Description:
exterior; rolling low green hills moving back to a blue hill, dark blue sky and pink moon reflecting on the furthest hill
Label Text:
Pink Moon Over Water is a relatively rare Maine landscape in O’Keeffe’s work. Most of her landscapes in the years before 1929, when she began traveling to New Mexico, depict the lush, rolling hills around Lake George. The museum’s painting shares with the Adirondack landscapes a simplification of form, with elements of the terrain treated summarily as broad shapes, and an interest in light and reflections on the water. Generally, in these landscapes the water is shown backed by or surrounded by hills. Pink Moon Over Water builds its composition from below with a series of three hillocks or rises in the landscape, above which the ocean and sky appear, blending one into the other. The horizon line is established by the topmost edge of the pink reflection of the moon in the water, and by a subtle shift from the blue of the sea into the blue of the sky.
Pink Moon Over Water is closely related to a 1922 pastel, Sun Water Maine, which is virtually the same composition, but in this case a daylight scene, with a yellow-rimmed, green sun shining down on the water. As O’Keeffe scholar Barbara Buhler Lynes points out: “O’Keeffe sometimes developed subjects first in pencil, and then in charcoal and pastel before rendering them in oil….With Pink Moon Over Water, she refined a theme she had already addressed in pastel.”
Pink Moon was first shown under the title The Ocean and the Pink Moon in an exhibition at the Anderson Galleries, New York, in early 1924.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+2006.73 |
