American Monotypes from the Baker/Pisano Collection | Page 50

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986)
Untitled (Woman Painting), ca. 1907–1908

Monotype, 4 1/8 x 3 1/8 in.
Chazen Museum of Art, Eugenie Mayer Bolz, Walter A. and Dorothy
Jones Frautschi, Alice Drews Gladfelter Memorial, Joen Greenwood,
Jean McKenzie, and Jim and Peg Watrous Endowment Funds and
D. Frederick Baker purchase, 2013.16

Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O’Keeffe became one of the
most celebrated artists of the twentieth century. She studied with
John Vanderpoel at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
(1905–1906) and with William Merritt Chase and F. Luis Mora
at the Art Students League of New York (1907–1908) where this
print was likely made. The monotype process seems an appropriate area for experimentation for those like O’Keeffe in Chase’s
curriculum at the Art Students League; it emphasized the deft
marks of Americans’ interpretation of Impressionism, like those
of the palette and canvas in this work. However, it is quite different from the work the artist would do when she started making
art again, after the four-year hiatus that followed her time at the
Art Students League. In the summer of 1912, O’Keeffe enrolled
in drawing classes at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville
with Alon Bement, student of Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922),
then head of the Art Department at Columbia University’s
Teachers College, which O’Keeffe attended in 1914. This redirection of her efforts reflects a break with her artistic past that opened
up new horizons for her, but the monotype was left behind,
despite this attractive early essay in the medium. Although
O’Keeffe’s monotype is made almost entirely with brush work,
a single fingerprint is visible midway down the figure’s back.
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T H E E X H I B I T IO N

NOTES:
Dow, Composition, 150.

Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1: cat. no. 35, illus;
2: 1142–1145.

Haskell, Georgia O’Keeffe, cat. no. 2., illus.

Pincus-Witten, Georgia O’Keeffe, cat. no. 1, illus.