More abstraction. The Whitney's colorful show puts aside the Georgia O'Keeffe we know best — the Gray Lady of New Mexico — to retrieve an O'Keeffe we ought to know better, the young woman who went fearlessly down the road of entirely abstract art in 1915, when it was a fresh idea with which only a few artists anywhere in the world were experimenting. Her taut vertical thunderbolts and giant crests of rainbow colors are like campaign banners being unfurled by an artist who has set herself — and the art of painting — entirely free.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, on view through 1/17/2010