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[applause] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (female speaker) If we were to look at art in monetary terms, the bulk of the most expensive artworks ever sold are often works that are based in or somehow related to modernism.

We're talking about Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Picasso.

Georgia O'Keeffe is among these masters.

Her work is one of the most recognizable of any American artist.

If you study art history, and especially contemporary American art history, you have to talk about O'Keeffe and the things that she did in terms of abstraction.

I think she inspired generations of artists, women and men, to pursue a singular vision of the artist's life and career.

Georgia O'Keeffe was, first and foremost, an American modern artist who was interested in developing and sort of shaping and directing her own unique brand of American modernism.

Modern art is, in the United States, very diverse, very open, and very much, in the late 19th and early 20th century, focused on self-direction.

It's not necessarily a single style or movement.

It's an attitude.

♪ (male speaker) Modernism is about breaking away from what people knew, taking risks, making art do things we didn't know it could do.

And O'Keeffe is following that path: nature, simplicity, clarity, balance, unification of opposites in one space.

It's beautiful, and part of what attracts us to O'Keeffe is it's not necessary to articulate why I like this.

You can see the simplicity, the clarity, the love of nature, and the passion for that, and it's satisfying.

♪ Women play pretty significant roles in putting culture on the map in 20th-century America, even though they don't always have their stories told.

Women are sort of written out of modern art or 20th-century American art history.

Women don't have the right to vote until the 19th Amendment is passed in 1920, so they don't have the full rights of being a U.S. citizen.

A lot of American women in the 20th century, women that we call the "new woman" today, are expected to and sort of willingly take up the responsibilities of pursuing jobs, sort of living on their own, and Georgia O'Keeffe is among them.

♪ (South) New York was a big city, but there was no Whitney Museum, no Museum of Modern Art.

Only a couple galleries in New York were showing modern art.

That said, it was the epicenter of art in America.

In New York, O'Keeffe studies at the Art Students League, where she forges a friendship with a student from Charleston, South Carolina.

Anita Pollitzer was from a wealthy, prominent, and political Lowcountry family, and the two created a bond that would last almost their entire lives.

They went to galleries and concerts and talked with each other about their art, and Anita was very political.

She writes about suffrage constantly in her letters to Georgia, and Georgia's interested.

So they're exchanging all kinds of ideas.

And the other thing they are talking about in their letters is the "great man."

(Nevitt) Alfred Stieglitz is a giant and one of the most important photographers in the world at the time.

He took photography and made it into a real art form.

He also was a profound gallery owner.

The first gallery was 291.

(Sparks) Stieglitz was really singlehandedly introducing European modernism to America.

And he had exhibits of Rodin and Matisse, Picasso, Braque.

You know, he was the only person who was exhibiting these people, and he talked about them endlessly, endlessly.

So if you were interested in the latest thing in modern art, you would go to 291.

(South) She is reading art theory.

She's just not "doing what she's told."

One of the books that has just come out at that time was Kandinsky's "On the Spiritual in Art."

(Adams) This book really influences the modern art movement with the idea that art is a pathway to transcendence and that the creative process is somehow connected to the spirit.

O'Keeffe was highly trained by the time she got here.

She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League, and Columbia Teachers College.

Among her teachers was Arthur Wesley Dow, and he embraced Oriental ideas, Asian ideas about composition, that there should be a balance, a unity, between black and white, between the thing you're depicting and the thing you're not depicting.

Those should relate to each other.

And he made his students do exercises in black and white.

While she's in New York, she's still painting fairly conservatively.

Her work looks like her teachers.

But those ideas were swirling around her, and they were incubating.

They just needed a time and place to erupt, and that place was gonna be Columbia, South Carolina.

♪ (Doss) The thing driving O'Keeffe is that she comes from impoverished financial circumstances.

She struggles in so many different ways because she has to make a living.

She has to support herself, and she is looking for art teaching positions.

She wanted to get away from the New York art scene, from her influences, so she could work on her own.

In 1915, Columbia College, it's a very small school.

It was for women only.

It included about 10 faculty members and about 200 students.

She predominantly taught painting and had time on her own.

In 1915, "The State" newspaper prints this big list of things on the front page, "What Columbia Has to Offer," the year she comes here.

It says, "We have three skyscrapers, "10-story, 12-story, and 15-story respectively.

"And on top of that, we have 15 miles-- count 'em, 15-- of paved sidewalk."

(Adams) Although she had other job offers, O'Keeffe chose Columbia College because of its access to nature and the relative isolation away from New York City However, she continues corresponding with her good friend Anita Pollitzer.

(Sparks) The correspondence between Georgia and Anita is fascinating because it's two young women artists and they talk about everything.

They talk about suffrage.

They talk about galleries.

They talk about new art.

Free from distractions, not teaching very much, and that meant a lot of time to think and to work.

Nature is right outside.

The college is a couple miles the other side of downtown.

She's not right in Columbia, and in those days, there's forest every direction.

There are lots of terrific trails, walks that she can go on.

She takes off, and she sees things like the Congaree, palmettos, various flowers, wildlife growing all around her.

(Sparks) Certainly, the landscape of South Carolina, the heat, the sun, the atmospheric effect, I'm sure that this has an effect on the sort of drawing that actually emerges.

(Adams) Shortly after her arrival in Columbia, O'Keeffe begins all this exploring, and she starts playing the violin.

She's not trained to play the violin, but she does so as some sort of means to an artistic catharsis.

And she writes about all this to Pollitzer, about her feelings, her frustrations, and her process.

The other thing was that she had met a young man in Virginia that summer, Arthur McMahon, and they were writing letters, and the letters were getting more and more intense.

So beautiful weather, long walks in the wood, playing the violin, and writing to Arthur, that seems to be the point at which it just explodes.

She starts doing major, major new work.

(Adams) O'Keeffe lived on campus in a building that was known as Old Main.

She would return from these excursions and begin working on this series of charcoal drawings on paper that she placed on the floor and on the back of a door.

She would wet the charcoal to form these distinct, clean lines, and she begins to create these abstracted images.

(South) She's not painting.

She's teaching painting, but working in black and white.

It's elemental, basic, nature-based, but it's with the idea of letting feeling pour out of her and finding equivalence in emotion, music, and things that are abstract.

Those drawings are touching on the pulse of nature.

Things are growing, dying, shifting.

It's a very poetic way of working, just charcoal, a piece of paper, sitting on the floor.

She's trying to draw the shapes that she has in her mind, and they're not like anything she's ever seen.

She kind of tosses out all the previous influences and says, I'm gonna draw what's in my head.

That process of abstraction is a real search for her of her own kind of reality or her own kind of language.

If you look at those drawings, they are the beginnings of her mature work, where she is starting to do those things that she seems to do for the rest of her career.

She draws on the lessons that she's learned from Dow while she was in New York, and she responds to the natural environment of South Carolina.

(Adams) The relationship with Arthur McMahon continued on and off.

He visits her here in Columbia on Thanksgiving that year, and they both travel to North Carolina together, where it's possible some of those charcoal drawings were conceived or even created.

The timing of this relationship and this new frenzy of creation simply can't be overlooked.

But at some point, the correspondence between the two ends.

She really wasn't here for approval of the artwork from the people at Columbia College.

She was here trying to get away and to have some opportunity to work on her own.

(Adams) O'Keeffe may have stood out during her time at Columbia College as sort of eccentric.

She was known for her distinct manner of dress, with long skirts and rugged, old-looking boots and a hat, which she always wore.

These are necessary items for someone who might spend time out in nature, but she became known around campus for this.

She managed to join in on the polite ribbing herself as she placed a satirical want ad in the school year book offering these used boots up for sale.

She would eventually leave them behind, tucked underneath her desk, before she departed Columbia College.

Georgia was constantly sending her work up to Anita.

Anita was showing it to friends and teachers at the Art League and getting feedback for Georgia, and Georgia actually says to Anita, "I would rather have Stieglitz "admire something that I did than anyone else.

"Maybe someday, if I ever do anything I'm proud of, "I will take it to Stieglitz and have him look at it "because praise from Stieglitz would matter to me more than praise from anyone else."

She was here a finite amount of time, you know, late 1915, early 1916.

O'Keeffe rarely would date her things, and the great thing about the drawings she did in Columbia is we often know when she did them because she would talk about it to Anita Pollitzer.

She takes those black-and-white drawings, rolls them up, and sends them to New York, and we know that Anita Pollitzer gets them on January 1, 1916.

And she spreads them out all over her classroom.

Not only has she never seen this from Georgia, she's never seen anything like it.

She knows that these are a breakthrough, that these are something totally new.

Those charcoals were explosions from her subconscious, and they really were images that were in her head, and they were, in a lot of ways, very private.

And then Anita takes that roll of drawings over to 291 Gallery and to Alfred Stieglitz.

(Adams) And when Stieglitz views these drawings, he says to Pollitzer, "At last, a woman on paper."

(Sparks) He immediately recognized that they were quite wonderful and told Anita, "I would put these in my gallery."

And he did.

Georgia begins corresponding with Stieglitz, and she leaves Columbia College mid semester and moves back to New York briefly.

She has accepted a new teaching position in West Texas, and as a hiring requirement for that position, she enrolls in another teaching course under Arthur Wesley Dow.

But she's intending to meet with Alfred Stieglitz.

Georgia O'Keeffe will show up later in 1916 when Stieglitz has hung these drawings without her knowledge, and she'll demand that they be taken down.

And of course a big confrontation ensues because he's Alfred Stieglitz.

And she's angry at him because he did it without her permission.

But on the other hand, it's Stieglitz, and it's 291, and they're hung very nicely, and they're in the big room, not the little room, and I think she forgives him.

Georgia O'Keeffe benefited from Stieglitz, and Stieglitz definitely benefited from Georgia O'Keeffe.

He was not happy in his first marriage, and O'Keeffe comes around, and he is just awed.

She is the dynamic, modern new woman, and they fall deeply in love.

O'Keeffe moves to Canyon, Texas to fill this teaching position and picks up where she left off in South Carolina, developing these refined images.

She is abstracting from nature, and she begins to incorporate color.

She's also continuing her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz and corresponds with him frequently.

They wrote, and they wrote four to five letters a week.

Her letters to Anita kind of fall off 'cause she's corresponding with Stieglitz.

The influence of Stieglitz was powerful.

I think she has her own innate understanding of what she wants her American modern to be and what kind of style she's thinking about.

But she is also introduced to lots and lots of modern American artists and European artists and a New York art scene to which she now belongs.

(Adams) O'Keeffe begins exploring more and more of the Southwest, producing numerous works.

Stieglitz continues to represent O'Keeffe and exhibit her work, and by 1924, the two are married.

Shortly after, there is a big show at 291 in which Stieglitz displays much of O'Keeffe's new work directly next to a series of his own photographs of her, very intimate, nude images of O'Keeffe, sometimes even posing next to her own artwork.

And art critics immediately draw a comparison between the two.

(Sparks) By putting up the double exhibition of the naked pictures and her actual art, it not just genderizes it; it sexualizes it.

And that's part of his marketing, and it's at that point that she begins to withdraw from it and not be happy.

And it's about in 1924, when she starts doing the giant flower paintings, that she has decided not to do any more abstractions because she can't stand what people say about the abstractions.

So she has determined that, from now on, she's gonna paint realistic things.

♪ ♪ New Mexico had been a destination for painters since the beginning of the 20th century.

Santa Fe had used art as a way of promoting the community.

O'Keeffe was getting away from New York.

Her career had been flourishing, but she'd had struggles in her personal life.

Things were rocky with Stieglitz, and she needed some space, and New Mexico offered that.

She's visiting Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos.

Mabel is a socialite, an amazing kind of patroness who invites every significant artist, writer, choreographer, musician to New Mexico, and the fact that New Mexico is a center for American modernism is, in large part, due to Mabel Dodge's salon in her home in Taos.

O'Keeffe comes out to spend the summer in New Mexico, and she's completely taken with the landscape.

She writes about how amazing this place is back to Stieglitz, who stays in New York.

That was the first of many summer trips, and eventually she moved permanently to New Mexico and made this her home.

She is fiercely independent, and New Mexico is the one place she can go and be free of the burdens of her marriage, be free of the burdens of urban New York, and really explore some of that organic, natural abstracted form that she was working on very early, 1915, in South Carolina.

I think O'Keeffe's dedication is something that everyone can identify with, whether they're an artist or not, because she made things happen to support that art career.

And when her career needed a change and she came here, she renegotiated her relationship with an older, powerful husband.

Then there is this idea of how she created two homes here in New Mexico, buying first a small one at the Ghost Ranch, where the most identifiable of her landscapes come from.

Then she bought a larger house and rebuilt that, and it's the same quest to have a working space that will support her career.

Modernism is a greater field because of her artwork, and I think that's an important legacy.

I realize there is much more to what she has to offer than just her artwork.

It's what she did to continue to create her artwork, how she adapted her life to make the best career she could.

O'Keeffe's ability to recognize something in her subject, hone in on it, and make that the subject of her composition is relatively unique, actually.

Often, you'll go to a site where O'Keeffe painted and see these grand vistas.

Most of us would think, That's gonna be my subject; I'm gonna capture this entire space.

O'Keeffe hones in on one little piece of the landscape, blows it up, brings it to our attention, and makes it something amazing that we never would have seen if she hadn't led our eye to that.

(Kastner) She's remembering all of her training, background, and experience in abstraction, and she brings that to the subject matter.

O'Keeffe brought her ability to distill a line with her.

I'm still learning to look at our landscape here through her eyes because she's always improving on what she sees, and that usually is a very simplified idea, and then she adds dramatic color to that.

So modernism, then, becomes her technique, and that she can apply that technique to an ancient culture, to ancient architecture, to an ancient landscape is really her effort to always stay focused on what's most important to her.

At the heart of O'Keeffe's notion of modernism is deep appreciation for the natural world.

For some artists, modernism was about the city, about the urban experience, and O'Keeffe did paintings of the city.

But for O'Keeffe and Stieglitz, the core, the real center for them of their experience and understanding of art was about this communion with the natural world and the ability to reflect upon what's experienced and seen and translate that into an artwork.

And somehow, far from the art center of New York in South Carolina, she had the freedom to try something new.

♪ At the end of Georgia O'Keeffe's life, she does this remarkable series of watercolors.

At this point, she's suffering from macular degeneration, functionally blind.

And she creates these amazing works that fill every inch of the surface, that activate the painting in amazing ways, bold, bright colors, gestural abstractions that hearken back directly to the abstractions that began her career when she was living in South Carolina.

They have the same flowing forms.

So she comes full circle.

Abstraction is where she got her first taste of independence creatively.

She broke free from what she had been trained and trusted herself to express the forms in her mind that were not like what she'd been taught in school.

It's amazing that, after more than 60 years, she returns to that language as one of her last creative acts.

Those shapes that she got down on paper in Columbia are fundamental shapes in her mind that she is going to incorporate in her art really for the rest of her life in one way or another.

(South) The drawings in Columbia, she was very secretive and not talkative about them until later in life.

So they must have been extremely personal to her.

She never showed them during her lifetime.

She hid them away in her studio in Abiquiu, and they were only found, along with a whole lot of other drawings, after her death.

(Adams) Georgia O'Keeffe came to Columbia College seeking something and even expressed that the works she created here started her on her way.

We continue to think American modern art is all about New York or all about the urban.

And the fact is that Georgia O'Keeffe's American modern was sparked in landscapes, in regions, such as the South and the Southwest.

And yet these become some of the hallmarks of American modern painting that we know today.

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