Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986

In 1923, the renowned photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz presented an exhibition of One Hundred Works by Georgia O’Keeffe, American.  Rather than traveling to Europe like most of her fellow artists, O’Keeffe found inspiration in the landscape and architecture of Texas, New York and New Mexico.  Her distinct visual language was immediately recognized by another member of Stieglitz’s circle, the photographer Paul Strand.  O’Keeffe and Strand shared an intense and often t.mes s reciprocal relationship, each striving to capture the essential character of a place or object on paper and canvas.  During a trip to Texas in 1917 O’Keeffe wrote to Strand, “I believe I’ve been looking at things and seeing them as I thought you might photograph them.” Strand, after O’Keeffe’s 1923 exhibition wrote, “here in America this amazing thing has happened.”  The present work, executed the year of this landmark exhibition, was owned by Strand from just after its completion until his death in 1976.

O’Keeffe approached her subjects with an innovative use of form and color, painting flowers, fruit, trees, and mountains with unique freedom. Of her place within the tradition of still-life painting O’Keeffe wrote: “I was an outsider.  My color and form were not acceptable.  It had nothing to do with Cézanne or anyone else” (Georgia O’Keeffe, 1976, New York).

O’Keeffe’s interest in the rhythm and forms of nature is evident in her reworking of themes over a period of months and even years.  Rather than progressing in a typically linear fashion from one style to another, she often altered between and worked simultaneously with realistic observation and abstraction.  The alligator pear series exemplifies this working method, with O’Keeffe’s first pictures presenting an almost literal depiction of the fruit, and then progressing, as in the present work, toward an image which is almost completely abstract.  Referring to her alligator pear series O’Keeffe remarked, “I had an alligator-pears-in-a-large-dark-basket period.  ... I have always considered that it was one of the t.mes s when I did what I really intended to do.  One isn’t always able to do that...”

Alligator Pears is one of two pastels of this subject O’Keeffe executed in 1923. “Pastel afforded O’Keeffe a medium for her most unabashedly beautiful works of art.  Exploiting pastel’s broad range in hue and value, she was able to combine the graceful tonal imagery she had developed in charcoal with the intense abstract color she had explored in watercolor.  Unexpectedly, she also found that pastel could project a captivating surface texture” (Judith C. Walsh, O’Keeffe on Paper, Washington, D.C., 2000, p.68).   In the present work, the alligator pears almost disappear into abstraction, surrounded by arcing shapes of subtly blended white and gray pigment.  O’Keeffe punctuates the composition with a triangle of forest green pastel, built up in layers to appear almost velvet-like, and a burst of salmon-pink applied in delicate, feathery strokes.

Walsh continues, “Her pictures, which must be viewed intimately, offer a startling incongruity: their pristine and subtle surface contrasts with the bold and graphic design.  The very act of looking at O’Keeffe’s art can cause us to reconsider the exquisite beauty in the variations of color, tone, and texture found on the surface of a work, or in the objects and forms around us” (O’Keeffe on Paper, Washington, D.C., 2000, p.77).