ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation / Thesis: “LIVING ON PAPER ...

O’Keeffe began her long and distinguished modernist career with these works on
paper before she turned to the oil paintings for which she is best known. As Judith C.
Walsh has demonstrated, O’Keeffe’s choice in the mid nineteen-teens to make her first
modern works in charcoal reflected a comfortable reliance on a medium she had mastered
during her academic art training. 5
I will also argue in this dissertation that many
additional factors were at work in the artist’s decision to use graphic media in her early
modern works. O’Keeffe’s visits to 291 and her reading of avant-garde books and
journals had exposed her to modern drawings and watercolors. The few oil paintings to
which she had access at this point were in the form of photographic reproductions.
Others have noted O’Keeffe’s early formal graphic inventions and their place at the core
of her life-long modernist enterprise. 6
This dissertation establishes, however, that
O’Keeffe’s grasp of the very notion of modernism came to her through graphic media.
Drawing and watercolor, as I aim to show, significantly conditioned and shaped
O’Keeffe’s initial modernist creations.
Near the end of her career, O’Keeffe affirmed her enduring regard for her early
works on paper. Doris Bry recalled, “When as guest curator of the Whitney retrospective
I reviewed the early drawings and watercolors with O’Keeffe in Abiquiu in 1969, she
turned to me at the end and remarked: ‘We don’t really need to have the show, I never
did any better.’” 7
For Stieglitz, too, O’Keeffe’s early graphic works held lasting appeal
on many levels. He approached these drawings and watercolors from his own viewpoints
as a promoter of modern art, a photographer, and a man who became the artist’s husband.
Stieglitz assembled a rich composite portrait of the artist as avant-garde draftswoman in
his letters, discussions with gallery visitors, and his photographs of O’Keeffe posed with
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