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World-renowned painter from New Mexico
Museum exhibits major works of artist Georgia O'Keeffe.
By Lynn B. Villella
Tribune Arts Editor
[[image]] 
(Staff photo by Ralph Looney)
Georgia O'Keeffe, artist

The Tribune
Accents
Lively Living
October 2, 1970    B-1

The largest and most comprehensive exhibition ever shown to date of the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, a pioneer of modern art in America, will open at New York City's Whitney Museum on Oct. 8 and continue through Nov. 29. 
Miss O'Keeffe, 83, is a longtime resident of Abiquiu, N.M. In 1964 she received an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from the University of New Mexico. 
The first major showing of her work in New York since 1946, the exhibition's 121 paintings, watercolors and drawings were selected from 55 years of her creative career. Many were lent for the first time by the artist. 

Miss O'Keeffe's paintings are marked by a wide range in subject and style, from early and recent abstraction to precise realism. 
To accompany the show, the Whitney Museum has published a full account of Miss O'Keeffe's life and art. The 196-page monograph is illustrated with 75 full-page plates, many of them in color, and contains a complete listing of the paintings on display.
No other book on Miss O'Keeffe currently is in print. 
In the monograph, Lloyd Goodrich, advisory director of the Whitney Museum, writes:

"To her, nature contains all that she needs for her art: sun and sky, mountains, plains and deserts, trees, flowers, plants and all kinds of growing things; and objects- stones, dead leaves, weathered wood, animals' bones - objects not generally regarded as things of beauty."
Born in Wisconsin in 1887, Miss O'Keeffe's early education was in Wisconsin and Virginia. Her early art training at the Art Institute of Chicago left her so discouraged that she decided to abandon painting entirely. 

Not until 1915 did she resume her painting career, after realizing that "I had lots of things in my head that others didn't have. I made up my mind to put down what was in my head."
So began the early abstract drawings, watercolors and oils which came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz. He showed them at this renowned Gallery 291 in 1916 and 1917. Their association led to marriage in 1924. 
For many years Miss O'Keeffe spent most of her time between New York City and Lake George. N.Y., living and painting in both- until her first visit to New Mexico in 1929. 

Thereafter she spent most summers in the West- first at a house in the desert which she finally bought in 1940 and later in a second adobe house in the village of Abiquiu in Northern New Mexico. This has been both her home and studio. 
Despite her long residency in New Mexico, Miss O'Keeffe's paintings have been exhibited in the state only once. 
This was in September of 1966 when 41 of her works were displayed at the University of New Mexico Art Museum. 

Many of the paintings of this last decade, never before shown as a group, derive from Miss O'Keeffe's experiences in traveling by air, rather than from sights and objects which surround her at home. 
Her first trip to Europe was not until 1953 but after that beginning she continued to explore the world. From these travels came a series of drawings and paintings, such as the series of four called "Sky Above Clouds," culminating in the 24-foot mural "Sky Above Clouds IV" of 1965.

Both this largest painting and her most recent work "Black Rock with Blue III," 1970, are included in the Whitney exhibition. 
Miss O'Keeffe, who this year received a National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Painting, has works in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum (all in New York), the Art Institute of Chicago and over 40 other museums throughout the United States as well as in many private collections.
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Absolute Clarity marks the style of Georgia O'Keeffe, famed New Mexico painter who is having a retrospective exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum of Art Oct. 8-Nov. 29. "From the Lake" (above) was painted in 1924, five years before she first visited New Mexico; "Sky Above Clouds" (below) is a work from 1963. The Whitney exhibition includes 121 of Miss O'Keeffe's paintings, watercolors and drawings.