Every Known Work by Georgia O’Keeffe Has Been Digitized and Made Available Online

Upon hear­ing the names of Arthur Dove or Mars­den Hart­ley, the sat­u­rat­ed col­ors and organ­i­cal­ly askew lines of those painters’ land­scapes may appear before your mind’s eye. But unless you have a spe­cial inter­est in Amer­i­can mod­ernists of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, they prob­a­bly don’t. The name Geor­gia O’Ke­effe, by con­trast, can hard­ly fail to bring a few images even to the mind of the strict­ly casu­al art appre­ci­a­tor: New Mex­i­can mesas, ani­mal skulls, and above all flow­ers in extreme close-up. Apart from the artis­tic skill and dis­tinc­tive vision with which she cre­at­ed it, O’Ke­ef­fe’s work per­sists in the wider cul­ture because of how well it hap­pens to repro­duce in a vari­ety of con­texts, includ­ing post­cards, mugs, and even appar­el, such as that sold at her epony­mous muse­um in San­ta Fe.

Keep­ing such prod­ucts around is, of course, no sub­sti­tute for see­ing the real thing; in their phys­i­cal real­i­ty, O’Ke­ef­fe’s paint­ings have a way of rebuff­ing all the inter­pre­ta­tions with which they’ve been freight­ed for more than a cen­tu­ry now. If you can’t make it out to New Mex­i­co, the Geor­gia O’Ke­effe Muse­um has been work­ing to make every sin­gle one of her pieces (includ­ing sculp­tures and pho­tographs) avail­able for view­ing online at a just-launched por­tal called Access O’Ke­effe.

The muse­um describes it as a “user-friend­ly, search­able web­site with high-res­o­lu­tion images, visu­al descrip­tions, exhi­bi­tion his­to­ries, archival mate­ri­als, and research data asso­ci­at­ed with the artist’s two-vol­ume cat­a­logue raison­né.” The site’s vis­i­tors “can browse by col­or, shape, or medi­um, explore the con­text of works cre­at­ed before and after a spe­cif­ic paint­ing, trace his­toric exhi­bi­tions, cre­ate lists of favorites, and down­load images.”

Access O’Ke­effe makes it easy to find the artist’s most famous paint­ings, but also works that may sur­prise view­ers who only know her mesas, skulls, and flow­ers. Take, for exam­ple, such noc­tur­nal­ly themed can­vas­es as her ear­ly Starlight Night, from 1917, or her late Unti­tled (City Night), from the nine­teen-sev­en­ties. O’Ke­ef­fe’s Amer­i­ca, we must remem­ber, isn’t lim­it­ed to the desert: though she did spend most of her near­ly cen­tu­ry-long life’s sec­ond half in New Mex­i­co, it also took her from Wis­con­sin to Vir­ginia to Texas to New York, with stints in South Car­oli­na and Hawaii. Giv­en the impor­tance of under­stand­ing any artist’s con­texts both geo­graph­i­cal and social, Access O’Ke­effe also pro­vides an archive of arti­facts and exhi­bi­tions relat­ed to the peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions asso­ci­at­ed with her — Arthur Dove and Mars­den Hart­ley includ­ed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Geor­gia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art, a Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Painter Nar­rat­ed by Gene Hack­man

How Geor­gia O’Keeffe Became Geor­gia O’Keeffe: An Ani­mat­ed Video Tells the Sto­ry

An Intro­duc­tion to the Paint­ing That Changed Geor­gia O’Keeffe’s Career: Ram’s Head, White Hol­ly­hock-Hills

The Real Geor­gia O’Keeffe: The Artist Reveals Her­self in Vin­tage Doc­u­men­tary Clips

Recipes from the Kitchen of Geor­gia O’Keeffe

Alfred Stieglitz: The Elo­quent Eye, a Reveal­ing Look at “The Father of Mod­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.