Sky above Clouds IV

This is a painting of clouds seen from above, the way they appear from an airplane window. It is enormous: eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide, which is about two and a half meters by seven and a half meters. It is oil on canvas, meaning paint made with oil, spread over stretched cloth. Georgia O'Keeffe made it in 1965. Stand back first to take in the whole width, then step closer. The clouds are not shown in a strictly lifelike way. They are simplified, stylized shapes, and the canvas is so wide that the sky seems to go on without end.

Georgia O'Keeffe painted this in the summer of 1965, when she was 77 years old. She worked in Abiquiu, New Mexico, where she lived. Around 1963 she began a series based on the endless clouds she had seen from airplane windows on trips around the world. She started with a fairly realistic picture of small white clouds on a canvas just three by four feet. Then she moved to bolder, more stylized versions on larger surfaces. This is the last in the series. She painted it in a garage with no heat, working from six in the morning until eight or nine at night, to finish before the cold set in. She admitted that such a size was ridiculous, but she had wanted to do it for a couple of years.

O'Keeffe had a long bond with Chicago. She enrolled at the School of the Art Institute in 1905, and the museum held her first retrospective, a large survey of her career, in 1943. In 1970 this painting was meant to travel to three cities, but in San Francisco it proved too large to fit through the museum's doors. It stayed in Chicago on loan for more than a decade, until it was arranged for it to join the permanent collection. Before you leave, stand at one end and let your eyes travel along the full length, as if you were still looking out of that airplane window.