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Kerry Nolan: This is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Kerry Nolan in for Alison Stewart. The great American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe, is most known for her enlarged paintings of flowers using oil paints on canvas, but what about her works on paper? A new exhibition called Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time displays more than 120 pieces of O'Keeffe's work using charcoal, watercolor, and pastels on paper that she made throughout her life in different areas.

She was in Texas and South Carolina, in New York, New Mexico, and a lot more places. Curator Samantha Friedman writes, "To see O'Keeffe, her work, her contribution, took time looking again and anew that her works on paper. The impression of her contemporaneity-" Did I say that word [unintelligible 00:00:55] "-remains true. It takes time to see." The show opened over the weekend at MoMA and it's open until August 12th. With me now in the studio is MoMA Associate Curator Samantha Friedman. Samantha, welcome.

Samantha Friedman: Thank you so much for having me.

Kerry Nolan: It's our pleasure. Before we go really deeply into the work of Georgia O'Keeffe. There's one sentence in the opening wall text of the show that I'd like to hear you talk a little bit about. Regarding the work on the exhibition, you say it demonstrates "the persistent process of an artist who sought to capture not only form, but rhythm". What do you mean by that?

Samantha Friedman: I think that often when we see an exhibition, or when we understand an artist's work, we focus on a single work of art. We might see a single great painting within the context of a collection, and what we wanted to do for this exhibition was to focus not only on O'Keeffe's works on paper, but the way that she made those works on paper in series. We wanted our audiences to be able to understand these works of art in the context of each other, and in the context of the artists process, which was something that was persistent, that had a rhythm, where each work was made in relationship to other works.

Kerry Nolan: Oh, okay. All right. The title of the show is To See Takes Time. How did that premise arise for you?

Samantha Friedman: That title comes from a quotation by the artist, and I should say that O'Keeffe's language is as vibrant and vivid as her works of art. She said about a flower, nobody sees a flower, we haven't time, and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time. I wanted to use that thought, that suggestion, that invitation from the artist to invite our visitors to also take time in seeing these multiple works.

Kerry Nolan: I love that. I love that. It's not a timed exhibition, you can take your time to just stand in front of a drawing and absorb it.

Samantha Friedman: Exactly. I think there's so much to see in works on paper, all of the marks of process, the remnants of the artist's journey with that work, so we would encourage our visitors to take time with individual works, but also to take time in seeing how they relate to each other just as it took the artist time to see, to see slowly, to see deeply, and to think about compositions across multiple sheets.

Kerry Nolan: There are a lot of different angles into exploring Georgia O'Keeffe's art. You talked a little bit about it, but I wanted to expand just a bit on why you wanted to focus this exhibition specifically on Georgia O'Keeffe's works on paper versus canvas.

Samantha Friedman: Often with an artist, it's the paintings that we know best, and specifically with Georgia O'Keeffe, it's those paintings of flowers that are zoomed in, especially from the 1920s, the 1930s. It's almost to the point where it becomes a poster, the mother's day calendar version of Georgia O'Keeffe or the dorm room poster. That's when we stop seeing. If we want to renew our vision just as she was renewing her vision all the time with the world around her, it can be really helpful to focus on works on paper, which necessarily maintain the traces of process in a way that paintings might not.

Kerry Nolan: It suddenly occurred to me that this was a palate cleanser for both the artist and the observer.

Samantha Friedman: Exactly, definitely. I think for O'Keeffe, it's important to remember that it's her breakthrough works, the first mature works that she makes, and that she's known through, that are works on paper, that are drawings. This is an artist who started with drawing, and that even when she moves to painting later in her career, she returns to works on paper at key moments of experimentation and change.

Kerry Nolan: That makes sense, actually, even from an economic standpoint, the paper is a little less expensive than a giant canvas. Did she think about the kinds of paper she used?

Samantha Friedman: She did. I should say I partnered on this exhibition both with the Curatorial Assistant, Emily Olek, and also with our Associate Paper Conservator, Laura Neufeld, and it's in partnering with a paper conservator that we can learn so much about the artist's material choices. O'Keeffe was an artist who left nothing to chance, she was exceedingly intentional about her material choices, and so when she's using a certain kind of paper, she's using it for very particular effects.

With charcoal, she's often using what we call a laid paper, which is a paper that has ribbed lines in it, and you can see how those ribbed lines take the charcoal, the particulate matter of the charcoal in a specific way, whereas often when she's working on watercolor, she might be using a smoother wove paper, or in particular instances, trying a very specific Japanese paper that might absorb the watercolor in a particular way.

Kerry Nolan: Did she do pen and ink drawings, or is it primarily the charcoal and the watercolors?

Samantha Friedman: There are ink drawings in the show, as well as good old graphite pencil drawings, sketches, ranging from sketches to very finished, beautiful, sensitive renderings in graphite, but it's interesting also to trace how she begins in charcoal, how she opens up to expand her palette with watercolor, and then when she starts painting in earnest, how she adopts pastel as a corollary to oil paint, another oil-based medium with a similar rich palette.

Kerry Nolan: If you're just joining us, my guest is Samantha Friedman. She's the Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art. We're talking about the new exhibition, Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time, which is on view at MoMA from now until August 12th. Samantha, was there a particular reason that you chose to present these drawings in chronological order? Was there a theme in there or?

Samantha Friedman: When I was thinking about bringing these series together, many for the first time, in many cases you'll see a group of works reunited, almost like a family reunion of related drawings for the first time, it made sense to echo that serial logic of the artist's practice with the chronological pathway of her career. I think it makes sense to see her work in that way because even as she's exploring individual series at particular moments, there's a recurrence that happens over time.

You might see a spiraling form in a charcoal or a watercolor from 1916, you might see it again in a pastel from '22, you might see it again in the vision of a goat's horn from the '40s, so presenting it in a chronological way shows how these series not only develop at a particular moment, but how they recur over time.

Kerry Nolan: Doing it in chronological order seems to me it would also show certain, I don't know whether obsessions is the right word or just a rush of work. In particular, the years 1915 to 18 are highlighted because she just did so much. Let's talk about that.

Samantha Friedman: Yes, that was her breakthrough period that I mentioned. It's important to say that, as a woman artist working in the first decades of the 20th century, from a farm family of seven children, she was not someone who could just be an artist at her leisure, she had to work, and for a woman at that time, that meant being an art teacher. You mentioned some of the geographical locations in which she made this work, and she was traveling to those different locations for teaching jobs.

She was a teacher in Virginia, in South Carolina, in Texas, and she would be teaching during the day, and at night she would be unrolling these large sheets of paper onto her floor often and working on her drawing practice.

Kerry Nolan: Was there a particular reason she was so prolific during this time? What was happening in her life at that point?

Samantha Friedman: I think it was because she was really developing her visual language. She says I have shapes in my head, and she almost felt like she didn't have enough time or enough paper to get them all down, so you really feel this dynamic rush of inventing a radical new language.

Kerry Nolan: We're talking about the artist Georgia O'Keeffe and the exhibition at MoMA, called Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time. We see a few examples of how people reacted to her work in this time period, and really how abstract her work was for that era. She herself wrote, and I quote, "I remember hesitating to show the paintings. They looked so real to me, but they passed into the real world as abstractions. No one's seeing what they are. Where did her desire to lean into abstraction come from?

Samantha Friedman: She says that about a series of watercolors that are actually abstract portraits, which seems like a contradiction in terms, but they're portraits of the photographer Paul Strand that she makes in watercolor. She says some people make me see shapes, others don't. I was trying to tell myself why. She makes these watercolors that for all intents and purposes, if you would look at them, you would think that they were abstract.

There's no identifying reference, there's no sense that they might be portraits, but for her, they captured something about the essence of Paul Strand. I think for her, that relationship between observation and abstraction is a really subtle and complex one and one that she explored really fruitfully throughout her entire career.

Kerry Nolan: We talked earlier about the different places she lived because she had to work in order to support her art. What do you notice from this exhibition about how the art changed, depending upon what geographic location she was in?

Samantha Friedman: Those abstractions begin when she's off in these teaching jobs. She goes to Virginia to teach. She starts camping in the mountains there. We start to see hills. We start to see the view from inside of a tent. We start to see an obsession with green and blue watercolor, which she describes as the colors of the landscape during that period. Then we see her go to Canyon, Texas.

We see the enormity of the Palo Duro Canyon, for which that city gets its name. We see her palette expand dramatically in response to the Texas sky. In 1918, she moves to New York. She's able to paint. We see amazing charcoals of cityscapes appear in the work. For an artist that we normally think of in relationship to landscape, we see that urban side. We follow her to the beach in Maine.

Then she's so closely associated with New Mexico. We see the motifs of bones, the door of her New Mexico home that she rendered again and again. She's definitely looking at the world around her, even all the way up through the latest series in the show, which she makes in 1959 when she's traveling around the world. She's looking at the view from the window of the airplane. Even from that high-up perspective, she's thinking about the landscape around her.

Kerry Nolan: You mentioned the way she observed things like the vast sky in Texas. We see the color blue and various shades of blue used throughout the work in this show. I'm thinking of the movement of the pieces, blue numbers one through four. What was it about that color for her?

Samantha Friedman: She talks about sticking with black and white until she could absolutely no longer do without color. She says, "I believe it was June before I needed blue." There's one composition of two lines that she traces first in charcoal, then in black watercolor, and then in blue watercolor. When she gets to the blue watercolor, she says, "This is the one that feels right." She associates herself very intimately with that work. She calls it my blue self. You have this sense that she's equating almost herself with that use of blue. You see that color recur throughout the whole career, all the way up to 1945 when you see her holding up a goat's horn to the sky as a lens to look at the blue of the sky. You see this very vibrant blue circle of sky through the lens of that horn.

Kerry Nolan: There are a few instances in which we see multiple versions of the same. You just mentioned her renderings of the door in her New Mexico home. It shows how repetitive it was when something got into her head, she just kept going and going. Why was that so important to her as an artist?

Samantha Friedman: I think that we often see a single so-called master work, and we forget that this is common to so many artists. This is common to most every artist, that there's repetition, there's rehearsal, there's practice, there are false starts, there's experimentation, and change. That was at the core of O'Keeffe's practice. I think that whether she's testing out different materials, whether she's reducing a form to its bare essentials, whether she's tracing a natural phenomenon that occurs over time, there are these different engines and different logics that drive her to explore her subjects in series.

Kerry Nolan: You talk about engines, and the actual physical creation of some of these works are very physical for her. She wrote about one piece called Drawing Number 9, and she said it was a very bad headache at the time that I was busy drawing every night sitting on the floor in front of the closet door. It was almost like she was punishing herself to get this art out.

Samantha Friedman: I love that drawing. I love the idea that you could make a drawing whose subject is a headache. It confounds this binary between representation and abstraction because she's getting at something experiential. That physicality also translates to the way she's making the works. I mentioned she's often making them on the floor. She's leaning her whole upper body strength into the making of these drawings.

When she's making pastel, and you'll see if you visit the exhibition, how some of these pastels are so smoothly gradated, and she says this thing in a letter, that the skin is wearing off her fingers from rubbing the pastels so much that she's getting them so smooth to the point of pain, to the point of her body really being in the process.

Kerry Nolan: Wow. [chuckles] She did spend some time here in New York City. We broadcast here. Let's talk about that. Beyond her urban scapes, what do we know about the art that she made while she lived and worked here?

Samantha Friedman: She moves to New York in 1918, I should say she studied in New York before that at the Art Students League and also at Teachers College, Columbia. She saw exhibitions at Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery 291, Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and gallerist who would later become her husband. In 1918, she moves to the city, and thanks to Stieglitz, she is given the opportunity to devote herself more fully to painting.

It's really that time and space and that material reality that allows her to move toward painting. That's actually when you see the works on paper practice slow down from that rush of early years, but you do see her focusing on pastel as a corollary to oil paint.

Kerry Nolan: When you say as a corollary, did she find it easier to work with oils or pastels, or do we even know that?

Samantha Friedman: She talks about how she likes that pastels can move more quickly and she can pick up and go off and pick it right up where she left off, whereas oil paint is slower and more definitive. There's something about those two mediums in conversation. There's a pair in the exhibition of a really beautiful 1918 pastel paired with a 1918 painting, and you can see how the matte texture and finish of both of those mediums and the similar palette allows her to experiment in tandem.

Kerry Nolan: You just mentioned Alfred Stieglitz, who she would later go on to marry, but they had an amazing connection artistically. We see examples of some correspondences that she had with him. Why was he such a toweringly important figure for her? What drew her to him?

Samantha Friedman: He was much older than her. He was established, he was a very celebrated photographer in his own right, and had this gallery in New York where he was showing modern art, in many cases, for the first time, artists who were being shown for the first time out of Europe. When she's writing to her girlfriend, Anita Pollitzer, in these early years, she says something to the effect of, "I'd rather he see my work than anyone else."

She's holding him up as this [unintelligible 00:18:34] audience that she wants. They start this very intense correspondence and love affair. I think that the relationship with Stieglitz is also complicated. He marketed her work in a very particular way. It was largely his presentation of her work in a specific way that led to a lot of Freudian over-readings over the years.

He knew that was good for business. He dies in 1946. She lives till 1986. She has decades of productive work and adventures and experiences beyond that period. It was important to me in the exhibition too that he take a backseat.

Kerry Nolan: When you were putting this collection together, this exhibition, rather, did you rely strictly on what MoMA has or were you able to go out to other places and find some of these drawings that you brought in?

Samantha Friedman: That's a great question. Like many exhibitions that we do at MoMA, the idea for the exhibition really grew out of our collection. We have eight works on paper by O'Keeffe in our own collection and a number of paintings also. It started with our own collection, and it was doing some research that I realized that each of the works in our own collection on paper were parts of this series, and that having spent time with those works over the years, I myself hadn't realized that, for example, our Evening Star watercolor, our iconic, beautiful watercolor was one of eight, and that we didn't see it in that context, and many people hadn't seen it in that context.

It grew out of our own collection, but in the end, the show has 58 lenders, both private and institutional. We're very grateful to them. I like to say that putting the checklist together for this show was akin to a game of gin. [laughs] That you were putting a series together and you were going down a road of clubs or sevens, and you were just hoping to get the full set in the deck in order to show them in their proper context.

Kerry Nolan: As somebody who was deeply, deeply involved in curating this exhibition, what did you see in her art that you hadn't seen before?

Samantha Friedman: So much. I think I was like many people who have a particular idea of Georgia O'Keefe. If you had asked me five years ago whether Georgia O'Keefe was in the top 10 artists that were important to me, I would've said no. It wasn't until I discovered these really fresh and contemporary feeling and radical works on paper that I truly fell for her.

Kerry Nolan: What do you hope the visitors take away from this?

Samantha Friedman: I think the most gratifying comment that I could hear, or that would make me the happiest as putting these things out there, would be for people to say, "I had no idea. That's a surprise to me." That this is not the Georgia O'Keefe that I knew because I think she's a lot more of a subtle and complex artist than we've often taken her to be.

Kerry Nolan: The exhibition is Georgia O'Keefe: To See Takes Time. It's on view at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York City until August 12th, and Samantha Friedman is the associate curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the museum. Thank you so much for coming in and spending time with us. This exhibition-- I can't wait.

Samantha Friedman: Thank you so much for having me.

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