Georgia O'Keeffe 1887 - 1986

Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Bill Dean, New York, 1986
Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1987

New York, The Downtown Gallery, Summer 1963 Exhibition, June-July 1963, no. 26

Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, 1999, vol. I, no. 246, p. 133, illustrated in color

Very good condition. Affixed at all four corners. Pinholes in upper left and upper right corners. Tape remnants in two areas along extreme left edge. Very minor handling creases at the bottom left and right corners.
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Georgia O’Keeffe produced The Park at Night during her earliest phase of experimentation with charcoal, pastel, and watercolor. These works, completed between 1916 and 1918, led to O'Keeffe's first critical recognition and acclaim in the New York art world, and are among the earliest examples of the organic and expressive images that have become her signature.

O’Keeffe worked almost exclusively in watercolor after arriving in Canyon, Texas to teach at the West Texas Normal School in 1916. The artist was thrilled by this professional opportunity as Texas had long existed in her imagination as a place of untamed adventure, an image cultivated from the stories her mother read her as a child about life in the West Texas Panhandle. The expansive grandeur of the landscape undoubtedly provided inspirational. She began to extensively explore the area soon after her arrival, and quickly discovered that the dry air of her new home produced spectacular light, particularly at dawn and dusk. O’Keeffe enthusiastically articulated her love of the color and visual energy she observed there in a 1916 letter to her friend Anita Pollitzer: “Tonight I walked into the sunset—to mail some letters—the whole sky—and there is just so much of it out here—was just blazing—and grey blue clouds were rioting all through the hotness of it” (quoted in J. Cowart , J. Hamilton, Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters, Washington, D.C., 1987, pp. 156-57).

An extraordinary group of sunset pictures resulted from O’Keeffe’s experience of twilight sky effects like these. While the portability of watercolor allowed her to explore these times of day and the effects they produced directly from nature, these images are not purely naturalistic. In The Park at Night, O’Keeffe creates a complex and radiant image that reflects her interest in exploring nature's shape, form and color rather than imitating the details of the scene before her.

In the present work, O’Keeffe combines two watercolor techniques: above, she washes a loose, watery sky; below, her drier brush maintains a crisper precision. Unpainted bands separate color areas, while the larger areas of deep blue bring a balancing coolness to the passages of fiery red and orange. The complexity of her composition and the wide variety of colors she incorporates reveals her growing sophistication with the medium. She deftly exploits its inherent fluidity: colors pool and puddle on the surface of the paper, bleeding into one another to produce nuanced surfaces and subtle variations of tone within color areas. As she simplifies and consolidates the landscape forms, O’Keeffe deliberately plays with modernist flatness and spatial depth, creating formal tensions that enhance the sense of dynamism that permeates the composition. Vibrant, lush and beautifully atmospheric, The Park at Night encapsulates O’Keeffe’s undeniably romantic vision of the Texas landscape, and provides particular insight into the origins of her singular aesthetic vocabulary.