Sky Above Clouds (1960–1977) is a series of eleven cloudscape paintings by the American modernist painter Georgia O'Keeffe, produced during her late period. The series of paintings is inspired by O'Keeffe's views from her airplane window during her frequent air travel in the 1950s and early 1960s when she flew around the world. The series begins in 1960 with Sky Above the Flat White Cloud II, the start of a minimalist cycle of six works, with O'Keeffe trying to replicate the view of a solid white cloud she saw while flying back to New Mexico. She would continue to work on this singular motif in Sky with Flat White Cloud, Clouds 5/ Yellow Horizon and Clouds, Sky with Moon, and Sky Above Clouds / Yellow Horizon and Clouds. A darker variation of this motif occurred in 1972, influenced by her battle with macular degeneration, resulting in The Beyond, her last, unassisted painting before losing her eyesight.
In 1962, O'Keeffe experimented with a representational cycle in the series based on a different view she saw while flying, this time of a pink sky above the horizon with patches of cloudlets, or cloud streets below it, rather than a solid mass of clouds. Her first attempt at trying to replicate this view, An Island with Clouds, was unsuccessful, but she began to make significant progress on this theme in 1963 with Above the Clouds I. The momentum carried her through two more variations on the same idea, Sky Above Clouds II and Sky Above Clouds III, with both works twice the size of the first. The final, fourth work in this cycle, Sky Above Clouds IV, is the largest painting ever created by the artist, at two meters (eight feet) high and seven meters (24 feet) wide. O'Keeffe completed this monumental work at the age of 77 in the summer of 1965. Three of the paintings in the series are held by private collectors, while the rest are found in the National Gallery of Art, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Background Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) spent her early career as an artist in New York from 1918 through 1929.Messinger 2001, p. 15. By the late 1930s, she had become the most famous woman painter in the United States.Lisle 1997, p. 306-307. She married art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz in 1924. His series of cloud photographs, known as the Equivalents (1925–1934), shows that O'Keeffe and her husband addressed similar subjects, but had different approaches.Messinger 1984, p. 78-19, 60. "More difficult to assess is the extent to which O'Keeffe and Stieglitz influenced each other’s work",Messinger 1984, p. 18. writes art historian Lisa Messinger. "Their subjects are often similar, but their approaches seem vastly different ... Both explored the multiple possibilities of a subject in a thematic series, reworking compositions in order to discover the ultimate solution."Messinger 1984, p. 18-19.
Stieglitz took a symbolist approach to his work, while O'Keeffe came at it systematically, but they equally made use of abstraction in their art. A Celebration (1924), an early cloud painting by O'Keeffe, appears to show the influence of Stieglitz on her work,Marshall 2007, p. 25. as Stieglitz was the first to produce identifiable works that incorporated abstraction; O'Keeffe was also the first to experiment with abstraction in her nonobjective work, beginning with Special No. 9. (1915), First Drawing of the Blue Lines, Black Lines, and Blue Lines X (1916), almost a decade before Stieglitz created the Equivalents. Messinger emphasizes that more than technique alone, "it was their equal dedication to perfection that made them compatible as partners and receptive to each other's influence".
In 1929, she began spending more time in New Mexico, with her cow skull paintings becoming some of her best known works during this period (Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue, 1931).Messinger 2001, p. 125. In 1934, she moved to Ghost Ranch and began working on landscape paintings of the desert. Stieglitz died in 1946, and in 1949, O'Keeffe moved permanently to the town of Abiquiú, where she had a second home as a studio. Here, she produced her famous patio series of paintings (In the Patio VIII, 1950) whose variations and abstractions would develop into her new series, Sky Above Clouds.Seiberling 1968, p. 52; Messinger 2001, p. 156-157. In 1960, just before she began working on the cloud series, which she would return to off and on for seventeen years,Messinger 2001, p. 177. curator Katharine Kuh asked O'Keeffe why she chose to work in the series format. O'Keeffe replied, "I have a single-track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It's like getting acquainted with a person, and I don't get acquainted easily."Prosyniuk 1991, p. 476; Kuh 1962, p. 191.
Development
O'Keeffe had been born in 1887, in the era of the horse and buggy, and was only 16 years old when the Wright brothers made the first controlled powered airplane flights, and 37 years old when she moved into a skyscraper in New York.Lisle 1997, p. 375. The post-war aviation era began in the 1950s, and with it, what became known as the Jet Age,Eldredge 1993, p. 208-209. bringing the opportunity of commercial air travel to the wider public. Despite her fear of flying,O'Keeffe 1976, n.p., p. 201. O'Keeffe took advantage of this new experience and she began to travel extensively outside the US at the age of 63, first to Mexico in 1951, Europe in 1953, followed by a trip to Peru in 1956, and finally around the world in 1959.Lisle 1997, p. 363-373.
In the 1950s, O'Keeffe's canvases grew larger, which was a style favored by the contemporaneous abstract expressionists. Although that style of art was popular, O'Keeffe's increasing use of larger sizes was more indicative of the larger world she was now exploring.Messinger 2001, p. 158. Her frequent trips on an airplane led to a change in her artistic perspective and viewpoint; her work, which once focused on magnification of her subjects, now became telescopic, and emphasized the importance of the sky itself.Robinson 1999, p. 495. From these travel experiences came two new series of paintings based on high altitude views from an airplane: a series of river paintings, and a series showing the sky above the clouds.Messinger 2001, p. 158-160; Hoffman 1984, p. 48-50. Between the rivers and clouds series, O'Keeffe also worked on a series of roads, viewed not from above in an airplane, but from high on top of her Abiquiú studio on the mesa.
In 1960, she wrote about the view outside her plane to her younger sister Claudia: "Now the sun is bright over what looks like a vast field of snow stretching all the way to the horizon..It is odd to look out on this field of snow or white cotton— It looks almost solid enough to walk on."Robinson 1999, p. 499. The Space Age, which began in 1958, was now well under way, with humanity orbiting around the Earth in just hours. "For O'Keeffe", writes Katherine Hoffman, "achievements in outer space were a way of living out man's dreams, an important achievement". Just five years later, humans were taking their first spacewalk. That same month, O'Keeffe began to explore the last version of this contemporaneous theme in a monumental work of art.
Series During her last productive period in her career, Georgia O'Keeffe completed a series of approximately 11 cloudscape paintings between 1960 and 1977. Eight of the primary works were completed between 1960 and 1965, with a ninth work in 1966, a tenth work in 1972, and an eleventh installment in the series in 1977. Six of the eleven paintings in this series are minimalist, showing simple strips of sky color on top and a solid or stripes of color, mostly white, on the bottom.Messenger 2001, p. 173-174, 176; Eipeldauer & Steininger 2016, p. 190. Five of the works are representational, with one, An Island with Clouds (1962), considered a failed attempt to initiate the motif, followed by a successful core motif in four "Sky Above Cloud" paintings showing variations on a pink sky above the horizon with patches of cloudlets in the foreground.
Sky Above Clouds IV (1965) is the largest painting by O'Keeffe in her entire collected work, measuring two meters (eight feet) high and seven meters (24 feet) wide.Hoffman 1984, p. 118. It is considered an extraordinary achievement for the artist, as she accomplished the painting at the age of 77.Messinger 1997, p. 45. O'Keeffe was active for a woman in her late 70s, but she began having problems with her eyesight in 1968, eventually losing her central vision due to macular degeneration in 1971.Messinger 2001, p. 173-180. She was left with limited peripheral vision, and made her final painting without assistance in 1972.Scott 2015, p. 190; Lynes 2007, p. 62. Undeterred, she continued working throughout the 1970s, and later into the 1980s with assistance from helpers.
Sky Above the Flat White Cloud II
Sky Above the Flat White Cloud II is the first cloudscape in O'Keeffe's cloud series that began in the 1960s. It started as a sketch sometime after October 1960 while she was on a six-week tour flying around the Asia-Pacific region, stopping over in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Fiji, Tahiti, Korea, and the Philippines.Drohojowska-Philp 2005, p. 477-479. It was completed in 1964. Art historian Lisa Messinger notes that the design of the painting follows the style of color field and minimalist painters. This was partly achieved by applying thin paint on a huge canvas with simple compositions making use of narrow strips of color at the top, leaving the bottom three-quarters white.
In 1976, O'Keeffe again reminisced about what got her started on the painting and the series: "One day when I was flying back to New Mexico, the sky below was a most beautiful solid white. It looked so secure that I thought I could walk right out on it to the horizon if the door opened. The sky beyond was a light clear blue. It was so wonderful that I couldn't wait to be home to paint it. I couldn't find a canvas the right size so it was painted on one I had—one that was too high and not wide enough."O'Keeffe 1976, n.p., p. 208-209. The painting was gifted to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in 2006.O'Keeffe 1960-1964.
An Island with Clouds
Like Sky Above the Flat White Cloud II before it, the creation of An Island with Clouds in 1962 was influenced by O'Keeffe's six-week trip to Asia in 1960.Eldredge 1997, p. 140. Unlike her first trip in 1959, the clouds she saw and tried to paint were broken up and patterned into rounded shapes. "The next time I flew", O'Keeffe reminisced, "the sky below was completely full of little oval white clouds, all more or less alike. The many clouds were more of a problem." Messinger believes that An Island with Clouds was O'Keeffe's first attempt to develop this idea, but that it failed to achieve the intended effect. It was not until Above the Clouds I, Messinger argues, that O'Keeffe was able to succeed in reproducing the "little oval white clouds" that she had originally seen from the airplane.
Sky with Flat White Cloud
Sky with Flat White Cloud, also known as Sky above White Clouds I,National Gallery of Art 1992, p. 252. is an abstract, 1962 painting that was inspired by O'Keeffe's trip to Egypt in the spring of that year. The canvas is horizontal, showing blue and green stripes of color (the sky) at the top, while two-thirds of the portion below (the clouds) is white. While abstract, O'Keeffe insisted it was close to photographic quality, as it was almost identical to what she saw outside her airplane window: "Usually, what I paint is something that I see. There was a line around the whole horizon. It was an extraordinary effect. Here was this great white field of clouds solid against the blue."Drohojowska-Philp 2005, p. 483-484.