Sky with Flat White Cloud is the second among a series of seven paintings in which Georgia O’Keeffe explored an unfamiliar perspective—the sky and clouds as seen from an airplane in flight. The artist described how her unusual and original choice of viewpoint was inspired by an experience she had traveling by air: “One day 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.” The view from the airplane window evoked two recurrent themes in O’Keeffe’s work, serenity and limitless space. While she was working on the cloud series, she said, “I’ve often thought how wonderful it would be to simply stand out in space and have nothing!” These images evoke her fantasy of stepping into that void.
O’Keeffe’s cloud paintings are reminiscent of her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of cloud formations from the 1920s, collectively known as Equivalents, that he defined as “direct revelations of a man’s world in the sky—documents of eternal relations—perhaps even a philosophy.” O’Keeffe had also experimented with cloudlike forms in an earlier painting, A Celebration (1924, Seattle Art Museum).
In Sky with Flat White Cloud, O’Keeffe represented the sky as three horizontal bands. The largest represents the solid cloudbank, surmounted by a narrow band of yellowish haze (possibly inspired by the airplane’s contrail) that leads to the blue sky above. The composition corresponds to that of the first picture of the series, Sky Above the Flat White Cloud II [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky Above the Flat White Cloud II, 1960–1964, oil on canvas, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 2006.5.364. © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, but the painting in the National Gallery of Art’s collection is twice as large. The large canvas fills the viewer’s field of vision, and the exaggerated horizontal axis emphasizes a sense of infinity.
The next three versions of the theme, Above the Clouds I [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] Georgia O'Keeffe, Above the Clouds I, 1962–1963, oil on canvas, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Gift of The Burnett Foundation and The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, 1997.5.14. © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Sky Above Clouds II [fig. 3]
[fig. 3] Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky Above Clouds II, 1963, oil on canvas, private collection. © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, and Sky Above Clouds III [fig. 4]
[fig. 4] Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky Above Clouds III, 1963, oil on canvas, private collection. © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, were all inspired by a different flight in which the artist found the sky dotted with “little oval white clouds, all more or less alike.” In these paintings, she represented the clouds as pebble-like forms arranged in a bright blue sky. In the sixth painting in the series, Clouds 5/Yellow Horizon and Clouds [fig. 5]
[fig. 5] Georgia O'Keeffe, Clouds 5/Yellow Horizon and Clouds, 1963–1964, oil on canvas, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 2006.05.364. © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, O’Keeffe reverted to the format of the first two pictures but added a diagonal path through the clouds ascending from left to right. In the seventh and final painting in the series, the twenty-four-foot-long Sky Above Clouds IV [fig. 6]
[fig. 6] Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky Above Clouds IV, 1965, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Restricted gift of the Paul and Gabriella Rosenbaum Foundation; gift of Georgia O'Keeffe, 1983.821. © The Art Institute of Chicago. Image: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY, O’Keeffe returned to the “little oval white clouds” motif on a monumental scale.
Robert Torchia
July 24, 2024
