Forget, if you can, what you think you know about Georgia O’Keeffe. Remember that American art in the 1950s was more than just Abstract Expressionism. And consider that Abiquiú, New Mexico, has identities and histories of its own.
With his book Georgia O’Keeffe: The Late Work, Randall C. Griffin contributes to the more than 150 monographs and biographies that have been written about the famed artist, setting his sights on her lesser-known post-war career. The book distinguishes itself by focusing on the works O’Keeffe created from the mid-1940s to the early ʼ80s (she died in 1986 at age 98) through the lenses of biography, gender, class, race, and modernity, relative to the New York School.
Though I’ve always been skeptical of O’Keeffe’s allure, my interest in the book was piqued by the author’s readings of the artist’s work along lines of class and race. Griffin, a professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University, shows that O’Keeffe was determined to create a place of her own in the village of Abiquiú, established as Tewa Pueblo land centuries ago, and interprets her series of over 20 abstract, geometric patio paintings as a “negotiation of identity” and a way to “defin[e] herself in opposition to her neighbors.”
The most reductive of the series is “My Last Door” (1952–54), with its nonnaturalistic palette of black, white, and gray. The door remains inaccessible, and the walls insurmountable. Griffin’s primary and secondary research — including a consideration of the villagers’ vantage points from both outside O’Keeffe’s courtyard walls and within them as house staff — informs his account of Whiteness at work in these paintings, which he proposes can be “seen in part as acts of erasure and possession.” This reading is supported by O’Keeffe’s own claim: “That wall with a door in it was something I had to have.”
Griffin’s footnotes provide helpful insights, such as those of Napoleón Garcia, a member of the Genízaro Abiquiú community who worked on and off for O’Keeffe for years. Notably, he notes that she was “indifferent to the plight of the poor,” which Griffin describes as “the most damning account of her.” However, he includes counterpoints as well, such as accounts of the affluent O’Keeffe’s substantial donations to the community for an elementary school, a gymnasium, and residential water for cleaning and drinking.
In the chapters that follow, Griffin addresses O’Keeffe’s road paintings and other views from the large picture windows she installed in her house, such as “Winter Road I” (1963). He details how her paintings of rivers and canyons reveal influences from her international travels and hint at her environmental concerns, and suggests that her clouds and sky paintings were informed by Zen Buddhism and her own mortality and loss. In the final chapter, O’Keeffe’s loss of her central vision due to macular degeneration led her deeper into formal abstraction — tactile pots, bronze sculptures, paintings of rocks — and, eventually, to hiring studio assistants to make her paintings. Her fascination with repeatedly painting the Washington Monument in a series generally referred to as From A Day with Juan (1976–77) is still lost on me, though Griffin convincingly humanizes the artist and her conceptual and formal pursuits in his assessment.
I am in no way an expert on O’Keeffe. Some of the same things that drew her to create a life for herself in New Mexico, however, also attracted me: light, space, land. But after reading Georgia O’Keeffe: The Late Work, I am convinced that the voids in her work speak volumes.
Georgia O’Keeffe: The Late Work (2025), written by Randall C. Griffin and published by Yale University Press, is available online and through independent booksellers.