When you walk into the Art Institute of Chicago, you usually expect the heavy hitters: the Seurats, the Hopper "Nighthawks," maybe some grainy Van Goghs. But then you hit the grand staircase. Hanging there, stretching so wide it practically swallows your peripheral vision, is a 24-foot-long expanse of white cottony puffs and a horizon that seems to vibrate. This is Sky Above the Clouds IV, and honestly, it’s nothing like the tiny, intimate flower paintings that made Georgia O'Keeffe a household name.
Most people see O’Keeffe as the "flower lady" or the hermit of New Mexico. They think of her wandering through the desert, picking up sun-bleached cow skulls. That’s the brand. But this painting? It’s different. It’s industrial, in a weird way. It’s a product of the Jet Age.
Why the Sky Above the Clouds IV is Actually an Airplane Painting
It sounds almost too modern to be true, but the primary inspiration for this series wasn't a spiritual vision or a dream. It was a window seat.
By the late 1950s and early 60s, O'Keeffe was in her 70s and traveling the world. She wasn't just staying in Abiquiu; she was flying to Japan, Peru, and India. Imagine being 77 years old and seeing the world from 30,000 feet for the first time. For someone who spent her life obsessed with the horizon line of the desert, seeing that horizon shift to the top of the world was a total brain-melt.
She started the "Sky Above the Clouds" series with smaller canvases, maybe three by four feet. Kinda manageable. But she kept getting more ambitious. She wanted to capture that "endless" feeling you get when the plane levels out and all you see are these repetitive, rhythmic cloud patterns that look like stepping stones to the edge of the universe.
The Logistics Were Actually Insane
Let’s talk about the physical reality of making something this big. Sky Above the Clouds IV is eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide. Think about that. That’s the size of a shipping container.
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O'Keeffe didn't have some high-tech, climate-controlled studio for a project this massive. She worked in her garage in Abiquiu. There was no heat. She had to start in the summer of 1965 and work like a woman possessed because she knew that once the New Mexico winter hit, the garage would be too cold to keep the oil paint workable.
"It kept me working every minute from six a.m. till eight or nine at night," O’Keeffe once wrote.
She was 77. She was crouching, stretching, and probably climbing ladders all day long just to reach the top of the horizon line. There's a grit to this painting that gets lost when you just see it on a postcard. It was a physical marathon.
Breaking Down the Visual Language
When you look at the painting, your eyes naturally try to make sense of the repetition. The clouds aren't fluffy or "realistic" in the way a Renaissance painter would do them. They’re stylized. Almost like little white lozenges.
- The Pattern: The lower two-thirds of the canvas is a sea of these white shapes. They get smaller as they move toward the top, creating a forced perspective that makes the canvas feel miles deep.
- The Horizon: Near the top, the clouds merge into a solid white band, topped by a thin strip of pale pink, salmon, and then a darkening blue.
- The Scale: Because it's 24 feet wide, you can't see the whole thing at once if you're standing close. You have to move your head. You have to walk. The painting forces you to physically participate in the "flight."
People often compare it to Monet’s Water Lilies, and they aren't wrong. Like Monet, O’Keeffe was moving toward a kind of "environmental" art. She wasn't painting an object; she was painting an experience you inhabit.
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The Heartbreaking Context of Her Vision
Here is the part that usually gets left out of the museum placards: O'Keeffe was losing her sight while she was leaning into these massive, sky-high themes.
In the late 1960s, shortly after finishing this masterpiece, she began suffering from macular degeneration. Her central vision started to dissolve. By 1971, she had lost most of it, leaving her with only peripheral vision.
There’s something incredibly poignant about a woman who spent her final years of clear sight looking at the most expansive, infinite thing possible—the sky from an airplane window—and trying to pin it down on a canvas so large it could barely fit in her house. Sky Above the Clouds IV was her last "monumental" work. After this, the scale had to shrink. The "The Beyond" (1972) was her final unassisted oil painting, and it’s a much darker, more minimal echo of this sky series.
What Most People Get Wrong
People often assume this is an abstract painting. O'Keeffe hated that. She famously said, "There's nothing abstract about those pictures. They are what I saw."
To her, the view from a Boeing 707 was just as "real" as a poppy in a vase. She wasn't trying to be "modern" for the sake of it. She was just a reporter of the world, and the world had suddenly expanded to include the stratosphere.
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Another misconception is that it was meant for the Art Institute. Actually, it was supposed to go to the Whitney in New York for a big retrospective in 1970. But it was so big that they couldn't get it through the doors or into the elevators. It literally couldn't fit into the building. It eventually found its permanent home in Chicago because they had the literal and architectural space to hold her ambition.
How to Actually "See" the Painting Today
If you find yourself in Chicago, don't just snap a photo and walk away. Here is how to actually experience it:
- Stand at the very bottom of the stairs. Look up. Let the horizon line at the top of the painting be your actual horizon.
- Walk slowly from left to right. Notice how the "pattern" of the clouds isn't actually a pattern. Every single cloud is slightly different. O'Keeffe didn't use a stencil; she painted every one of those hundreds of shapes by hand.
- Check the edges. See how the paint meets the frame. You can see the haste of a woman trying to beat the winter cold.
Actionable Insight for Art Lovers:
If you want to understand O'Keeffe beyond the "flower lady" myth, look into her late-career "River" series (like Green, Yellow and Orange, 1960). It pairs perfectly with the Sky series. It shows her transition from looking at the world to looking down on it, a shift that redefined American Modernism for the jet age.
Visit the Art Institute of Chicago's digital collection to see the high-resolution brushwork of Sky Above the Clouds IV if you can't make the trip in person. It’s the only way to appreciate the sheer labor that went into those twenty-four feet of oil and canvas.