Artfully ambiguous

Mar. 3—details

—Radical Abstraction

—10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Mondays, through Oct. 30

—Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St.

—Tickets are $20; 505-946-1000, okeeffemuseum.org

In 1887, the year of Georgia O'Keeffe's birth, the only way to reach a far-off locale such as Japan involved many days aboard a passenger ship. By the 1950s, commercial flight was widespread, greatly speeding travel and providing a perspective of the planet previously unfamiliar to humanity.

She didn't fly until she was in her 70s, roaming the globe and taking in not only foreign cultures and architecture but a bird's-eye view of Earth's natural beauty.

"It's actually in 1959 that she makes this around-the-world trip that takes her to East Asia and Southeast Asia, and she comes back via Europe," says Ariel Plotek, curator of fine art at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. "It was a pretty remarkable journey, and she had not traveled in that way internationally before [husband Alfred Stieglitz's] death. This was her first view from an airplane looking into the horizon or the clouds — not from the ground, but from above. And she's very inspired by it, so she makes little notes on paper cards that then serve her in the studio. She's making notes, little color notations about where the gray and the pink belong."

That perspective shows up in multiple pieces in Radical Abstraction, which runs through Oct. 30 at the museum, which is aimed at showcasing a lesser-seen side of the modernist painter.

Ariel had in mind that abstraction was itself a radical development in modern art and the works in this installation are among the most radical examples of O'Keeffe's engagement with abstraction in the museum's collections.

Among the pieces is an enormous horizontal canvas called The Beyond, from 1972, showing what appears to be a horizon, and On the River I from 1965. While it's clear that flight influenced O'Keeffe's work, it's not always clear which of her more abstract pieces reflect that experience.

The Beyond is an important piece for the museum, Plotek says, because it's thought to be the final painting O'Keeffe created without assistance. As macular degeneration gradually narrowed her field of vision, she relied on help to create the watercolors she painted late in life.

"One of the wonderful things about it is the degree of ambiguity that O'Keeffe has managed to maintain," Plotek says of the painting. "We have what looks like the blue of the sky here, like a distant horizon, perhaps a band of clouds, and she gives the painting this fantastically poetic title, The Beyond, which to me only adds to the sense of the sublime when you look at this work."

Many of the 13 works in the exhibition were recently returned to the museum after being on loan elsewhere for nearly two years, says Renee Lucero, the museum's public relations manager. Several were part of a touring European retrospective of O'Keeffe's work, with stops at Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; and the Foundation Beyeler museum in Basel, Switzerland.

Some of these works are among Plotek's personal favorites, he says, and haven't been featured before because they didn't fit previous exhibitions' themes.

That's what led to Radical Abstraction. Plotek acknowledges that the latter word "can be a bit challenging, because probably most of us feel more comfortable with the idea of realism and imitation. The notion that something has been observed in life, in nature, and copied by the artist feels familiar to us. Abstraction departs from that and is basically the product of an artist's imagination."

While Making a Life, which also is on display now, showcases O'Keeffe's personal effects, Radical Abstraction includes work spanning her long career.

"I think people will observe a kind of remarkable continuity" in her work, Plotek says, "like a single-mindedness of purpose."