Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction Blue

During the 1920s, Georgia O’Keeffe became widely-known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, and these canvases arguably remain her most iconic today. But she regularly returned to abstraction—the language of her breakthrough drawings from the 1910s. Executed in 1927, Abstraction Blue retains the glowing color, careful modulation, and zoomed-in view of the artist’s contemporaneous blooms, while foregoing any obligation toward representation. In this volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Samantha Friedman considers how these and other factors converged in the creation of this composition.