MoMA to Showcase Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rarely Seen Works on Paper – ARTnews.com

Perhaps his ubiquity in the Southwest American imagination is why people forget that there is so much more to learn about Georgia O’Keeffe. The patron saint of the sick, sensual side of nature, O’Keeffe has created some of the most iconic paintings of the last century. A new show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, however, will shed light on how those canvases are indebted to a Darwinian investigation he had begun earlier on paper.

Opening next April, “Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time” will gather more than 120 rarely seen paper works showing how the artist used charcoal, watercolor, pastel, and graphite to revisit and riff in organic forms. This will be the first museum show to explore O’Keeffe’s process series and — somewhat unbelievably — the first exhibition dedicated to him at MoMA since 1946. Some of O’Keeffe’s related paintings will also be on display. in drawings.

“O’Keeffe is a much loved and not often understood actress,” said Samantha Friedman, the show’s curator. ARTnews in a telephone interview. “I included a charcoal drawing of O’Keeffe with ours [2020] show ‘Degree Zero,’ and people were surprised to find out it was his. It doesn’t match what they expected from this artist’s work. ”

O’Keeffe, the painter of lush, close -up flowers and wild mountains, first began his career as an artist by making charcoal drawings. In 1915, while working as an art teacher, even before he achieved fame, he began making sweeping and curving tendrils of charcoal on many sheets of paper. The result suggested ripples of water, smoke, or primordial soup. He dubbed the series “Specials.”

A friend of his brought the drawings to photographer and influential gallerist Alfred Stieglitz (his future wife), who called them the “purest, best, most honest things” that entered his establishment in a few years. He showed them without his knowledge, which first angered him — and then became famous.

O’Keeffe did most of his works on paper from 1915 to 1918. In the 1930s, O’Keeffe became known for his painted studies of the natural world, most of which capture static extremes, such as blooming flowers or weather -bleached animal skulls. However, “nature doesn’t happen in an instant,” Friedman said.

In his wealth of letters, O’Keeffe describes the fun “carelessness” of paper versus canvas, where the consequences weigh. The paper is the place to develop motifs and find the essence of his subjects. He once dragged unique bands of watercolor to watch the pigments bleed into the kind of short-lived gradients seen on the horizon.

“How do you record the course of the sunset on a sheet? You need a lot to see it go up and down,” Friedman added.

Among the major works in the exhibition are No. 8 – Special (Drawing No. 8), from 1916, resembling a vivid storm; a reunion of brilliant watercolors from his series of 1917 responses to the Texas sky; at Drawing X (1959), created the man who made O’Keeffe a three -month trip around the world and that is inspired by his view from the plane window. Here the boundary of representation and abstraction is surprisingly blurred — the entirety of the scene is distilled into two wandering lines.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time” is scheduled to run from April 9 — August 12, 2023, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.