MoMA will showcase Georgia O’Keeffe’s rarely seen work on paper – ARTnews.com

Perhaps it is their ubiquity in the imagination of Western South America that makes people forget that there is more to learn about Georgia O’Keefe. The patron saint of nature’s sensual and patient side, he created some of the most famous paintings of the last century. A new display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, however, will highlight how indebted those paintings are to a Darwinian achievement that she began long before on paper.

Opening this April, the exhibition “Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time” will bring together more than 120 rarely seen works on paper that show how the artist uses charcoal, watercolor, pastels and graphite to rethink organic forms. It will be the first museum exhibition to explore O’Keeffe’s serial process and – somewhat unbelievably – the first exhibition dedicated to it at MoMA since 1946. Several of O’Keeffe’s paintings relating to graphics will also be on display.

“O’Keefe is a well-loved and insufficiently understood artist,” said curator Samantha Friedman. ARTnews In a phone interview. “I’ve included a charcoal drawing of O’Keefe in our area [2020] Showing Zero Degree, people were shocked to learn that it belonged to her. It did not correspond to their expectations for the work of this artist. ”

A painter of lush flowers and rocky mountains, O’Keefe first started her career as an artist by making charcoal drawings. In 1915, while working as an art teacher, long before she gained fame, she began making tendrils of charcoal across multiple sheets of paper. The result indicates ripples of water, smoke, or primordial soup. She called the series “Specials”.

One of her friends brought the drawings to influential photographer and gallery maker Alfred Stieglitz (her future husband), who called them “the purest, coolest, truest things” that entered his establishment several years ago. He offered them without her knowledge, which made her angry at first – then famous.

O’Keeffe produced most of her work on paper from 1915 to 1918. By the 1930s, O’Keeffe was best known for her painted studies of the natural world, most of which capture its utmost constancy, such as blooming flowers or animal skulls bleaching over time. However, Friedman said, “Nature does not happen in an instant.”

In her wealth of correspondence, O’Keefe described the delightful “recklessness” of paper compared to canvas, in which the consequences carry weight. Paper was the place to develop motifs and search for the essence of their subjects. Sometimes she would pull distinct streaks of watercolor to see the pigments bleed into the sort of fleeting gradients that are on the horizon.

“How do you plot the path of a sunset on a single sheet of paper? You need many things to see it rise and fall,” Friedman added.

Among the main works in the exhibition No. 8 – Special (Painting No. 8), from 1916, looks like an ink hurricane; A reunion of luminous watercolors from their series Responses to the 1917 Texas Skies; And the X . drawing (1959), created in the year that O’Keeffe made a three-month circumnavigation of the world and This is it Inspired by her view from an airplane window. Here the boundaries of representation and abstraction are amazingly blurred – the entire scene is distilled into two itinerant lines.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time” is set from April 9 to August 12, 2023 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.