Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986)

The present work is one of a series of seven pastels George O’Keeffe executed while staying at her friend Florence Schauffler’s home in York Beach, Maine, in May 1922. Seeking to recapture the same vast and untamed landscape from her earliest days in Texas, O’Keeffe was mesmerized by the Maine coast, writing to Alfred Stieglitz, “For three hours watching the tide coming in with these tremendous waves rolling over rocks that make New York seem like an idiot’s toy — The sky mostly blue — and such masses of froth and foam rushing and rolling and booming till everything seemed to shake — and such whiteness I had never imagined — such maddening power —.”(as quoted in S. Greenough, ed. My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, New Haven, Connecticut, 2011, pp. 326-27). In Wave, O’Keeffe exhibits her control over the pastel medium while brilliantly capturing the dynamism and sublime beauty of the ocean which so fascinated her.