April 9, 2023
Georgia O'Keeffe: Learning to See, Slowly
MoMA's 2023 exhibition 'To See Takes Time' focused on Georgia O'Keeffe's drawings, tracing how America's great modernist built her vision in series.
Georgia O'Keeffe is famous for her enormous flowers and the bleached bones and red hills of New Mexico. MoMA's 2023 show 'To See Takes Time' took a quieter route, focusing on her works on paper and the way she worked in patient, evolving series.
Charcoal spirals, watercolour dawns and pastel abstractions revealed an artist endlessly circling the same forms, refining them until they sang. The title came from O'Keeffe herself: really seeing a thing, she believed, takes time.
A pioneer of American modernism, she turned the landscapes of the Southwest into something elemental and her own. The show let visitors watch that vision being born, line by line.
Image: “Desert Landscape - New Mexico (5989098056)” — Thomas Shahan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.