Washington, D.C.—Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is widely celebrated for her iconic
paintings of flowers, animal bones, and stark New Mexican cliffs. While she has long
been regarded as a central figure in 20th-century art, the radical abstract work she made throughout her career has remained less known. The Phillips Collection examines her artistic achievement from a fresh perspective in a landmark exhibition—Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction. By delving into this work, the exhibition demonstrates O’Keeffe’s important contribution to the history of American abstraction. Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction is on view at the Phillips from February 6 to May 9, 2010.
Showcasing over 100 paintings, drawings, watercolors, and sculpture dating from 1915 to the late 1970s, the exhibition also includes 14 photographic portraits of O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz. By assembling works from her entire career, this exhibition reveals O’Keeffe as a painter who adopted abstraction as early as 1915, worked extensively with it throughout the 1920s, and used it thereafter as the foundation for her art. Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction is organized by The Phillips Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
In 1915, O’Keeffe moved into the forefront of abstraction with a group of charcoal drawings that were among the most radical creations produced in the United States at that time. A year later, she added color to her repertoire, and by 1918 she was expressing the union of abstract form and color in paint. First exhibited in 1923, O’Keeffe’s psychologically charged, brilliantly colored abstract paintings garnered immediate acclaim. By the mid-1920s, however, O’Keeffe had shifted the emphasis in her work from abstraction to redefine herself as a painter of representational forms. Yet abstraction remained the guiding principle of her art, even at its most representational.
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