Definite Form for Intangible Things: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abstraction Blue

Over the course of a career that spanned the better part of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe forged a distinctive visual language that managed to be both acutely observational and radically abstract. By 1927, the year O’Keeffe turned 40 and painted Abstraction Blue, she had already become one of the most prominent American artists of her day—a position all the more noteworthy for a woman artist at a time when women in the United States had only recently been given the right to vote. Abstraction Blue made its public debut the following year in an exhibition of O’Keeffe’s work at the Intimate Gallery—a small space, as the name implied, in a building on the corner of Park Avenue and 59th Street in New York. Testifying to the exceptional attention O’Keeffe commanded, a review in Time magazine focused as much on the particulars of the artist—her outfit, her expression, her command of the space—as on the details of the 41 paintings that were presented:

There were some paintings hung on the walls of a tiny room...other paintings, smaller ones, rested on cabinets or stood along the floor. The room was full of people, talking to each other in awed, foolish whispers. In the corner of the room sat a lady dressed in a black cloth coat, smiling like a severe Mona Lisa. She was Georgia O’Keeffe; the paintings on the wall belonged to her because she had made them; for some reason, the room seemed hers as well.¹

Of the other paintings that were included in the exhibition, 35 have titles that identify their subjects, such as Radiator Building—Night, New York [left] and Black Iris. The titles of the three remaining works that were featured, including Abstraction White Rose, temper their descriptive designation with the word “abstraction,” as if to suggest that the work at once depicts the thing named and transcends that classification toward some larger compositional end. But, lacking any mention of a subject that might link it to the observed world, Abstraction Blue—along with Abstraction White and Black Abstraction, both of which were captured in an installation shot of the show—suggests a more complete submission to pure form.