Red and Pink | Harvard Art Museums

Gallery Text

O’Keeffe created Red and Pink on commission for the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company, the largest American producer of the fabric in the 1920s. The painting was reproduced in advertisements for the colorful textile designs the company was introducing in the fall of 1926. The artist achieved abstraction by enlarging and cropping the cascading petals of a flower beyond recognition, in a manner that recalls the close-up techniques of modernist photography. It was an approach she also employed in her iconic large-scale paintings of plants, flowers, and natural phenomena of the American southwest. The vibrant undulating forms insinuate a wide range of organic structures: from the anatomy of flora, to the composition of flames, to the sanguine recesses of the body.

Identification and Creation

Object Number: 2006.49
People: Georgia O'Keeffe, American (Sun Prairie, WI 1887 - 1986 Santa Fe, NM)
Title: Red and Pink
Classification: Paintings
Work Type: painting
Date: 1925
Culture: American
Persistent Link: https://hvrd.art/o/312684

Location

Location: Level 1, Room 1310, Modern and Contemporary Art, Surrealism

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Physical Descriptions

Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 40.6 x 31.8 cm (16 x 12 1/2 in.)
framed: 61.2 x 52.5 x 4 cm (24 1/8 x 20 11/16 x 1 9/16 in.)

Provenance

Recorded Ownership History: Georgia O'Keeffe, sold; to Doris Bry, New York 1977. Private Collector, Hawaii. [Sotheby's, New York, 30 November 2005, lot 102], sold. [David Findlay, Jr., Inc., New York, New York]; sold; to Harvard University Art Museums, 2006.

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line: Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Dr. Ernest G. Stillman, Class of 1907, by exchange
Copyright: © The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Accession Year: 2006
Object Number: 2006.49
Division: Modern and Contemporary Art
Contact: am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu
Permissions: The Harvard Art Museums encourage the use of images found on this website for personal, noncommercial use, including educational and scholarly purposes. To request a higher resolution file of this image, please submit an online request.

Publication History

Charles C. Eldredge, Georgia O'Keeffe: American and Modern (New Haven, 1993), pl. 43
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonne (New Haven, CT, 1999), p. 267, no. 480 in Vol. I, ill.
Stephan Wolohojian and Alvin L. Clark, Jr., Harvard Art Museum/ Handbook, ed. Stephan Wolohojian, Harvard Art Museum (Cambridge, 2008), p. 201, ill.
Barbara Haskell, ed., Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 2009), p. 97, ill., 230.
Wanda M. Corn, Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books Prestel (Brooklyn, NY, 2017), pp. 112-113, fig. 105, ill. (color)

Exhibition History

Re-View: S118 European & American Art since 1900, Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Cambridge, 09/13/2008 - 04/09/2011
O'Keeffe and Abstraction, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 09/17/2009 - 01/17/2010; The Phillips Collection, Washington, 02/06/2010 - 05/09/2010; Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, 05/28/2010 - 09/12/2010
Re-View: European and American Art Since 1900, Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Cambridge, 05/03/2011 - 06/01/2013
32Q: 1310 Surrealism, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 11/16/2014 - 04/14/2025; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 11/16/2014 - 01/01/2050

Subjects and Contexts

Collection Highlights
Iconic Works

Verification Level

This record has been reviewed by the curatorial staff but may be incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu

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2006.49: Red and Pink