“Georgia O’Keeffe’s early abstractions, although not as well known as her later southwestern paintings, played a pivotal role in the development of American modernism. Grey Blue & Black—Pink Circle is the culmination of O’Keeffe’s Special series, a body of abstract drawings and paintings that she made during the 1920s. She created these works outside the influence of the New York mainstream and before her initial contact with the works of Wassily Kandinsky, whose treatise On the Spiritual in Art had a measurable impact on her later abstract style.
The nodes in the center of the painting recall the headdress of Hopi kachina dancers (and the headdresses of the eponymous kachina dolls); the surrounding whorls of color amplify the suggested motion of the dance and the consonant rhythms of the universe…”
Adapted from
Dallas Museum of Art
- Eleanor Jones Harvey, “Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey, Blue, Black, Pink, and Green Circle (Kachina Abstraction),” in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, ed. Suzanne Kotz (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 1997), 253.
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Tag: Georgia O’Keeffe At Sunnyside
Thanks for Visiting 🙂
~Sunnyside
At Sunnyside - Where Truth and Beauty Meet 
Reblogged this on penwithlit and commented:
Lovely colour combination.
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Thanks, penwithlit. 🙂
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I’m really enjoying the new O’Keeffe paintings I’m meeting through your blog entries. If not for the mention of the Kachina, I would have seen this as a more abstract floral.
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I am happy you enjoy these, too, Linda. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. 🙂
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A few days ago we spent an hour at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.
The “nodes” near the center of this painting are a shape I’d long noticed in many of O’Keeffe’s works. I’ve thought of them as Q-Tips. Kachina headdresses are more romantic.
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Agree – no romance in Q-tips! Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Steve. 🙂
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A great post really like O’Keeffe’s painting as she is has influenced some of my floral photographs.
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Your photos are spectacular, Dawn. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. 🙂
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Thank you much appreciated. 🙏😊
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The featured O’Keeffe’s painting takes me to the center of my being.
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😎❤️
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Sunnyside, this painting came to mind when reading Friedrich’s post on Daoism in Chinese painting. In my view, a lot of O’Keeffee’s work expresses the essence of object depicted.
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What an interesting connection, Rosaliene! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. 🙂
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Thank you, for this re-introduction to O’Keeffe. I am still questioning myself about why I return so often to the art and words of women. Something to do with my mother, perhaps? 🙋♂️
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Perhaps so, Ashley. Thanks for visiting and sharing your thoughts. 🙂
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