Georgia O’Keeffe

The 28 year‐old Georgia O’Keeffe wrote these words to her friend Anita Pollitzer towards the end of 1915, while teaching in South Carolina and working on a series of abstract charcoal drawings evocative of natural forms, which she came to see as representing her “aesthetic awakening”. Against O’Keeffe’s wishes, Pollitzer took ten of the drawings to Alfred Stieglitz, who was then running his “291” art gallery in New York. Stieglitz called them the “purest, finest, sincerest things that have entered 291 in a long while”, and in May 1916 what was to become a very long and legendary career was...