| Artist: | O'Keeffe, Georgia |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Music - Pink and Blue, II | |
| Date of Work: | 1919 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Biomorphic Abstraction | |
| Movement: | American Abstraction | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: music represented as color and free-floating forms, influenced by Kandinsky's ideas of synaesthesia (when one sensory stimulus evokes another; i.e., you hear music and see colors). O'Keeffe, following Kandinsky's lead, was listening for the "inner sound" of color. For her, the hidden drama of nature is not the underlying grid but a spiral or aura that radiates outward with a biomorphic rhythm from an inner mystical core. Style: "I look at nature and I see shapes." Her shapes unfold in a biomorphic way, with a curving contour that may be hard-edged in its clarity of vision, but not geometric in form. Her biomorphic forms are more metamorphic, suggesting growth and regeneration. She uses a wider spectrum of colors than Mondrian. Context: O'Keeffe is arguably the first American to develop an abstracting style that was not directly derived from European models, though inspired in part from Kandinsky's writings. This early work was influenced by Kandinsky's "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," which she read in Stieglitz's periodical, "Cameraworks." O'Keeffe gives us a home-grown abstraction that comes from a close observation of nature rather than from fantasy. But what she paints is a world that did not exist before she painted it; in other words, she paints a personal vision more than a thing or object. And in the process she reveals new edges of vision. Like Mondrian, her image is not an illusionistic image of surface appearances, but an abstracted vision of the mystical inner construction of nature. Her abstract vision is less concerned with universals, though, and more engaged with the personal and unique moments of nature. For her nature is seen as abstract shapes and "felt" as interiorized body experiences (the "inner haptic"). | ||
