Georgia O'Keeffe

An American Place, New York
The Downtown Gallery, New York
Wright Ludington, Santa Barbara, California (1934)
Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York and Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York (1981)
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon (acquired from the above in October 1983)

New York, An American Place, Georgia O'Keeffe: Paintings--New and Some Old, January - March 1933, cat. no. 7 (as Barn No. 2)
Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, American Painting and Sculpture of the 18th, 19th & 20th Centuries, January - February 1935, cat. no. 80, p. 26, illustrated (as Canadian Barn No. 1)
Dayton, The Dayton Art Institute, Shown in the Modern Room, December 1944, cat. no. 13
San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 2nd Annual Exhibition of Painting, November 1947 - January 1948
Claremont, Pomona College Galleries, Stieglitz Circle: O'Keeffe, Marin, and Dove, October - November 1958, cat. no. 50
Fort Worth, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art; Houston, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Georgia O'Keeffe: An Exhibition of the Work of the Artist from 1915 to 1966, March - July 1966, illustrated p. 15 (as White Barn No 1) and p. 29
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Art, Georgia O'Keeffe, October 1970 - April 1971, cat. no. 78, p. 128, illustrated
New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Lines of a Different Character-American Art from 1727-1947, 1982 - 1983, cat. no. 77, p. 95, illustrated and p. 94

Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, 1999, vol I, cat. no. 805, p. 494, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition. The canvas is lined, and there are some discrete drying cracks in the roof of the barn and foreground that are inherent to the artist's materials. There are a few very small accretions in the roof of the barn and in the center left sky that appear to be on the surface. Under UV: there is no apparent inpainting.
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Georgia O’Keeffe painted White Barn during a 1932 visit to the Gaspé Peninsula in eastern Canada. The artist was encouraged to make the trip by the photographer Paul Strand, who had traveled there in 1929. O'Keeffe found inspiration in the bucolic northern landscape, which reminded her of her childhood home of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She later recalled, "That was a wonderful trip...The soil there was a marvelous deep black after it had been turned over, and there were beautiful blossoming potato flowers—very lush" (Roxana Robinson, Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, New York, 1989, p. 375).

O'Keeffe was particularly captivated by the long, low white barns that peppered the landscape. She ultimately painted seven canvases featuring this subject. In the present painting, O’Keeffe depicts the barn in severely reduced terms; indeed, the minimal character of the composition is striking. Stripped of almost all graphic details, the structure is composed of large geometric areas of pure color. The crisp white of the façade contrasts dynamically with the brilliant blue and green she utilizes to render the earth and sky. She closely crops the scene so that the surrounding environment is dwarfed by the barn, imbuing the composition with a modern quality of compressed pictorial space.

In their search for a national art, artists closely associated with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his galleries frequently turned to subjects and themes they viewed as an expression of authentic and uniquely American values. As the muse and wife of this early champion of the avant-garde, O’Keeffe was closely associated with this circle, many members of which considered the barn a distinctively American architectural type symbolizing the heartland of the country, its agrarian roots and its puritan work ethic. O’Keeffe’s attraction to barns as a subject, however, was also deeply personal. Born and raised on a Wisconsin farm, she once wrote, “The barn is a very healthy part of me—There should be more of it—It is something that I know too—it is my childhood—I seem to be one of the few people I know of to have no complaints against my first twelve years” (Sarah Whitaker Peters, Becoming O’Keeffe: The Early Years, New York, 1991, p. 281).

Some of O’Keeffe’s earliest paintings of barns feature those located on the Stieglitz family's estate in Lake George, New York, where O’Keeffe and Stieglitz typically spent the warm summer months. She converted one of the barns on the property (figure 1) into a studio as a place to escape the demands made by the constant stream of summer visitors, about whom she frequently complained in her letters from this period. O’Keeffe planned her 1932 trip to Canada partly as an attempt to avoid her husband—who had been having an affair—during their customary summer stay at the Stieglitz home.

While the simplified lines and functionalism of the barn appealed to the spare, rigorous aesthetic most often associated with Charles Sheeler (figure 2), O’Keeffe typically explored a less exacting precisionism during her career. In her barn subjects from this  trip including White Barn, however, O’Keeffe seems to revel in the austere simplicity of the structure, focusing on its fundamental formal qualities of line and color. As with other barn paintings from the Canadian series, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s White Canadian Barn II, the structures assume an anonymous, inaccessible quality. The clean lines and reductive composition give the images a deceptive simplicity, yet the formal rigor creates an impenetrable façade. Although O’Keeffe entirely banishes the inky and foreboding storm clouds often present in the Lake George Barn scenes here, in White Barn this symbol of bucolic comfort is similarly transformed into a protective space, not unlike her private studio where she sought refuge from the outside world.