GEORGIA O'KEEFFE 1887-1986
Cottonwood III, 1944
Oil on canvas, 19 1/2 X 291/4" (49.53 x 74.30 cm.)
Unsigned
Museum purchase, 990-0-111
 

Georgia O'Keeffe, the first American woman artist of major stature, achieved a mythic presence in American art, both through the photographs of her by Alfred Stieglitz and others, and through her remarkable paintings. She was the last surviving member of the small group of pioneering modernists that Stieglitz, gathered around him. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe studied art at The Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League in New York, and the University of Virginia. Early in her career, she taught art in the public schools in Amarillo and at West Texas State Normal School in Canyon.
Through Alan Beniont, a disciple of the nineteenth century art educator Arthur Dow, she had been exposed to the idea that art consisted not in representation, but design, in "filling a space in a beautiful way."' She explored this idea in a series of abstract and nearly abstract drawings and watercolors. These attracted the attention of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who showed them in his New York gallery, 291, in May of 1916. Deeply moved by the mysterious forms in these drawings, which seemed to him to express a uniquely feminine sensibility, Stieglitz is said to have remarked, 'At last, a woman on paper." In that same month, O'Keeffe traveled East to meet Stieglitz, they became romantically involved, and in 1924, they married. During the 1920s, Stieglitz exhibited many photographs for which she posed, both clothed and in the nude, which fostered her unique mystique and presented her as a force of nature. During this time she produced a particularly dramatic series of close-ups of flowers, generally larger in scale than her earlier work, which was widely interpreted as possessing sexual symbolism, and was regarded as revealing the essence of the female soul.
In 1929, O'Keeffe was invited to New Mexico by Mabel Dodge Luhan, a patron of the Taos Artists Society. During this visit, O'Keeffe was drawn to the Southwestern landscape because of its restful qualities of stillness and solitude as well as the austere clarity of its strong shapes, clear light, and lack of atmosphere. In 1930, following a nervous breakdown, O'Keeffe began spending large parts of each year in New Mexico, where she painted desiccated landscapes and portraits of cow skulls and bones. Many of these paintings, such as Black Cross, New Mexico (1929, Art Institute of Chicago) and Cow Skull-Red, White and Blue (1931, Metropolitan Museum of Art), possess an iconic quality, and they often show objects levitating in improbable but visually compelling ways.
Cottonwood III, executed in 1944 and first exhibited at An American Place in 1945, depicts the New Mexico landscape, here the ubiquitous cottonwood trees that line the riverbed of Abiquiu, the town which became O'Keeffe's winter home in 1945. The composition of the painting differs from the more stark, dramatic work of the 1930s and adopts a less abstract, less geometric, more naturalistic approach. Although painted late in O'Keeff's career, the technique of the piece refers to the work of the American Impressionist, William Merritt Chase, with whom O'Keeffe studied at the Art Students League in 1907-08. A master of outdoor Impressionism, Chase painted many beach scenes of Shinnecock, Long Island, which resemble Cottonwood III, both in their soft handling of form and in their use of green and blonde tonalities. While the forms have been simplified, Cottonwood III might almost be taken for a turn- of-the -century American Impressionist painting. O'Keeffe enjoyed her study with Chase, recalling that, "There was something fresh and energetic and fierce and exacting about him that made him fun."
Cottonwood III relates not only to Chase's work, but to the early canvases which O'Keeffe produced under Chase's tutelage. In 1908, Chase awarded O'Keeffe a prize for the painting Dead Rabbit and Copper Pot (1908, Art Students League). This painting, executed very much in Chase's style, depicted a still-life, one of Chase's specialties. Although different in subject matter, there are many technical similarities between Cottonwood III and Dead Rabbit and Copper Pot. Both paintings are based on calculated contrasts between hard and soft forms, as well as clear and diffuse edges. In Cottonwood III, O'Keeffe recalls techniques she had developed years before, while studying with Chase.

HENRY ADAMS