Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986

The Intimate Gallery, New York
Helene Fraenkel, New York, 1927 (sold: Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, December 4, 1980, lot 151, illustrated in color)
Acquired by the present owner at the above sale

New York, Intimate Gallery, Georgia O'Keeffe: Paintings, 1926, January-February 1927 (as Light Blue Sea - Maine)

Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, 1999, vol. I, no. 567, p. 324, illustrated in color
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, In Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, New York, 2004, p. 267

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In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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The American Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century believed the key to spiritual enlightenment lay in the study of nature and natural forms -- in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "to look at the world with new eyes." This essential belief in the purity of an unrestricted vision informed the circle of artists managed and represented by the legendary photographer and art dealer, Alfred Stieglitz, at his Intimate Gallery. Rather than create an exact likeness of nature, these artists, including Stieglitz's wife, Georgia O'Keeffe, attempted to reduce it to its most essential forms, which then served as a framework upon which to express and interpret their individual emotional states through the formal elements of color and line.

Excerpts from the essays written for O'Keeffe's 1927 exhibition which featured Blue Wave Maine (1926), reveal the extent to which this ideology permeated O'Keeffe's work.  Oscar Bluemner wrote lyrically of O'Keeffe: "All nature seen as organic living flesh – form transposed into line and color – surface throbbing with pulse – line quivering with intense inner life – color rigorously restricted with corresponding significance." Charles Demuth similarly extolled, "Colour as colour, not as volume, or light, - only as colour.... In her canvases each colour almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself, on forming the first rain-bow."

O'Keeffe's gender made her work even more susceptible to this kind of rhetoric, given the commonly shared and stated belief that women were biologically and emotionally closer to nature than men. Louis Kalonyme of the New York Times wrote: "She reveals woman as an elementary being, closer to the earth than man, suffering pain with passionate ecstasy and enjoying love with beyond-good-and-evil-delight" (O'Keeffe, Stieglitz, and the Critics: 1916-1929, 1989, p. 257). 

The artists of the Stieglitz circle were also heavily influenced by the work of the German Expressionist Wassily Kandinsky, whose seminal 1914 text On the Spiritual in Art was widely read among the group.  Kandinsky believed that expression in art could be communicated through the formal elements of painting, and even went so far as to suggest that certain colors reflected particular mental states: blue, he believed, was the color of the spiritual.

In 1926 O'Keeffe and Stieglitz made their customary trip the Stieglitz family summer residence at Lake George in upstate New York. While this was supposed to be a place for respite, O'Keeffe often felt suffocated by Stieglitz's desperate need for company and the constant intrusion of family members, journalists, and friends throughout the season.   O'Keeffe wrote that Stieglitz "loved having people around the house all the time and I'd have to take three weeks off to do a painting," she said. "And that's no way to be a painter" (Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, 2004, p. 293). O'Keeffe acknowledged that her art often derived from her emotions. During her stay that summer she painted Lake George Blue (1926, Private collection) an obvious key to her darker feelings of claustrophobia; the somber mountains in the distance seem to be pressing up against the sky, the trees in the foreground crowding out the lake - it is painting  of nature closing in on itself.  

By the end of the summer, O'Keeffe went to Maine in order to get away from the distractions and resentments associated with Stieglitz's summer home. Although Stieglitz followed, imploring her to return, she stayed at her ocean-side retreat for a month before capitulating to the demands of life. The ocean at York Beach was a world away from the stressful life at Lake George as well as her hectic one in New York.  She "loved running down the board walk to the ocean – watching the waves come in, spreading over the hard wet beach – the lighthouse steadily bright far over the waves in the evening when it was almost dark (Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, p. 287).  Here she painted Blue Wave Maine in which the ocean appears as a reservoir of peace and contemplation, harmony and spirituality. The sublime, ethereal quality of the fluidly swirling hues, a dramatic contrast to the sense of sheer weight of the earlier Lake George picture. 

O'Keeffe retreated once more to Maine in 1928, when Stieglitz began his affair with the much younger Dorothy Norman.  No longer simply avoiding the commotion of Lake George, O'Keeffe was running away from the chaos of a turbulent relationship. Though equally abstract, the black and grey tones of Wave, Night (1928, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy) imply a much more somber meditation and a sadness absent from Blue Wave Maine.  The sea that was once active and bright is now dense and dark. Airless and empty, OKeeffe's canvas expresses far more eloquently than words the depths of the artist's inner despair.