Narcissa's Last Orchid,

1940

Georgia O’Keeffe first used pastel as a student of William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in New York in 1907–8. Since pastel and charcoal are direct media, unlike oil painting, her early works on paper were the initial vehicles for the pursuit of a visual language. Although she employed charcoal only intermittently, O’Keeffe worked in pastel consistently throughout her long career. From Arthur <br>Wesley Dow, she learned to draw by extending her entire arm while holding the implement upright. Employing the same technique in her pastels, O’Keeffe also adopted the habit of using her finger-tips to massage the medium into the support, enabling her to exploit the matte surface to painterly effect, as in <em>Narcissa’s Last Orchid</em>.The splayed white blossom echoes the forms in the artist’s bone and antler paintings from the 1930s. Here she deposits a rim of white pigment dust along the edges of the petals, endowing them with a tactile quality and creating the illusion of three-dimensionality in places where the petals appear to fold back on themselves, casting shadows. The flower itself seems to merge with the landscape behind it, and strokes of pink and blue fleck its white fringe. As the title suggests, this is a specific orchid. Narcissa Swift King, a friend of O’Keeffe’s in New York, sent her an orchid that became the basis for this pastel, which was first exhibited in 1941 at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery An American Place. Disappointed that she had not been thanked, Swift King is said to have declared, "That’s the last orchid you’ll ever get from <em>me</em>!" Hence O’Keeffe’s title. In spite of the incident, the two women remained friendly. In the notes she wrote to accompany an exhibition at An American Place a year earlier, O’Keeffe had in fact likened the activity of perceiving a flower to that of nurturing a friendship: "Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time."