O'Keeffe Museum Deaccessions Painting To Raise Funds

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Dec 1st 2010 at 2:01AM

The seller of a 1926 flower painting by artist Georgia O'Keeffe that goes up for sale Wednesday at Christie's in New York is none other than the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Canna Red and Orange is expected to bring between $1.2 million and $1.8 million and will benefit the museum's acquisition fund.

Museum director Robert Kret told the New Mexican that the decision to deaccession the painting was made after "long deliberations and thoughtful conversations." It was decided that the work could be sold to buy other O'Keeffe artworks that would flesh out the collection. Canna Red and Orange is smaller than O'Keeffe's large-scale canvases of flowers. O'Keeffe began painting flower pictures in 1918 and they were shown for the first time by Alfred Stieglitz in 1923. By 1924, she was painting large-scale flower paintings, which were exhibited the following year at Anderson Galleries. This 20-inch by 16-inch oil-on-canvas has been on exhibit in New York in 1927 and in Santa Fe in 1997.

Tags: art, christies, georgia okeeffe, okeeffe