Footnotes

Provenance
The artist.
The Downtown Gallery, New York.
A. Leon Fergenson and Constance Friend Fergenson, New York, 1961.
Estate of the above.
Sale, Christie's, New York, May 25, 2006, lot 121.
M.S. Rau Antiques, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Private collection, Texas, acquired from the above, 2007.

Exhibited
New York, The Downtown Gallery, Spring 1961 Exhibition, 1961.

Literature
B.B. Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. two, New Haven, Connecticut, 1999, p. 846, no. 1354, illustrated.

Arguably one of the most important and influential American artists of the twentieth century, Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1887. The second of seven children born to Francis and Ada O'Keeffe, a pair of dairy farmers of Irish and Hungarian descent. Georgia was their first daughter, soon to be followed by another, with whom she would take watercolor lessons from the local artist, Sara Mann. At ten years old, O'Keeffe had decided that she would become an artist, continuing her formal education through high school in Wisconsin and then later Virginia where her family relocated in 1902. She attended the renowned School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906 and then went on to study under William Merritt Chase, Kenyon Cox and F. Luis Mora at the Art Students League, in New York City, in 1907. During this period, O'Keeffe was instructed to paint like the masters, evident from her prize-winning still life, Dead Rabbit with a Copper Pot, which no doubt appealed to her traditional teachers, each known for their romantic yet realistic portraiture, Chase being the most distinct and later celebrated in the canon of American Art. Yet O'Keeffe found herself emotionally unattached in keeping with this tradition, uninterested in merely learning how 'to paint like everyone else,' and instead found herself radically affected by the practices and writings of Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow, himself once a teacher at the Art Students League until 1903, believed that rather than painting directly and solely from nature, artists should learn to interpret their surroundings by taking color and composition into consideration. Unwilling to create 'art for art's sake' as a purely decorative force, Dow praised abstraction and urged his students 'to fill a space in a beautiful way,' an idea O'Keeffe would take to heart with her later, iconic body of work.

Although highly influenced by Dow and his ideas, O'Keeffe was nonetheless frustrated by the fear that she may never distinguish herself as an artist. After two years of teaching art in Amarillo, Texas, O'Keeffe returned to New York and spent a year attending the Teachers College of Columbia University, as both a student under Dow and a summer teaching assistant to Alon Bement. While teaching in South Carolina, O'Keeffe had produced some charcoal drawings which she later sent to her friend, Anita Pollitzer, back in New York. Pollitzer promptly delivered the work to Alfred Stieglitz, the noted photographer and champion of Modern Art in America, at his 291 Gallery. Stieglitz, whom O'Keeffe would later marry, organized the artist's first solo show in 1917. Thus beginning a fruitful and complicated partnership, both in their artistic practices and private lives, that would last until Stieglitz's death in 1946.

During their marriage, O'Keeffe spent time in Lake George, New York, where the Stieglitz family had a home. She found the surroundings 'too green,' and the region a stark contrast to the vistas of Northern New Mexico, where she first traveled in 1929. In that vast and arid environment, O'Keeffe would find her 'spiritual home,' belonging to the land like no other place she had ever inhabited, a far cry from metropolitan Manhattan – which she would famously depict in geometric abstraction at nightfall – and the plains of her native Midwest. Spending time in both Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, O'Keeffe would draw from an endless well of inspiration, in both the natural landscape, horizon line and what bones she could cull from the sand, she produced some of her most important and original work to date.

The present lot, It Was Yellow & Pink I, depicts an aerial view of a winding riverbed as it curves deep into the earth. Believed to have been inspired by O'Keeffe's airplane trips, and subsequent vantage point, the work, which was painted in 1959, whispers of Dow's early influence over the now established artist with his urging to consider the emotion of color and line found in nature. The warm, honeyed hues of the riverbed embrace the flowing lines of pink that seem to engulf the composition and then extend outward, on an endless trip we cannot travel. Like O'Keeffe's famous flower paintings, this work suspends the viewer between dream and reality; a ribbon of pink is not only a river, but a streak of sunset, the paler edge of a limb or the slope of a mountain. Though she would travel often, O'Keeffe always admitted to her fear of flying. Yet she did find pleasure in her skyward glance:

"After the plane takes off I enjoy what I see from the air and forget the hazards. I was surprised that there were so many desert areas with large riverbeds running through them...The color used for the paintings had little to do with what I had seen - the color grew as I painted. Edith Halpert was still my dealer at the time and she wondered what the paintings were about. She thought maybe trees. I thought that as good as anything for her to think – as for me, they were just shapes. But one day I saw a man looking around at my Halpert showing. I heard him remark, 'They must be rivers seen from the air.' I was pleased that someone had seen what I saw and remembered it my way." (G. O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keeffe, New York, 1976, n.p.)

It Was Yellow & Pink I is the product of O'Keeffe's encounters with the land she loved from a unique perspective, with all the abstraction and purity of feeling she so believed in. It was Yellow and Pink II, 1959, is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, and It was Yellow and Pink III, 1960, is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.