Black White and Blue was painted at a critical juncture in Georgia O'Keeffe's life. In 1929 she began to spend several months of each year in New Mexico, away from both New York and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and promoter of American modernist painting and photography. As she embraced the clear light of New Mexico, her art changed and became cleaner, sharper, and both literally and metaphorically larger and more focused. Rejecting some of the emotionalism of her work from the 1920s, she began to adopt a more distanced approach and to concentrate on simpler forms and cooler subjects, often with overt religious symbolism. The underlying structure of the parched land of the Southwest and its churches, crosses, and animal skulls became the object of her scrutiny. Like Black White and Blue the best of her paintings after 1929 are infused with a religious, iconic, and even monumental quality.

In addition, after 1929 O'Keeffe started painting larger canvases, perhaps as a result of the scale of the land itself or even of the magnitude of her revived ambition. During the 1920s she had made many small paintings, several not much more than 9 x 10 inches. Only New York—another big subject—had consistently motivated O'Keeffe to create large paintings. Her only other paintings of comparable size, Black Cross, New Mexico (1929, 39 x 30 1/16 inches, The Art Institute of Chicago) and Cow Skull: Red, White, and Blue  (1931, 39 7/8 x 35 7/8 inches, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), are New Mexico works of comparable ambition that were clearly inspired by O'Keeffe's fascination with the crosses that dot the Southwest landscape. "Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses," she told the critic Henry McBride, "simply doesn't get that country." [1]

O'Keeffe said little about her paintings, but in 1976 she wrote that Black and White (1930, Whitney Museum of American Art), an earlier version of Black White and Blue, "was a message to a friend—if he saw it he didn't know it was to him and wouldn't have known what it said. And neither do I." [2] Messages, though, can usually be decoded. The friend was most likely a New Mexico male acquaintance who did not often, if ever, see O'Keeffe's paintings. [3] It could have been Tony Luhan, Mabel Dodge Luhan's Native American husband, whose quiet, dignified, enigmatic presence O'Keeffe greatly admired. [4] In addition, because O'Keeffe repeatedly asserted that she could express herself better in color and form than in words, the "message" is also undoubtedly encoded in the color and structure of the painting itself. Black White and Blue presents the intersection of two quite different forms—one black and fluid, one blue and rigid—that are both pierced and about to be divided by a sharp white wedge. Again, parallels can be drawn to the dark and mysterious Tony Luhan, who also had a Native American wife whom he regularly saw, provoking fits of jealousy and despair in Mabel that threatened to tear apart their union.

However, the critical point is that O'Keeffe stated that she herself did not know what the message was. This was not a coy remark on her part. For O'Keeffe the very act of painting was a way of clarifying an experience for herself: it was not a way of illustrating an idea or explicating a cause, but simply the means she used to express her visual, emotional, sensual, and tactile experience of the world. It was her way of coming to terms with, of knowing and understanding, an experience. As she repeatedly insisted, her paintings embodied the "things that I had no words for . . . the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint." [5]

(Text by Sarah Greenough, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation,  2000)

Notes

1. As quoted by Henry McBride, "O'Keeffe in Taos," New York Sun, 8 January  1930; reprinted in The Flow of Art: Essays and Criticisms of Henry McBride ed.  Daniel Catton Rich (New York, 1975), 261.

2. O'Keeffe in Georgia O'Keeffe (New York, 1976), opposite plate 53.

3. Lisa M. Messinger, "Sources for O'Keeffe's Imagery: A Case Study," in From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O'Keeffe as Icon, eds. Christopher Merrill and Ellen  Bradbury (Reading, Mass., 1992), 55 - 64, has written that the source of this  painting is Edward Weston's photograph The Ascent of Attic Angles (1921,  private collection). However, while O'Keeffe learned much from photography,  there is no evidence that she ever saw this photograph or knew of it. Moreover,  while she had met Weston in New York in 1922, she probably did not consider  him a "friend."

4. See letter from O'Keeffe to Russell Vernon Hunter, January 1932, as quoted in  Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton, and Sarah Greenough, Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters [exh. cat., National Gallery of Art] (Washington, 1987), 205.

5. See O'Keeffe 1976, opposite plate 13 and Alfred Stieglitz Presents One Hundred Pictures, Oils, Watercolors, Pastels, Drawings by Georgia O'Keeffe, American  [exh. cat., The Anderson Galleries] (New York, 1923), unpaginated.