Georgia OKeeffe: Abstraction Blue

O’Keeffe’s 1927 painting expresses her defiant commitment to abstraction and the influences of Kandinsky, Dove and othersDuring the 1920s, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) became widely known for her paintings of enlarged flowers. But she regularly returned to abstraction, and indeed found it “surprising how many people separate the objective from the abstract.” Executed in 1927, Abstraction Blue illustrates that belief, retaining the glowing color, careful modulation and zoomed-in view of the artist’s contemporaneous blooms, while forgoing any obligation toward representation. In this latest volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Samantha Friedman considers how these and other factors converged in the creation of this composition.