Skip to main content
In 1922, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were living together, although he would not divorce his wife and marry O’Keeffe until 1924. This drawing was first exhibited in 1923 as part of O’Keeffe’s solo exhibition (organized by Stieglitz) at the Anderson Galleries, Park Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street, New York City. Stieglitz had recently exhibited his photographic portraits of O’Keeffe, a series of detailed studies of her hands, face, and nude body, often posed in juxtaposition with her paintings and drawing. Frank and intimate, these images also demonstrate Stieglitz’s conviction that, in O’Keeffe, he had discovered the great woman Modernist. “At last, a woman on paper!” he had exclaimed upon first seeing her work in 1916.
From her studies with the Art Students League’s distinguished teacher William Merritt Chase, O’Keeffe had learned to work quickly—she called it his “dash and go” style—to capture detail with an economy of strokes while integrating the parts into the whole. But she did not want to paint like Chase and was later inspired by her teachers Alan Bement and Arthur Wesley Dow to “fill space in a beautiful way.” [2] With charcoal, chalks and watercolor she could work out her new attempts at pictorial composition freely, and between the years 1916 and 1918 she produced more works on paper than she did during the entirety of her long career. Particular about her craftsmanship and artists’ materials, she sometimes even made her own pastel chalks and ground her own pigments for her oil paints. [3]
Pool in the Woods, Lake George is a rectangular composition, oriented horizontally, with a dark black ovoid placed slightly off-center to the left. The center ovoid/void is delineated by a curvilinear grayish white line that suggests either swelling form or a reflection of light on the water’s surface. Enfolding this central form or space is a swath of sienna brown with modeling in brighter tints and deeper shades of brown to suggest lips, eyelids, or labial folds. The reddish brown color is intensified by an encircling band of green. Because O’Keeffe drew with many short strokes of her chalks to optically mix yellow, green and viridian, the textural suggestion is of nature, such as trees from a distance. Surrounding this green concentric band, the subsequent color bands flatten out at midpoint, suggesting a more traditional pictorial representation of a horizon line, defined by trees and water, mountain and sky. Barbara B. Millhouse has noted, “By bringing the mountain and rimmed cavity into a single image, she has merged the faraway and the nearby.” [4]
There are two other 1922 pastels of this subject with similar color scheme; Lake George in the Woods was also shown in the 1923 Anderson exhibition and, although a much squarer composition, it shares a similar ovoid around which fringed concentric rings spread outward from the center. Stieglitz noted that another painting, The Pond in Woods, Lake George was described by O’Keeffe as “the last one,” presumably of this series. [5] It does appear that the central ovoid is further receding from the picture plane in a downward spiraling movement, almost as if O’Keeffe is bidding farewell to this series of images.
O’Keeffe’s style is one of minimal detail, enlarged form, and deliberate cropping. Her emphasis on her overall composition and balance of positive and negative space renders her natural forms more abstract. Yet her compositions are not static. As art historian Kathleen Pyne has observed, “At times O’Keeffe combined lateral undulations with a centered form. She organized Pool in the Woods, Lake George for example, around a vortex or a nebula that generates its energies outward from the center across the surface in rhythmic lines. Edges and lines on her surfaces, whether evoking a still-life form or the surge of wind, water, or earth, she conceived in terms of velocity—movement—that was always unpredictable”. [6]
Art historians have noted the influence of photography on O’Keeffe’s use of pictorial space. “The radicality of her early transformation of sense data into a psychologically-charged visual language accelerated after her introduction to photography, as she began to translate the medium’s compression of near and far space and its reliance on framing and viewpoint into high-keyed color and boldly articulated organic forms.” [7]
“O’Keeffe’s teachers Alon Bement and Arthur Wesley Dow had encouraged her to listen to music while composing her drawings and to visualize music. [8] O’Keeffe’s idiom of musicality—flowing movements that suggest the polyphonic lines of song as released and contained with a spiral—was highly personal to her and therefore effective as a translation of her feelings.” [9] As O’Keeffe wrote in her artist’s statement for the 1923 Anderson exhibition, “I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way—things that I had no words for.” [10]
Notes:
[1] Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vol. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, Washington, D.C: National Gallery of Art; Abiquiu, NM: Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 1999, vol. 1: p. 214.
[2] “Dow’s design process emphasizes the framing of a motif—its placement on the surface and its relation to the whole space—and the study of notan, or the relation between light and dark tonalities. . . Based on the lessons of the Japanese print, Dow’s illustrations taught the Photo-Secessionists as well as O’Keeffe’s generation of modernists how to pull out the frame vertically or horizontally and arrange the motif on the surface for surprisingly intimate effects.” (Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné.)
[3] Leeds, Valerie Ann. “Georgia O’Keeffe: Color and Conservation,”American Art Review Vol XVIII: 2. 2006, 156.
[4] Millhouse, Barbara and Robert Workman. American Originals: Selections from Reynolda House Museum of American Art. New York: The American Federation of Arts, 1990, p 108.
[5] Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol 1, p. 214
[6] Pyne, p. 255
[7] Letter dated April 2, 2007 from Barbara Haskell, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art to Executive Director Allison Perkins, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, in the museum’s collection records.
[8] O’Keeffe enrolled in summer session art classes at the University of Virginia in 1912 and 1913, studying with Alon Bement, a disciple of Dow. She was Bement’s assistant in 1914 and he helped her find a job in Texas. She returned to be a full-time instructor in UVA’s summer sessions in 1915 and 1916.
[9] Pyne, Kathleen. Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007: 203-4.
[10] Lynes, Barbara Buhler. O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, appendix A p. 184.
ProvenanceTo at least 1935
Georgia O’Keeffe [1]
Downtown Gallery, New York NY [2]
Harry Spiro, New York NY [3]
1975
M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York. [4]
From 1975 to 1984
Barbara B. Millhouse, purchased from M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York on April 1, 1975. [5]
From 1984
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC, donated by Barbara B. Millhouse on December 2, 1984. [6]
Notes:
[1] Artist lent her work to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York for the “Abstract Painting in America” exhibition in 1935.
[2] Old coversheet from 1996, object file.
[3] See note 2.
[4] Bill of sale, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., object file.
[5] See note 4.
[6] Deed of Gift, object file.
Exhibition History1935
Abstract Painting In America
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (1935)
Lent by artist
1952
Georgia O'Keeffe: Exhibition of Pastel Paintings Retrospective, 1914-1945
Downtown Gallery, New York NY (1952)
1973
Pioneer Of American Abstraction
Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York NY (1973)
1987
O'Keefe Centennial Celebration
Columbia College, Columbia SC (11/13/1987-11/16/1987)
Three day festival
1990-1992
American Originals, Selections From Reynolda House Museum of American Art
The American Federation of Arts
Center for the Fine Arts, Miami FL (9/22/1990-11/18/1990)
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs CA (12/16/1990-2/10/1991)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (3/6/1991-5/11/1991)
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis TN (6/2/1991-7/28/1991)
Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth TX (8/17/1991-10/20/1991)
Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago IL (11/17/1991-1/12/1992)
1992
Georgia O'Keeffe: Natural Issues, 1918-1924
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown MA (4/27/1992-7/12/1992)
1993-1994
Georgia O'Keeffe: Modern And American
Organized by InterCultura, Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, and United States Information Agency (USIA), in cooperation with the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas TX.
The Hayward Gallery, London (4/8/1993-6/27/93)
Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (7/15/1993-10/1/1993)
Yokohama Museum of Art, Tokyo (10/30/1993-1/16/1994)
1997
Georgia O’Keeffe: From 291 to New Mexico
The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque NM (7/13/1997-10/18/1997)
2008-2009
Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (5/23/2008-9/7/2008)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC (9/26/2008 -1/4/2009)
Only 2 venues
2009-2010
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (9/17/2009-1/17/2010)
Phillips Collection, Washington DC (2/6/2010-5/9/2010)
Only 2 venues
2016
Georgia O'Keeffe
Tate Modern, London (7/6/2016-10/30/2016)
2017-2018
Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern
Brooklyn Museum, New York (3/3/2017–7/23/2017)
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (8/18/2017-11/19/2017)
Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (12/16/2017 4/8/2018)
2021-2022
The O'Keeffe Circle: Artist as Gallerist and Collector
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (9/10/2021-3/3/2021)
2023
Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time
Museum of Modern Art, New York (4/12/2023 - 8/12/2023)
Published ReferencesEldredge, Chas C. Georgia O'keefe: American And Modern. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992: color plate 26.
Millhouse, Barbara B. and Robert Workman. American Originals. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1990: 108-9.
Hammond, Anne Dr. History of Photography. Taylor and Francis, Winter 2008.
Morgan-Griffiths, Lauris. Georgia O’Keeffe: An American Perspective. London: Quercus, 2011.
Haskell, Barbara, ed. O’Keeffe’s Abstraction: Making the Unknown Known. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2009. [Whitney Museum of American Art]
Pyne, Kathleen A. Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle. Berkley CA: University of California Press, 2007.
Pioneers of American Abstraction: Oscar Bluemner, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, Max Weber. New York: Andrew Crispo Gallery, 1973.
Barson, Tanya, ed. Georgia O'Keeffe. London: Tate Publishing, 2016. Pg 81.
Corn, Wanda M., Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern.New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2017. Pg. 159.
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories , with contributions by Martha R. Severens and David Park Curry (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Reynolda House Museum of American Art affiliated with Wake Forest University, 2017). pg. 208, 209
DepartmentAmerican Art
Pool in the Woods, Lake George
Artist
Georgia O'Keeffe
(1887 - 1986)
Date1922
Mediumpastel on paper
DimensionsFrame: 26 1/2 x 37 x 1 1/4 in. (67.3 x 94 x 3.2 cm)
Image: 17 x 27 1/2 in. (43.2 x 69.9 cm)
Paper: 17 1/2 x 27 7/8 in. (44.5 x 70.8 cm)
Signed<none>
Credit LineGift of Barbara B. Millhouse in memory of E. Carter, Nancy Susan Reynolds, and Winifred Babcock
Copyright© 2021 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Object number1984.2.9
DescriptionA backing inscription on this pastel drawing by Georgia O’Keeffe, written in Alfred Stieglitz’s hand, reads “Walk in Lake George/Pond in Centre.” [1] Whether “pool” or “pond,” the landscape depicted is thus associated with the Stieglitz family compound at Lake George. Georgia O’Keeffe had first visited the Stieglitz home at Lake George during the summer of 1918 to meet the family of the noted photographer and gallery owner who was also her lover. O’Keeffe had begun a professional relationship with Stieglitz by participating in exhibitions at his progressive New York City gallery “291” in 1916, and an intimate relationship in 1918. In 1922, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were living together, although he would not divorce his wife and marry O’Keeffe until 1924. This drawing was first exhibited in 1923 as part of O’Keeffe’s solo exhibition (organized by Stieglitz) at the Anderson Galleries, Park Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street, New York City. Stieglitz had recently exhibited his photographic portraits of O’Keeffe, a series of detailed studies of her hands, face, and nude body, often posed in juxtaposition with her paintings and drawing. Frank and intimate, these images also demonstrate Stieglitz’s conviction that, in O’Keeffe, he had discovered the great woman Modernist. “At last, a woman on paper!” he had exclaimed upon first seeing her work in 1916.
From her studies with the Art Students League’s distinguished teacher William Merritt Chase, O’Keeffe had learned to work quickly—she called it his “dash and go” style—to capture detail with an economy of strokes while integrating the parts into the whole. But she did not want to paint like Chase and was later inspired by her teachers Alan Bement and Arthur Wesley Dow to “fill space in a beautiful way.” [2] With charcoal, chalks and watercolor she could work out her new attempts at pictorial composition freely, and between the years 1916 and 1918 she produced more works on paper than she did during the entirety of her long career. Particular about her craftsmanship and artists’ materials, she sometimes even made her own pastel chalks and ground her own pigments for her oil paints. [3]
Pool in the Woods, Lake George is a rectangular composition, oriented horizontally, with a dark black ovoid placed slightly off-center to the left. The center ovoid/void is delineated by a curvilinear grayish white line that suggests either swelling form or a reflection of light on the water’s surface. Enfolding this central form or space is a swath of sienna brown with modeling in brighter tints and deeper shades of brown to suggest lips, eyelids, or labial folds. The reddish brown color is intensified by an encircling band of green. Because O’Keeffe drew with many short strokes of her chalks to optically mix yellow, green and viridian, the textural suggestion is of nature, such as trees from a distance. Surrounding this green concentric band, the subsequent color bands flatten out at midpoint, suggesting a more traditional pictorial representation of a horizon line, defined by trees and water, mountain and sky. Barbara B. Millhouse has noted, “By bringing the mountain and rimmed cavity into a single image, she has merged the faraway and the nearby.” [4]
There are two other 1922 pastels of this subject with similar color scheme; Lake George in the Woods was also shown in the 1923 Anderson exhibition and, although a much squarer composition, it shares a similar ovoid around which fringed concentric rings spread outward from the center. Stieglitz noted that another painting, The Pond in Woods, Lake George was described by O’Keeffe as “the last one,” presumably of this series. [5] It does appear that the central ovoid is further receding from the picture plane in a downward spiraling movement, almost as if O’Keeffe is bidding farewell to this series of images.
O’Keeffe’s style is one of minimal detail, enlarged form, and deliberate cropping. Her emphasis on her overall composition and balance of positive and negative space renders her natural forms more abstract. Yet her compositions are not static. As art historian Kathleen Pyne has observed, “At times O’Keeffe combined lateral undulations with a centered form. She organized Pool in the Woods, Lake George for example, around a vortex or a nebula that generates its energies outward from the center across the surface in rhythmic lines. Edges and lines on her surfaces, whether evoking a still-life form or the surge of wind, water, or earth, she conceived in terms of velocity—movement—that was always unpredictable”. [6]
Art historians have noted the influence of photography on O’Keeffe’s use of pictorial space. “The radicality of her early transformation of sense data into a psychologically-charged visual language accelerated after her introduction to photography, as she began to translate the medium’s compression of near and far space and its reliance on framing and viewpoint into high-keyed color and boldly articulated organic forms.” [7]
“O’Keeffe’s teachers Alon Bement and Arthur Wesley Dow had encouraged her to listen to music while composing her drawings and to visualize music. [8] O’Keeffe’s idiom of musicality—flowing movements that suggest the polyphonic lines of song as released and contained with a spiral—was highly personal to her and therefore effective as a translation of her feelings.” [9] As O’Keeffe wrote in her artist’s statement for the 1923 Anderson exhibition, “I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way—things that I had no words for.” [10]
Notes:
[1] Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vol. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, Washington, D.C: National Gallery of Art; Abiquiu, NM: Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 1999, vol. 1: p. 214.
[2] “Dow’s design process emphasizes the framing of a motif—its placement on the surface and its relation to the whole space—and the study of notan, or the relation between light and dark tonalities. . . Based on the lessons of the Japanese print, Dow’s illustrations taught the Photo-Secessionists as well as O’Keeffe’s generation of modernists how to pull out the frame vertically or horizontally and arrange the motif on the surface for surprisingly intimate effects.” (Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné.)
[3] Leeds, Valerie Ann. “Georgia O’Keeffe: Color and Conservation,”American Art Review Vol XVIII: 2. 2006, 156.
[4] Millhouse, Barbara and Robert Workman. American Originals: Selections from Reynolda House Museum of American Art. New York: The American Federation of Arts, 1990, p 108.
[5] Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol 1, p. 214
[6] Pyne, p. 255
[7] Letter dated April 2, 2007 from Barbara Haskell, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art to Executive Director Allison Perkins, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, in the museum’s collection records.
[8] O’Keeffe enrolled in summer session art classes at the University of Virginia in 1912 and 1913, studying with Alon Bement, a disciple of Dow. She was Bement’s assistant in 1914 and he helped her find a job in Texas. She returned to be a full-time instructor in UVA’s summer sessions in 1915 and 1916.
[9] Pyne, Kathleen. Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007: 203-4.
[10] Lynes, Barbara Buhler. O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, appendix A p. 184.
ProvenanceTo at least 1935
Georgia O’Keeffe [1]
Downtown Gallery, New York NY [2]
Harry Spiro, New York NY [3]
1975
M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York. [4]
From 1975 to 1984
Barbara B. Millhouse, purchased from M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York on April 1, 1975. [5]
From 1984
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC, donated by Barbara B. Millhouse on December 2, 1984. [6]
Notes:
[1] Artist lent her work to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York for the “Abstract Painting in America” exhibition in 1935.
[2] Old coversheet from 1996, object file.
[3] See note 2.
[4] Bill of sale, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., object file.
[5] See note 4.
[6] Deed of Gift, object file.
Exhibition History1935
Abstract Painting In America
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (1935)
Lent by artist
1952
Georgia O'Keeffe: Exhibition of Pastel Paintings Retrospective, 1914-1945
Downtown Gallery, New York NY (1952)
1973
Pioneer Of American Abstraction
Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York NY (1973)
1987
O'Keefe Centennial Celebration
Columbia College, Columbia SC (11/13/1987-11/16/1987)
Three day festival
1990-1992
American Originals, Selections From Reynolda House Museum of American Art
The American Federation of Arts
Center for the Fine Arts, Miami FL (9/22/1990-11/18/1990)
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs CA (12/16/1990-2/10/1991)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (3/6/1991-5/11/1991)
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis TN (6/2/1991-7/28/1991)
Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth TX (8/17/1991-10/20/1991)
Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago IL (11/17/1991-1/12/1992)
1992
Georgia O'Keeffe: Natural Issues, 1918-1924
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown MA (4/27/1992-7/12/1992)
1993-1994
Georgia O'Keeffe: Modern And American
Organized by InterCultura, Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, and United States Information Agency (USIA), in cooperation with the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas TX.
The Hayward Gallery, London (4/8/1993-6/27/93)
Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (7/15/1993-10/1/1993)
Yokohama Museum of Art, Tokyo (10/30/1993-1/16/1994)
1997
Georgia O’Keeffe: From 291 to New Mexico
The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque NM (7/13/1997-10/18/1997)
2008-2009
Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (5/23/2008-9/7/2008)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC (9/26/2008 -1/4/2009)
Only 2 venues
2009-2010
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (9/17/2009-1/17/2010)
Phillips Collection, Washington DC (2/6/2010-5/9/2010)
Only 2 venues
2016
Georgia O'Keeffe
Tate Modern, London (7/6/2016-10/30/2016)
2017-2018
Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern
Brooklyn Museum, New York (3/3/2017–7/23/2017)
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (8/18/2017-11/19/2017)
Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (12/16/2017 4/8/2018)
2021-2022
The O'Keeffe Circle: Artist as Gallerist and Collector
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (9/10/2021-3/3/2021)
2023
Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time
Museum of Modern Art, New York (4/12/2023 - 8/12/2023)
Published ReferencesEldredge, Chas C. Georgia O'keefe: American And Modern. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992: color plate 26.
Millhouse, Barbara B. and Robert Workman. American Originals. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1990: 108-9.
Hammond, Anne Dr. History of Photography. Taylor and Francis, Winter 2008.
Morgan-Griffiths, Lauris. Georgia O’Keeffe: An American Perspective. London: Quercus, 2011.
Haskell, Barbara, ed. O’Keeffe’s Abstraction: Making the Unknown Known. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2009. [Whitney Museum of American Art]
Pyne, Kathleen A. Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle. Berkley CA: University of California Press, 2007.
Pioneers of American Abstraction: Oscar Bluemner, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, Max Weber. New York: Andrew Crispo Gallery, 1973.
Barson, Tanya, ed. Georgia O'Keeffe. London: Tate Publishing, 2016. Pg 81.
Corn, Wanda M., Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern.New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2017. Pg. 159.
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories , with contributions by Martha R. Severens and David Park Curry (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Reynolda House Museum of American Art affiliated with Wake Forest University, 2017). pg. 208, 209
Status
Not on view