Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe: On the Intangible in Art and Nature

Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe, although committed realist artists using straightforward photographic technique and an objective style of painting, transfigured the natural scene artistically to express profoundly metaphysical responses to nature. Both Adams and O'Keeffe were aware of manifold currents of mystical thought in the 1930s through personal contact with the theosophical teachers A. R. Orage and Jean Toomer. Treating landscape features as psychological and spiritual phenomena, they shared a lifelong quest for creative development and self‐discovery through the forms of nature.