Georgia O’Keeffe’s artwork
Each chapter of Georgia & Anita is titled after a painting or series that O’Keeffe was working on during the period of time the chapter covers, along with one of Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘A Woman’ photographs. Below are links to each of the works cited. Rights restrictions prohibit showing many of the artworks. The ones exhibited below are in the public domain, along with paintings, also in the public domain, created about the same time and in the same manner as the title painting.
Chapter One:
The Charcoals
“She picked up the piece of charcoal and drew a zig zag up the length of the soft dark bulbous forms that had flowered earlier under the palm of her hand…. With the edge of her eraser, she gently outlined the curve of the mountain ridge and highlighted the unstoppable flow of water and longing.”
–Georgia & Anita
Chapter Two:
Blue Lines X
Chapter Three:
Train Coming into the Station
“She’d been teaching her class about Kandinsky, his belief that color directly influenced the soul. Yellow generated a kind of manic insanity. Red was determined and powerful. Blue was restful, but also a desire for purity and transcendence. She painted it again in midnight blue, the color of the sky on the darkest of nights. When it sinks almost to black, Kandinsky wrote, blue echoes a grief that is barely human.“
–Georgia & Anita
Chapter 4:
Fifty-ninth Street Studio
Chapter 5:
Starlight Night, Lake George
“Her thoughts filled with different shapes and colors—an undulating wave of blue mountains, a plate of purple and scarlet plums, a backward flowing orchestration of pale greens and deep blues.”
–Georgia & Anita
Chapter 6:
Red Flower
“She was able to see things in ways that others didn’t. She could stare down on the lake with the night vision of an owl. She could look up as a bee might at the plush crimson curve of a petal. She could crawl across the glistening cheek of the flower. She could taste its strange sweetness as she slipped her brush between its dark red lips.”
–Georgia & Anita
Chapter 7:
A Woman
“The crowd was three and four deep around the series of nude portraits grouped together under the prim label: A Woman. In the other photos — the ones of Georgia wearing her cloak or the bowler she fancied, or posed in front of one of her paintings — her face was visible, and she was identified in the captions. The nudes, however, were nameless, though it was brazenly obvious who the model was.”
–Georgia & Anita
Chapter 8:
My Shanty
“She could say things with color and shapes that she couldn’t say in any other way — things that she had no words for.… It was better not to know, she thought, better not to name it. Let the painting be whatever it was.”
–Georgia & Anita
Chapter 9:
Chestnut Trees
Chapter 10:
New York with Moon
“Georgia hadn’t understood how beautiful the city could be until they moved into their rooms on the 30th floor of the Shelton Hotel. It was the height that made all the difference. The dizzying new perspective allowed her to see that water towers and streetlights could be as wonderful to paint as flowers. She didn’t paint the city as she saw it; she painted how it made her feel. She listened to the music of it; the rhythms of the taxies and buses and subways pulsing up from below. She would gaze down at the streets for hours, thrilling at the view.”
–Georgia & Anita
Chapter 11:
Black Abstraction
Chapter 12:
Purple Hills Ghost Ranch
“The desert offered a full palette of earth tones: light maples, yellows, through ochres—orange and red and purple. Nothing separated her from the distant mountains that had been formed across tens of millions of years. The vast, empty, untouchable vistas that had given her back her life.”
–Georgia & Anita
