Georgia O'Keeffe American, 1887-1986
22.9 x 30.5 cm
Alligator Pears belongs to a group of fourteen works Georgia O’Keeffe produced from 1920 to 1923 that depict avocados. O’Keeffe was mesmerized by the fruit upon her first encounter: “The first alligator pear I became acquainted with I didn’t eat,” O’Keeffe recalled. “I kept it for years—a dry thing, a wonderful shape.” [1]
O’Keeffe produced approximately six still lifes in 1903 and 1904 before shifting her focus largely to abstraction in the years following. The artist later trained at the Art Students League, where she studied still life painting under William Merritt Chase from 1907 to 1908, but it was not until 1919 that she returned to still life subjects with renewed enthusiasm. During this period, she developed a singular stylistic approach that occupies the liminal zone between abstraction and representation. The undulating white ground in Alligator Pears, for instance, is recognizable as a cloth or sheet. The variation in color, light and shade, and line, however, reveals another layer of the subject, which is the application of paint itself. O’Keeffe also chose a close crop for this composition, likely influenced by the photographic technique her husband Alfred Stieglitz and others practiced, which further abstracts the alligator pears into mysterious ovoid forms. O’Keeffe was drawn to this type of biomorphic shape, which reappeared throughout her body of work as figs, eggplants, and the negative space created by the opening of a pelvis bone.
The alligator pear subject has been recognized by institutions as a critical episode in O’Keeffe’s artistic development. An early example of the subject, a 1920 charcoal on paper, is now in the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. The present work was included in the 2009-10 traveling exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
[1] O’Keeffe quoted in S.W. Peters, Becoming O’Keeffe, New York, 1991, p. 256.
Provenance
The artist;[Robert Miller Gallery, New York];
Private collection, Westport, Connecticut, 1979;
[Robert Miller Gallery, New York];
[Kennedy Galleries, New York, 1980]; to
The Williams Collection, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1980; to
[Sale: Christie's, New York, December 5, 2002, lot 143];
John and Dolores Beck, Orlando, Florida, acquired by 2009 and until at least 2010;
Private collection, Boston, Massachusetts, 2011; to
The estate of the above, 2025
Exhibitions
The Anderson Galleries, New York, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1924, among nos. 1-7The Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tulsans Collect, February 16-April 15, 1990
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, September 17, 2009-September 12, 2010
Schoelkopf Gallery, New York, 25 | 250: A Celebration of American Art Part I, January 16—February 28, 2026
Literature
William H. Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801-1939, Columbia, Missouri, 1981, p. 268, illus.Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe, Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999, vol. I, p. 227, no. 420, illus. in color
Barbara Haskell, ed., Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2009, p. 229, pl. 71, illus. in color p. 82
