“There are two Georgia O’Keeffes. They’re closely related, but one is far more interesting than the other. Not so interesting, except maybe as a marketing phenomenon, is the post-1930s cow-skull painter and striker of frontier-priestess poses. More interesting, and less familiar, is the artist found in “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction,” a vivid and surprisingly surprising show of more than 130 paintings and drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art.” – Holland Cotter

Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction
Whitney Museum of American Art
September 17, 2009–January 17, 2010

• http://www.whitney.org/Exhibitions/GeorgiaOKeeffe/

“Nancy Spero, an American artist and feminist whose tough, exquisite figurative art addressed the realities of political violence, died on Sunday in Manhattan, reports Holland Cotter for the New York Times. She was eighty-three.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/arts/design/20spero.html

Images courtesy of courtesy of Nikon Small World.

• http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/gallery/year/2009/1
• http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/photomicrography/all/1

“A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world’s focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as ‘Abstract Expressionists’ or ‘The New York School’  did, however, share some common assumptions…”

• http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/abex/hd_abex.htm

Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental
Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992)
1941–42
Oil on canvas
86″ x 140 1/2″

“Charles Seliger, a distinguished abstract expressionist painter who played a vital role in the New York art scene for over sixty-five years, died on Thursday. He was 83 years old.”

UPDATED October 26, 2009
Don Quixote (1944) is now on view in the lobby of the Whitney.