Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986). Abstraction, 1917. Watercolor on paper, 40 x 27.6 cm. Collection of Gerald and Kathleen Peters. Courtesy Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe

During the early to mid-twentieth century, American artists championed modern and abstract art while also looking to Asian aesthetics and philosophies that envisioned nature as a site where matter and spirit could be united. From Asian art they distilled an aesthetic of weightlessness, silence, and rhythmic form. On the West coast increasing Asian immigration contributed to the dissemination of Buddhist teachings, inspiring some artists to become students and practitioners of meditation techniques and East Asian calligraphy.

On the East coast Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922), an influential Japanese-art specialist and teacher, would influence a generation of artists. As head of the Fine Arts Department at Teachers College, Columbia University, Dow taught that art should express an artist’s own feelings and that subject matter could be best realized through the arrangement of line, color, and n?tan (the classical Japanese system of light and dark in painting). His revolutionary methods were set out in his landmark textbook Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected from a New System of Art Education (1899). A young student in his class, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), would incorporate his teachings into her personal style. Dow’s method encouraged students to experiment with nonrepresentational shapes and patterns as they learned the concepts of composition and balance. In 1917, while teaching art in Canyon, Texas, O’Keeffe spent time exploring the wide open spaces and watching the changing sky. She began to invent ways to express her feelings, reducing her pictures to shapes and colors. Most of the time she worked in watercolor because she lacked the uninterrupted hours required for oil. But watercolor, it turned out, was ideal for her subject, the Western sky, since she could let colors flow into one another. Although some of O’Keeffe’s acquaintances in Texas commented that these works did not look like the canyon, O’Keeffe responded that she was painting the way she felt about the landscape, not the way it looked. Later that year O’Keeffe’s first gallery exhibition opened in New York City and included many of these watercolors. Throughout her long career, the spare simplicity of Asian art, a mix of both abstraction and representation, and a love of open landscape would permeate and inspire her work.

• What is your initial reaction to each of these works?
• Compare Dow’s approach to landscape with O’Keeffe’s. What are the similarities and differences?
• Describe these paintings in as much detail as possible. What might each artist be attempting to convey?
• O’Keeffe titled this 1917 watercolor Abstraction. What title would you give it? Why?
• Although O’Keeffe was inspired by the landscape in Canyon, she was not attempting to paint the way it looked. Write a paragraph that describes the feeling that this painting conveys to you, and then share your response with another student. How was his or her response similar to or different from yours?

• At the beginning of the 20th century, traditional academic training for an artist consisted of copying works by old masters. Student work was judged by how closely it imitated reality. Arthur Wesley Dow’s influential textbook Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected from a New System of Art Education (1899) changed the focus of art education by placing the emphasis on the compositional elements of line, color, and n?tan (a Japanese word meaning “lightness-darkness”) as the basic principles in art. He believed that “art should be approached through composition rather than through imitative drawing.” Many of his lessons require in-depth study, but others can be adapted for the elementary school art classroom. Here are two simplified ideas for exercises focusing on n?tan adapted from Dow’s textbook.
• To heighten a student’s awareness of n?tan, begin with a simple geometric line design and make several copies of it. Experiment with creating variations of the same design by applying different combinations of black and white. Then discuss which are most successful and why.
• Choose a landscape with a variety of large and small spaces. Using only black paint on white paper, create an arrangement of dark and light that describes that landscape while also creating a harmonious balance. Discuss which of the students’ works are most successful and why.
  Visual Arts


• O’Keeffe fell in love with the Texas landscape and recalled, “I couldn’t believe Texas was real. When I arrived out there, there wasn’t a blade of green grass or a leaf to be seen, but I was absolutely crazy about it…. For me Texas is the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Have you ever encountered a landscape that you found inspirational? Where was it? What about it appealed to you? Recall that place, and like O’Keeffe create a watercolor painting that emphasizes how that place felt, rather than attempting to replicate how it looked.
  Visual Arts