Georgia O'Keefe Works on Paper

This groundbreaking volume, the first to consider Georgia O'Keeffe's works on paper, explores the media of watercolor, charcoal, pencil, and pastel. O'Keeffe, an artist of immense stature in twentieth-century art, is known primarily as a painter. However, her earliest mature works, which led to her first New York exhibitions and initial acclaim, were works on paper as well, and she resumed her intense commitment to drawing and watercolor in the 1960s and 1970s. The works on paper can be viewed in the larger context of O'Keeffe's career as an artist. They move from stylized, flat patterning of the early charcoals to the rhapsodic organic forms and fresh uses of color in the watercolors to the tighter, more focused compositions of the later pastels, charcoals, and pencil drawings. Finally, the works on paper of the 1960s and 1970s are characterized by an extreme simplification and almost decorative flatness. Richly illustrated with thirty-one full-color plates and twenty-one duotones, accompanied by an introduction, critical essay, and biographical chronology.

Barbara Haskell is a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the author of many books and catalogues, including works on Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery, Charles Demuth, and Donald Judd. She lives in New York City.