Sky Above Clouds (1960–1977) is a series of cloudscape paintings by American artist Georgia O'Keeffe produced during her late period. The works were completed at her home and studio in Abiquiú and at her Ghost Ranch studio in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. Only four paintings in the series share the same motif–a pink sky above the horizon with patches of cloudlets, or cloud streets below it, progressing from smaller to larger canvases. The motif was inspired by views from her airplane window during her frequent air travel in the 1950s and early 1960s when she flew around the world. Sky above Clouds IV, the fourth version in the shared motif of the series, is two meters (eight feet) high and seven meters (24 feet) wide. It is the largest painting ever created by the artist, accomplished at the age of 77 in the summer of 1965. Two of the paintings in the series are held by private collectors, while the rest are found in the National Gallery of Art, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Background
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) spent her early career as an artist in New York from 1918 through 1929. By the late 1930s, she had become the most famous woman painter in the United States. She married art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz in 1924. His series of cloud photographs, known as the Equivalents (1925–1934), shows that O'Keeffe and her husband addressed similar subjects, but had different approaches. O'Keeffe's cloud painting A Celebration (1924), illustrates her early abstract potential. In 1929, she began spending more time in New Mexico, with her cow skull paintings becoming some of her best known works during this period (Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue, 1931). In 1934, she moved to Ghost Ranch and began working on landscape paintings of the desert. Her husband died in 1946, and in 1949, O'Keeffe moved permanently to the town of Abiquiú, where she had a second home as a studio. Here, she produced her famous patio series of paintings (In the Patio VIII, 1950) whose variations and abstractions would develop into her new series, Sky Above Clouds.
The post-war aviation era began in the 1950s, and with it, what became known as the Jet Age, bringing the reach of economical, commercial international travel by aircraft to more people. Writer Laurie Lisle notes that O'Keeffe had been born in 1886, in the era of the horse and buggy, and was only 16 years old when the Wright brothers made the first controlled powered airplane flights, and 37 when she moved into a skyscraper in New York. Despite her fear of flying, O'Keeffe took advantage of this new experience and began to travel extensively outside the US at the age of 63, first to Mexico in 1951, Europe in 1953, followed by a trip to Peru in 1956, and finally around the world in 1959.
In the 1950s, O'Keeffe's canvases grew larger, which was a style favored by the contemporaneous abstract expressionists. Although that style of art was popular, O'Keeffe's increasing use of larger sizes was more indicative of the larger world she was now exploring. Her frequent trips on an airplane led to a change in her artistic perspective and viewpoint; her work, which once focused on magnification of her subjects, now became telescopic, and emphasized the importance of the sky itself. From these travel experiences came two new series of paintings based on high altitude views from an airplane: a series of river paintings, and a series showing the sky above the clouds. Between the rivers and clouds series, O'Keeffe also worked on a series of roads, viewed not from above in an airplane, but from high on top of her Abiquiú studio on the mesa.
In 1960, she wrote about the view outside her plane to her younger sister Claudia: "Now the sun is bright over what looks like a vast field of snow stretching all the way to the horizon..It is odd to look out on this field of snow or white cotton— It looks almost solid enough to walk on." The Space Age, which began in 1958, was now well under way, with humanity orbiting around the Earth in just hours. "For O'Keeffe", writes Katherine Hoffman, "achievements in outer space were a way of living out man's dreams, an important achievement". Just five years later, humans were taking their first walks in space, with Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov on the Voskhod 2 mission in March 1965, followed by astronaut Ed White on Gemini 4 in June. That same month, O'Keeffe began to explore the last version of this contemporaneous theme in a monumental work of art. "O'Keeffe released the sky from its earthly tether and concentrated on the effect of infinite space in her art", writes Drohojowska-Philp.