Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds IV (1965)

Stand at the landing, and the wall becomes weather: Rows of pillowy ovals marching to a thin blue horizon. It’s Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds IV (1965), oil on canvas, an eight-by-twenty-four-foot panorama (96 × 288 in / 243.8 × 731.5 cm) that today hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago. The scale does half the talking; your eyes do the rest.

How It Got So Big

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, O’Keeffe started flying a lot. Airplanes offered a new vantage—above the weather rather than under it—and she chased that view until it demanded a mural. She was 77 when she painted this piece; ambition didn’t retire on her behalf. (We’ve all tried the airplane-window photo; O’Keeffe did the hard version.) 

A Series, Not a One-Off

The painting caps a long run: the “Sky Above Clouds” series spans 1960–1977, eleven canvases in all, developing from minimal bands to gridded cloudlets to near-infinite fields. Early on, works like Sky with Flat White Cloud reduce the scene to planes of color; Above the Clouds I introduces the dotted cloud pattern that eventually fills IV. Think of them as rehearsal, rhythm, and then the full orchestra. 

Reading the Grid

The small cloud forms behave like notes on staff paper. Repetition builds rhythm; spacing builds tension. The horizon line—razor-thin—turns the “landscape” into almost pure structure, edging toward abstract art. Yet the subject is still the air we know, which keeps it comfortably inside landscape art, just viewed from the seat no plein-air painter could reach. If this logic of pattern and space is your thing, detour to our Abstract Paintings space for kindred geometry.

Echoes and Influences

O’Keeffe wasn’t alone in looking skyward. Alfred Stieglitz—her partner, promoter, and a North Star for American modernism—made his Equivalents, cloud photographs that treated the sky as emotion and form rather than weather report. Different medium, same lesson: abstraction can start with something as ordinary as clouds. 

If You’re Visiting Chicago

You meet Sky Above Clouds IV at a staircase. The painting spans a vast wall above a major stairway sightline, which means the best introduction is on the climb—your steps mirror the painting’s slow swell to the horizon. Don’t rush the landing; the distance matters here. The museum even features it on its “What to See in an Hour” guide, which tells you it’s both a showstopper and a shortcut. 

One aside from me: the work reads beautifully from 10 meters and oddly well from 50 centimeters, where brush edges break the serenity—little decisions holding a big view together.

Contemporary Echo

That aerial grid still tempts painters. On Subjektiv, Liliya Nebera’s A running cloud winks at the same subject from ground level—smaller in size, playful in tone, but part of the long conversation between sky and surface. And if you prefer horizon lines with trees, wander our Landscape Painting space.