Georgia O’Keeffe Made These Works After Going Blind

When I saw the title of latest big Georgia O’Keeffe show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art— “To See Takes Time”—I got excited. Finally, I thought to myself, we are going to talk about her blindness. In the 1970s, O’Keeffe’s macular degeneration prompted her to pivot briefly from painting to sculpture: she began working with her hands, with clay, before eventually finding ways to work on paper and canvas again.

Mostly, I guessed wrong about the show. The exhibition focuses on works she made around the 1910s, in series and on paper. Still, I was fascinated by how similar the early and late works are. In both periods, she often used watercolor to draw bold lines. And in both, her watercolor was rarely, well, watery. O’Keeffe laid the paint on thick. She liked pairing greens with pinks—though the complimentary combo grows much bolder in those works from the end of her career. She’d try out the same composition with subtle variations, often leaving lots of the paper raw, working in series. You get the sense that spending time with the scene at hand is more about grasping and distilling its essence than it is copying it precisely.

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One of O’Keeffe’s assistants, Carol Merrill, writes in a memoir that the artist kept her blindness private during her lifetime. She also recounted to Merril that she lost her vision slowly, but adjusted to blindness rapidly. Still, O’Keeffe was encouraged to keep it private by her dealer, who worried it would devalue her work. So often, we celebrate artists for helping us see the world differently; yet so often, we are reminded that certain perspectives are too different, unwelcome.

The oil on canvas works are traditionally considered her greatest hits, but critics everywhere—Jackson Arn in the New Yorker, Sebastian Smee in the Washington Post, Johanna Fateman in 4Columns—are loving these works on paper. They point to the obvious sense of freedom she felt in her youth, and absent the perssure of a canvas. It made me wish that more of the works she made late in her career, hiding her truth from an ableist world, could have been up at MoMA, too.

There is actually one painting on view that she made while blind. But it’s not on the checklist or in the catalogue, and it’s displayed in more of a stairwell than a gallery. Don’t miss it. It’s called From a Day with Juan II (1977), and it’s from a series of canvases she made that shows a foreshortened, rectangular gray gradient extending upward into a blue sky. In the slideshow up top, I’m including some other works she made after going blind—excerpts from series, works that I’d have included if it were up to me. They speak, I think, to the astonishing persistence of her artistic vision, which outlived her ocular one.