Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Georgia O’Keefe
American; 20th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
72%
Music — Pink and Blue No. 1. 1918. Oil on canvas
Among her earliest abstractions, this painting is a rare success of O'Keefe's. Typically her organicism cloys and her colors are far, far too pretty. The colors here are pretty but also are complicated by all sorts of gradations and suppressed extra layers, and the forms, while soft, are self-sure enough in their movements and unspecific enough in their interrelations to justify how easy they are to take in. The painting's main arch-form is certainly too regular, but the individual surfaces that comprise it make up for this by the infinite variability of their presentation: hues ebb and flow and never seem to settle into place. It's problematic that this painting's morphology is something that O'Keefe's inspired colorism has to, like, apologize or account for. (TFS, 2026)
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
39%
A Celebration. 1924. Oil on canvas
O'Keefe's art loses out as soon as she gives up color for form-making. The only aesthetically productive thing she could ever really manage was a sort of pensive unfixity of hue; her curves and curls and folding bulbs seldom work together towards anything greater than themselves, and her paintings are always badly painted. There's something equivocal about O'Keefe's modeling, as though she couldn't bear to commit to any one structure over another. Look at the grayer, more prickly cloud-form at the foreground; not only is its wily physique unfounded intrinsically, but what propositions made by the softer shapes behind it does it develop, repeat, negate, or transform? I think it's just that they're round and it's less round. (Too, the zigzag of blue negative space at center tries to justify the vertical format of this picture, but it doesn't get away with it.) (TFS, 2026)