O'Keeffe on Paper
July 29, 2000 - October 29, 2000
O’Keeffe on Paper was organized in celebration of the publication
of Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, by Barbara Buhler
Lynes, which documents more than 1000 works on paper, and more than 1000
paintings and three-dimensional works. The exhibition was organized by Barbara
Buhler Lynes, curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum who is also the
Emily Fisher Landau director of the Museum’s Research Center, and Ruth
E. Fine, curator of modern prints and drawings at the National Gallery of
Art.
During a career that spanned the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986)
created approximately 1000 works on paper, ranging from quick graphite sketches
to highly finished abstractions, landscape, still lifes, and portraits in
charcoal, watercolor, and pastel. These works were especially important
to O’Keeffe: many mark profound changes in her style and choice of
imagery, and she retained many of them in her own collection during her
lifetime.
Although O’Keeffe’s oil paintings are often exhibited, her drawings
are rarely shown because exposure to light threatens their pristine condition.O’Keeffe on Paper included 52 of O’Keeffe’s most outstanding
works in charcoal, pastel, and watercolor, such as No. 7 Special (1915);Untitled (Abstraction/Portrait of Paul Strand) (1917); Over Blue
(1918); Calla Lily Turned Away (1923); A White Camellia (1938);
and Pink Shell with Seaweed (c. 1938), and provided an unusual opportunity
to survey this critical aspect of the artist’s work.
The exhibition was made possible by The Burnett Foundation, The Georgia
O’Keeffe Foundation, The Henry Luce Foundation, and the National Advisory
Council of Art, Washington, DC. The exhibition was funded in part by the
City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax.