| Artist: | O'Keeffe, Georgia |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Shelton with Sunspots | |
| Date of Work: | 1926 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Precisionism with a touch of Magic Realism | |
| Movement: | Amercian Abstraction | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: a New York skyscraper, in fact, the one she lived in with Stieglitz. But perhaps her real subject here is not the building and the machine-like precision of the modern city so much as vision itself, referenced here through the sun spots that linger as after-image dot patterns. O'Keefe ends up celebrating a personal vision of unique, peak moments of revelation. Style: "I look at nature and I see shapes." Her shapes usually unfold in a biomorphic way, with a curving contour that may be hard-edged in its clarity of vision, but not geometric in form. Here she is more geometric because her urban subject dictates it, but it would seem wrong to simply label this work "Precisionist" as a result; the image is less motivated by a utopian machine beauty than it is by a kind of magic realism, which focuses on a personal, transformative vision rather than a machine aesthetic. Context: O'Keeffe is arguably the first American to develop an abstracting style that was not directly derived from European models. She 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 the Precisionists of the twenties, but with a different emphasis. O'Keeffe never eliminates the personal in vision. | ||
