 Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887–1986)
Waterfall—End of Road—'Iao Valley, 1939
Oil on canvas
Purchase, Allerton, Prisanlee and General Acquisition
Funds and with a gift from The Honolulu Advertiser,
1989 (5808.1)
In 1939, Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now the Dole
Company), in a campaign to market its canned fruit
products by evoking the balmy exoticism of the islands,
invited Georgia O’Keeffe—one of America’s foremost
painters—to travel to Hawaii to make pictures for its
print advertisements. For nearly two months, O’Keeffe
traveled throughout all the major islands, capturing their
unique topography and vegetation in a group of 20
extraordinary paintings.
This is one of four paintings of waterfalls that O’Keeffe
generated from the back seat of a borrowed station
wagon on a day trip to ’Iao Valley, a mountainous
tropical forest on the island of Maui noted for its rain-fed
waterfalls. Photographs of the valley reveal that
O’Keeffe remained remarkably faithful to her subject but
abstracted its salient characteristics, reducing her
palette to shades of green, grey, and white, and
focusing on the cascade as it zigzags down the steep
slopes of the mountains. The painting’s loose,
expressionistic brushwork suggests immediate
observation and announces a visual formula—the
vortex—which O’Keeffe refined and elaborated both in
the other Waterfall paintings and in later works such as
Black Place I (1944, San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art), a composition likewise bifurcated by a narrow
mountain cleft. |