Sky Above Clouds (1960–1977) is a series of eleven cloudscape paintings by the American modernist painter Georgia O'Keeffe, produced during her late period.

The series of paintings is inspired by O'Keeffe's views from her airplane window during her frequent air travel in the 1950s and early 1960s when she flew around the world.

A darker variation of this motif occurred in 1972, influenced by her battle with macular degeneration, resulting in The Beyond, her last, unassisted painting before losing her eyesight.

[3] "More difficult to assess is the extent to which O'Keeffe and Stieglitz influenced each other’s work",[4] writes art historian Lisa Messinger.

Both explored the multiple possibilities of a subject in a thematic series, reworking compositions in order to discover the ultimate solution.

[11] The post-war aviation era began in the 1950s, and with it, what became known as the Jet Age,[12] bringing the opportunity of commercial air travel to the wider public.

[11] Despite her fear of flying,[13] O'Keeffe took advantage of this new experience and she 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.

[15] Her frequent trips on an airplane led to a change in her artistic perspective and viewpoint;[α] her work, which once focused on magnification of her subjects, now became telescopic, and emphasized the importance of the sky itself.

[22] O'Keeffe was active for a woman in her late 70s, but she began having problems with her eyesight in 1968, eventually losing her central vision due to macular degeneration in 1971.

It started as a sketch sometime after October 1960 while she was on a six-week tour flying around the Asia-Pacific region, stopping over in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Fiji, Tahiti, Korea, and the Philippines.

Art historian Lisa Messinger notes that the design of the painting follows the style of color field and minimalist painters.

This was partly achieved by applying thin paint on a huge canvas with simple compositions making use of narrow strips of color at the top, leaving the bottom three-quarters white.

[23] In 1976, O'Keeffe again reminisced about what got her started on the painting and the series: "One day when I was flying back to New Mexico, the sky below was a most beautiful solid white.

"[26] Messinger believes that An Island with Clouds was O'Keeffe's first attempt to develop this idea, but that it failed to achieve the intended effect.

The canvas is horizontal, showing blue and green stripes of color (the sky) at the top, while two-thirds of the portion below (the clouds) is white.

"I literally took one look at Sky Above Clouds II and was so inspired by its gentle floating quality that I immediately went to the piano and wrote the opening of what became my piano concerto...I thought the title of my concerto was my own invention, but in 1976, at the time of the premiere, I reread the Life magazine article and found that the author had written, 'O'Keeffe's paintings could be considered landscapes of the mind.

'"[41] Architect Steven Holl pointed to Richter's piece and O'Keeffe's painting as inspiration for the 1987-1988 interior redesign of the carpets in an apartment of the 68 story Metropolitan Tower building in Midtown Manhattan.

[46] The final work depicts striated clouds on the bottom of the painting, with a narrow horizon on top in yellow, green, and blue.

[48] The large format and design for Sky above Clouds IV was initially inspired by O'Keeffe's visit to the opening ceremony of the John Deere World Headquarters in Moline, Illinois, on June 4, 1964.

O'Keeffe was invited to the ceremony by her friend, designer Alexander Girard (1907–1993), who was commissioned to create a large, monumental mural about the history of the John Deere company for the headquarters.

Girard proposed that O'Keeffe should consider a similar painting for the company, and she seemed to support the idea, creating her first sketch of clouds after arriving home from the ceremony.

[49] O'Keeffe told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that she originally got the idea for Sky above Clouds IV after seeing an "enormous empty white wall" at Deere headquarters.

Architectural historian Sarah Rovang writes that "O'Keeffe’s abstract clouds would have softened the transition between Saarinen's sleek corporate interior and Sasaki's soft, organic surroundings".

[49] Several months later, O'Keeffe was unsure about the commercial work, and with a busy schedule of traveling, painting, and home improvements planned, the project never went forward.

To paint it, O'Keeffe constructed platforms to reach the canvas at its highest point, working seven days a week from six in the morning until nine at night without heat, making sure to finish it before the weather got cold.

[56] In a review of the exhibition, art critic Peter Plagens described the work as innovative, but found its large size reminiscent of both a common billboard as well as a somewhat absurd "metamorphosis of scale into physical reality".

[62] The painting was previously held by a Swiss private collector since 1999, and was exhibited at the Kunsthaus Zürich from 2003-2004,[63] and at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt in 2013.

[66] Around this time, she had previously confided to actor Dennis Hopper, a New Mexico resident and art collector, that she was "almost totally blind" and asked him to keep it a secret.

[69] The painting shows a partly abstract horizon at twilight, with blue sky on top and the lower portion of the canvas in black.

Due to the loss of O'Keeffe's central vision by 1972, she was helped with the painting by her then, full-time personal assistant Belarmino Lopez.