrations of Stieglitzs
photography on OKeeffes work,
photographs made in response to
in S.W. Peters, Becoming OKeeffe:
these works, Greenough 2002, CR
The Early Years, New York 1991.
501, 527, 517, 518.
16. See, for example, Barbara
26. OKeeffe recalled that
Buhler Lynes, Georgia OKeeffe:
Stieglitzs exposures were three
Catalogue Raisonne, New Haven
to four minutes long. OKeeffe,
1999, CR 127, 1314, 1546,
in Stieglitz, Georgia OKeeffe: A
and 199211.
Portrait, exh. cat., Metropolitan
17. See OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, Museum of Art, New York 1978,
30 November 1916, in Greenough
unpaginated. On 3 November
(ed.) 2011, pp.834, for OKeeffes
1922, Stieglitz himself wrote to
description of seeing a train
Rebecca Strand that he had made
coming into Canyon in the early
a 110-second exposure of OKeeffe
morning: just a light with a trail
and she did not move. Alfred
of smokewhite Its great to see Stieglitz/Georgia OKeeffe Archive,
that terrifically alive black thing
Yale Collection of American
coming at you in the big frosty
Literature, Beinecke Rare Book
stillness. See OKeeffe, letter to
and Manuscript Library, Yale
Stieglitz, 21 December 1916, in
University, New Haven hereafter
Greenough (ed.) 2011, pp.924,
cited as YCAL.
for her comments on Stieglitzs
27. Stieglitz, letter to Anne
photographs, Snapshot In the
Brigman, 20 December 1919,
New York Central Yards 1903 and
YCAL. See also Anne McCauley,
The Terminal 1893.
Rethinking Woman in the Age of
18. See OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, Psychoanalysis: Alfred Stieglitzs
10 December 1916, in Greenough Photographs of the Female
(ed.) 2011, p.87. Nude, https://www.academia.
19. OKeeffe, letter to Paul Strand, edu/11297656/Rethinking_woman_
3 June 1917, as quoted in Sarah in_the_age_of_psychoanalysis_
Greenough, From the Faraway, in Alfred_Stieglitzs_photographs_
Jack Cowart and Juan Hamilton, of_the_female_nude, accessed 8
Georgia OKeeffe: Art and Letters, December 2015.
exh.cat., National Gallery of Art, 28. OKeeffe, as recorded by Perry
Washington 1987, p.161.
Miller Adato in footage filmed in
20. OKeeffe, letter to Anita the early 1980s and incorporated
Pollitzer, 20 June 1917, as quoted into The Eloquent Eye: Alfred
in Peters 1991, p.192. Peters points Stieglitz and Modern Art in
America, American Masters,
out that Dows lessons had also
Perry Miller Adato, New York 2001,
taught OKeeffe how to compose
88 min, unrated.
by cropping; p.193.
21. Lynes 1999, CR 199206, 2215. 29. OKeeffe, in Stieglitz, Georgia
OKeeffe: A Portrait, exh. cat.,
22. Ibid., CR .229, 230, 231, 245.
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
23. Stieglitz was ruthless in editing New York 1978, unpaginated.
his work and throughout his
30. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz,
lifetime he destroyed hundreds of
30 May 1929, in Greenough (ed.)
negatives and prints of OKeeffe
2011, p.430.
and other subjects. See Sarah
Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: 31. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz,
The Key Set, The Alfred Stieglitz 16 June 1917, in Greenough (ed.)
Collection of Photographs, 2011, p.161.
Washington and New York 2002, 32. See Peters 1991, pp.2537.
pp.xixiii.
33. See Lynes 1999, CR 268, 286,
24. Greenough 2002, CR 50811. 298, 301, 304, 314316, 347, 349, 355,
365, 378, and 379.
25. See Greenough 2002,
pp.xxxvixxxix, for reproductions 34. Both OKeeffe and Stieglitz
247

were fascinated with the view
that could be seen from the
Stieglitz familys farmhouse at
Lake George, looking east to the
lake and mountains. OKeeffe was
particularly intrigued by the way
the mountains and clouds were
reflected in the lake, sometimes
creating a mirror-image; see, for
example, Lake George 1922 (fig.78).
OKeeffe painted and sketched
this view ten times (Lynes 1999,
CR 38996, 457, 468). Other, more
abstract, works, like Pink Moon
1923, and Blue Lines or Red Lines
1923 (Lynes 1999, CR 406, 407) may
be this view of the lake, mountains
and clouds rotated 90 degrees.
Similar and possibly rotated forms
appear in four more works: see
Lynes 1999, CR 293, 294, 406, 407,
442, 447, 573.
35. Stieglitz, letter to Herbert
Seligmann, 18 September 1921,
YCAL; Stieglitz, quoted by Herbert
Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz
Talking: Notes on Some of his
Conversations, 19251931, New
Haven 1966, p.61.
36. Stieglitz, letter to Seligmann,
9 August 1923, YCAL; Stieglitz,
letter to Sherwood Anderson,
11 October 1923, YCAL.
37. Stieglitz, letter to John Marin,
2 November 1920, YCAL.
38. See Greenough 2002, CR 779.
39. Stieglitz, letter to OKeeffe,
25 September 1923, in Greenough
(ed.) 2011, p.354.
40. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz,
25 September 1923, in Greenough
(ed.) 2011, p.357.
41. For further discussion, see
Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe,
Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929,
Ann Arbor, MI, 1989.
42. OKeeffe, Georgia OKeeffe,
New York 1976, unpaginated.
43. The Stieglitz-OKeeffe
correspondence indicates that
Stieglitzs photographs of OKeeffe
with horse and cow skulls, such
as Georgia OKeeffe Hands and
Horse Skull 1931 (fig.190),
were most likely made between
mid-July and late September 1931,
before OKeeffe painted several
pictures of the subject, including
Cows Skull with Calico Roses 1931
(fig.121) and Cows Skull: Red, White,
and Blue 1931 (fig.135) in late-
October and early November 1931.
See Greenough (ed.) 2011,
pp.6034, 61213.
44. OKeeffe 1976, unpaginated.
Georgia OKeeffe
45. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, 9
July 1929 in Greenough (ed.) 2011,
pp.46971.
Seeing OKeeffe
Seeing
Griselda Pollock
1. Christine Taylor Patten,
writing in Christine Taylor
Patten and Alvaro Cardona
Hine, Miss OKeeffe, 2nd edition,
Alberquerque 2013 [1992], p.5.
2. On the most trivial of notes,
my abiding memory from this
visit was the idea of a book room.
Behind that blank wall of the
adobe courtyard, so often painted
under brilliant light that blackened
its one door, was OKeeffes
extensive library. Hidden from
view, not allowed to bring their
riot and chaos into the house,
books awaited her coming and
selection. As someone whose
life is spent under the towering
forms and threatening eyes of
ever-advancing shelves of books,
I hold onto the idea of one day
also having a book room where
they can all rest, while I live, like
OKeeffe, with objects and plain
of Georgia OKeeffe: The Work of
spaces to rest an exhausted mind
the Young Artist Whose Canvases
and always interested eyes.
Are to Be Exhibited in Bulk for
3. See Griselda Pollock, The the First Time This Winter, Vanity
Missing Future: MoMA and Modern Fair, no.19, October 1922, p.112,
Women, in Cornelia H. Butler and reprinted in Lynes 1989, p.178, and
Alexandra Schwartz (eds.), Modern pp.13842 in this publication.
Women: Women Artists at the
9. Paul Rosenfeld, Georgia
Museum of Modern Art, New York OKeeffe, in Paul Rosenfeld, Port
2010, pp.2854.
of New York: Essays on Fourteen
4. Griselda Pollock, Feminist
Interventions in the Histories of
Art, in Griselda Pollock, Vision and
Difference: Feminism, Femininity
and Histories of Art, Routledge
Classic, London 2003 [1988],
pp.117. The reference to ideology
and politics is a paraphrasing
of Clement Greenbergs classic
explanation of modernist arts
retreat the better to protect
art against political abuse
under capitalism; see Clement
Greenberg, Towards a Newer
Laocon, Partisan Review, no.7,
JulyAugust 1940, pp.296310.
5. On ne nat pas femme: on le
devient., Simone de Beauvoir,
Le Deuxime Sexe, Paris 1949,
p.13. One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman, The Second
Sex, trans. by H.M. Parsley, New
York 1953, p.9. One is not born,
but rather becomes, woman,
The Second Sex, complete, new,
unabridged trans. by Constance
Borde and Sheila Malvany-
Chevalier, New York 2010, p.295.
I am grateful to Elspeth Mitchell
19081922, in Adele Heller and Lois
Rudnick (eds.) 1991, p.134.
for drawing the importance of 13. See Judy Chicago, Through the
the retranslation to my attention.
This critical phrase is the
Flower: My Struggle As a Woman
Artist, New York 1977. Chicago
opening sentence of the second
volume of this tome, whose first
places OKeeffe alongside major
abstract artists including Barbara
volume challenges biological,
Hepworth and Lee Bontecou
psychoanalytical and Marxist
but she also glibly suggests
explanations of womens inferiority that OKeeffe used the flower
and difference. Volume one also as a symbol of femininity (p.141).
examined the myths ideologies OKeeffe refused permission to
of the feminine. The second have her work reproduced in
volume tracks the lived experience this volume.
from childhood to adulthood
14. Ann Sutherland Harris and
through which process all of
Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550-
the above impinge on and form
1950, exh. cat., Los Angeles County
(deform) the human being that is
Museum of Art 1976, pp.300302.
being made into woman.
15. Anna C. Chave, OKeeffe and
6. For a fuller discussion of
the Masculine Gaze, in Merrill and
modernism as a space of formal
Bradbury (eds.) 1992, p.38. See
freedom embraced by women
also Barbara Buhler Lynes, The
artists, see Griselda Pollock,
Language of Criticism: Its Effects
Painting, Feminism and History, in
on Georgia OKeeffes Art in the
Griselda Pollock, Looking Back to
1920s, in Merrill and Bradbury
the Future: Essays on Art, Life and
(eds.) 1992, pp.4354.
Death, London 2000, pp.73112.
16. Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the
7. Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe,
Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper
Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929,
and Georgia OKeeffe, Chicago
Ann Arbor, MI, 1989.
2003, pp.11718.
8. Paul Rosenfeld, The Paintings
17. Kathleen Pyne, Modernism
and the Feminine Voice: OKeeffe
and the Women of the Stieglitz
Circle, exh. cat., Georgia O'Keeffe
Museum, Santa Fe 2007, p.189.
18. Julia Kristeva, Is there a
Feminine Genius?, Critical Inquiry,
vol.30, issue 3, Spring 2004,
pp.493504. See also Julia Kristeva,
Le Gnie fminin: La Vie, la folie, les
mots, 3 vols., Paris 19992002, trans.
American Moderns, New York 1924,
as three separate works, under
p.207, cited in Lynes 1989, p.207.
the titles Melanie Klein, Hannah
10. Barbara Buhler Lynes, The
Arendt and Colette, by Ross
Language of Criticism: Its Effects
Guberman, New York 20012004.
on Georgia OKeeffes Art in the
19. Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of
1920s, in Christopher Merrill and
the Medusa [1974], trans. by Keith
Ellen Bradbury (eds.), From the
Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs,
Faraway Nearby: Georgia OKeeffe
vol.1, no.4, Summer 1976, pp.87593;
as Icon, Reading, MA 1992, pp.4354.
citation p.876.
11. As Sanford Gifford has written,
20. These attempts at giving
Freuds lectures at Clark University,
Worcester, Massachussetts, in 1909,
visual forms to non-objective
perceptions of emotions and
were the equivalent of the Armory
Show for the history of painting in
responses to art were recently a
the United States. Sanford Gifford,
centrepiece of the 14th Istanbul
Biennial, SALTWATER: A Theory of
The American Reception of
Thought Forms, drafted by Carolyn
Psychoanalysis 19081922, in Adele
Christov-Bakargiev.
Heller and Lois Rudnick (eds.),
21. See Maurice Tuchman and
1915, The Cultural Moment: The
New Politics, the New Woman, the Judi Freeman, The Spiritual in Art:
New Psychology, the New Art and Abstract Painting 1890-1985, exh.
the New Theatre in America, New cat., Los Angeles County Museum
Brunswick, N.J., 1991, p.128. of Art 1989.
22. Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and
12. Lincoln Steffens, quoted in
Sanford Gifford, The American Abstract Art, exh. cat., Museum
Reception of Psychoanalysis of Modern Art, New York 1936,
p.11. There are richer accounts
248
of formalism in art to be found
in Roger Fry, Vision and Design,
London 1930.
23. For the recent recognition
of Hilma af Klint, see Catherine
de Zegher (ed.), 3 x Abstraction:
New Methods of Drawing by Hilma
af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes
Martin, exh. cat., The Drawing
Centre, New York 2006; John
Hutchinson (ed., with Sheena
Malone), Hilma af Klint: The
Greatness of Things, exh. cat.,
Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 2005;
and, to accompany the major
retrospective, Hilma af Klint: A
Pioneer of Abstraction, exh. cat.,
Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2013.
24. Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall,
Carr, OKeeffe, Kahlo: Places of
Their Own, New Haven 2000,
p.vii.
25. Anne Wagner, Three Artists
(Three Women): Modernism and
the Art of Hesse, Krasner and
OKeeffe, Berkeley 1996, p.100.
26. Il ny a pas de dpassement
de la sexualit, comme il ny as pas 8. Ibid.
de sexualit ferme sur elle-mme.
Personne nest sauv; et personne
nest perdu tout fait. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, cited in Wagner
1996, p.100.
27. Ibid., p.102.
28. Griselda Pollock, Visions of
Sex ca.1920, in Griselda Pollock,
Encounters in the Virtual Feminist
Museum: Time, Space and the
Archive, London 2007, pp.10534.
29. Now titled Nude Series, the
thirteen watercolours are listed
and illustrated in Barbara Buhler
Lynes, Georgia OKeeffe: Catalogue
Raisonne, vol. 1, New Haven 1999,
pp.10611, CR 17688.
30. Pollock 2007.
31. Laura Mulvey, Pandoras Box:
Topographies of Curiosity, in Laura Ceremony at Santo Domingo, Art
Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity,
London 1996, p.59.
Location and
Dislocation in the
Life and Art of
Georgia OKeeffe
Cody Hartley
1. OKeeffe, Georgia OKeeffe, New
York 1976, unpaginated.
2. Wendell Berry quoted in
Wallace Stegner, The Sense of
Place, in Where the Bluebird Sings
to the Lemonade Springs: Living
and Writing in the West, New York
1992, p.199.
3. OKeeffe, letter to Stieglitz, 11
August 1929, in Sarah Greenough
(ed.), My Faraway One: Selected
Letters of Georgia OKeeffe and
Alfred Stieglitz, Volume One,
19151933, New Haven 2011, p.516.
4. Lesley Poling-Kempes, Ghost
Ranch, Tucson 2005, p.140.
5. Charlie Eldridge, Chronology,
in Joseph S. Czestochowski (ed.),
Georgia OKeeffe: Visions of the
Sublime, exh.cat., University of
Michigan Museum of Art, Ann
Arbor 2004, p.173.
6. See Barbara Buhler Lynes,
Lesley Poling-Kempes and
Frederick W. Turner, Georgia
OKeeffe and New Mexico: A Sense 3. Extracts from Concerning the
of Place, exh. cat., Georgia OKeeffe Spiritual in Art, published as On
Museum, Santa Fe 2004. the Spiritual in Art, in Camera
7. Erin B. Coe, Gwendolyn Owens
and Bruce Robertson, Modern
Nature: Georgia OKeeffe and
Lake George, exh. cat., The Hyde
Collection, Glens Falls, New York
and Georgia O'Keeffe Museum,
Santa Fe 2013, pp.67, 68.
9. Between 1930 and 1940, the
population of New Mexico grew
from 427,000 to 531,000. The towns Gail Levin and Marianne Lorenz
and villages of northern New
Mexico remained small, however.
In the 1930s, Taos had fewer than
1,000 residents; Santa Fe around
15,000. Abiquis population, both 19923, Boston 1992, p.26.
then and now, is measured in the
hundreds.
10. See Greenough (ed.) 2011.
11. See Marsden Hartley, Tribal
Esthetics, Dial, vol.65, no.77, 1918,
p.399; Red Man Ceremonials:
An American Plea for American
Esthetics, Art and Archaeology,
vol.9, no.1, 1920, pp.714; The
Scientific Esthetic of the Red
Man, Part I: The Great Corn
and Archaeology, vol.13, no.3, 1922,
p.114; and The Scientific Esthetic
of the Red Man, Part II: The Fiesta
of San Geronimo at Taos, Art and
Archaeology, vol.14, no.3, 1922, p.138.
12. OKeeffe 1976, unpaginated.
13. OKeeffe, About myself, in
Georgia OKeeffe: Exhibition of oils have long been overlooked.
and pastels, exh. cat., An American Authors such as Barbara Rose
Place, New York 1939, unpaginated. and Robert Rosenblum, and
14. OKeeffe 1976, unpaginated.
Notes
OKeeffes
Late Blooms:
The Abstract
Landscapes
Heike Eipeldauer and
Florian Steininger
1. Oscar Bluemner, Statement,
in The Forum Exhibition of Modern
American Painters, exh. cat.,
The Anderson Galleries, New York
1916, unpaginated.
2. See Roxana Robinson,
Georgia OKeeffe: A Life, New York
1989, p.108.
Work, no.39, July 1912, p.34. For
Kandinskys original wording,
see Wassily Kandinsky, ber das
Geistige in der Kunst [Concerning
the Spiritual in Art], with an
introduction by Max Bill, Bern 1952
(2004 edition), p.128. OKeeffe first
heard about Kandinskys book
from her teacher Alon Bement.
See Gail Levin, Kandinsky and the
First American Avant-Garde, in
(eds), in Theme and Improvisation:
Kandinsky & the American Avant-
Garde 19121950, exh. cat., The
Phillips Collection, Washington
4. See Gnter Brucher, Kandinsky:
Wege zur Abstraktion (Kandinsky:
Paths towards Abstraction),
Munich 1999, pp.1557.
5. Georgia OKeeffe, in Herbert
J. Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz
Talking: Notes on Some of His
Conversations, 19251931, New
Haven 1966, unpaginated. Quoted
in Barbara Haskell (ed.), The
American Century: Art & Culture
19001950, exh. cat., Whitney
Museum of American Art,
New York 1999, p.197.
6. Georgia OKeeffe, Georgia
OKeeffe, New York 1985 (original
edition: New York 1976), p.62.
7. Kandinsky 1952, p.84.
8. OKeeffes late abstract works
exhibitions such as Georgia
OKeeffe: Visions of the Sublime
(20045), Georgia OKeeffe:
Nature and Abstraction (2007)
and Georgia OKeeffe: Abstraction
(200910) were the first to
recognise their significance.
249
9. See Barbara Rose, OKeeffes
Originality, in Peter H. Hassrick
(ed.), The Georgia OKeeffe
Museum, New York 1997, p.109. See
also Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia
OKeeffe and Abstraction: An
Uneasy Peace, in Barbara Haskell
(ed.), Georgia OKeeffe: Abstraction,
exh. cat., Whitney Museum of
American Art,
New York 2009, p.171.
10. See Fairfield Porter in
Rackstraw Downes (ed.), Art in
Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism
19351975, New York 1979, p.179.
11. Letter from Georgia OKeeffe
to Alfred Stieglitz, 6 May 1922.
Quoted in Elizabeth Hutton
Turner, OKeeffe as Abstraction,
in Haskell (ed.) 2009, p.71.
12. Robert Rosenblum,
Georgia OKeeffe and Abstract
Expressionism, in Joseph S.
Czestochowski (ed.), Georgia
OKeeffe: Visions of the Sublime,
exh. cat., University of Michigan
Museum of Art, Ann Arbor 2004,
p.124.
13. See Rose 1997, p.103.
Observations about OKeeffes
role as a pioneer have been made
largely in the field of OKeeffe
scholarship, and it has not yet
received much attention in the
literature on painters or artistic
trends that were influenced by her.
14. Barbara Buhler Lynes,
Georgia OKeeffe: Catalogue
Raisonne, New Haven 1999,
CR 205, 206.
15. Eugene C. Goossen, The Art
of the Real, exh. cat., Museum of
Modern Art, New York 1968, p.7.
More than two decades earlier,
however, in a review critical of
her 1946 retrospective at MoMA,
the critic Clement Greenberg had
dismissed OKeeffe as a pseudo-
modern figure, indebted to realist
regionalism and antithetical to
modernist painting. Clement
Greenberg, Review, The Nation,
15 June 1946, p.727f, reproduced
in this publication.
16. Goossen 1968.
17. See Barbara Rose, Opinion:
The Truth About Georgia OKeeffe,
Journal of Art, 5, February 1990,
p.24.
18. Lisa Mintz Messinger, Georgia
OKeeffe, London 2001, p.177.
19. Robert Rosenblum, Modern
Painting and the Northern
Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to
Rothko, New York 1975, p.201. See
also Marjorie Balge-Crozier, The
Sublime Landscapes of Georgia

OKeeffe, in Czestochowski (ed.)
2004, pp.10311. Rosenblums
interpretation of the abstract
expressionists in terms of the
Romantic tradition was heavily
criticised; among other things, his
reading of Mark Rothkos abstract
colour fields as landscapes was
problematised. See Anna C.
Chave, Mark Rothko: Subject in
Abstraction, dissertation, London
1989, pp.12832.
20. Rosenblum wrote that, the
expansiveness of its conception of
primeval nature was also reflected
in [Clyfford] Stills completely
non-representational, enormous
planes of colour, which translate
the experience of a sublime,
desolate landscape into the
language of pure abstraction.
Rosenblum 1975, p.212.
21. Ibid., p.211.
22. See Balge-Crozier, The
Sublime Landscapes of Georgia
O'Keeffe, in Czestochowski (ed.)
2004, p.106.
23. OKeeffe 1985, p.100.
24. Retrospectively, OKeeffe
actually spoke of the curse of
the door. See Katherine Kuh, The
Artists Voice: Talks with Seventeen
Artists, New York 1961. Quoted in
Robinson 1989, p.479.
25. Ibid., p.479.
26. Calvin Tomkins, Profiles: The
Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty
Fine, New Yorker, issue 50,
4 March 1974, p.42.
27. Letter from Josef Albers to
Wassily Kandinsky, 22 August 1936.
Quoted in Brenda Danilowitz
and Heinz Liesbrock (eds), Anni
und Josef Albers: Begegnung
mit Lateinamerika [Anni and
Josef Albers: Encountering Latin
America], exh. cat., Josef Albers
Museum, Bottrop 2007, p.209.
28. Porter 1979; Rose 1997, p.104.
29 . O'Keeffe 1985, p.106.
30. I Cant Sing, So I Paint! Says
Ultra Realistic Artist, New York
Sun, 5 December 1922. Quoted
in Laurie Lisle (ed.), Portrait of
an Artist: A Biography of Georgia
OKeeffe, Albuquerque 1986, p.278.
31. Two months after the end of
the exhibition Fifteen Americans,
Rothko wrote to Herbert Ferber,
having just come from MoMA: My
room is now inhabited by [John]
Marins and OKeefe [sic]. I must
admit the after-show remaining
from my own stuff made those
quite invisible for me at least.
Letter from Mark Rothko to Ilse
Georgia OKeeffe
and Herbert Ferber, 19 August 1952,
in Mark Rothko and Miguel Lpez-
The Light One:
Remiro (eds.), Writings on Art, A Case Study
New Haven 2006, p.80.
Georgiana Uhlyarik
32. Agnes Martin relocated to
The author would like to thank
New Mexico in 1940, where she
Carolyn Kastner and Brent Raycroft
met Georgia OKeeffe. Until the
for their sensitive insights and
end of her life, a poster of one of
valuable comments in the writing
OKeeffes paintings hung on her
of this text.
wall. See Tiffany Bell, Happiness
1. In the letter that accompanied
is the Goal, in Frances Morris and
Tiffany Bell (eds.), Agnes Martin, the shipment of the painting to
exh. cat., Tate Modern, London New York, OKeeffe requests that
2015, p.23. the light one be sent back to her
after it is shown, in order to paint
33. Irving Sandler, Interview with
the white whiter. OKeeffe, letter
Agnes Martin, Art Monthly, 169,
to Edith Halpert, 18 September
September 1993, p.4f.
1952, Downtown Gallery Papers,
34. Lynne Cooke, in Distant Light, 18241974, Archives of American
Arforum, issue 43, no. 6, February Art, Smithsonian Institution,
2005, p.27. Briony Fer, Whos Afraid Georgia OKeeffe file 19505, box 25,
of Triangles?, in Morris and Bells reel 5550, frame 1065.
(eds.) 2015, pp.17282, 188.
2. Barbara Buhler Lynes and
35. See Balge-Crozier 2004, Agapita Judy Lopez,Georgia
p.110. OKeeffe sensed in this OKeeffe and Her Houses: Ghost
the opportunity to emancipate
Ranch and Abiqui, New York and
herself from her strict Catholic London 2012, pp.445. See John
upbringing. Eugenia Parry, That Loengard photograph, 1966, p.45.
Memory or Dream Thing I Do, in
3. OKeeffe, letter to Edith Halpert,
Czestochowski (ed.) 2004, p.2.
18 September 1952, Downtown
36. Barbara Rose, Georgia
Gallery Papers, 18241974, Archives
OKeeffe: The Paintings of
of American Art, Smithsonian
the Sixties, Artforum, issue 9, Institution, Georgia OKeeffe file
November 1970, pp.426; Rose 19505, box 25, reel 5550, frame 1065.
1990; Rose 1997.
4. Quoted in Calvin Tomkins,
37. Greenberg 1946 and in this
Profiles: The Rose in the Eye
publication. See also Caroline A. Looked Pretty Fine, New Yorker,
Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement issue 50, 4 March 1974, p.53.
Greenbergs Modernism and the
5. Lloyd Goodrich,Georgia
Bureaucratization of the Senses,
OKeeffe, exh. cat., Whitney
Chicago and London 2005, p.145f
Museum of American Art, New
and 170f.
York 1970, p.26. This retrospective
38. Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia was the largest OKeeffe exhibition
O'Keeffe and Abstraction: An assembled in her lifetime.
Uneasy Peace in Haskell (ed.),
6. Barbara Rose, Georgia
2009, p.170f.
OKeeffe: The Paintings of the
39. Peter J. Schneemann, Sixties, Artforum, vol.9, November
Erklrungen der Schnheit 1970, p.46.
[Explanations of Beauty], in Bice
7. O'Keeffe quoted in Katharine
Curiger (ed.), Georgia OKeeffe, exh.
Kuh,Georgia OKeeffe, in The
cat., Kunsthaus Zrich 2003, p.56.
Artists Voice: Talks with Seventeen
40. Rather than joining in with Artists, New York 1962, p.190.
paintings swan-song, here
8. OKeeffe, Georgia OKeeffe, New
OKeeffe seems to be voicing
York 1976, unpaginated, opp. pl.82.
her desire to end the curse of
9. In a 1962 interview with
the door.
Katharine Kuh, OKeeffe insisted
41. OKeeffe 1985, p.88.
that the paintings are not abstract:
Those little squares in the door
paintings are tiles in front of the
door; theyre really there, so you
see the painting is not abstract. Its
quite realistic, she said. Quoted in
Kuh 1962, p.190. See also Barbara
Buhler Lynes, Georgia OKeeffe
and Abstraction: An Uneasy Peace,
in Barbara Haskell (ed.), Georgia
OKeeffe: Abstraction, exh. cat.,
250
Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York 2009, pp.1712.
10. Ibid., in Haskell (ed.) 2009, p.175.
11. Wanda Corn, Telling Tales:
Georgia OKeeffe on Georgia
OKeeffe, American Art, vol.23,
no.2, Summer 2009, p.68.
12. George Kubler,The Shape
of Time: Remarks on the History
of Things, New Haven 1962, p.20.
13. Ibid., p.25.
14. Formal brilliance, from
Rose 1970, p.44. Rose later notes
that it was New York artists
such as Don Judd, Ellsworth Kelly,
and Frank Stella who did much
to revive interest in her work
during the Sixties. See Barbara
Rose, OKeeffes Trail,New
York Review of Books, 31 March
1977, www.nybooks.com/
articles/1977/03/31/okeeffes-trail/,
accessed 17 April 2016.
15. Painter Rita Donagh wrote
in 1980, The arresting originality
of these late works lies to some
extent within the imagery. Rita
Donagh, Georgia OKeeffe in
Context, Oxford Art Journal, vol.3,
no.1, Women in Art, April 1980, p.44.
16. Kubler 1962, p.25.
17. The door leads to a salita a
sitting room but OKeeffe used
the room for storage and as a work
space. See Buhler Lynes and Lopez
2012, pp.14853.
18. Quoted in Kuh 1962, p.190.
OKeeffe also wrote: When I first
saw that Abiquiu [sic] house it was
a ruin with an adobe wall around
the garden broken in a couple of
places by falling trees. As I climbed
and walked about in the ruin I
found a patio with a very pretty
well house and bucket to draw up
water. It was a good-sized patio
with a long wall with a door on
one side. That wall with a door in
it was something I had to have. It
took me ten years to get it three
more years to fix the house so I
could live in it and after that the
wall with a door was painted many
times. OKeeffe 1976, opp. pl.82.
19. Quoted in Kuh 1962, p.190.
20. See Georgia OKeeffe, Door
and Adobe Wall, Abiquiu, New
Mexico 19578, (Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, acc.
no. 1977.657.2). See more related
photographs: acc. nos. 1977.657.1,
1977.657.4, 1977.657.6.
21. OKeeffe first saw the house
in 1935. She purchased it in 1945
and renovations began in 1946.
She moved permanently into the
Notes
house in 1949. It was her primary
fall and winter residence. See
OKeeffe, letter to Edith Halpert,
18 September 1952, Downtown
Georgia OKeeffe: Catalogue
Raisonne, vol.2, New Haven 1999,
this. See Dorothy Norman papers,
Yale Collection of American
Lynes and Lopez 2012, p.112. Gallery Papers, 18241974, Archives pp.11427. I am grateful to Sarah Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and
22. In June 1918, OKeeffe of American Art, Smithsonian Greenough for pointing out that Manuscript Library, Yale University,
moves into a studio apartment Institution, Georgia OKeeffe file the correspondence between New Haven, CT.
at 114 East 59th Street. Haskell (ed.) 19505, box 25, reel 5550, frame 1065. Stieglitz and O'Keeffe supports 11. In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz
NB: it is likely that the red one this, see Greenough (ed.) 2011. I am
2009, p.212. on 10 July 1931, OKeeffe writes
mentioned in OKeeffes 1952 also indebted to the chronologies
23. Quoted in Kuh 1962, p.200. that she is sending a barrel and
letter is the same as Black Door compiled by Charles C. Eldredge
See also Hartley in this publication. two packages aside from my box.
with Red (fig.208), however records for Georgia O'Keeffe: American and
Reprinted in Greenough (ed.) 2011,
24. Ibid., p.190. are incomplete. Barbara Buhler Modern, exh.cat., Hayward Gallery,
pp.5956. For further details, see
25. See OKeeffe, Green Patio Door Lynes, email to the author, 28 London 1993; and Barbara Haskell also Greenough, note 43.
1955 (Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia December 2015. and Sasha Nicholas for Georgia
12. Waldo Frank et al (eds.),
OKeeffe: Catalogue Raisonne, New 33. Edith Halpert, letter to O'Keeffe: Abstraction, exh.cat.,
America & Alfred Stieglitz: A
Haven 1999, CR 1282) and Black Georgia OKeeffe, 21 October Whitney Museum of American Art,
Collective Portrait, New York
Patio Door 1955 (fig.205). 1955, Downtown Gallery Papers, New York 2009.
1934. Norman spearheads the
18241974, Archives of American 4. An account of OKeeffes
26. OKeeffe first painted a similar publication and acts as co-editor.
Art, Smithsonian Institution, disagreement with a shopkeeper
but smaller composition: In the
13. Georgia OKeeffe, quoted in
Patio VII 1950. She exhibited it in Georgia OKeeffe file 19557, box 25, in Canyon, Texas, over her
Laurie Lisle, Portrait of an Artist:
1950 at An American Place. She reel 5551, frame 43. request for the removal of a
A Biography of Georgia OKeeffe,
later painted over the canvas. The 34. See OKeeffe, letter to group of vehemently anti-German
New York 1980; revised ed.,
painting no longer exists. Elizabeth Edith Halpert, 18 September Christmas cards is given in a letter
New York 1986, p.295.
Ehrnst, Archives and Digital 1952, Downtown Gallery Papers, to Elizabeth Stieglitz [Davidson]
Collections Librarian, Georgia in January 1918. Reprinted in 14. Stieglitzs collection is
18241974, Archives of American
OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe, email Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton and distributed among: The Art
Art, Smithsonian Institution,
Institute of Chicago; Museum
to the author, 8 December 2015. Georgia OKeeffe file 19505, box 25, Sarah Greenough (eds.), Georgia
In the Patio VII is not included in OKeeffe: Art and Letters, exh. of Fine Arts, Boston; Fisk
reel 5550, frame 1064.
the OKeeffe catalogue raisonne, cat., National Gallery of Art, University, Nashville; The
35. Quoted in Tomkins 1974, p.41.
Lynes 1999. Washington 1987, p.1667. Metropolitan Museum of Art,
36. In 1983, OKeeffe sold the New York; National Gallery of Art,
27. OKeeffe 1976, unpaginated, 5. OKeeffe describes her
painting to fashion designer Washington; Philadelphia Museum
pl.87. impressions of the New Mexican
Calvin Klein. See Charlotte of Art; and San Francisco Museum
landscape in a letter to Alfred
28. In the Patio V appears not to Curtis, Of Mr. Klein and Miss of Modern Art.
Stieglitz, 15 August 1917. In Sarah
have been hung in this display. OKeeffe, Arts section, New York
Greenough (ed.), My Faraway 15. Pollitzers biography is
See Lynes 1999, CR 1162. Times, 26 July 1983, http://www.
One: Selected Letters of Georgia eventually published by Simon &
29. She exhibited Pelvis Series 1947 nytimes.com/1983/07/26/arts/
OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Schuster in 1988 as A Woman on
no-headline-057517.html, accessed
(fig.181). In 1956 and 1958, OKeeffe Volume One, 19151933, New Haven Paper: Georgia OKeeffe, two years
painted two versions of Pedernal 22 December 2015. The painting after OKeeffes death and thirteen
2011, p.181.
From the Ranch, which are also has recently entered mainstream
years after the authors.
related to Pelvis Series. culture in the U.S.; it is featured in 6. See Griselda Pollock in
16. Georgia OKeeffe, Some
the opening scenes of an episode this publication.
30. It is a painting OKeeffe kept, Memories of Drawings,
of Breaking Bad: Abiquiu, season 3, 7. Stieglitz, Georgia OKeeffe C.
and had been thought lost or introduction by Doris Bry, New
episode 11, dir. Michelle MacLaren, Duncan Rn Lafferty, Camera
destroyed until the contents of her York, 2nd ed., Albuquerque 1988.
aired 30 May 2010, 47 min, AMC Work, no.48, October 1916, pp.1213.
estate became public. See Wanda
Network Entertainment LLC. Reprinted in Barbara Buhler
Corn, Painting Big: OKeeffes
Lynes, OKeeffe, Stieglitz and the
Manhattan, American Art, vol.20, 37. Rose 1970, p.44.
Critics, 1916-1929, Ann Arbor 1989,
no.2, Summer 2006, pp.225.
31. With one exception, a mural
Chronology appendix A, no.2, p.166.
8. Georgia OKeeffe, To MSS.
commission in 1936, Manhattan Hannah Johnston
and Its 33 Subscribers and Others
was among her largest paintings 1. Whilst O'Keeffe's younger
Who Read and Dont Subscribe!
until the late 1940s. brother is widely referred to as
[letter to the editor], MSS., no.4,
Alexius (see also fig.32), research
32. OKeeffe mentions two December 1922, pp.1718. Reprinted
paintings in a 1952 letter to her conducted by Sarah Greenough
in Lynes 1989, pp.1824 and in
dealer: the light one and the red has confirmed that the correct
this publication.
one. She uses these descriptions spelling of his name is Alexis.
9. Georgia OKeeffe in Alfred
to differentiate between My Last 2. The Art of Spiritual Harmony,
Stieglitz Presents Fifty-one Recent
Door, the light one, from the originally published in German
Pictures: Oils, Water-colors,
other painting she was writing in 1911 as Uber das Geistige in der
Pastels, Drawings by Georgia
about. It is interesting to note Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual
OKeeffe, exhibition leaflet, the
that, while the two paintings are in Art) was fully translated into
Anderson Galleries, New York 1924,
identical in both composition and English, by Michael Sadler, in 1914.
unpaginated. Reprinted in Lynes
size, OKeeffe priced the light
3. The group exhibition includes 1999, vol.2, p.1098.
one higher than the red one.
work by OKeeffe, Masson C.
Colour must have accounted for 10. See Greenough (ed.) 2011. I
Duncan and Rn Lafferty. For
the $1,000 difference. The range am grateful to Sarah Greenough
a comprehensive record of
now given for the light painting, for pointing out that the
OKeeffes exhibition history,
1952 to 1954, denotes OKeeffes correspondence between Stieglitz
see the chronology compiled
intention to repaint both. See and Dorothy Norman supports
by Barbara Buhler Lynes for
251

Exhibited Works
Georgia OKeeffe
(18871986)
Early No. 2 1915
Charcoal on paper
61 x 47
The Menil Collection, Houston,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation, 1995
CR 51
Special No. 9 1915
Charcoal on paper
63.5 x 48.6
The Menil Collection, Houston
CR 54
Pink and Blue Mountain 1916
Watercolour on paper
22.3 x 30.3
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift
of The Burnett Foundation and
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
(1997.04.015)
CR 106
Blue Hill No. II 1916
Watercolour on paper
22.5 x 30.3
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift
of Dr and Mrs John B. Chewning
(2002.01.001)
CR 109
Sunrise 1916
Watercolour on paper
22.5 x 30.2
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth
CR 131
No. 14 Special 1916
Charcoal on paper
62.9 x 47.6
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, Gift of The Georgia
OKeeffe Foundation,
1992.89.9
CR 61
Georgia OKeeffe
Abstraction 1916
Charcoal and wash on paper
63.2 x 48.3
Greenville County Museum of
Art, Museum purchase with
funds donated by The Museum
Association, Mr and Mrs
Thomas Howard Suitt, Jr., Richs
Department Store; and Mr and Mrs
C. H. Abbe
CR 98
No. 12 Special 1916
Charcoal on paper
61 x 48.3
The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation, 1995
CR 117
Abstraction 1916, cast 197980
Lacquered bronze
25.4 x 12.7 x 12.7
Number 6 in an edition of 10
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
(2006.05.021)
CR 73
No. 15 Special 191617
Charcoal on paper
47.9 x 61.9
Philadelphia Museum of Art:
125th Anniversary Acquisition.
Purchased with the gift
(by exchange) of Dr and Mrs
Paul Todd Makler, with funds
contributed by Mr and Mrs
John J. F. Sherrerd, the Alice
Newton Osborn Fund, the Lola
Downin Peck Fund, and gift of The
Georgia OKeeffe Foundation, 1997
(1997-39-1)
CR 154
Untitled (Still-Life) c.1916/17
Ink on paper
8.8 x 6.3
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
252
(2006.05.063) Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
CR 167 gift of Georgia OKeeffe, 1969.835
Untitled (Figure) c.1916/17
CR 344
Graphite on paper Black Lines 1919
9.2 x 7.6 Charcoal on paper
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of
62.6 x 47.6
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation Addison Gallery of American
(2006.05.066)
Art, Phillips Academy, Andover,
CR 170 Massachusetts, museum
purchase, 1959.22
Adrienne Brugger sketchbook
CR 275
191718
No. 17 Special 1919
Graphite and watercolour on
paper Charcoal on paper
50.2 x 32.4
28.9 x 19.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift
of The Burnett Foundation and
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
2006.05.6192006.05.628
(1997.05.015)
CR 17931806
CR 280
Music Pink and Blue No. I 1918
Apple Family 2 c.1920
Oil paint on canvas
Oil paint on canvas
88.9 x 73.7
20.3 x 25.7
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth.
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift
Partial and promised gift to Seattle
of The Burnett Foundation and
Art Museum
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
CR 257
(1997.04.003)
Red and Orange Streak 1919 CR 315
Oil paint on canvas Lake George 1922
68.6 x 58.4 Oil paint on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art: 41.3 x 55.9
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe for San Francisco Museum of Modern
the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987 Art, Gift of Charlotte Mack
(1987-70-3) CR 395
CR 287
Pool in the Woods, Lake George
Lake George, Coat and Red 1919
1922
Oil paint on canvas
Pastel on paper
69.6 x 59
43.2 x 69.9
The Museum of Modern Art, New
Courtesy of Reynolda House
York. Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Museum of American Art,
Foundation, 1995
Winston-Salem, NC, an Affiliate
CR 289
of Wake Forest University. Gift of
Barbara B. Milhouse in memory of
Blue and Green Music 1919/21
E. Carter, Nancy Susan Reynolds,
Oil paint on canvas
and Winifred Babcock
58.4 x 48.3
CR 396
The Art Institute of Chicago;
Mask with Golden Apple 1923
Oil paint on canvas
22.9 x 40.6
Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum
of American Art, Bentonville,
Arkansas
CR 408
Alligator Pear 1923
Pastel on paper
30.5 x 25.4
Private collection
CR 414
Calla Lily in Tall Glass No.2 1923
Oil paint on board
81.6 x 30.5
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Burnett Foundation
(1997.06.010)
CR 426
Grey Lines with Black, Blue and
Yellow c.1923
Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 76.2
The Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston. Museum purchase with
funds provided by the Agnes
Cullen Arnold Endowment Fund
CR 477
A Celebration 1924
Oil paint on canvas
88.6 x 45.7
Seattle Art Museum. Gift of The
Georgia OKeeffe Foundation,
94.89
CR 452
The Eggplant 1924
Oil paint on canvas
81.5 x 30.5
Collection Art Gallery of Ontario,
Toronto. Donated in memory of
Doris Huestis Mills Speirs by her
husband Dr J. Murray Speirs, 1990
90/36
CR 453
Autumn Leaves Lake George, N.Y.
1924
Oil paint on canvas
51.4 x 41.3
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio,
Museum Purchase, Howald Fund II
CR 464
From the Lake No. 1 1924
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 76.2
Purchased with funds from the
Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan
Emory Coffin Collection of the Des CR 530
Moines Art Center, 1984.3
CR 470
From the Lake, No. 3 1924
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 76.2
Philadelphia Museum of Art:
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe for
the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987
(1987-70-2)
CR 471
Autumn Trees The Maple 1924
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 76.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of
The Burnett Foundation and Gerald Abstraction Blue 1927
and Kathleen Peters (1996.03.001)
CR 474
Petunia and Glass Bottle 1924
Oil paint on canvas
50.8 x 25.4
Denver Art Museum collection,
Gift of the Charles Francis Hendrie Dark Iris No. 1 1927
Memorial Collection, 1966.44
CR 489
New York Street with Moon 1925
Oil paint on canvas
122 x 77
Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza
Collection, on loan at the Thyssen-
Bornemisza Museum
CR 483
Grey Tree, Lake George 1925
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 76.2
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe, 1986
(1987.377.2)
CR 512
Untitled (New York) c.192530
Charcoal on paper
62.3 x 47.6
Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, Gift of Mrs Charlotte S.
Mack 1961.48.1
CR 525
Abstraction 1926
Oil paint on canvas
76.7 x 46.4
Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York. Purchase, with funds
from Georgia OKeeffe and by
exchange, 58.43
CR 522
New York Night (Madison Avenue)
1926
Oil paint on canvas
81.3 x 30.5
Museum of Fine Arts, St
Petersburg, Florida. Gift of Charles
C. and Margaret Stevenson
Henderson in memory of Hunt
Henderson, 1971.31
Lake George Barns 1926
Oil paint on canvas
53.8 x 81.4
Collection Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis. Gift of the T.B.
Walker Foundation, 1954
CR 575
Line and Curve 1927
Oil paint on canvas
81.2 x 41.2
National Gallery of Art, Washington,
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest
of Georgia OKeeffe, 1987.58.6
CR 572
Oil paint on canvas
102.1 x 76
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Acquired through the
Helen Acheson Bequest, 1979
CR 573
Oil paint on canvas
81.3 x 30.5
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center,
Anonymous gift, FA1954.4
CR 583
Oriental Poppies 1927
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 101.9
The Collection of the Frederick
R. Weisman Art Museum at
the University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, Museum Purchase,
1937
CR 595
Abstraction White Rose 1927
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 76.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift
of The Burnett Foundation and
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
(1997.04.002)
CR 599
Abstraction Alexius 1928
Oil paint on canvas
92.1 x 76.5
Private collection, Switzerland
CR 616
East River from the 30th Story of
the Shelton Hotel 1928
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 122.2
Courtesy of the New Britain
Museum of American Art,
Stephen B. Lawrence Fund 1958.09
CR 620
Ritz Tower, Night 1928
Oil paint on canvas
102.2 x 35.6
Private collection
CR 621
Shell No. 2 1928
Oil paint on board
23.5 x 18.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Burnett Foundation
(1997.06.037)
CR 624
Calla Lilies on Red 1928
Oil paint on canvas
253
81.6 x 43.5
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of
Anne Windfohr Marion (1996.05.01)
CR 628
New York, Night 19289
Oil paint on canvas
101.9 x 48.7
Sheldon Museum of Art, Sheldon
Art Association, Thomas C. Woods
Memorial, N-107.1958
CR 646
Farmhouse Window and Door 1929
Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 76.2
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Acquired through the
Richard D. Brixey Bequest, 1945
CR 653
Black Cross with Stars and Blue 1929
Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 76.2
Private collection
CR 668
Oak Leaves, Pink and Grey 1929
Oil paint on canvas
84.1 x 45.7
The Collection of the Frederick
R. Weisman Art Museum at
the University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, Museum Purchase,
1936.85
CR 677
Soft Gray, Alcalde Hill 192930
Oil paint on canvas
25.5 x 61.2
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
CR 691
Taos Pueblo 1929/34
Oil paint on canvas
61.6 x 102.2
Courtesy of the Eiteljorg
Museum of American Indians
and Western Art, Indianapolis
CR 699
Schneider sketchbook 1929/30s
Graphite on paper
12.7 x 20
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
(2006.05.6332006.05.674)
CR 18071848
Pelican V sketchbook 1929/30s
Graphite on paper
17.8 x 11.7
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of
The Georgia OKeeffe Foundation
(2006.05.6852006.05.717)
CR 18591891
Black, White and Blue 1930
Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 76.2

Collection of Barney A.
Ebsworth. Partial and promised
gift to National Gallery of Art,
Washington
CR 701
White Iris 1930
Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 76.2
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift
of Mr and Mrs Bruce C. Gottwald
CR 721
Rust Red Hills 1930
Oil paint on canvas
40.6 x 76.2
Sloan Fund Purchase,
Brauer Museum of Art, 62.02,
Valparaiso University
CR 740
Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico
/ Out Back of Maries II 1930
Oil paint on canvas
61.6 x 92.1
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Burnett Foundation
(1997.06.015)
CR 730
Ranchos Church, New Mexico 19301
Oil paint on canvas
62.2 x 91.4
Amon Carter Museum of
American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
CR 705
Another Church, Hernandez,
New Mexico 1931
Oil paint on canvas
25.4 x 60.6 cm
American Museum of Western Art
The Anschutz Collection, Denver
Colorado, purchase, 1973
CR 770
Horses Skull on Blue 1931
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 40.6
Collection of Arizona State
University Art Museum, Tempe;
Gift of Oliver B. James
CR 776
Kachina 1931
Oil paint on wood panel
52.4 x 40.6
Collection of Jan T. and
Marica Vilcek, Promised Gift to
The Vilcek Foundation
CR 781
Pauls Kachina 1931
Oil paint on board
21.4 diameter
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.134)
CR 782
The Mountain, New Mexico 1931
Oil paint on canvas
76.4 x 91.8
Georgia OKeeffe
Whitney Museum of American Art, Grey Hill Forms 1936
New York. Purchase 32.14
CR 790
Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1
1932
Oil paint on canvas
121.9 x 101.6
Crystal Bridges Museum of
American Art, Bentonville,
Arkansas, 2014.35
CR 815
Nature Forms Gasp 1932
Oil paint on canvas
26 x 61
Private collection
CR 819
Kachina 1934
Oil paint on canvas
55.9 x 30.5
Private collection
CR 826
Kachina 1934
Charcoal on paper
60 x 48.3
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (1997.12.001)
CR 823
Kachina 1934
Charcoal on paper
60 x 48.3
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (1997.12.002)
CR 824
Eagle Claw and Bean Necklace 1934
Charcoal on paper
48.5 x 63.9
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Given anonymously
(by exchange), 1936
CR 829
Untitled (Skull) c.1934
Charcoal on paper
47.3 x 62.9
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.144)
CR 848
Purple Hills 1935
Oil paint on canvas
40.6 x 76.2
The San Diego Museum of Art,
Gift of Mr and Mrs Norton S.
Walbridge, 1976
CR 870
Mules Skull with Pink Poinsettia
1936
Oil paint on canvas
101.9 x 76.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Burnett Foundation
(1997.06.014)
CR 876
Oil paint on canvas
50.5 x 75.7
Gift of the Estate of Georgia
OKeeffe, University of New Mexico
Art Museum, Albuquerque, P87.1
CR 895
Pedernal with Red Hills 1936
Oil paint on canvas
50.2 x 75.6
Collection of the New Mexico
Museum of Art. Bequest of
Helen Miller Jones, 1986
(1986.137.18)
CR 900
From the Faraway, Nearby 1937
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 101.9
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1959
(59.204.2)
CR 914
Horn and Feathers 1937
Oil paint on canvas
51 x 61.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.152)
CR 916
My Backyard 1937
Oil paint on canvas
50.8 x 91.4
New Orleans Museum of Art:
Museum purchase, City of
New Orleans Capital Funds, 73.8
CR 932
Chama River, Ghost Ranch,
New Mexico 1937
Oil paint on canvas
77.5 x 41.9
Collection of the New Mexico
Museum of Art. Gift of the
Georgia OKeeffe Estate, 1987
(1987.312.1)
CR 933
Deer Horns 1938
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 40.6
Private collection
CR 941
Kachina 1938
Oil paint on canvas
17.8 x 17.8
San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art. Gift of the
Hamilton-Wells Collection
CR 942
(1997.06.005)
Red and Yellow Cliffs 1940
Oil paint on canvas
61 x 91.4
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest
of Georgia OKeeffe, 1986
254
w(1987.377.4)
CR 997
A Man from the Desert 1941
Oil paint on canvas
43 x 18
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.167)
CR 1015
My Front Yard, Summer 1941
Oil paint on canvas
50.9 x 76.5
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.173)
CR 1023
Red Hills and Bones 1941
Oil paint on canvas
75.6 x 101.6
Philadelphia Museum of Art:
The Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
1949 (1949-18-109)
CR 1025
Blue Sky 1941
Oil paint on canvas
91.8 x 40.8
Worcester Art Museum, Gift of
Mr and Mrs Robert W. Stoddard
CR 1028
Black Hills with Cedar 19412
Oil paint on canvas
40 x 76
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
CR 1040
Dead Pion Tree 1943
Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 76.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.180)
CR 1068
Untitled (Abstraction) 1943
Charcoal and chalk on paper
61 x 45.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.177)
CR 1051
Untitled (Dry Waterfall, Ghost
Ranch) c.1943
Graphite and charcoal on paper
60.6 x 45.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Burnett Foundation
CR 1071
Untitled (Ghost Ranch Cliff) c.1943
Graphite and charcoal on paper
60.6 x 45.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Burnett Foundation
(1997.06.006)
CR 1070
Pelvis I 1944
Oil paint on canvas
91.4 x 76.2
Milwaukee Art Museum. Gift of
Mrs Harry Lynde Bradley, 1973
CR 1075
Black Place III 1944
Oil paint on canvas
91.9 x 101.9
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Burnett Foundation
(2007.01.026)
CR 1082
Black Place No. IV 1944
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 91.4
Private collection
CR 1083
Untitled (Black Place) c.1944/5
Graphite on paper
29.8 x 45.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.184)
CR 1093
Untitled (Black Place) c.1944/5
Graphite on paper
45.1 x 29.8
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.185)
CR 1094
Black Place II 1945
Oil paint on canvas
61 x 76.2
The Vilcek Foundation
CR, appendix ii, no.119, p.1107
Spring Tree No. 1 1945
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 91.4
Collection of the New Mexico
Museum of Art. Gift of the Georgia
OKeeffe Estate, 1987 (1987.312.3) Wall with Green Door 1953
CR 1120
The Black Place III 1945
Pastel on paper
70.5 x 111.1
Private collection, courtesy
The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe,
New Mexico
CR 1112
Pedernal 1945
Pastel on paper
54.6 x 109.9
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Burnett Foundation
(1997.06.008)
CR 1117
Pelvis Series 1947
Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 121.9
Private collection, courtesy
Eykyn Maclean
CR 1157
In the Patio No. IV 1948
Oil paint on canvas
35.6 x 76.5
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Gift of the William H. Lane
Foundation, 1990
CR 1161
Black Place Green 1949
Oil paint on canvas
94.6 x 117.5
Private collection
CR 1175
Rams Horns I c.1949
Charcoal on paper
47.3 x 63.2
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.207)
CR 1176
Winter Trees, Abiqui, III 1950
Oil paint on canvas
64.5 x 78.7
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.229)
CR 1220
My Last Door 19524
Oil paint on canvas
122.5 x 213.8
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Burnett Foundation
(1997.06.029)
CR 1263
Cottonwoods c.1952
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 91.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.244)
CR 1261
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 122.6
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Corcoran Collection
(Gift of the Woodward Foundation)
(2015.19.155)
CR 1265
Winter Cottonwoods East V 1954
Oil paint on canvas
101.6 x 91.6
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Burnett Foundation
(1997.06.024)
CR 1276
Blue I 1958
Oil paint on canvas
76.5 x 66.4
Permanent Collection, Snite
Museum of Art, University of
Notre Dame, Gift of Mr Walter R.
Beardsley, 1978.073.001
CR 1330
Blue II 1958
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 66
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Burnett Foundation
and The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (1997.05.005)
CR 1331
Blue B 1959
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 91.4
Milwaukee Art Museum. Gift of
Mrs Harry Lynde Bradley, 1973
CR 1357
From the River Pale 1959
Oil paint on canvas
105.4 x 79.7
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation (2006.05.280)
CR 1360
Drawing III 1959
Charcoal on paper
47.3 x 62.9
Philadelphia Museum of Art:
125th Anniversary Acquisition.
Purchased with funds contributed
by the Arcadia Foundation, and
gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation, 1997 (1997-42-1)
CR 1351
It Was Blue and Green 1960
Oil paint on canvas
76.5 x 101.6
Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York; Lawrence H. Bloedel
Bequest 77.1.37
CR 1444
Sky with Flat White Cloud 1962
Oil paint on canvas
152.4 x 203.2
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, Bequest of
Georgia OKeeffe, 1987.58.8
CR 1473
Winter Road I 1963
Oil paint on canvas
55.9 x 45.7
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Gift of The Georgia
OKeeffe Foundation, 1995.4.1
CR 1477
Sky Above the Clouds III /
Above the Clouds III 1963
Oil paint on canvas
122 x 213.4
Private collection, Texas
CR 1479
255
Ansel Adams
(190284)
Ranchos de Taos Church, Front 1929
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
15.2 x 18.7
Gift of Ansel Adams,
University of New Mexico
Art Museum, Albuquerque
68.129
A Man of Taos, Tony Lujan c.1930
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
31.3 x 22.7
Collection Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona
78.187.6
Ghost Ranch Hills, Chama Valley,
Northern New Mexico 1937
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
35.1 x 48.9
Collection Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona
84.92.555
Thunderstorm, Ghost Ranch,
Chama Valley, Northern New
Mexico 1937
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
36.7 x 49.9
Collection Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona
76.89.96
Georgia OKeeffe in the
Southwest 1937
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
29.7 x 18.7
Collection Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona
84.89.205
Georgia OKeeffe and Orville
Cox, Canyon de Chelly National
Monument 1937
Photograph, gelatin silver print on
paper
17.5 x 26.2
Collection Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona
76.83.12
Road and the Pedernal, Chama
Valley, New Mexico c.1937
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
21.5 x 32.8
Collection Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona
76.89.8
Moonrise, Hernandez,
New Mexico 1941
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
39 x 48.5

Victoria and Albert Museum,
London
CIRC.600-1975
Mary Hunter Austin
(18681934) and
Ansel Adams
(190284)
Taos Pueblo 1930
San Francisco: Grabhorn Press,
no.61
43.1 x 31.8
University of New Mexico,
University Libraries, Center for
Southwest Research
Taos Pueblo 1930
San Francisco: Grabhorn Press,
no.61
43.1 x 31.8
The Richard and Ronay Menschel
Library, George Eastman Museum
Marsden Hartley
(18771943)
New Mexico Recollection #14 c.1923
Oil paint on canvas
76.2 x 101.6
Collection of Jan T. and
Marica Vilcek, Promised Gift to
The Vilcek Foundation
John Marin
(18701953)
Downtown, New York 1923
Watercolour on paper
67.9 x 55.2
Tate: Purchased out of a sum of
money made available from the
Bruern Foundation 1956
T00080
Alfred Stieglitz
(18641946)
Portrait of Marsden Hartley 191315
Photograph, platinum print
on paper
23.8 x 20.3
The Collection of the Frederick
R. Weisman Art Museum at
the University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis. Gift of Ione and
Hudson D. Walker, 1975
1975.17.25
From the Back-Window 291 1915
Photograph, platinum print
Georgia OKeeffe
on paper
24 x 19.2
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1949.3.401
Georgia OKeeffe at 291 1917
Photograph, platinum print
on paper
23.3 x 19
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1980.70.1
OKeeffe Exhibition at 291,
Interior Gallery View 1917
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
20.3 x 25.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe
Foundation (2006.06.1128)
OKeeffe Exhibition at 291,
Interior Gallery View 1917
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
20.3 x 25.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe
Foundation
(2006.06.1129)
Georgia OKeeffe Exhibition at 291,
Interior Gallery View 1917
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
20.3 x 25.4
Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift of
The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation
(2006.06.1483)
Georgia OKeeffe 1918
Photograph, platinum print
on paper
24.2 x 19.2
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1980.70.12
Georgia OKeeffe 1918, printed
1924/37
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
23.5 x 18.4
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1980.70.19
Georgia OKeeffe Torso 1918
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
23.6 x 18.5
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1980.70.36
Georgia OKeeffe 1918, printed 1930s
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
11.2 x 9.1
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1980.70.52
Georgia OKeeffe 1918, printed 1920s
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
11.7 x 8.9
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1980.70.76
Georgia OKeeffe 1918
Photograph, palladium print
on paper
24.8 x 20.3
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles
(91.XM.63.13)
Georgia OKeeffe with watercolor
paint box 1918
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
9 x 11.7
George Eastman Museum,
purchase and gift of
Georgia OKeeffe
1974.0052.0045
Georgia OKeeffe Torso 1918/19
Photograph, platinum print
on paper
23.9 x 17.8
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1980.70.33
Georgia OKeeffe Torso 191819
Photograph, platinum/palladium
print on paper
23.6 x 19.8
Victoria and Albert Museum,
London, Gift of The Georgia
OKeeffe Foundation
E.888-2003
Georgia OKeeffe Breasts 1919
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
22.5 x 17.2
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1980.70.109
Georgia OKeeffe Hands 1919,
printed 1920s/30s
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
24.2 x 19.5
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles
(93.XM.25.43)
Georgia OKeeffe 1920
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
23.7 x 18.4
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1980.70.143
Paul Rosenfeld 1920
Photograph, gelatin silver print
256
on paper
23.3 x 18.6
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1949.3.446
Georgia OKeeffe 1920
Photograph, platinum print
on paper
24.5 x 19.5
George Eastman Museum,
purchase and gift of
Georgia OKeeffe
1974.0052.0092
John Marin 1921/2
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
23.2 x 18.5
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1949.3.510
Claudia OKeeffe 1922
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
18.4 x 23
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1949.3.518
Rebecca Salsbury Strand 1922
Photograph, palladium print
on paper
23.7 x 19.2
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1949.3.543
Apples and Gable, Lake George 1922
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
11.4 x 9.1
George Eastman Museum,
purchase and gift of
Georgia OKeeffe
1974.0052.0069
Lake George 1922/3
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
23.7 x 19
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1949.3.916
Portrait of Georgia, No. 1 1923
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
11.7 x 9.1
George Eastman Museum,
purchase and gift of
Georgia OKeeffe
1974.0052.0047
Portrait of Georgia, No. 2 1923
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
9.2 x 11.9
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1949.3.889
Portrait of Georgia, No. 3 1923
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
9.2 x 11.4
Ackland Art Museum, The
University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, 80.32.1
Barn & Snow 1923
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
24.5 x 19.2
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1949.3.617
Ida and Georgia OKeeffe 1924
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
11.2 x 9
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1980.70.198
Equivalent 1925
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
11.8 x 9.2
George Eastman Museum,
purchase and gift of
Georgia OKeeffe
1974.0052.0006
Equivalent 1925
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
9.3 x 11.8
George Eastman Museum,
purchase and gift of
Georgia OKeeffe
1974.0052.0021
Equivalent 192534
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
11.7 x 9.1
Victoria and Albert Museum,
London, Gift of The Georgia
OKeeffe Foundation
PH.1385-1980
Equivalent 1925
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
11.9 x 9.3
Victoria and Albert Museum,
London
E.891-2003
Lake George 1926
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
9.1 x 11.9
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1949.3.667
Equivalent 1926
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
11.9 x 9.1
Victoria and Albert Museum,
London New York from An American Georgia OKeeffe
PH.366-1982 Place 1931 1974.0052.0074
Photograph, gelatin silver print
From the Shelton, New York,
on paper
Looking East 1926/7
Photograph, gelatin silver print
24.2 x 19.2 Paul Strand
on paper
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz (18901976)
9 x 11.7
Collection, 1949.3.1243
National Gallery of Art,
Abstraction, Porch Shadows,
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 1949.3.1267
Georgia OKeeffe 1931
Photograph, gelatin silver print
Twin Lakes, Connecticut 1917
From the Shelton, New York (Room
on paper
23.7 x 16.6
Photograph, heliogravure on paper
23.8 x 18.6
3003) Looking Southeast 1927 Muse dOrsay, Paris, Gift of Minda
National Gallery of Art,
Photograph, gelatin silver print de Gunzburg, 1981
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
on paper PHO 1981 35 10
Collection, 1980.70.252
8.8 x 11.5
National Gallery of Art, Abstraction, Bowls, Twin Lakes,
Georgia OKeeffe Hands and
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Connecticut 1917
Horse Skull 1931
Collection, 1949.3.1197 23.8 x 16.7
Photograph, gelatin silver print
Photograph, heliogravure on paper
From the Shelton Looking on paper
Muse dOrsay, Paris, Gift of Minda
North 1927 19.4 x 24.1
de Gunzburg, 1981
Photograph, gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum,
PHO 1981 35 11
on paper Los Angeles
11.4 x 8.9 (93.XM.25.58)
Ranchos de Taos Church,
The J. Paul Getty Museum, New Mexico 1931
From My Window at the Shelton,
Los Angeles
North 1931 Photograph, gelatin silver print
(84.XM.914.1)
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
11.4 x 14.4
Equivalent 1927
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
24.3 x 19.1 Private collection, USA
on paper
11.4 x 9.4
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Church, Ranchos de Taos,
Los Angeles
New Mexico 1931
Victoria and Albert Museum, (87.XM.62)
Photograph, platinum print
London, Gift of The Georgia
Dorothy Norman 1932 on paper
OKeeffe Foundation
Photograph, gelatin silver print 14 x 11.2
E.892-2003
on paper Private collection, USA
Equivalent 1927 11.4 x 9.2
Ranchos de Taos Church,
Photograph, gelatin silver print George Eastman Museum,
New Mexico 1930-2
on paper purchase and gift of
Photograph, platinum print
9.5 x 11.8 Georgia OKeeffe
Victoria and Albert Museum, 1974.0052.0001
on paper
9.2 x 11.7
London, Gift of The Georgia
Georgia OKeeffe 1933
Private collection, USA
OKeeffe Foundation
Photograph, gelatin silver print
E.893-2003 Ranchos de Taos Church,
on paper
Georgia OKeeffe After Return 22 x 18.8 New Mexico 1931/2
from New Mexico 1929 Private collection, Switzerland Photograph, platinum print
Equivalent O1 on paper
House and Grape Leaves 1934
Photograph, gelatin silver print 8.6 x 11.5
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper Private collection, USA
on paper
7.9 x 11.7
24.4 x 19.2 Church Buttress, Ranchos de Taos,
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift New Mexico 1932
Los Angeles
of Cary Ross, Knoxville, Tennessee Photograph, platinum print
(93.XM.25.72)
Equivalent 1929
1935.54 on paper
14.6 x 11.3
Photograph, gelatin silver print
Door to Shanty, Lake George 1934/7 Private collection, USA
Photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper
on paper
11.8 x 9.3
11.6 x 9.2
Victoria and Albert Museum,
National Gallery of Art,
London
Washington, Alfred Stieglitz
PH.369-1982
Collection, 1949.3.824
Equivalent 1930
From the Shelton, Looking West,
Photograph, gelatin silver print
1933 1935
on paper
Photograph, gelatin silver print
9 x 11.8
on paper
Victoria and Albert Museum,
24.2 x 19.1
London, Gift of The Georgia
George Eastman Museum,
OKeeffe Foundation
purchase and gift of
E.896-2003
257
 Georgia OKeeffe

John Loengard, Georgia OKeeffe
at Ghost Ranch: A Photo Essay,
New York 1998
Agapita Judy Lopez and Barbara
Buhler Lynes, Georgia OKeeffe
and Her Houses: Ghost Ranch
and Abiquiu, New York and
Emily Balley Neff, The Modern
West: American Landscapes 1890-
1950, exh. cat., The Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston 2006
Peter Barbarie, Paul Strand:
Photography and Film for the
Twentieth Century, exh. cat.,
Modernism, New Haven and
Santa Fe 2007
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the
Spiritual in Art, London 2006 [1914]
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Shared
Intelligence: American Painting and
the Photograph, exh. cat., Georgia
and pastels, exh. cat., An American
Place, New York 1939
Anita Pollitzer, Thats Georgia,
Saturday Review, 4 November 1950,
pp.41-3
Griselda Pollock, The Missing
Future: MoMA and Modern

Further Reading
Exhibition catalogues:
Ellen Roberts, OKeeffe,
Stettheimer, Torr, Zorach: Women
Modernists in New York, exh. cat.,
Norton Museum of Art, Palm
Beach 2016
Sophie Bernard, Georgia OKeeffe
et Ses Amis Photographs (Georgia
OKeeffe and Her Photographer
Friends), exh. cat., Muse de
Grenoble 2015
Erin Coe et al, Modern Nature:
Georgia OKeeffe and Lake George,
exh cat., The Hyde Collection,
Glens Falls, New York and Georgia
OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe, 2013
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia
OKeeffe: Leben und Werk (Life and
Work), exh. cat., Kunsthalle der
Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich 2012
Barbara Buhler Lynes and Carolyn
Kastner, Georgia OKeeffe in New
Mexico: Architecture, Katsinam,
and the Land, exh. cat., Georgia
O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, 2012
Valerie Ann Leeds, Georgia
OKeeffe and the Faraway: Nature
and Image, exh. cat. National
Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame,
Fort Worth and Georgia O'Keeffe
Museum, Santa Fe 2010
Barbara Haskell, Georgia OKeeffe: Museum of Art, Ann Arbor,
Abstraction, exh. cat., Whitney
Museum of American Art, New
York 2009
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia
OKeeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural
Affinities, exh. cat. Georgia
OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe 2008
Susan Danly, Georgia OKeeffe and
the Camera: the Art of Identity,
exh. cat., Portland Museum of Art,
Maine 2008
Kathleen Pyne, Modernism and
The Feminine Voice: OKeeffe
and the Women of the Stieglitz
Circle, exh. cat., Georgia OKeeffe
Museum, Santa Fe 2007
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia
OKeeffe: Circling Around
Abstraction, exh. cat., Norton
Museum of Art, Palm Beach 2007
Richard D. Marshall, Georgia
OKeeffe: Nature and Abstraction,
exh. cat., Irish Museum of Modern
Art, Dublin 2007
Ren Paul Barilleaux and Sarah
Whitaker Peters, Georgia OKeeffe:
Color and Conservation, exh. cat.,
Mississippi Art Museum,
Jackson 2006
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia
OKeeffe and Andy Warhol: Flowers
of Distinction, exh. cat., Georgia
OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe 2005
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Lesley
Poling-Kempes and Frederick W.
Turner, Georgia OKeeffe and New
Mexico: A Sense of Place, exh. cat.,
Georgia OKeeffe Museum,
Santa Fe 2004
Joseph S. Czestochowski, Georgia
OKeeffe: Visions of the Sublime,
exh. cat., University of Michigan,
Memphis 2004
Bice Curiger, Georgia OKeeffe, exh.
cat., Kunsthaus Zurich 2003
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia
OKeeffe and the Calla Lily in
American Art, 1860- 1940, exh. cat.,
Georgia OKeeffe Museum
Santa Fe, 2002
Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr,
OKeeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their
Own, New Haven 2000
Ruth E. Fine and Barbara Buhler
Lynes, OKeeffe on Paper, exh.
cat., National Gallery of Art,
Washington 2000
Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Georgia
OKeeffe: The Poetry of Things,
exh. cat., The Phillips Collection,
Washington 1999
Amy Ellis, Elizabeth Mankin
Kornhauser and Maura Lyons,
Stieglitz, OKeeffe & American
Modernism, exh. cat., Wadsworth
Atheneum, Hartford 1999
Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, OKeeffe
and Texas, exh. cat., The Marion
Koogler McNay Art Museum,
San Antonio 1998
Ruth E. Fine, Elizabeth Glassman,
and Juan Hamilton, The Book
Room: Georgia OKeeffes Library in Charles C. Eldredge, Georgia
Abiquiu, exh. cat., The Grolier Club, OKeeffe, New York 1991
New York 1997
Charles C. Eldredge, Georgia
OKeeffe: American and Modern,
exh. cat., Hayward Gallery,
London 1993
Alexander Arrowsmith and
Thomas West (eds.), Two Lives,
Georgia OKeeffe & Alfred Stieglitz:
A Conversation in Paintings and
Photographs, exh. cat., The Phillips
Collection, Washington 1992
Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton and
Sarah Greenough (eds.), Georgia
OKeeffe: Art and Letters, exh.
cat., National Gallery of Art,
Washington 1987
Barbara Haskell, Georgia OKeeffe:
Works on Paper, exh. cat., Museum
of Fine Arts (Museum of New
Mexico), Santa Fe 1985
Doris Bry and Lloyd Goodrich,
Georgia OKeeffe, exh. cat.,
The Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York 1970
Daniel Catton Rich, Georgia
OKeeffe, The Art Institute of
Chicago 1943
Books and Collections:
Michael Berry, Georgia OKeeffe:
Painter, New York 1988
Doris Bry (ed.), Georgia OKeefe,
Some Memories of Drawings,
Albuquerque 1988 [1974]
Jan Garden Castro, The Art & Life
of Georgia OKeeffe, New York 1985
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Full
Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia
OKeeffe, New York 2005
Clive Giboire (ed.), Lovingly,
Georgia: The Complete
Correspondence of Georgia
OKeeffe and Anita Pollitzer,
New York 1990
Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the
Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper
and Georgia OKeeffe,
Chicago 2003
Sarah Greenough, My Faraway
One: Selected Letters of Georgia
OKeeffe and Alfred Stieglitz:
Volume One, 1915-1933,
New Haven 2011
Randall Griffin, Georgia OKeeffe,
London and New York 2014
Hannah Johnston, Georgia
OKeeffe, London 2016
Laura Lisle, Portrait of an Artist:
A Biography of Georgia OKeeffe,
New York, 1980
London 2012
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia
OKeeffe Museum Collections,
New York 2007
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia
OKeeffe Catalogue Raisonn,
vols 1 and 2, New Haven 1999
Barbara Buhler Lynes, OKeeffe,
Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929,
Ann Arbor 1989
Barbara Buhler Lynes and Ann
Paden, (eds), Maria Chabot/Georgia Place at Mabel Dodge Luhans,
OKeeffe: Correspondence, 1941-
1949, Albuquerque 2003
Christopher Merrill and Ellen
Bradbury (eds.), From the Faraway New York 1977
Nearby: Georgia OKeeffe as Icon,
Albuquerque, 1992
Lisa Mintz Messinger,
Georgia OKeeffe, New York and
London 2001
Georgia OKeeffe, Georgia OKeeffe, Taos, Santa Fe 2007 [1935]
New York 1976
Anita Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper: Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality,
Georgia OKeeffe, New York 1988
Christine Taylor Patten and Alvaro
Cardona Hine, Miss OKeeffe,
Albuquerque 2013
Sarah Whitaker Peters, Becoming
OKeeffe: The Early Years,
New York 1991
Roxanna Robinson, Georgia
OKeeffe: A Life, London 1990
Nancy J. Scott, Critical Lives:
Georgia OKeeffe, London 2015
Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia OKeeffe:
a Portrait, Introduction by
Georgia OKeeffe, exh cat.,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York 1978
Anne Middleton Wagner, Three
Artists (Three Women): Modernism
and the Art of Hesse, Krasner
and OKeeffe, Berkeley and
Los Angeles 1996
Myron Wood, OKeeffe at Abiquiu,
New York 1995
Contextual Books:
Mary Austin and Ansel Adams,
Taos Pueblo, San Francisco 1930
Philadelphia Museum of Art 2014
Annie Besant and Charles
Leadbeater, Thought-Forms,
London 1901
Marcia Brennan, Painting Gender,
Constructing Theory: The Alfred
Stieglitz Circle and American
Formalist Aesthetics, Cambridge
MA and London 2001
Flannery Burke, From Greenwich
Village to Taos: Primitivism and
Lawrence, Kansas 2008
Essays on Fourteen American
Judy Chicago, Through the Flower:
My Struggle As a Woman Artist,
Wanda Corn, The Great American
Thing: Modern Art and National
Identity, 19151935, Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London 1999
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Winter in
2011
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of
Albuquerque 1987 [1937]
Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition:
A Series of Exercises in Art
Structure for the Use of Students
and Teachers, New York 1914 [1899]
Waldo Frank, Our America,
New York 1919
Waldo Frank [Search-Light, pseud.], Times, 7 March 1986
Time-Exposures by Search-Light,
New York 1926
Waldo Frank (ed.), America and
Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective
Portrait, New York 1934.
Sarah Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz, on the Granite: Memories of a
The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz
Collection of Photographs, at the
National Gallery of Art, Washington,
vols 1 and 2, New York 2002
Sarah Greenough, Modern Art
and America: Alfred Stieglitz
and His New York Galleries, exh.
cat., National Gallery of Art,
Washington 2000
Marsden Hartley, Adventures in the
Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters,
Vaudeville and Poets, New York 1921
Heather Hole and Barbara Buhler
Lynes. Marsden Hartley and the
West: The Search For an American
OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe 2011 Women, in Cornelia Butler and
Alexandra Schwarz (eds.) Modern
Sarah Milroy and Ian Dejardin
Women: Women Artists at the
(eds.), From the Forest to the Sea:
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Emily Carr in British Columbia,
2010, pp.2854
exh. cat., Art Gallery of Ontario,
Toronto 2015 Griselda Pollock, Feminist
Interventions in the Histories
Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz:
An American Seer, New York 1990 of Art in Vision and Difference:
[1960] Feminism, Femininity and the
Histories of Art, London 2003,
Lesley Poling-Kempes, Ghost pp.117
Ranch, Tucson 2005
Barbara Rose, Georgia OKeeffe:
Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York:
The Paintings of the Sixties,
Artforum, November 1970, vol.5,
Moderns, New York 1924
no.5, pp.42-6
John Szarkowski, Ansel Adams at
Nancy Scott, The OKeeffe-
100, exh. cat., Museum of Modern
Pollitzer Correspondence, 1915-1917,
Art San Francisco 2001
Notes in the History of Art, vol.3,
Martha Tedeschi with Kristi Dahm no.1, Fall 1983, pp.3442
et al., John Marins Watercolors:
A Medium for Modernism, exh.
cat., The Art Institute of Chicago,
Yale University Press, New Haven
Maurice Tuchman, The Spiritual in
Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985,
Los Angeles 1989
Journals and Articles:
Edith Evans Asbury, Georgia
OKeeffe Dead at 98; Shaper of
Modern Art in U.S., New York
Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro,
Female Imagery, Womanspace
Journal 1, Summer 1973
Donald C. Gallup, Georgia
OKeeffe: 1949-1986 in Pigeons
Yale Librarian, New Haven 1988,
pp.221-53
Mary Lynn Kotz, Georgia OKeeffe
at 90, ARTnews, December 1977,
pp.36-45
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia
OKeeffe and Feminism: A Problem
of Position, in Norma Broude
and Mary D. Garrard (eds.), The
Expanding Discourse: Feminism
and Art History, New York, 1992,
pp.436-449
Georgia OKeeffe, About myself in
Georgia OKeeffe: Exhibition of oils

258 259

Page numbers in italic type refer
to pictures in the chronology.
All other pictures are referred to
by figure number.
59th St. Studio 221
A Arden, Elizabeth 238, 238
Abbott, Berenice 104
Abiqui 16, 104, 146, 148, 149, 150,
153, 1878, 2201, 224, 235, 237, 2401,
240, 241; figs.98, 137
Abiqui Mesa I fig.195
abstract expressionism 20, 186,
188, 189, 190, 192
abstraction 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 53,
55, 56, 11011, 150, 1856, 1912, 21920
Abstraction (charcoal and wash)
fig.15
Abstraction (oil) fig.36
Abstraction (sculpture) fig.24
Abstraction Alexius fig.32
Abstraction Blue 20, 56; fig.30
Abstraction White Rose 150; fig.31
Adams, Ansel 12, 237, 238, 239
Alfred Stieglitz and Painting by
Georgia OKeeffe ... 240
Church at Ranchos de Taos ...
fig.188
Georgia OKeeffe, Carmel,
California 243
Georgia OKeeffe in the Southwest
fig.192
Ghost Ranch Hills, Chama Valley
... fig.191
Untitled (David McAlpin, Al
Rhode, Godfrey Rockefeller,
OKeeffe and Helen Rockefeller)
fig.133
African masks 54
Agar, Eileen 104
Albers, Anni 104
Albers, Josef
Homage to the Square 189
Variant/Adobe series 189; fig.173
Alligator Pear fig.108
American, use of term 14
American Academy of Arts and
Georgia OKeeffe
Index
Letters 241
American luminism 11
Anderson, Sherwood 56
Annan, James Craig 98
Another Church, Hernandez, New
Mexico fig.149
Apple Family fig.81
Art Institute of Chicago 232. 242
Art Students League 20, 56, 98,
232
Asbury, Edith Evans 20
At the Rodeo, New Mexico 19
Autumn Leaves Lake George, N.Y.
fig.87
Autumn Trees The Maple fig.84
Bourgeois, Louise 104
B Bourke-White, Margaret 104
Baker, Josephine 114
Barr, Alfred H. 111
Bashkirtseff, Marie 48
Beauvoir, Simone de
The Second Sex 105, 109
Bement, Alon 233
Benglis, Lynda 21
Fling, Dribble, and Drip 21
Bergson, Henri
Creative Evolution 109
Besant, Annie 111
The Beyond 188; fig.172
Bierstadt, Albert 188
Bisti Badlands 15, 239
Black Bird Series 222
Black Cross with Stars and Blue
fig.139
Black Door with Red 189, 223;
fig.208
Black Hills with Cedar 16; fig.159
Black Iris fig.113
Black Lines (charcoal) fig.26
Black Lines (watercolour) fig.19
Black Mesa Landscape, New
Mexico/Out Back of Maries II
fig.142
Black Patio Door 224; fig.205
Black Place series 1518, 20, 239;
figs.6, 7, 1605
Black Place Green 17; fig.165
Black Place I 16, 18; fig.160
Black Place II 1944 1617; fig.161
Black Place II 1945 239; fig.164
Black Place III (oil) 16, 18; fig.162
The Black Place III (pastel) 17; fig.7
Black Place No. IV 17; fig.163
Black, White and Blue fig.38
Blue I (1916) 185; fig.100
Blue I (1958) fig.197
Blue II fig.198
Blue B fig.199
Blue and Green Music fig.28
Blue Hill No. II 187; fig.22
Blue Sky fig.158
Bluemner, Oscar 185
Bonheur, Rosa 227
Columbia College, South Carolina
Brancusi, Constantin 52
Sleeping Muse I 54; fig.43
Brandt, Marianne 104
Braque, Georges 233
Breton, Andr 105
Brigman, Anne 53, 55, 108
Bry, Doris 240, 242
Buffon, Comte de 48
Burke, Edmund 188
C D
Calla Lilies on Red fig.106
Calla Lily in Tall Glass No. 2 fig.105
Cameron, Julia Margaret 98
Canaday, John 1920
Carr, Emily 19, 112
Untitled 19; fig.9
Carrington, Leonora 104
Cassatt, Mary 227
A Celebration fig.69
Cerro Pedernal 238, 241, 243
Czanne, Paul 52, 54, 152
Chabot, Maria 17, 23940
Georgia OKeeffe, The Black Place
239
Chama River, Ghost Ranch, New
Mexico fig.150
Charlottesville, Virginia 233
Chase, William Merritt 56, 181, 232
Chase Award 233
260
Chatham Episcopal Institute 2323
Chave, Anna C. 13, 107
Chicago 146, 150, 233
Chicago, Judy 21, 106
The Dinner Party 21
Church, Frederic
Twilight in the Wilderness 11; fig.3
City Night 58
Cixous, Hlne 109
Cliffs Beyond Abiqui, Dry Waterfall
fig.101
Coburn, Alvin Langdon 98
Coe, Erin B. 148
colour field painters 1867, 18990,
192, 220
colour palette 58, 13840, 219
Ford, John
234
Corn, Wanda 10, 14, 220
Cottonwoods fig.186
Covarrubias, Miguel 147, 240
Cows Skull: Red, White, and Blue
16, 20, 58, 152; fig.135
Cows Skull with Calico Roses 58;
fig.121
cubism 216, 217
Cunningham, Imogen 104, 114
Dahl-Wolfe, Louise 104
Dark Iris No.1 fig.111
Davis, Stuart 151
Day, F. Holland 98
Dead Pion Tree fig.157
Dead Tree, Bear Lake, Taos 19;
fig.10
Deers Skull with Pedernal fig.125
de Kooning, Willem 105
Delaunay, Sonia 104, 227
Demachy, Robert 98
Demuth, Charles 230, 236, 238
Dodge, Mabel 106, 147, 149, 151,
230, 237
Dove, Arthur 12, 52, 147, 185, 216, 236
Snow Thaw 230
Dow, Arthur Wesley 10, 52, 55, 98,
111, 189, 233, 234
Drawing III fig.202
drawings 10, 19, 1523, 181, 185, 234
Duchamp, Marcel 111
Dust Bowl 14
E Goossen, Eugene C. 187
Eagle Claw and Bean Necklace
fig.193
Early Abstraction 53; fig.13
Early No. 2 53; fig.14
East River No. 1 58
East River from the 30th Story of
the Shelton Hotel fig.77
Edelson, Mary Beth
OKevelson 21; fig.11
Some Living American Women
Artists 21
The Eggplant fig.107
Eilshemius, Louis 230
Engelhard, George 236
Engelhard, Georgia 238
Eugene, Frank 98
Evening Star series 11, 53
Evening Star III 11, 21, 53
Evening Star No. VI 11, 187; fig.166
F Halpert, Edith 21, 186, 240, 242
Farmhouse Window and Door 187,
189; fig.89
Fauvism 216
feminist interpretation of
OKeeffes work 11, 12, 19, 21, 1048, hard-edged abstraction 21
11014, 242
Fer, Briony 191
figuration 17, 21, 190
Figures under Rooftop 53
Fini, Leonor 104
Flower Abstraction fig.29
The Grapes of Wrath 14
Frank, Waldo 19
White Paint and Good Order
1802
Frankenthaler, Helen 20, 186, 187,
227
Freud, Sigmund 105, 106, 110
The Interpretation of
Dreams 106
Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality 106
Freudian interpretations of
OKeefes work 12, 21, 105, 235, 236
From a Day with Juan series 188,
191; fig.178
From the Faraway, Nearby 14, 16,
224; fig.126
From the Lake No. 1 fig.82
From the Lake, No. 3 fig.83
From the River Pale 187; fig.200
Fryd, Vivien Green
Art and the Crisis of Marriage
1078
Fuller, Meta Vaux Warrick 104
G In the Patio No. IX 222; fig.207
Gast, John
American Progress 14; fig.5
Gentileschi, Artemisia 227
Georgia OKeeffe Foundation 243
Georgia OKeeffe Museum 243
German expressionism 216
Ghost Ranch 15, 17, 1469, 219, 238,
240
Gluck 104, 114
Gourmont, Remy de
Mr Antiphilos, Satyr 100
Great Depression 13, 14, 237
Greenberg, Clement 9, 11, 17, 1820,
105, 1912
Review of an Exhibition of
Georgia OKeeffe 21617
Towards a Newer Laocon 17,
18
Green Patio Door 221
Grey Blue & Black Pink Circle 19;
fig.33
Grey Hill Forms 16; fig.6
Grey Line with Lavender and Yellow
20, 21
Grey Lines with Black, Blue and
Yellow 21, 56; fig.34
Grey Tree, Lake George fig.85
H Jersey 187; fig.169
Halsman, Philippe
Georgia OKeeffe at Ghost Ranch
... 240
Hamilton, Juan 191, 2423
Harris, Ann Sutherland 107
Hartley, Marsden 11, 12, 18, 52, 147,
151, 216, 235, 236
portrait by Stieglitz fig.65
Hepworth, Barbara 104
Herrera, Carmen 201
Blanco y Verde 21
Red with White Triangle 21
Hesse, Eva 112
hiking 11, 237
Hill, David Octavius 98, 99
Hiller, Susan 21
OKeeffe as I see her 22631
Hch, Hannah 104
Hopper, Edward 107
Hopper, Josephine Nivison 107
Horn and Feathers fig.151
Horses Skull on Blue fig.118
Horses Skull with Pink Rose 58;
fig.119
The House I Live In fig.127
House with Picket Fence 53
I 11
In the Patio No. I 220
In the Patio No. II 221
In the Patio No. III 221
In the Patio No. IV 2212; fig.99
In the Patio No. V 221, 222, 223;
fig.206
In the Patio No. VI 222
In the Patio No. VIII 222
Irvine, Rosalind 239
It Was Blue and Green fig.201
J M
Jack-in-the-Pulpit series 224
Jimson Weed 238; fig.117
Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1
243; fig.110
Johnson, Spud 238, 240
Jones, Lois Mailou 104
K Mannes, Marya 227
Kachina (17.8 x 17.8) fig.155
Kachina (55.9 x 30.5) fig.145
Kachina (charcoal) fig.194
Kahlo, Frida 104, 112, 147, 240
Kandinsky, Wassily 1011, 52, 111, 112,
1856, 216, 233
The Art of Spiritual Harmony 233
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
10, 111, 185
Cossacks 11
Improvisations 185
Karsh, Yousuf
Georgia OKeeffe 241
Ksebier, Gertrude 109
Kelly, Ellsworth 107, 219
Window 187
Klee, Paul 217
Klint, Hilma af 111
Kollwitz, Kthe 114
Krasner, Lee 104, 112, 227
Kristeva, Julia 109
Kubler, George
The Shape of Time 220
Kuhn, Heinrich 98
Kupka, Frantiek 185
Tale of Pistils and Stamens I 185; Monet, Claude 16, 186
fig.167
L Mules Skull with Pink Poinsettia
Lake George 10, 51, 56, 146, 147, 148, fig.123
150, 233, 235; figs 50, 789, 823, 867, Mulvey, Laura 114
934, 1289
Lake George fig.78
Lake George, Coat and Red fig.50
Lake George Barns fig.86
Lange, Dorothea 104
Larkin, Oliver
Art and Life in America 226, 227
Laurencin, Marie 227
Lawrence, D.H. 19, 142
The Lawrence Tree 19; fig.8
Leadbeater, Charles 111
Leyster, Judith 227
Light Coming on the Plains series
Line and Curve 20; fig.37
Looney, Ralph
OKeefe in her Studio fig.98
Louis, Morris
Stripe series 21
Unfurled series 21
Veil series 21
Where 21
While 21
Luhan, Mabel Dodge see Dodge,
Mabel
Luhan, Tony 237
Lynes, Barbara Buhler 12, 49, 105
261
Maar, Dora 104
McAlpin, David 238, 239; fig.133
McBride, Henry 12
Maillol, Aristide 105
A Man from the Desert fig.156
Manhattan 223
Manifest Destiny 14
Man Ray 100
235
Marin, John 12, 13, 52, 56, 151, 230,
236
portrait by Stieglitz fig.64
Martin, Agnes 21, 1901
Happy Holiday 1901; fig.175
Homage to Life 191
Mountain 191; fig.177
Mask with Golden Apple fig.51
Matisse, Henri 52, 54, 105, 111, 216,
217
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 113
Meyer, Adolph de 98
Miller, Lee 104
minimalism 187, 189, 190, 192, 219
modernism 910, 11, 12, 1314, 15, 17,
18, 21, 52, 1045, 192, 216
formalism 111
influence of Stieglitz 12
New York City 150
Protestant readings 111
women artists 10415
Modersohn-Becker, Paula 114
Modotti, Tina 114
Mondrian, Piet 111
Morisot, Berthe 227
The Mountain, New Mexico fig.143
music and synaesthesia 12, 53, 138
Music Pink and Blue No. I 107, 185,
228; fig.27
My Backyard fig.132
My Front Yard, Summer fig.153
My Last Door 189, 192, 21925;
fig.209
My Shanty, Lake George 148; fig.129
N
national and cultural identity 10,
17, 1512
National Institute of Arts and
Letters 240, 242
National Medal of Arts 243
National Womans Party 12, 235,
236
Native American art and culture
1415, 112
naturalism 16
Nature Forms Gasp fig.97
Neel, Alice 227
negative space 58
Nemser, Cindy 106
Nevelson, Louise 21, 104, 227
Newman, Arnold
portrait of OKeeffe and Stieglitz
239

Newman, Barnett 20, 186, 190
Adam 20
Eve 20
Moment 20
The Name I 20
Untitled (The Break) 20
Vir Heroicus Sublimis 186; fig.170
The Word I 20
Zip paintings 20, 189
New Mexico 12, 1319, 51, 58, 104,
145, 1467, 14850, 1513, 18890,
23740; figs 98, 127
New York City 1213, 19, 58, 145, 146,
14950, 151, 232, 2345; figs 4, 35, 703,
77, 134
New York, Night 13; fig.73
New York Night (Madison Avenue)
fig.35
New York Street with Moon 13;
fig.71
New York Worlds Fair (1939) 239
No. 12 Special 107; fig.17
No. 14 Special 107; fig.18
No. 15 Special 107; fig.20
No. 17 Special 107; fig.25
Nochlin, Linda 107, 230
Noland, Kenneth 107
Norman, Dorothy 58, 236, 237,
238, 240
America & Alfred Stieglitz 238
Nude Series 114; fig.104
Nude Series VII 114; fig.103
O 21; fig.12
Oak Leaves, Pink and Grey fig.88
oil paint 56
OKeefe, Alexius Wyckoff 232, 237
OKeefe, Anita Natalie 232, 238
OKeefe, Claudia Ruth 232, 234
OKeefe, Georgia
autobiography 148
categorisation as woman artist
12
death 243
early life 52, 1456, 232
economic independence 237
education 98, 1456, 189, 2323
family 232, 234
first exhibitions 9, 10, 234, 235,
236
image-construction 1013, 1819,
21, 51, 58, 105, 109, 150, 151
influence 9, 1921, 103, 187
influence of photography 1213,
16, 18, 53, 556, 58, 98100
influence of Stieglitz 53, 556
influence on Stieglitz 567
macular degeneration 242
portraits by Stieglitz 545, 56,
58, 2279, 2348, 235, 243; figs.39,
42, 46, 528, 601, 668, 90, 102,
18990
psychoneurosis 238
relationship with Stieglitz 1013,
519, 10810, 146, 147, 150, 1812,
2349
spartan aesthetic 148
teaching posts 11, 53, 146, 148,
2334
Georgia OKeeffe
temperament 55, 58, 1801 Ranchos Church, New Mexico fig.91 Woman in Art 12 Train at Night in the Desert 53;
To MSS. and Its 33 Subscribers fig.138 Barn & Snow fig.80 Stieglitz, Emmeline 235, 236 fig.41
... 98100 Red Amaryllis fig.114 Camera Work 53, 54, 99, 109, 185, Stieglitz, Kitty 236 transcendentalism 10
travel 1457, 238, 2412; figs.1301, Red Hills and Bones fig.154 234, 235 Still, Clyfford 20 Tree with Cut Limb 567; fig.45
243 Red Lines 20 cultural nationalism 10, 151 A Storm 188 Tree and Picket Fence 53
OKeeffe, Francis Calyxtus 232 Red and Orange Streak 11; fig.2 The Dancing Trees 57 Strand, Paul 12, 52, 53, 99, 236, 237 Turrell, James 21
OKeeffe, Ida Totto 232 Red and Yellow Cliffs fig.152 death 18, 240 Abstraction, Bowls, Twin Lakes, Roden Crater 21
Olitski, Jules 186 Regionalists 15 The Dying Chestnut 567; fig.44 Connecticut 53 Two Calla Lilies on Pink fig.116
Oppenheim, Meret 104, 227 Reinhardt, Ad 20 Equivalents 13 Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George, New Tyrrell, Henry 10, 21
Oriental Poppies fig.109 Renoir, Pierre-August 105 family background 52 York fig.95 Esoteric Art at 291 4849
Ornstein, Leo 138, 139 Rhoades, Katharine 109 first marriage 235, 236 portrait by Stieglitz fig.62
Rhode, Al fig.133 From the Back-Window 291 St Francis Church, Ranchos de U
P Ritz Tower, Night fig.72 fig.75 Taos... fig.187 Udall, Sharyn Rohlfsen 112
Pack, Arthur 238 Rivera, Diego 147, 241 From my Window at An American The White Fence 53 University of Virginia 98, 233
Pandora myth 114 Rockefeller, Godfrey fig.133 Place, Southwest (19.3 x 24.1) 58; Strand, Rebecca 237 Untitled (New York) fig.70
Patio Door Green Red 223 Rockefeller, Helen fig.133 fig.48 Stravinsky, Igor 138 Untitled (Patio Door) fig.196
Patio series 21, 186, 187, 18890, Rodin, Auguste 52, 54, 111, 232 From my Window at An American Stuck, Franz von Untitled (Self-portrait, Torso) 56;
192, 224; fig.174 Romanticism 10, 1878 Place, Southwest (24.1 x 19) 58; The Sin (Die Snde) 54 fig.47
Patten, Christine Taylor 103 Rose, Barbara 19, 186, 191, 220, 225 fig.49 subject matter 11011, 150
Pauls Kachina fig.144 Rosenblum, Robert 186 From the Shelton, New York, allegories 14 V
Pedernal fig.180 Modern Painting and the Looking East fig.74 Black Place series 1517, 18, 20; Vaccaro, Tony
Pedernal with Red Hills fig.148 Northern Romantic Tradition 188 Georgia OKeeffe fig.58 figs.6, 7, 159, 160, 162, 163, 165, 175 Georgia OKeeffe with painting in
Pelvis I fig.179 Rosenfeld, Paul 9, 12, 105, 235 Georgia OKeeffe Hands fig.60 bones and skulls 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, the desert 242
Pelvis series 21, 224, 226; fig.181 portrait by Stieglitz fig.63 Georgia OKeeffe at 291 fig.52 58, 152, 187, 237; figs 11819, 121, 123, Vanderpoel, John 232
Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow The Paintings of Georgia Georgia OKeeffe After Return 125, 135, 154, 179, 1812,224 Vieira da Silva, Maria Helena 104
fig.182 OKeeffe 13842 from New Mexico/Equivalent O1 flowers 12, 106, 22930, 236, 237 Von Lintel, Amy 148
Pereira, Irene Rice 104 Rothko, Mark 107, 186, 190 fig.102 influence of photography 1213,
Peterson, Charles (Untitled) White, Pink and Georgia OKeeffe Breasts 56; 16, 18, 53, 556, 58, 98100 W
Portrait of Elizabeth Arden and Mustard fig.168 fig.46 Kachina dolls 1415; figs 1445, Wagner, Anne 11213
Georgia OKeeffe 238 Rubens, Peter Paul Georgia OKeeffe Hands and 1556, 194 Wall with Green Door fig.210
Petunia and Glass Bottle fig.112 Hlne Fourment 54 Horse Skull fig.190 Lake George 150 Wall Street Crash 13, 237
Peyton, Elizabeth Rust Red Hills fig.146 Georgia OKeeffe Torso 54; landscapes 11, 1418, 56, 1503, watercolour 56
Georgia OKeeffe after Stieglitz Ryder, Albert Pinkham 188 fig.56 18592; figs.13943, 1468, 150, 1524, Wave, Night 1878; fig.171
House and Grape Leaves fig.92 15865 Webb, Todd 241
Picasso, Pablo 52, 53, 105, 111, 216,S House on the Hill, Lake George New Mexico 1317 Georgia OKeeffe on the portal at
233 Schapiro, Miriam 21, 106 146; fig.128 New York City 1213, 58, 150, 151; the Ghost Ranch 243
Pink and Blue Mountain 187; fig.21 Schneemann, Peter J. 192 influence of OKeefe 567 figs 4, 35, 703, 77, 134 Georgia OKeeffe on the portal at
Pink and Green Mountains 53 Scotus, John Duns 109 influence on modernism 910, 12 Patio series 21, 186, 187, 18890, the Ghost Ranch 241
Pink Moon and Blue Lines 20 Series 1 From the Plains 11; fig.1 influence on OKeefe 53, 110 192, 224; fig.174 West Texas State Normal College
place and OKeefes work 1314, sexualized interpretations of Interpretation fig.59 Pelvis series 21, 187, 224, 226; figs 234
14553 OKeefes work 12, 1058, 186, 235, Intimate Gallery 236, 237 179, 1812 White, Clarence H. 98
Plaza Blanca 16, 237, 241 242 John Marin fig.64 still lifes 186 White Calico Flower fig.120
Pollitzer, Anita 10, 233, 234, 2401 Sheeler, Charles 989 Lake George (9.1 x 11.9) fig.94 White Place series 16 White Iris fig.115
biography of OKeeffe 240, 241 Church Street El 230 Lake George (23.7 x 19) fig.93 sublime, concept of 188, 189 White Patio with Red Door 18990,
Pollock, Griselda Shell No. 2 fig.96 Main Room Wall, Next to Door, Summer Days fig.124 224, 225; fig.174
Virtual Feminist Museum 113 The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. Right 234 Sun Prairie, Wisconsin 9, 52, 145, White Place series 16, 237, 241
Pool in the Woods, Lake George 1213, 58, 229; fig.4 Manuscripts 235 181, 232 Williamsburg 232, 239
fig.79 Sky Above Clouds III fig.204 Marsden Hartley fig.65 Sunrise 11; fig.23 Willis, Elizabeth May 232, 233
Porter, Eliot 12, 240 Sky Above Clouds IV 242 New York from An American Sunrise and Little Clouds No. II 11 Winter Cottonwoods East V fig.185
Porter, Fairfield 186 Sky Above Clouds series 21, 190, Place fig.76 Surrealism 14, 217 Winter Road I 153, 187, 225; fig.136
post-impressionism 216 225, 242; fig.204 OKeefes image-construction Symbolism 10, 111 Winter Trees, Abiqui, III fig.184
post-painterly abstraction 21, 186 Sky with Flat White Cloud fig.203 1013, 1819, 21, 51, 58, 105, 109, 150, synaesthesia 11, 17, 523 woman artist, OKeefe as 12
precisionism 12 Sky with Moon fig.176 151 Woolf, Virginia 114
Presidential Medal of Freedom Soft Gray, Alcalde Hill fig.140 Paul Rosenfeld fig.63 T Wright, Frank Lloyd 147, 239
242 Some Memories of Drawings 242 Paul Strand fig.62 Tack, Augustus Vincent 188 Wyeth, Andrew 20
Progressive Era 910, 13 Special No. 9 53; fig.16 photographs of OKeeffe 545, Tanning, Dorothea 104
Purple Hills fig.147 Special No. 32 11 56, 58, 109, 2279, 2349, 235, 243; Taos Pueblo fig.141 Y
Pyne, Kathleen 108 Spring Tree No. 1 fig.183 figs 39, 42, 46, 528, 601, 668, 90, Taos Society of Artists 151 Yuliang, Pan 114
Modernism and the Feminine Steichen, Edward 98 102, 18990 Tawney, Lenore 104
Voice 109 Steinbeck, John portrait by Strand fig.95 Teachers College, Columbia
The Grapes of Wrath 14 Portrait of Georgia, No. 1 fig.66 University 10, 98, 111, 233, 234
R Sterne, Hedda 104 Portrait of Georgia, No. 2 fig.67 Texas 11, 12, 53, 145, 146, 148, 149,
Radiator Building Night, New York Stieglitz, Alfred 913, 16, 1819, 21, Portrait of Georgia, No. 3 fig.68 233, 234
13: fig.134 216, 232 relationship with OKeefe 1013, Theosophy 10, 111
Radio City Music Hall mural 238 291 Gallery 9, 10, 12, 489, 52, 54, 512, 549, 10810, 146, 147, 150, 1812, Thomas, Alma 104
Rama, Carol 104 109, 181, 185, 232, 233, 234 2349 thought-form concept 10
Rams Head, White Hollyhock-Hills... 291 periodical 234 Snapshot In the New York Totto, Alletta 232
fig.122 An American Place 237, 238, 240 Central Yards 53; fig.40 Totto, Charles 232
Rancho de los Burros 238, 239 Apples and Gable, Lake George temperament 52, 58 Totto, Leonore Lola 232
262 263

Picture Credits
Copyright credits
All images 2016 Georgia OKeeffe London: fig.170
Museum/ DACS, London, with the
exception of the following:
2016 The Ansel Adams
Publishing Rights Trust: figs 133,
188, 191, 192, p.240 above,
p.243 below
ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2016: figs 43, 167
The Josef and Anni Albers
Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
and DACS, London 2016: fig.173
Amon Carter Museum of
American Art: figs 138, 205
Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul
Strand Archive: figs 95, 187
The Art Institute of Chicago:
figs 4, 28, 121
Mary Beth Edelson. Image
courtesy the artist: fig.11
J. Paul Getty Trust: figs 58, 102,
190, p.234 above
The Estate of Yousuf Karsh:
p.241 above
Ellsworth Kelly: fig.169
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art: p.234 below
2016. Agnes Martin / DACS:
figs 175, 177
Milwaukee Art Museum: fig.13
Board of Trustees, National
Gallery of Art, Washington: figs 39,
42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57,
59, 62, 64, 67, 74, 75, 76, 80, 90, 93,
94, 136, 189, 203, p.235 below,
p.238 above
New Mexico Museum of Art:
figs 148, 183
Georgia OKeeffe
2016 The Barnett Newman
Foundation, New York / DACS,
The Estate of Charles Peterson:
p.240 below
Elizabeth Peyton, courtesy Sadie
Coles HQ, London: fig.12
1987, Private collection: figs 162,
180, 196
1998 Kate Rothko Prizel &
Christopher Rothko ARS, NY and
DACS, London: fig.168
Estate of Georgia O'Keeffe/
Courtesy of University of New
Mexico Art Museum: fig.6
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts:
fig.115
Estate of Todd Webb, Portland,
Maine, USA: p.241 below,
p.243 above
Yale University: figs 63, 128
Lender and photo credits
Ackland Art Museum, The
University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, 80.32.1:
fig.68
Addison Gallery of American
Art, Phillips Academy, Andover,
Massachusetts;
Museum purchase, 1959.22: fig.26;
Purchased as the gift of Charles L.
Stillman (PA 1922), 1947.33: fig.171;
Photos Addison Gallery of
American Art, Phillips Academy,
Andover, MA/ Art Resource, NY
Photo The Josef and Anni
Albers Foundation. Photo: Tim
Nighswander: fig.173
The Albuquerque Museum of Art
and History, gift of the Estate of
Ralph and Clarabelle Looney.
264
Image The Albuquerque
Museum Photoarchives: fig.98
Courtesy of American Museum
of Western Art The Anschutz
Collection. Photo: William J.
OConnor: fig.149
Amon Carter Museum of
American Art, Fort Worth, Texas.
1971.16: figs 138, 205
Collection of Arizona State
University Art Museum, gift of
Oliver B. James 1951.057.030: fig.118
Art Gallery of Ontario. Donated in
memory of Doris Huestis Speirs by
her husband, Dr. J. Murray Speirs,
1990 90/36: fig.107
Robison III: fig.110, cover
The Art Institute of Chicago:
Gift of Leigh B. Block, 1985.206:
fig.4;
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of
Georgia OKeeffe, 1969.835: fig.28;
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of
Georgia OKeeffe, 1947.712: fig.121
Autry National Center. Museum
Purchase 92.126.1: fig.5
Brauer Musuem of Art, Valpariaso
University. Sloan Fund Purchase
62.02: fig.146
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of
Edith and Milton Lowenthal,
1992.11.28: fig.122
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk,
VA. Bequest of Walter P. Chrysler,
Jr. 89.63: fig.208
The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt
Fund 1965.233: fig.3;
Gift of Cary Ross, Knoxville,
Tennessee 1935.54: fig.92;
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe
1987.141: fig.101. Photos The
Cleveland Museum of Art
Collection Center for Creative
Photography, University of
Arizona: figs 133, 188, 191, 192,
p.240 above
Collection of the Colorado Springs
Fine Arts Center. Anonymous gift,
FA 1954: fig.111
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio:
Museum Purchase, Howald Fund II,
1981.006: fig.87
Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum
of American Art, Bentonville,
Arkansas: figs 51, 110;
Photography by Dwight Primiano:
fig.51;
Photography by Edward C.
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of The
Georgia OKeeffe Foundation,
1994.54: fig.33
Denver Art Museum Collection:
Charles Francis Hendrie Memorial
Collection, 1966.44. Photo courtesy
of the Denver Art Museum: fig.112
Purchased with funds from the
Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan
Emory Coffin Collection of the Des
Moines Art Center, 1984.3: fig.82
George Eastman Museum: figs 61,
66, 91, p.235 above
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth:
fig.23
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth.
Partial and Promised gift to Seattle
Art Museum: fig.27
Courtesy of Mary Beth Edelson:
fig.11
Courtesy of the Eiteljorg Museum
of American Indians and Western
Art, Indianapolis. Cat No: 1989.3.55:
fig.141
The Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, gift of Mrs. Charlotte S.
Mack, 1961.48.1: fig.70
Co-owned by Fisk University,
Nashville, Tennessee, and Crystal
Bridges Museum of American
Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Alfred
Stieglitz Collection. Photography
by Edward C. Robison III: fig.134
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles: figs 58, 102, 190,
p.234 above
Greenville County Museum of
Art, Museum purchase with
funds donated by The Museum
Association, Mr. and Mrs.
Thomas Howard Suitt, Jr., Richs
Department Store; and Mr. and
Mrs. C. H. Abbe: fig.15
Photo Philippe Halsman/Magnum (1997.61.67): p.237 below
Photos: p.240 below
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Gift
of Eli Lilly and Company, 1997.131:
fig.117
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. below, p.240 above
Collection : Museo Tamayo Arte
Contemporneo. Donation:
Georgia OKeeffe Museum: fig.206 Museum of Art/ Art Resource/
Philippe Halsman/Magnum
Photos: p.240 below
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Foundation and The Georgia
Garden , Smithsonian Institution;
Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. Photo: Malcom Varon: fig.13;
Photography by Lee Stalsworth:
fig.43;
Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972. Dedra Walls: fig.179;
Photography by Cathy Carver: figs Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley,
140, 159
Holsinger Studio Collection,
ca. 1890-1938, Accession #9862,
Special Collections, University of
Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.:
p.233 above
Photograph by Yousuf Karsh,
Camera Press London: p.241 above Photographs 2016 Museum of
Photo courtesy Ellsworth Kelly
Studio: fig.169
Collection of Jane Lombard: fig.165
Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, Gift of the Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation 1994. Digital image
2015 Museum Associates/
LACMA/ Art Resource NY/ Scala,
Florence: fig.119
The Menil Collection, Houston;
Gift of the Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation, 1995. Photo George
Hixson: fig.14
The Menil Collection, Houston.
Photo Paul Hester: fig.16
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York;
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1952: Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
fig.135;
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1959: Acquired through the Helen
figs 126, 161;
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1969: Acquired with matching funds
fig.113;
Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe, 1986
(1987.377.2): fig.85;
Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe, 1986
(1987.377.4): fig.152
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York; Gift of Georgia OKeeffe,
through the generosity of The
Georgia OKeeffe Foundation and
Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997;
(Accession Number 1997.61.13):
p.234 below
fig.50;
(1997.61.40): p.238 above
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Photos 2015. Image copyright
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/
Art Resource/ Scala, Florence:
figs 85, 135, 152, p.236 below, p.239 Myron Kunin Collection of
Photos: Malcom Varon 2015.
Image The Metropolitan
Scala, Florence: figs 113, 126, 161
Milwaukee Art Museum;
Gift of Jane Bradley Pettit
OKeeffe Foundation.
Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley,
MI1973.609 Photo: John Nienhuis,
MI1973.606. Photo: Larry Sanders:
fig.199
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
Gift of the William H. Lane
Foundation, 1990.434: fig.99
Gift of the William H. Lane
Foundation, 1990.432: fig.125
Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston. Museum purchase with Collection;
funds provided by the Agnes
Cullen Arnold Endowment Fund:
fig.34
Museum of Fine Arts, St.
1980.70.52: fig.55; 1980.70.38: fig.56;
Petersburg, Florida, Gift of
Charles and Margaret Stevenson
Henderson in memory of Hunt
Henderson 1971.31. Photograph by
Thomas U. Gessler: fig.35
Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo
Museum Folkwang Essen
Artothek: fig.168
The Museum of Modern Art, Courtesy of the New Britain
New York; Museum of American Art. Stephen
B. Lawrence Fund 1958.09: fig.77
Foundation, 1995: fig.17;
Collection of the New Mexico
Museum of Art,
Acheson Bequest, 1979: fig.30;
Bequest of Helen Miller Jones, 1986
(1986.137.18): fig.148;
from the Committee on Drawings
Gift of the Georgia OKeeffe Estate,
and the National Endowment for
1987 (1987.312.3): fig.183, (1987.312.1):
the Arts: fig.41;
fig.150;
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Photographs by Blair Clark
Foundation, 1995: fig.50;
Acquired through the Richard D. The New Orleans Museum of Art:
Brixey Bequest, 1945: fig.89; Museum Purchase, City of New
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller. Orleans Capital Funds, 73.8: fig.132
Acc. No: 240.1969: fig.170;
Photo by Arnold Newman/Getty
Ruth Vollmer Bequest. Acc. N.:
Images: p.241 above
318.1983: fig.177;
Given anonymously (by exchange), Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Gift
1936: fig.193; of The Burnett Foundation:
Photo 2015. Scala, Florence: 2007.01.013: fig.1; 2007.01.001: fig,19;
1997.04.015: fig.21; 2002.01.001: fig.22;
Photos 2015. Digital image, The 2006.05.021: fig.24; 1997.05.015: fig.25;
1997.04.00: fig.31; 2006.05.089:
/ Scala, Florence: figs 17, 30, 41, 89, fig.45; 2003.01.003: fig.60;
177, 193 1997.04.003: fig.81; 2007.06.037:
fig.96; 1997.04.010: fig.103;
1997.04.013: fig.104; 1997.06.010:
American Art, Minneapolis,
fig.105; 1996.05.001: fig.106;
Minnesota: fig.174
1997.06.014: fig.123; 2006.06.1082:
National Gallery of Art, fig.137; 1997.06.015: fig.142;
Washington: fig.49 2006.05.134: fig.144; 2006.05.152:
fig.151; 2006.05.173: fig.153;
National Gallery of Art,
2006.05.167: fig.156; 2006.05.180:
Washington;
fig.157; 2007.01.026: fig.162;
Gift (Partial and Promised)
1997.18.003: fig.166; 2006.05.460:
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth
fig.172; 2006.05.482: fig.178;
1998.93.1: fig.38
1997.06.008: fig.180; 2006.05.229:
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
fig.184; 1997.06.024: fig.185;
Foundation 1995.4.1: fig.136;
2006.05.244: fig.186; 1997.05.001:
Gift of Georgia OKeeffe, 1949:
fig.195; 1997.06.003: fig.196;
figs 80, 94;
1997.05.005: fig.198; 2006.05.280:
Gift of Georgia OKeeffe, 1980:
fig.200; 1997.06.029: fig.209;
fig.53;
RC.2005.001.001: p.232; 2014-03-
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe, 1987:
0056: p.236 below
figs 37, 203;
Gift of The Georgia OKeeffe
Georgia OKeeffe Museum;
Foundation, 1992: fig.18; Gift of The Burnett Foundation
Corcoran Collection (Gift of the and Gerald and Kathleen Peters
Woodward Foundation) 2015.19.155: (1996.03.001): fig.84
fig.210
Extended loan, private collection
(1997.03.04L): fig.182
National Gallery of Art,
Gift of Maria Chabot
Washington. Alfred Stieglitz
(RC.2001.002.105): p.239 below
1980.70.16: fig.42; 1980.70.26: fig.39; Courtesy of the Palace of the
1949.3.439: fig.44; 1980.70.108: fig.46; Governors Photo Archives
1949.3.1240: fig.48; 1949.3.1233: fig.49; (NMHM/DCA). Negative Number
1980.70.1: fig.52; 1980.70.76: fig.54; 009763: p.237 above
Private collection, courtesy the
1980.70.12: fig.57; 1980.70.127: fig.59;
artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London:
1949.3.411: fig.62; 1949.3.510: fig.64;
fig.12
1949.3.889: fig.67; 1949.3.372: fig.74;
1949.3.1267: fig.75; 1949.3.1243: fig.76;
Philadelphia Museum of Art;
1980.70.143: fig.90; 1949.3.916: fig.93;
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe for
1959.3.667: fig.94; 1980.70.252: fig.189;
the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987
1980.70.145: p.235 below; 1980.70.174:
1987-70-3: fig.2
p.236 above
125th Anniversary Acquisition.
Purchased with the gift (by
exchange) of Dr. and Mrs.
265

Paul Todd Makler, with funds
contributed by Mr. and Mrs. John
J. F. Sherrerd, the Alice Newton
Osborn Fund, the Lola Downin
Peck Fund, and gift of The
Georgia OKeeffe Foundation, 1997
(1997.39.1): fig.20;
Gift of Carl Zigrosser, 1966
(1966.205.20): fig.40;
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe for
the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987
(1987.70.02): fig.83;
Bequest of Georgia OKeeffe for
the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987
(1987.70.4): fig.116;
The Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
1949 (1949.18.109): fig.154
125th Anniversary Acquisition.
Purchased with funds contributed
by the Arcadia Foundation, and
gift of the Georgia OKeeffe
Foundation, 1997 (1997.42.1): fig.202
The Phillips Collection,
Washington D.C., acquired 1926:
fig.129
Paris, Centre Pompidou - Muse
national dart moderne - Centre
de cration industrielle. Photo
Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI,
Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jean-
Claude Planchet: fig.167
Private collections: figs 47, 97, 108,
139, 145, 194, 204
Private collection. Image 2007
Christies Images Limited: fig.100
Private collection, Courtesy Eykyn
Maclean . Photo Light Blue
Studio: fig.181
Private collection. Photo Joshua
Nefsky: fig.163
Private Collection, courtesy
The Owings Gallery: fig 7
Private collection. Photo 2016
Scala, Florence: fig.72
Private collection, Dallas, Texas:
fig.10
Private collections, Switzerland:
figs 32, 176
Courtesy of Reynolda House
Museum of American Art,
Affiliated with Wake Forest
University. Gift of Barbara B.
Millhouse in memory of E. Carter,
Nancy Susan Reynolds, and
Winifred Babcock: fig.79
San Diego Museum of Art, Gift of
Mr. and Mrs. Norton S. Walbridge,
1976: fig.147
San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art
Gift of Charlotte Mack. Photo: Ben
Blackwell: fig.78;
Gift of the Hamilton-Wells
Georgia OKeeffe
Collection. Photo: Don Ross: fig.155; fig.36;
Gift of Charlotte Mack. Photo: Ben Purchase, 1932: fig.120;
Blackwell: fig.160
Seattle Art Museum, Gift of The
Georgia OKeeffe Foundation,
77.1.37: fig.201;
94.89: fig.69
Sheldon Museum of Art, Sheldon
Art Association, Thomas C. Woods
Memorial, N-107.1958 Collection
Thomas C. Woods Memorial, 1958.
Photo Sheldon Museum of Art:
fig.73
The Snite Museum of Art,
University of Notre Dame, Gift
of Mr. Walter R. Beardsley,
1978.073.001: fig.197
Tate. Photo Tate Photography:
fig.175
Terra Foundation for American
Art, Gift of Mrs. Henrietta Roig,
Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation,
Photography Terra Foundation
for American Art, Chicago: fig.114
Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza
Collection on loan at the Museo
Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid: fig.71
Gift from the estate of Georgia
OKeeffe, University of New Mexico
Art Museum, Albuquerque, P87.1.
Photo Courtesy of Geistlight
Photography: fig.6
Collection of the Vancouver
Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust.
VAG 42.3.114. Photo: Trevor Mills,
Vancouver Art Gallery: fig.9
Photo by Tony Vaccaro/Getty
Images: p.244
The Vilcek Foundation: fig.164
Collection of Jan T. and Marica
Vilcek, Promised gift to the Vilcek
Foundation/ Private collection:
fig.207
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,
Richmond. Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Bruce C. Gottwald. Photo:
Katherine Wetzel: fig.115
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary
Catlin Sumner Collection Fund,
1981: fig.8
Collection Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis. Gift of the T. B.
Walker Foundation, 1954 Photo:
Courtesy Walker Art Center: fig.86
Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York;
50th Anniversary Gift of Sandra
Payson. 85.47: fig.29;
Purchase, with funds from Georgia
OKeeffe and by exchange, 1958:
Gift of Calvin Klein, 1994: fig.124;
Purchase, 1932: fig.143;
Lawrence H. Bloedel Bequest
Image Whitney Museum, NY:
figs 29, 36, 120, 124, 143, 201
Supporting Tate
The collection of the Frederick
R. Weisman Art Museum at
the University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis.
Gift of Ione and Hudson D. Walker
1975.17.15: fig.65;
Museum Purchase, 1936.85: fig.88;
Museum Purchase, 1937.1: fig.109
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester,
Massachusetts, Gift of Mr and
Mrs Robert W. Stoddard, 1981.334.
Image Worcester Art Museum:
fig.15 Tate relies on a large number
of supporters individuals,
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266
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267
 Georgia OKeeffe

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268 269
 Georgia OKeeffe

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Sarah Bejerano Charles-Henri McDermott Richard Chang (Vice Chair) Laura Rapp and Jay Smith Anne Louis-Dreyfus Mrs Madhu Ruia David Solo Richard S. Hamilton
Nathalie Berger Fiona McGovern Pierre TM Chen, Yageo Foundation, Taiwan Maya and Ramzy Rasamny Lu Xun Mrs Karen Ruimy Saadi Soudavar L.A. Hynes
Liddy Berman Amanda Mead Mr Kemal Has Cingillioglu Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Elisabetta Marzetti Mallinson Dania Debs-Sakka Nicholas Stanley John Janssen
Athena Bersimis Chelsea Menzies Mr and Mrs Attilio Codognato Agostino Re Rebaudengo Elaine Forsgate Marden Shihab Shobokshi Maria and Malek Sukkar Dr Martin Kenig
Poppy Boadle Miss Nina Moaddel Sir Ronald Cohen and Lady Sharon Harel- Robert Rennie and Carey Fouks Marleen Molenaar Miss Yassi Sohrabi Mrs Caroline Trausch Isa Levy
Roberto Boghossian Mr Fernando Moncho Lobo Cohen Sir John Richardson Mr John Porter Maria and Malek Sukkar Michael and Jane Wilson Jean Medlycott
Georgina Borthwick Erin Morris Mr Douglas S Cramer and Mr Hubert S Michael Ringier The Red Mansion Foundation Faisal Tamer and those who wish to remain anonymous Martin Owen
Johan Bryssinck Ikenna Obiekwe Bush III Lady Ritblat Dr Gene Sherman AM (Co-Chair) Tsukanov Family Foundation Simon Reynolds
Miss Verena Butt Heline Odqvist Mr Dimitris Daskalopoulos Ms Hanneli M Rupert Leo Shih Berna Tuglular Russia and Eastern Europe Acquisitions Dr Claudia Rosanowski
Jamie Byrom Berkay Oncel Mr and Mrs Michel David-Weill Ms Gler Sabanci Sir David Tang Yesim Turanli Committee Ann M Smith
Sarah Calodney Periklis Panagopoulos Julia W Dayton Dame Theresa Sackler, DBE Chikako Tatsuuma Sebnem Unlu Dmitry Aksenov Deborah Stern
The Hon Nicholas Campbell Andrew Paradis Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian and Ago Mrs Lily Safra Mr Budi Tek, The Yuz Foundation Madhi Yahya Dilyara Allakhverdova Jennifer Toynbee-Holmes
Alexandre Carel Christine Chungwon Park Demirdjian Muriel and Freddy Salem Dr Neil Wenman Roxane Zand Maria Baibakova Estate of Paule Vzelay
Francesca Castelli William Pelham Joseph and Marie Donnelly Rajeeb and Nadia Samdani Yang Bin and those who wish to remain anonymous Razvan BANESCU D. von Bethmann-Hollweg
Federico Martin Castro Debernardi Anna Pennink Mrs Olga Dreesmann Alejandro Santo Domingo and those who wish to remain anonymous David Birnbaum Audrey Wallrock
Alexandra and Kabir Chhatwani Alexander V. Petalas Barney A Ebsworth Dasha Shenkman, OBE North American Acquisitions Committee Maria Rus Bojan Professor Brian Whitton
Yoojin Choi Robert Phillips Fsun and Faruk Eczacibai Poonam Bhagat Shroff Latin American Carol and David Appel Maria Bukhtoyarova Simon Casimir Wilson
Arthur Chow The Piper Gallery Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson Uli and Rita Sigg Acquisitions Committee Jacqueline Appel and Alexander Malmaeus Mark uek Andrew Woodd
Aidan Christofferson Courtney Plummer Mr and Mrs Edward Eisler Norah and Norman Stone Ghazwa Abu-Suud Abigail Baratta Elena Evstafieva Mr and Mrs Zilberberg
Bianca Chu Maria-Theresia Pongracz Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein Julia Stoschek Monica and Robert Aguirre Dorothy Berwin and Dr Kira Flanzraich (Chair) and those who wish to remain anonymous
Niamh Coghlan Asta Ramonaite Harald Falckenberg John J Studzinski, CBE Jos Antonio Alcantara de la Torre Dominique Lvy Lyuba Galkina
Luis Benshimol Suad Garayeva Tate Modern Corporate Supporters
Caroline Cole Yonatan Raz-Fridman Fares and Tania Fares Maria and Malek Sukkar Paul Britton
Celia Birbragher Dr Dr Joana Grevers Bloomberg
Thamara Corm Mr Eugenio Re Rebaudengo HRH Princess Firyal of Jordan Mrs Marjorie Susman Many Cawthorn Argenio
Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky Konstantin Grigorishin BMW
Tara Wilson Craig Jordana Reuben Mrs Doris Fisher Mr Christen Sveaas Dillon Cohen
Miguel Angel Capriles Cannizzaro Cees Hendrikse BP
Sadrine Currimjee Debacker Elise Roberts Mrs Wendy Fisher Mr Budi Tek, The Yuz Foundation Matt Cohler
Trudy and Paul Cejas Mr Vilius Kavaliauskas Christies
Sonata Dallison Katharina Sailer Dr Kira Flanzraich Mr Robert Tomei Michael Corman and Kevin Fink
HSH the Prince Pierre dArenberg Carl Kostyl Credit Suisse
Henry Danowski Nour Saleh Dr Corinne M Flick The Hon Robert H Tuttle and Mrs Maria Theo Danjuma
Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian (Chair) Arina Kowner Deutsche Bank AG
Mr Joshua Davis Paola Saracino Fendi Amanda and Glenn Fuhrman Hummer-Tuttle James E Diner
Patricia Fossati Druck Mrs Grayna Kulczyk EY
Ms Lora de Felice Natasha Maria Sareen Candida and Zak Gertler Mr and Mrs Guy Ullens Wendy Fisher
Angelica Fuentes de Vergara Peter Kulloi Hildon Ltd
Countess Charlotte de la Rochefoucauld Rebekka Schaefer Mrs Yassmin Ghandehari Mrs Ninetta Vafeia Glenn R Fuhrman
Ronald Harrar Krzysztof Madelski Hyundai Card
Agnes de Royere Franz Schwarz Mr Giancarlo Giammetti Paulo A W Vieira Victoria Gelfand-Magalhaes
Barbara Hemmerle-Gollust Eduard Matk Hyundai Motor
Suzana Diamond Alex Seddon Alan Gibbs Robert and Felicity Waley-Cohen Amy Gold
Marta Regina Fernandez Holman Teresa Mavica Laurent Perrier
Mira Dimitrova Count Indoo Sella Di Monteluce Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Diana Widmaier Picasso Nina and Dan Gross
Julian Iragorri Luba Michailova Markit
Indira Dyussebayeva Jelena Seng Mr Laurence Graff Christen and Derek Wilson Pamela J Joyner
Anne Marie and Geoffrey Isaac Rita Navalinskaite Qantas
Alexandra Economou Cordelia Shackleton Ms Esther Grether Mrs Sylvie Winckler Monica Kalpakian
Nicole Junkermann Maarja Oviir-Neivelt Solarcentury
Miss Roxanna Farboud Robert Sheffield Konstantin Grigorishin Anita and Poju Zabludowicz Elisabeth and Panos Karpidas
Jose Lorenzo Lorenzo Paini Sothebys
Ottavia Fontana Henrietta Shields Mr Xavier Guerrand-Herms Michael Zilkha Christian Keesee
Milagros Maldonado Neil K. Rector and those who wish to remain anonymous
Jane and Richard Found MinJoo Shin Mimi and Peter Haas Fund and those who wish to remain anonymous Anne Simone Kleinman and Thomas Wong
Laurie Frey Ms Marie-Anya Shriro Margrit and Paul Hahnloser Fatima and Eskander Maleki Marjorie and Michael Levine Valeria Rodnyansky
Tate Modern Corporate Members
Magdalena Gabriel Jag Singh Andy and Christine Hall Africa Acquisitions Committee Francisca Mancini James Lindon Robert Runtk
AIG
Mr Andreas Gegner Tammy Smulders Mrs Susan Hayden Kathy Ackerman Robins Felipe and Denise Nahas Mattar Rebecca Marks Ovidiu andor
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Lana Ghandour Dominic Stolerman Jorge and Sylvie Helft Tutu Agyare Susan McDonald Lillian and Billy Mauer Zsolt Somli
BCS Consulting
Nicolas Gitton Dr Kafui Tay Ms Ydessa Hendeles Anshu Bahanda Veronica Nutting Liza Mauer and Andrew Sheiner Elena Sudakova
Bloomberg
David Green Soren S K Tholstrup Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin Mrs Nwakaego Boyo Victoria and Isaac Oberfeld Nancy McCain Mrs Elena Todorova
Citi
Judith Greve Omer Tiroche Andr and Rosalie Hoffmann Priti Chandaria Shah Esther Perez Seinjet Stavros Merjos The Tretyakov Family Collection
Clifford Chance LLP
Antonella Grevers Simon Tovey Ms Maja Hoffmann (Chair) Mrs Kavita Chellaram Catherine Petitgas Gregory R Miller Miroslav Trnka
CREATIVE HEAD
Lydia Guett Mr Giancarlo Trinca Vicky Hughes Colin Coleman Claudio Federico Porcel Rachelli Mishori and Leon Koffler Mrs Alina Uspenskaya
The Cultivist
Alex Haidas Mr Philippos Tsangrides Dakis and Lietta Joannou Salim Currimjee Mr Thibault Poutrel Megha Mittal Jo Vickery
Deutsche Bank AG London
Angus Haldane and Emily de Vismes Ms Navann Ty Sir Elton John and Mr David Furnish Harry G. David Frances Reynolds Shabin and Nadir Mohamed Georgi Voynov
EY
Haldane Celine Valligny Pamela J. Joyner Mr and Mrs Michel David-Weill Erica Roberts Jenny Mullen Veronika Zonabend
Finsbury
Jurg Haller Dee Walsh Mr Chang-Il Kim Robert and Renee Drake Judko Rosenstock and Oscar Hernandez Elisa Nuyten and David Dime Mr Janis Zuzans
GAM (UK) Limited
Ms Michelle Harari Alexandra Warder Jack Kirkland Mrs Wendy Fisher Alin Ryan Lobo Amy and John Phelan and those who wish to remain anonymous
HSBC
Sara Harrison Ryan Wells C Richard and Pamela Kramlich Andrea Kerzner Catalina Saieh Guzman Laura Rapp and Jay Smith Hyundai Card
Matthias and Gervanne Leridon Lilly Scarpetta South Asia Acquisitions Committee
Allison Hastings Mr Neil Wenman Mrs Grayna Kulczyk Robert Rennie (Chair) and Carey Fouks Imperial College Healthcare Charity
Caro Macdonald Camila Sol de Pool Maya Barolo-Rizvi
Max Edouard Friedrich Hetzler Ewa Wilczynski Andreas and Ulrike Kurtz Kimberly Richter and Jon Shirley JATO Dynamics
Dale Mathias Juan Carlos Verme Krishna Bhupal
Caroline Hoffman Elizabeth Wilks Catherine Lagrange Carolin Scharpff-Striebich Kingfisher plc
Professor Oba Nsugbe QC Tania and Arnoldo Wald Akshay Chudasama
Andrew Honan Kim Williams Mr Pierre Lagrange Komal Shah Linklaters
Pascale Revert Wheeler Juan Yarur Torres Anjali and Gaurav Grover
Simona Houldsworth Kate Wong Baroness Lambert Dasha Shenkman OBE Macfarlanes LLP
Emile Stipp and those who wish to remain anonymous Zahida Habib
Hus Gallery Edward Woodcock Bernard Lambilliotte Donald R Sobey McGuireWoods London LLP
Mr Varnavas A. Varnava Shalini Hinduja
Kamel Jaber Tyler Woolcott Raymond Learsy Robert Sobey Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP
Burkhard Varnholt Middle East and North Africa Acquisitions Dr Amin Jaffer
Scott Jacobson Eirian Yem Agns and Edward Lee Beth Swofford The Moodys Foundation
Mercedes Vilardell (Chair) Committee Aparajita Jain
Sophie Kainradl Jing Yu Mme RaHee Hong Lee Juan Carlos Verme Morgan Stanley
Marwan G Zakhem HRH Princess Alia Al-Senussi Yamini Mehta
Miss Meruyert Kaliyeva Daniel Zarchan Jacqueline and Marc Leland Christen and Derek Wilson Pearson
and those who wish to remain anonymous Abdullah Al Turki Shalini Misra
Mrs Vasilisa Kameneva Sharon Zhu Mrs Fatima Maleki and those who wish to remain anonymous Saatchi & Saatchi
Mehves Ariburnu Amna and Ali Naqvi
Miss Tamila Kerimova Marcelo Osvaldo Zimmler Panos and Sandra Marinopoulos Siegel + Gale
Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee Marwan T Assaf Photography Acquisitions Committee Fayeeza Naqvi
Zena Aliya Khan and those who wish to remain anonymous Mr and Mrs Donald B Marron Slaughter and May
Matthias Arndt Niloufar Bakhtiar Clignet Ryan Allen Mrs Chandrika Pathak
Ms Chloe Kinsman Mr Ronald and The Hon Mrs McAulay The Brooklyn Brothers
Bonnie and R Derek Bandeen Perihan Bassatne Artworkers Retirement Society Puja and Uday Patnaik
Sadie Kirshman International Council Members Mark McCain and Caro MacDonald Tishman Speyer
Andrew Cameron AM Foundation Boghossian Nicholas Barker Lekha Poddar (Co-Chair)
Daniel Klier Mr Segun Agbaje Angela Westwater and David Meitus Unilever
Mr and Mrs John Carrafiell Jennifer Boghossian Cynthia Lewis Beck Mr Raj and Mrs Reshma Ruia
Berrak Kocaoglu Staffan Ahrenberg, Editions Cahiers dArt Mr Leonid Mikhelson Wolff Olins
Francise H Chang Ms Isabelle de la Bruyre Pierre Brahm (Co-Chair) Nadia Samdani
Anastasia Koreleva Mr Geoff Ainsworth AM Aditya and Megha Mittal and those who wish to remain anonymous
Richard Chang Fsun Eczacibai Mrs William Shaw Broeksmit Rajeeb Samdani (Co-Chair)
Maria Korolevskaya Dilyara Allakherdova Mr Donald Moore
Jasmine Chen Maryam Eisler (Co-Chair) Elizabeth and Rory Brooks Mrs Tarana Sawhney
Stephen Kovalcik Doris Ammann Simon and Catriona Mordant
Adrian Cheng Shirley Elghanian Marcel and Gabrielle Cassard Sanjiv Singhal
Mr Jimmy Lahoud Carol and David Appel Mrs Yoshiko Mori
Mr Yan dAuriol Delfina Entrecanales, CBE Nicolas (Co-Chair) and Celia Cattelain Osman Khalid Waheed
Miss MC Llamas Mr Plcido Arango Mr Guy and The Hon Mrs Naggar
Katie de Tilly Noor Fares Beth and Michele Colocci Manuela and Iwan Wirth
Leo Loebenberg Gabrielle Bacon Fayeeza Naqvi
Mr Hyung-Teh Do Negin Fattahi-Dasmal Mr and Mrs Michel David-Weill Ambreen Zaman
Wei-Lyn Loh Anne H Bass Mr and Mrs Takeo Obayashi
Ms Kerry Gardner Raghida Ghandour Al Rahim Charlie Fellowes and Jeremy Epstein, Edel and those who wish to remain anonymous
Lindsey Love Cristina Bechtler Andrea and Jos Olympio Pereira
Ms Mareva Grabowski Mareva Grabowski Assanti
Yi Luo and Xi Liu Nicolas Berggruen Hideyuki Osawa The 1897 Circle
Reade and Elizabeth Griffith Ayegl Karadeniz Nikki Fennell
Frederic Maillard Mr Pontus Bonnier Irene Panagopoulos Marilyn Bild
Cees Hendrikse Maha and Kasim Kutay David Fitzsimons
Ms Sonia Mak Paloma Botn OShea ITYS, Athens David and Deborah Botten
Philippa Hornby Mrs Fatima Maleki Lisa Garrison
Dr Christina Makris The Hon Dame Janet Wolfson de Botton, Young-Ju Park Geoff Bradbury
Mr Yongsoo Huh David Maupin Ms Emily Goldner and Mr Michael
Mr Jean-David Malat DBE Ms Lisa Paulsen Charles Brett
Mrs Natalie Kadoorie Gonzlez Tansa Mermerci Eksioglu Humphries
Kamiar Maleki Ms Miel de Botton Yana and Stephen Peel Eloise and Francis Charlton
Shareen Khattar Harrison Basma Haout Monla Margot and George Greig
Daria Manganelli Frances Bowes Daniel and Elizabeth Peltz Mr and Mrs Cronk
Mr Chang-Il Kim Fayeeza Naqvi Alexandra Hess
Zoe Marden Ivor Braka Fondation Cartier pour lart contemporain Alex Davids
Ms Yung Hee Kim Dina Nasser-Khadivi Bernard Huppert

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