Georgia O'Keeffe: Drawn to Abstraction
Take a closer look at O’Keeffe’s early black-and-white drawings, which transformed her observations into abstracted forms.
Overview
“I feel that there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.”
—Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887 to 1986) was a true groundbreaker of American modernism. Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O’Keeffe decided to become an artist at age nine. She received formal art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and New York’s Art Students League. After two years as a commercial illustrator, she spent seven years teaching in Virginia, South Carolina, and Texas, while continuing her own studies.
O’Keeffe was strongly influenced by the ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow (1857 to 1922), who advocated simplifying forms as a means of capturing their essence and developing a personal style. In 1915, following her time with Dow, O’Keeffe destroyed all of her previous work. She returned to the basics, creating radical charcoal drawings that led directly to experiments with abstraction.
Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe was an American artist whose drawings and paintings of abstract forms, flowers, bones, and the New Mexico landscape mark her as a significant modernist painter.
A Closer Look: Alligator Pears
Alligator Pears in a Basket
In this early charcoal drawing, Alligator Pears in a Basket (1920 to 1921), O’Keeffe modernizes the still life, a time-honored subject.
She abstracts a simple arrangement of avocados, also known as alligator pears, in a basket. By eliminating color, details, and references to the setting, the still life becomes an interplay of circular forms and space.
The roundness of the fruit echoes the curves of the basket, and the negative (white) space is as important compositionally as the positive (dark) space occupied by the objects.
O’Keeffe was known to repeat compositional elements, including rounded forms, light-dark gradations, and spatial experiments, across the various mediums in which she worked.
She often used serial paintings to work through a motif, rethinking a natural object in increasingly abstract terms with each new interpretation. She also tended to explore minute natural elements at a grand scale.
Alligator Pears
Avocados were a novelty food in New York during the 1920s and caught O’Keeffe’s attention. She created a number of avocado-centered drawings and paintings, playing with levels of color and abstraction.
In her painting Alligator Pears (1920 to 1921) from the same time period as the charcoal drawing, O’Keeffe uses color (pinks, grays, greens, and browns) to give dimensionality to the forms.
Artistic Process
“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.”
—Georgia O’Keeffe
O’Keeffe continued her rigorous drawing practice throughout her career, recording in sketchbooks for 60 years. In addition to her preparatory drawings, her painting process involved making charcoal outlines on canvas before applying paint.
She settled in New Mexico in 1949, after traveling there throughout her marriage to photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz (1864 to 1946). The dry, bright open spaces appealed to her immensely. She continued to paint and create art there until her death at 98.
