Curator, Samantha Friedman: In 1917, O’Keeffe made a series of self-portrait nudes in watercolor. In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz, her gallerist and later husband, she talks about the experience of shifting her weight this way or that, of catching herself in a pose that might have been unexpected and trying to commit that pose to paper.
She admits the pleasure she took in the experience of creating these works. And she asks him not to show them to anyone. So she’s aware of how unusual it is for a woman artist, in the first decades of the 20th century, to be expressing herself so frankly with this real sense of abandon in her medium.
Conservator, Laura Neufeld: Most of her watercolors are on this student-grade paper, but it was perfect for her because it has this semi-absorbent quality that allowed for both crisp, defined brushstrokes or allowed her to blend and bleed strokes of color together to create these saturated pools that would sit and dry on the surface.
It was very inexpensive. She writes in a letter to Stieglitz that a stack of it almost a foot tall makes her feel “downright reckless,” and you can really see the glee in the watercolors that she makes on that paper.