Georgia O’Keeffe, Evening Star II, 1917

Narrator: O’Keeffe painted the watercolor Evening Star III and most of the works in this room while teaching art in a public high school in Canyon, Texas. It is an abstract response to the landscape of the American West, which she loved. Barbara Haskell:

Barbara Haskell: She talked about the plains, the wild emptiness of it, the silence. And she endows the series of pictures of the Evening Star with a sense of intensity of nature’s rhythms and its energy that extends out from one pulse point and fills the canvas, as if it’s extending beyond the boundaries of the picture.

Narrator: Three works from the Evening Star series are on this wall.

Barbara Haskell: What was unusual about O’Keeffe’s work, even in relationship to the other American modernists who were embracing abstraction, is that she never fractured form. She never adopted the Cubist fracturing and flattening of space. She always embraced the organic quality of nature—the sinuous, dynamic, rhythmic lines of nature.