I have just come from the Intimate Gallery, where Stieglitz has hung six lily studies by Georgia O'Keeffe, and I cannot resist the desire to try to put a few of my impressions into words. I am, of course, familiar with Miss O'Keeffe's work, but I had never before seen these particular studies; and they gave me an entirely new idea of that amazing woman's art.

Like all modern painters she has, either consciously or unconsciously, been striving for years toward an abstract conception of natural objects; but in these six studies she has gone even further into the research for the beauty of form, and has, after determining the basic relationship of pure linear and chromatic design, completed the cycle back to reality. She has, in short, found the realism which is symbolically implicit in her abstract conceptions. One comes to her "illustrative" objects by way of the abstract, whereas in the majority of modern paintings one reaches the abstract by way of recognizable objectivity. Her lilies seem to have grown inevitably out of a poetic vision of line and color harmony - a vision which, in its inception, had no preconceived idea of lilies. And, as a result, the beauty of the lilies' reality is at once philosophic and symbolic, and therefore more intensely realistic than the most metriculous copying of nature could possibly be. Years ago I wrote in "The Creative Will": "Art does not show man the way to nature. Rather does it lead him *via* nature to knowledge." In these six paintings by Miss O'Keeffe nature and knowledge become one.

To speak of the "purity" of a series of studies of calla-lilies is, to the average person, misleading, for the association of lilies and purity is too firmly rooted in the modern human consciousness. But in these six pictures of lilies there is a purity which is organic -- a purity which not only embraces all of our every-day associations, but at the same time embodies

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a philosophic perception of purity. One feels, rather than recognizes, their
underlying purity of form and design; and this is far profounder than
the mere associative impressions of purity which one might experience in
looking at an ordinary painting of calla-lilies.

This is why, I think, even the layman will find in Miss O'Keeffe's canvasses
a meaning which no mere realism, however masterfully metriculous, could ever
produce. And this meaning is inevitably the foundation of sheer aesthetic
beauty - perhaps not understood, but certainly sensed. To those of us,
on the other hand, who have analyzed our emotions in the face of art and have
sought to harness values to the various manifestations of an artist's expression,
the lilies of Miss O'Keeffe may have a more specific meaning -- a more definite
and more intellectualized emotion.

But the two reactions are at bottom the same; for here, in these paintings,
is a segment of the world of actuality as every one knows it; and here also
is the beauty of order and harmony and color, without which the world of
actuality would be a meaningless and oppressive chaos. Miss O'Keeffe has
carried us to the inner intellectual world through the emotions; and for this
reason the loveliness and purity of herlilies are far more abiding than if she
had sought to reach our emotions through the intellect.