Lot 23
  • 23

Georgia O'Keeffe

Estimate
700,000 - 1,000,000 USD
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Description

  • Georgia O'Keeffe
  • Shell (Shell IV, The Shell, Shell I)
  • oil on canvas
  • 9 1/2 by 13 inches
  • (24.1 by 33 cm)
  • Painted in 1937.

Provenance

Downtown Gallery, New York
Private collection, New York, 1952
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1990
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1997

Exhibited

New York, An American Place, Georgia O'Keeffe: The 14th Annual Exhibition of Paintings With Some Recent O'Keeffe Letters, December 1937-February 1938, no. 6 (as Shell IV)
Des Moines, Iowa, Des Moines Art Center, The Artist's Vision, February-March 1952, no. 57
New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Six American Modernists—Marsden Hartley, Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelman, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, John Storrs, November 1991-January 1992, no. 65 (as Shell No. 1)
Santa Fe, New Mexico and New York, Gerald Peters Gallery, Georgia O'Keeffe: Floral Works and Small Paintings, May-August 1995 (as Shell No. 1)

Literature

Jan Garden Castro, The Art & Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, New York, 1985, illustrated p. 168 (as Shell I, 1927)
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, 1999, vol. I, no. 918, p. 571, illustrated

Condition

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Catalogue Note

Throughout the course of her life, Georgia O’Keeffe was fascinated with the natural world, and collected objects such as flowers, bones, shells and leaves to depict in her paintings. She approached these objects with an innovative use of form and color, painting them with a unique sense of freedom. O’Keeffe’s interest in the rhythm and forms of nature is evident in her reworking of themes over a period of months and even years. Rather than progressing in a typically linear fashion, she often alternated between realistic interpretation and abstraction. Shells, like flowers, preoccupied the artist throughout the early part of her career, painting them in magnification. These paintings not only won her immediate acclaim, but are also the works she is perhaps most celebrated for today.

O’Keeffe’s fascination with shells began in her childhood, spent far from the ocean in rural Wisconsin. She recalls, “When I was small and went to visit my O’Keeffe grandmother, I sometimes got into the parlor by myself and would take a shell from the ‘whatnot,’ a set of fancy shelves between two windows. The shelves held many things I was not to touch but when I got in there alone I would take a shell from the whatnot and hold it close to my ear. I had been told that the sound I heard was the sound of the sea – I had not heard the sea at that time but it was wonderful to me to listen to it in the shell. So when I grew up and went where there were shells I was always looking for them” (Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, 1976). The artist first used shells as subject matter in 1926, producing a group of paintings devoted to realistically depicting the shape and appearance of the clam shell. That same year, she embarked on a series entitled Shell and Old Shingle, which challenged the boundaries of abstraction and distilled the shell and shingle to their essential shapes. She continued to paint the shell through the late 1920s and 1930s, experimenting with the orientation and alternating between realism and abstraction.   

Painted in 1937, Shell exemplifies O’Keeffe’s mastery of form and color, particularly her opulent sense of white. Through subtle variations of tone paired with precise brushstrokes, O’Keeffe renders the undulating edges of the shell and creates volume to convey the tactile quality of both the shell and the surrounding coral. Shell is an expression the artist’s experimental thought process as the composition can be viewed both horizontally and vertically. Painted the same year as Shell and similarly intimate in size, Two Pink Shells/Pink Shell can also be viewed in this manner and demonstrates how O’Keeffe experimented with the orientation of her still life paintings (fig. 1). Shell was most likely painted at Ghost Ranch, the Abiquiú, New Mexico property O’Keeffe visited for the first time in 1934 and then almost annually between 1934 and 1939 until making it her permanent home in 1940. Later in life, O’Keeffe reflected on shells as subject matter, “I have picked up shells along the coast of Maine – farther south, in the Bermudas and Bahamas I found conch shells along the pure sandy beaches. Then when I was in Yucatan out on the beach from Merida there were fine bleached white shells in the undergrowth where the water must have washed them up… Each shell was a beautiful world in itself… Even now, living in the desert, the sea comes back to me when I hold one to my ear” (Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, 1976).