O’Keeffe opens at MAG October 1

This gelatin silver print, "Georgia O'Keeffe with Watercolor Paint Box," was taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1918. Courtesy of George Eastman House.

n 1916 at Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 291 Gallery in New York City, the world got its first look at an artist that would one day become an American master. Ninety years later, the Memorial Art Gallery is hosting what promises to be one of the most intimate and revealing exhibitions of works by Georgia O’Keeffe.

The show, Georgia O’Keeffe: Color and Conservation, opens on October 1 and remains on view through December. The gallery is one of only three national venues hosting the exhibition that features 25 rarely seen oil paintings and two pastels—among them landscapes, flower paintings, still lifes, and abstractions—from all periods of her career. Also on view are iconic photographs of O’Keeffe on loan from George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. Organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, Color and Conservation marks the first O’Keeffe exhibition in Rochester and the first anywhere to focus on O’Keeffe’s painstaking choice of color, her studio methods, and her involvement in conservation issues.

“Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the iconic figures in the history of American art, and this particular exhibition reflects the depth and breadth of her career,” says gallery director Grant Holcomb. “The variety of subject matter, the artist’s probing of the intricacies of color, and her pioneering interest in art conservation will combine to make the exhibition unique, significant, and enjoyable to our visitors.”

This exhibition, conceptualized by O’Keeffe scholar Sarah Whitaker Peters and cocurated by René Paul Barilleaux, former deputy director of the Mississippi Museum of Art, focuses on conservation issues surrounding the artist’s painting. The pictures demonstrate O’Keeffe’s pristine methods and the painstaking conservation necessary to preserve the character and subtlety of her original colors.

For seven decades, O’Keeffe (1887–1986) was a major figure in American art. She was keenly interested in how her works looked throughout her life and was devoted to maintaining her original pictorial intentions. By the mid-1940s, working closely with conservator Caroline Keck, she had become actively engaged in attempting to preserve the original colors and pristine surface qualities of her paintings.

While the public knew little about O’Keeffe’s surprisingly traditional craftsmanship during her lifetime, intimate details of her methods are documented in the 1947 to 1981 correspondence with Keck. The exhibition catalog includes selections from this correspondence, reproduced for the first time by permission of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and annotated by Peters. The letters offer insightful details about the way O’Keeffe thought and worked as an early American modernist. The book also contains three essays and full-color reproductions of all the artworks featured in the exhibition and is available for purchase at the Gallery Store.

Peters, who has contributed essays on O’Keeffe to several journals and books, will give an illustrated lecture at the gallery on Sunday, October 1, at 2 p.m. For details on this lecture and other events related to the exhibition as well as hours and ticket information, visit http://mag.rochester.edu.