Start: 6:00 pm
End: 8:00 pm
Barbara Buhler Lynes - the curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and
the Emily Fisher Landau director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
Research Center - will give a talk on "Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction",
the upcoming exhibition at the museum. She will also sign copies of the
exhibition catalogue.
Although Georgia O’Keeffe
(1887–1986) has long been regarded as a central figure in 20th-century
art, the abstract works she created throughout her career have remained
critically and popularly overlooked in favor of her representational
subjects. Beginning with charcoal drawings made in 1915, which were
among the most radical creations produced in the United States at that
time, O’Keeffe sought to transcribe pure emotion in her work. While her
output of abstract work declined after 1930, she returned to
abstraction in the 1950s with a new vocabulary that provided a
precedent for a younger generation of abstractionists. By devoting
itself to this largely unexplored area of her work, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction is an overdue acknowledgment of her place as one of America’s first abstractionists.
In
addition to rethinking O’Keeffe’s role in the development of a uniquely
American abstract style, this book chronicles the shifts and changes in
subject matter and style over the span of her long career. It adds
significant new insight into her life, reproducing excerpts of
previously sealed letters written by O’Keeffe to photographer and
gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, whom she married in 1924. These previously
unpublished letters, along with other primary documents referenced by
the authors, offer an intimate glimpse into her creative method and
intentions as an artist.