Georgia O'keeffe

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for. Georgia O'keeffe

There has been so much attention to  Georgia's flowers that when I found this article it really spoke to me because I prefer O'keeffe's abstractions.

Love It or Hate It, O'Keeffe's at the Whitney

Email Print More...By Leon Neyfakh

September 15, 2009
7:22 p.m

There are two types of people Barbara Haskell hopes to surprise with the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition opening on Thursday, Sept. 17, at the Whitney Museum of American Art: those who love O’Keeffe for her famous flowers and those who deride her for them.

The show, which consists of more than 130 pieces, highlights O’Keeffe’s little known abstract works, many of which she made early in her career, before her focus shifted to the more representational paintings of flowers, animal bones, and landscapes for which she is best known. In an interview Tuesday, Ms. Haskell, who led the curatorial team, said the exhibition aims both to advance the idea that O’Keeffe was at heart an abstractionist, and to rescue her from critics who for years have written off her work as decorative and commercial kitsch. “We want to argue that Georgia O’Keeffe created a body of fantastically radical abstract work, and that she was at the forefront of the most vanguard concepts of what it meant to make a painting,” Ms. Haskell said. “There’s a paradox, in that she is so beloved by the public and yet in some ways is not taken as seriously by the so-called art connoisseurs. She needed a fresh look. One of the handlers here said he’d always taken her for granted and had never thought of her as a serious painter. Now he’s totally convinced.”