A Celebration

Georgia O'Keeffe

1924

Oil on canvas

Seattle Art Museum

In the early 20th century, many Modernist artists developed pictorial strategies for responding emotionally to landscape. O’Keeffe sought formal correspondences for the things in the world that inspired her: “Even if I could put down accurately certain things that I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling the object gave me—I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at—not copy it.” Created in 1924, the year O’Keeffe married the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, this work is redolent of a summer sky, where cumulus clouds dance and swirl exuberantly across a vivid blu