Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction

Fifty-one full page color plates arranged chronologically from 1915 thru the 1970s bring out the "pulsing, spiraling, swirling circular forms" that O'Keeffe consistently used as a basis for her paintings and drawings and occasional sculptures. Although O'Keeffe did not singularly introduce or use spiral forms, more than any other American or European modern artist, she "developed an entire vocabulary of circular forms" which identifies her work over her long career. She was too imaginative and innovative to be confined to these forms, but in her paintings of flowers, skies and landscapes, rocks, and her "pelvic series" in the 1940s, she returns again and again to them. She builds on these with great flourishes, bold colors and shadings for depth, and repetitions and morphings of aspects of circular forms. Stuhlman's essay focuses on circular forms as the basis for O'Keeffe's art throughout her career. Lynes's essay points to the sources for these in the Southwest landscape she was attached to. The focus on O'Keeffe's circular forms goes a long way toward explaining the pleasing, alluring effects of her art works; and it adds depth to analysis of them.

Georgia O'Keeffe continues to be regarded as one of America's most creative and original painters whose work continues to influence and inspire new generations of artists long after her death."Circling Around Abstraction" beautifully traces and showcases O'Keeffe's experiments with circular forms throughout her lengthy career from hypnotic swirls in charcoal abstractions in the 1910s, through her carefully constructed still lifes of the 1920, to close-up depictions drawn from the natural world in the 1930s, to her seminal pelvis series of the 1940s, and concludes with a selection of her late paintings in which she went back to the visionary roots of her earliest days as an artist. Enhanced with a pare of informed and informative essays by exhibition curators Jonathan Stuhlman and Barbara Buhler Lynes, "Circling Around Abstraction" is an invaluable contribution to O'Keeffe studies and a critically important addition to academic library American Art History reference collections.