In 1916, Georgia O’Keeffe, by day an art teacher in Canyon, Texas, could often be found by night crawling around on the floor of her top-story rented room. With cramps in her feet, yet feeling “downright reckless,” she fought to capture a jag of lightning or a rising moon on a foot-high stack of cheap paper until she “got it right.” Working rapidly—first in charcoal (sometimes wearing the skin off her fingers from the rubbing) and eventually in pastels, graphite, or watercolors—was a way of seeing things over time, as if in a series of photographs, a practice she’d learned at college.
The serial works that O’Keeffe made so passionately throughout her life are the subject of “Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time,” an exhibition opening tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City. (MoMA’s last O’Keeffe exhibition—its very first devoted solely to the work of a female artist—was in 1946.) In contrast to O’Keeffe’s self-described “frenzied” state of mind, the curators have approached these works, rarely seen in full, in a spirit of “investigation.” They illustrate her exacting artistic process from documentation to abstraction.
