“Seeing takes time,” wrote Georgia O’Keeffe. Best known for her flower paintings, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) also produced extraordinary series of works in charcoal, pencil, watercolor and pastel. This is the first time MoMA has dedicated an exhibit to O’Keeffe since 1946.
The experimental works of Georgia O’Keeffe
Bringing together works on paper often seen individually, as well as key paintings, this exhibition offers a rare insight into the artist’s working methods and invites us to take the time to look.
Over his long career, O’Keeffe has revisited and reworked the same subjects, developing, repeating and transforming motifs that lie between observation and abstraction. Between 1915 and 1918, a period of experimental breakthrough, she produced as many works on paper as she would in the next four decades, producing progressions of bold lines, organic landscapes and candid nudes, as well as radically abstract charcoals which she called “specials”.
Although she turned increasingly to painting, important series – notably flowers in the 1930s, portraits in the 1940s and aerial views in the 1950s – reaffirmed her commitment to working on paper. Drawing in this way allows O’Keeffe to capture not only the forms of nature but also its rhythms: tracing the spiraling descent of the sun with vividly hued pigments, or transcribing in velvety black the changing perspective as seen from an airplane window.
2023-07-21 07:31:44
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