Georgia O’Keeffe: Watercolors 1916–1918

Georgia O'Keeffe: Watercolors catalogs the first major exhibition in 2016 of the nearly 50 watercolors created by O’Keeffe between 1916 and 1918, while she lived in Canyon, Texas. 

These years mark a period of radical innovation for the artist, during which she firmly established her commitment to abstraction. While her work in Texas is often understood as merely a prelude to her career in New York City, these watercolors and drawings mark a seminal stage in O’Keeffe’s artistic formation, representing the pivotal intersection of her disciplined art practice and her allegiance to the revolutionary techniques of her mentor, Arthur Wesley Dow. 

O’Keeffe’s watercolors explore the texture and landscape of the Texas desert and the artist’s own body in an exceptionally fragile and sensitive medium, representing a substantial achievement in their own right. These early works also relate to O’Keeffe’s large-scale oil paintings, which in their handling of color and texture in some ways seem to aspire to the condition of watercolor.