Georgia O'Keeffe retrospective at the Pompidou
From September 8 to December 6, 2021, the Centre Pompidou in Paris is organising the first retrospective in France of the work of the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe.
Georgia OKeeffe - Inside Red Canna - 1919Georgia OKeeffe - Rams Head White Hollyhock Hills - 1935
Source: Centre Pompidou, Paris. Images: Georgia O'Keeffe, "Inside Red Canna", 1919. Oil on canvas, 55,9 × 43,2 cm © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Adagp Paris 2021 ·· Georgia O'Keeffe, "Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills (Ram’s Head and White Hollyhock, New Mexico)", 1935. Oil on canvas, 76,2 × 91,4 cm. Brooklyn Museum. Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Adagp, Paris 2021
The exhibition at the Pompidou features approximately one hundred works by the artist, including paintings, drawings and photographs, spanning all stages of O'Keeffe's long career, from her modernist works of the 1910s to her lesser-known abstract paintings of the 1960s.
Born in Wisconsin in 1887, Georgia O'Keeffe studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League in New York, where she was taught by William Merritt Chase, one of the leading figures of American Impressionism. Chase was attracted by O'Keeffe's work, and awarded her a scholarship to the summer school at Lake George, New York. This event was of enormous importance in the artist's career, as in New York she had the opportunity to visit 291, the Manhattan art gallery founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1905, where she became acquainted with the work of avant-garde European artists such as Henri Matisse and Francis Picabia.
Stieglitz was the first to exhibit the work of O'Keeffe, whom he married in 1924. O'Keeffe's time at Gallery 291, which was closed in 1917, forms the first part of the retrospective, showing works such as "Special No.15", from 1916-1917. Shortly afterwards, the artist began to create her flower paintings, which are among the best known and best-loved of all her oeuvre. As proof of this, "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1", a 1932 painting shown in the Pompidou exhibition, was sold for $44.4 million in 2014, being acquired by Alice Walton for the Crystal Bridges Museum.
Nevertheless, the Pompidou exhibition wants to look beyond these floral paintings, and also gives due importance to the paintings of the American West that O'Keeffee created after his trip to Taos in 1929, with works such as "Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills", from 1935.

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