Kandinsky and O'Keeffe: Pioneers of Abstraction

Early Abstraction, 1915
In 1915 O'Keeffe was a 28-year-old art teacher stuck at a small women's college in South Carolina. One year earlier, she had been living happily in New York City and getting her first eager taste of Picasso, Braque and American modernists like John Marin. Stranded in a place she called the "tail end of the world," she decided to go where none of those artists had ventured. Drawing on the liquid forms of Art Nouveau and her own churning inner life, she produced an astonishing series of purely abstract charcoal drawings.

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