For as long as I have known her name, I have associated Georgia O’Keeffe with the deserts, skulls, and flowers pictured in her most famous paintings. So I found myself startled by the monochrome, nonfigurative Black Abstraction (1927) when I passed it on a recent trip to The Met. This painting was different from the work I knew: it seemed somehow vaster than the landscapes, deader than the bones.
Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887-1986). Black Abstraction, 1927. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 1/4 in. (76.2 x 102.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1969 (69.278.2)
“Abstraction” by Maggie Millner
At first there was silence
You were on your back
Beneath a square of sky
When faintly there arrived
A sucking sound
Like planets make
By moving wind
Around their moons
And the light too
Began to pull away
From the prone body
On the operating table
With your mind inside
Somewhere else
Two hands took up
Two silver blades
And a gigantic lid
Came down over the world
Like an old hex
You’d known before this life
And then forgot
How matter’s always
Passing into mist
And back again
You can conduct it
If you dare
To be conducted
Through the tunnel
Where the self is
Suctioned off
Like darkness tears
The color from a rose
That velvet chute
Where nothing grows
Except some grammar
And an egg
Giving off heat
Containing mostly trust
Note: In 1927, Georgia O’Keeffe had two surgeries to remove a benign lump from her breast. She later described the experience this way: “I was on a stretcher in a large room, two nurses hovering over me, a very large bright skylight above me. I had decided to be conscious as long as possible. I heard the doctor washing his hands. The skylight began to whirl and slowly became smaller and smaller in a black space. I lifted my right arm overhead and dropped it. As the skylight became a small white dot in a black room, I lifted my left arm over my head. As it started to drop and the white dot became very small, I was gone.” She completed Black Abstraction a few weeks after the second surgery.
