Grey Blue & Black—Pink Circle

Georgia O'Keeffe

1929

Oil on canvas

Dallas Museum of Art

Georgia O’Keeffe’s early abstractions, although not as well known as her later southwestern paintings, played a pivotal role in the development of American modernism. Grey, Blue, and Black—Pink Circle is the culmination of O’Keeffe’s Special series, a body of abstract drawings and paintings that she made during the 1920s. She created these works outside the influence of the New York mainstream and before her initial contact with the works of Wassily Kandinsky, whose treatise On the Spiritual in Art had a measurable impact on her later abstract style. The nodes in the center of the painting recall the headdress of Hopi kachina dancer