Never-Before-Seen O'Keeffe Work on View

While known for her large-scale abstract oil paintings of flowers, a certain number of of Georgia O'Keeffe's most innovative explorations of abstraction were created using watercolor, pastel and charcoal, as examined in the exhibit "O'Keeffe upon Paper" at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and coorganized by the agency of The National Gallery of Art in Washington. upon view until Oct. 29, the exhibit not aways 55 of the 300 known watercolors, pastels and charcoals through the late artist--many of which have not at any time been seen before.

Barbara Buhler Lyne O'Keeffe Museum curator, said this exhibit is lengthy overdue. "A lot of the works upon paper hadn't been in the public organ of sight for a very long time, because they were either in the hands of private collectors or O'Keeffe had kept them in her hold collection," said Lynes.

In addition to their aesthetic value, O'Keeffe's works upon paper also help viewers understand the evolution of her mode of expression "There is a complexity to O'Keeffe's disclosure during the teens which family might not realize without examining her works upon paper," said Lynes. "It was during this time that she was trying to discover a personal language of her hold ... by synthesizing everything she knew Her early charcoals are actual abstract, which is a language that greatest in quantity American artists weren't using at that time. The way she handled watercolors was to create a series of pictures that were abstract and that strike one as beinged to be at one with the two-dimensional surface. There is real little recession of space, and a fate of times the background becomes part of the image, as in `Evening Star No.V.'"

In 1918 O'Keeffe settl in of recent origin York where she became part of the circle of modernists gathered around Alfred Stieglitz, whom she later married in 1924 During this period she move rounded away from works on paper and worked almost entirely in oil because, as Lyne noted, "In order to be taken seriously as an artist at that time in America, and especially as a woman, O'Keeffe extremityed to demonstrate proficiency as an oil painter." O'Keeffe later get backed to works on paper, on the contrary her early period represented the height of her innovation.

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