The Early Years (1915 – 1918)

"I have but one desire as a painter – that is to paint what I see, as I see it, in my own way, without regard for the desires or taste of the professional dealer or the professional collector."-  Georgia O’Keeffe

Between 1915 and 1918, when O’Keeffe was either teaching or taking art classes, she explored abstraction as a means of self-expression. Her keen interest in abstraction as an expressive device distinguishes her work from the representational art of most of her American contemporaries, and establishes O’Keeffe as among the most innovative American artists of the period.

Her experiments began in the fall of 1915, when she held a private exhibition of her work in her room and realized that most of it had been made to please others. Inspired to chart a new direction that would be hers alone, she limited herself to charcoal on white paper and began a series of highly abstract drawings, examples of which she mailed to a friend in New York. The friend took them to photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who at this time was also American’s leading proponent of modern art. Shortly thereafter, in May 1916, Stieglitz included ten of O’Keeffe’s drawings in a group show at his famous gallery, 291.

O’Keeffe continued producing charcoal abstractions, but gradually extended her experiments to the medium of watercolor; by the fall of 1916, she had returned to a full complement of color. During this period she became increasingly sophisticated with watercolor, using it less to describe than to capture and convey her enthusiasm for the vast expanses of the sky and landscape that she experienced in Texas, where she lived and taught from the fall of 1916 to early 1918. Increasingly, however, recognizable forms also become part of her vocabulary, and although the most representational works of these years read equally well as abstractions, this period marks the beginning of a trend toward investigating certain aspects of both abstraction and representation – a trend that would characterize the remainder of her career.