Georgia O’Keeffe, Above the Clouds 1, 1962/63
Georgia O’Keeffe conjures images of a desert landscape—the Santa Fe sky, an abandoned skull. Recognizable objects and depictions. Yet the current exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art challenges this preconception of who Georgia O’Keeffe is and what she is capable of.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction presents works from the late artist which stand alone as organic forms, free-flowing shapes and—as the exhibit title suggests—pure abstractions. In 1915, O’Keeffe blazed onto the art scene with a group of radical abstract charcoal drawings (on view at the exhibit) that gave her career its start. In this sense, “It was with abstraction that O’Keeffe entered the art world and first became celebrated as an artist” (Whitney Museum, exhibit caption). No small thing! For the lengthy, substantial, and influential career that O’Keeffe cultivated, it’s almost a surprise that the very beginning—the birth itself—of her journey and style has not yet been highlighted the way it is at the Whitney.
I went to the exhibit expecting to see the pieces of O’Keeffe’s that I already knew about; I left the exhibit satisfied that I was wrong.
PS-Don’t miss the small room, set off in a corner, of Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of O’Keeffe. Good grief. What gym did she belong to?...
Alfreid Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1919
Images via the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
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