Month: September 2016

  • Georgia O’Keeffe: How a pink rose got in the horse’s eye

    Georgia O’Keeffe: How a pink rose got in the horse’s eye

    I love the stories that arrive right after I share that I’m writing a book on Georgia O’Keeffe. One woman recalls in detail the first time she saw an O’Keeffe painting. Another shares that her aunt was named after the painter. And another remembers the story, told in art school, of how the young O’Keeffe…

  • O’Keeffe’s Texas watercolors: prototype for postwar modernism?

    O’Keeffe’s Texas watercolors: prototype for postwar modernism?

    If the Arts News review of the Texas watercolors  exhibited in 1958 made the backhanded compliment that they were Georgia O’Keeffe’s best works — and that she had peaked early — other critics and historians chose to look forward, rather than backward. Could the artist’s primal abstractions, they wondered, be a precedent for the latest…

  • Georgia O’Keeffe’s Texas watercolors: “astonishing” and “touching”

    Georgia O’Keeffe’s Texas watercolors: “astonishing” and “touching”

    Here’s an interesting take on Georgia O’Keeffe’s Texas watercolors (click here for my review of their current exhibition at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum) when they were shown in 1958, for the first time in some 40 years: “.. an astonishing and, in many ways, touching group of watercolors now on view at the Downtown Gallery,…

  • Georgia O’Keeffe: Far, Wide Texas

    Georgia O’Keeffe: Far, Wide Texas

    As a critic and cultural historian, I find myself more curious about an artist’s formative moments than her culminating masterworks. “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Far Wide Texas,” on exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum through October 30, gives a rare and exhilarating glimpse into those several years, 1916 to 1918, in Canyon, Texas, when the artist forged…