During the final decades of her career, O'Keeffe continued to paint with an eye toward clarity. Some of these austere late paintings-particularly those focusing on the architecture of her adobe home-reveal that she was willing to incorporate a new sense of geometry into her compositions. Others, however, suggest that O'Keeffe was revisiting and taking stock of her earlier accomplishments while simultaneously exploring their potential to reinvigorate her current work, for many of her late paintings, watercolors, and drawings feature circular forms closely related to those that she had used so effectively in the past.
As late as 1976, the year before her ninetieth birthday, O'Keeffe made her ongoing commitment to abstraction clear. "The abstraction," she wrote, "is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint."