Revealing O’Keeffe’s Secrets on Paper

Before her 1970 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Georgia O’Keeffe was looking through some of her 1915 drawings, which she titled “Specials.” Turning to Doris Bry, her agent at that time and co-curator of the exhibition, O’Keeffe said, “We don’t really need to have the show, I never did any better.”

It seems an odd remark from one of America’s most popular artists, known chiefly for her oil paintings of huge poppies and bleached cow skulls. Yet, when you see those early abstract charcoals, it’s clear they exemplify her initial break from traditional representational painting. The dark gray shapes--plumes, sprays and ripples--came out of her imagination. On inexpensive sheets of Manila paper, O’Keeffe found freedom of expression.

This is but one of the revelations to come from the groundbreaking exhibition “O’Keeffe on Paper.” The survey of 55 pastels, watercolors and charcoals--among them some of the rarely seen “Specials”--continues to July 9 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., then travels to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., where it will be on view from July 25 to Nov. 9.

Curiously, given O’Keeffe’s affinity for watercolor and drawing in pastel or charcoal, she rarely exhibited or sold her work on paper. In all, only 20% of the pieces in “O’Keeffe on Paper” have been available to the public. The rest were found in O’Keeffe’s estate or in private collections by Barbara Buhler Lynes, guest curator of the show with Ruth E. Fine, curator of modern prints and drawings at the National Gallery. Lynes discovered about 1,000 previously unknown works on paper, many of them sketches, in the process of compiling 2,000-plus images for the O’Keeffe catalogue raisonne, published last winter by Yale University Press in association with the National Gallery and the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Abiquiu, N.M.

As it turns out, about half the works in the show were made by O’Keeffe before she fell under the influence of legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who became her husband and dealer. These include the 1915 charcoals that he later showed at his gallery, 291, and a 1916 trio of abstract splashes of yellow, red and black watercolor meant to be experiential portraits of photographer Paul Strand. Lynes writes in the catalog, “The astonishing degree of abstraction . . . distinguished them as being among the most innovative works in early American modernism.”

A 1916 series of arabesques and candy-cane shapes painted in blue watercolor particularly demonstrate the theoretical impact of artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow, who told his students, including O’Keeffe, that the purpose of art was “to fill space in a beautiful way.” He advocated the use of Japanese brushes and ink to learn sensitivity of line, and the show includes “Black Lines,” a more severe rendition of her oft-published study in duality, “Blue Lines.” A stunning 1918 abstract pastel “Over Blue” is composed of veils of tangerine and chartreuse arching over a hemisphere of blue--filling space in an especially beautiful way.

Such images prove that paper was a beguiling medium for O’Keeffe, who was experimenting with pure abstraction only a few years after the first nonobjective paintings were exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Curator Fine explains, “We wanted to show how highly refined she was on paper while at the same time being more exploratory than she was on canvas.”

Yet, even on disposable paper, O’Keeffe never fully committed herself to the mandates of abstraction. Between 1915 and 1918, when she settled down with Stieglitz, she traveled around the country to teach and make plein-air paintings. She used watercolor to record the simple shapes of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and the glorious sunsets of Canyon, Texas. While in San Antonio, she painted groups of women wearing Mexican shawls as well as nudes executed in a few brush strokes of pink and tan tint.

After O’Keeffe and Stieglitz began living together in New York in 1918, she produced bold, nonobjective charcoals of thick black diagonals cutting across a rounded form, and another of organic shapes cavorting around the paper and aptly titled “Crazy Day.” Around the same time, she painstakingly labored in pastel to produce her first erotic flower picture, in which electric blue petals are being thrust apart by a golden stamen.

She would continue to vacillate between abstraction and representation throughout her career. The show includes a pair of 1923 pastels of avocados, one of which is pristinely realized, and the other, “Alligator Pears,” a highly stylized composition of black, green and cream.

However, charcoal drawings completed after Stieglitz’s death in 1946 demonstrate her attempt to meld abstraction and representation into a single image. Shape rather than subject occupied her attention in “Drawing V” (1959), the view of a river seen from above during an airplane flight. It shows a thick, sink-pipe curve with a little angled tributary shooting off from the side. She completed four similar drawings before translating the shape into oil. After a rafting trip on Lake Powell, she drew the cliffs shooting skyward, framing a triangular wedge of white sky. This, too, was remade as a copper and red oil painting.

The show and the catalogue raisonne pose a provocative question: Why are the works on paper so little-known? How could it be, given the demand for O’Keeffe’s work, that so many pieces remained hidden.

Lynes, who is Emily Fisher Landau director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center as well as the museum’s curator, explains, “The key is that when she was making her way as an artist, she had to be identified as an oil painter because watercolor was not thought of as being in as high a class as oil. Even though Stieglitz promoted [John] Marin as a watercolorist, I don’t believe O’Keeffe could have stayed with watercolor and been recognized as a major significant artist. I think she had to demonstrate her prowess in oil. She does more work on paper between 1916 and 1918 than she does during the rest of her life, yet there are over 800 works in oil after 1918.”

And there’s the fact that the works on paper offer a certain delicacy and tentativeness not evident in the oils. Part of their charm is the way they show the artist conceiving and revising ideas. Was she afraid of revealing the process behind her seamless painting technique?

Perhaps. O’Keeffe had a history of keeping secrets and was subject to bouts of perfectionism. “I think she was a very private person--and of a generation that did not talk about private life very much,” Lynes says.

Whatever her reasons may have been, the secrets have been revealed. While the show offers only a tantalizing sample of the hundreds of works in the catalogue raisonne, it still provides a fuller understanding of O’Keeffe’s artistic process and adventurous spirit.

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“O’KEEFFE ON PAPER,” National Gallery of Art, East Building, 4th Street at Constitution Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. Dates: Through July 9. Phone: (202) 842-6353. Also: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St., Santa Fe, N.M. Dates: July 25 to Nov. 9. Phone: (505) 989-1124.

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is a frequent contributor to Calendar.