AFA 18th Anniversary

Antiques & Fine Art 129 2018 Georgia O’Keef�e has never allowed her life to be one thing and her painting another. — Frances O’Brien, longtime friend (1927) Dress (tunic and underdress), attributed to Georgia O’Keeffe, ca. 1926. Ivory silk crepe. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, N.Mex.; Gift of Juan and Anna Marie Hamilton (2000.03.0235 and 2000.03.0236). Photo © Gavin Ashworth. O’Keeffe was an accomplished seamstress who hand made her clothes early in her life. Because of its fine details and high-quality construction—hallmarks of her dress in the 1920s—it seems reasonable to assume that she made this ivory silk ensemble. That she moved this garment and others like it from one home to the next for over half a century, suggests that they carried memories not only of her first years with Stieglitz but also of her considerable labors and artistry in crafting them. Tunics worn over an underdress of the same fabric were popular in both fashion and “art dress” in the 1920s, especially among artists and habitués of Greenwich Village. Peasant sleeves inspired by traditional Russian and Balkan vernacular dress were also trendy. O’Keeffe’s design conformed to her desire for ease of movement and evidence the ways she distilled and personalized current fashions. Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), Line and Curve, 1927. Oil on canvas, 32 x 16¼ in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe (1987.58.6). © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. O’Keeffe enjoyed painting entire pictures in shades of black and white, the same restricted palette she used in dress. First in her abstract drawings and watercolors in the 1910s, then in oil paintings of the 1920s, she made black and white into “colors” that were subtle and versatile. Sometimes she juxtaposed them; she also mixed the two and came up with a beautiful tonal range of grays. This narrow, vertical abstraction may also have been informed by O’Keeffe’s paintings of modern skyscrapers of Manhattan in the late 1920s.