Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction

Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the Emily Fisher Landau director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center, takes you on a tour of the acclaimed exhibition, "Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction".

"Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction" includes approximately 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors by O'Keeffe. The exhibition is being organized by Barbara Haskell, Project Director and Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; Barbara Buhler Lynes, the Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center, Santa Fe; Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Guest Curator, The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; and Bruce Robertson, consulting curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by the organizers, excerpts from the recently unsealed Stieglitz-O'Keeffe correspondence, and a chronology of the exhibition history of O'Keeffe's abstractions annotated by her public statements on her art.

The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Phillips Collection, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum jointly organized "Abstraction", the first exhibition to focus comprehensively on Georgia O'Keeffe's abstractions over the course of her career. There have been many exhibitions devoted to O'Keeffe's art that have either surveyed her entire career or examined different aspects of her subject matter. Unlike those, this project aims to clarify the origins and range of O'Keeffe's radical and singular abstract invention and to illuminate the subjective approach to subject matter that underlay all her work, whether overtly representational or explicitly abstract. By exploring the particular nature of O'Keeffe's abstraction and the aesthetic climate in which it developed, this exhibition returns us to a clearer understanding of the origins of modernist abstraction and the heady euphoria that surrounded the first steps artists took into this uncharted aesthetic territory.

During its exhibition at the Whitney in New York, "Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction" earned many accolades, including:

Time Magazine's Top 10 Art Exhibitions of 2009
The New Yorker Magazine's Best Museum Shows of 2009
Art + Auction's 2009 Power Exhibitions