Organizer
Georgia O’Keeffe: Color and Conservation was organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, and presented as part of the Annie Laurie Swaim Hearin Memorial Exhibition Series.
About the curators
Sarah Whitaker Peters, who earned her master’s in art history from Columbia University and her doctorate from the City University of New York Graduate Center, lives in New York and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She has contributed essays on O’Keeffe to several journals and books, including Women Artists 1550–1950, by Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, and most recently, to Portraits of American Women. Peters has also taught art history at the University of Long Island (C. W. Post College). She will give an illustrated lecture at MAG on Sunday, October 1.
René Paul Barilleaux is former deputy director for programs at the Mississippi Museum of Art. From 1993 through 2001 he was the Museum’s chief curator. Barilleaux received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute. Since the early 1980s, he has organized numerous exhibitions of modern and contemporary art and alternative media, including Passionate Observer: Photographs by Eudora Welty, which was shown in fall 2003 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. |
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Color and conservation
For seven decades, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) was a major figure in American art. Remarkably, she remained independent from shifting art trends and stayed true to her own vision, which was based on finding the essential, abstract forms in the world around her. With exceptionally keen powers of observation and great finesse with a paintbrush, she recorded subtle nuances of color, shape, and light that enlivened her paintings and attracted a wide audience. Her primary subjects were landscapes, flowers and bones, explored in series over several years and even decades. The images were drawn from her life experience and related either generally or specifically to places
where she lived.
O’Keeffe’s work was shown for the first time in 1916 at Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 291 Gallery in New York City. Since then, there have been frequent exhibitions worldwide of her art. This exhibition, conceptualized by O’Keeffe scholar Sarah Whitaker Peters and co-curated by René Paul Barilleaux, former deputy director of the Mississippi Museum of Art, focuses on conservation issues surrounding the artist’s painting. The pictures demonstrate O’Keeffe’s pristine methods and the painstaking conservation necessary to preserve the character, subtlety and beauty of her original colors. It is an area never before explored.
O’Keeffe was keenly interested in how her works looked throughout her life and was devoted to maintaining her
original pictorial intentions. By the mid-1940s, working closely with the distinguished conservator Caroline Keck,
she had become actively engaged in attempting to preserve the original colors and pristine surface qualities of
her paintings.
O’Keeffe loved the very substance of color. She used the finest paint materials available, and sometimes ground her own pigments to attain greater translucency in her oils. She is also known to have made a number of her own pastel sticks. The pastels’ extensive range in hue and value was a major and continuing influence on her oils.
Exhibition catalog
Georgia O’Keeffe’s surprisingly traditional craftsmanship was kept secret from the world as long as she lived. But her perfectionist labors—and her constant, painstaking experiments to better her craft—are specifically documented in the 1947–1981 correspondence with her conservator Caroline Keck.
The exhibition catalog includes selections from this correspondence, reproduced for the first time by permission of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and annotated by Sarah Whitaker Peters. These fascinating letters contain much new information about the way O’Keeffe thought and worked as an early American modernist. The book also contains three essays and full-color reproductions of all the artworks appearing in the exhibition. $34.95 at the Gallery Store. |
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