| Artist: | O'Keeffe, Georgia |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Radiator Building at Night, NY | |
| Date of Work: | 1927 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Precisionism with a touch of Magic Realism | |
| Movement: | American Abstraction | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: a New York skyscraper, the Art Deco Radiator Building in night vision. Stieglitz's name is illuminated on the red neon light at left. Perhaps her real subject here is not the building and the machine-like precision of the modern city so much as the magical transformations of vision itself, which uses the nighttime scene as almost a pretext for the pattern play of shapes and lights. O'Keeffe 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. Note how even smoke (pictured at the right) has a hard, crisp edge, though she makes a wonderful biomorphic shape out of it. There is nothing fuzzy about O'Keeffe's vision; this work is defined and clearly directed. "Abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint." Her work is at once both representational and abstract. 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. | ||
