Abstraction Blue

Georgia O'Keeffe, 1927

Alright, so, look at the line first. That thin white one going straight down the middle. Everything else is soft. Blues, some pink around the edges. Curves inside curves. Then there’s that one line. Dead straight. And the two sides don’t match. Bluer on the left, kinda greyer on the right. Like it got cut in half and put back just a hair off. So… hold that thought. You probably know O’Keeffe. Flowers, the desert, cow skulls, a million dorm posters. But before all that, she’s teaching art at a little college in South Carolina. She’s only twenty-seven. She makes a bunch of charcoal drawings with nothing you can name. Just… shapes. Almost nobody in America is doing that sort of thing yet. So she mails them to a friend in New York, Anita Pollitzer. And then Pollitzer takes them to this guy Alfred Stieglitz. Photographer. Runs a gallery. And he just hangs them up! Without asking her. So… eventually, she finds out, and tells him take ’em down. But… they stay up. Turns out Stieglitz falls for her, starts photographing her, and puts some of those photographs in a show. A bunch of ’em nude. After that, a lot of critics stop seeing paint. Ya know, Freud’s the hot new thing at the time, and suddenly every critic in town is a doctor. Then the big flowers come. Sex, they say. More flowers. Sex. She could have painted a filing cabinet and they would have found a way. So her answer, more or less: you hung your own stuff on my flower. But all through this, she keeps making abstractions. In 1927 the Brooklyn Museum gives her her first solo museum show. That same year, she paints this. Abstraction Blue. She said she could say things with color and shapes that she couldn’t say any other way. Things she didn’t have words for. Now come back to that white line. Look where the curves reach it from either side. The grey one lands a little lower than the blue one across from it. They almost line up. Almost.

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