Georgia O'Keeffe

One of America’s most important early modernist artists, Georgia O’Keeffe created powerful images, from floral still lifes to views of Manhattan skyscrapers and Southwestern scenery. Partly inspired by both of her grandmothers’ activities as amateur flower painters, O’Keeffe decided to become an artist when she was a girl on her parents’ Wisconsin farm. She studied drawing in school and then at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League in New York City. She was most profoundly influenced, however, by the important art teacher and theorist Arthur Wesley Dow, from whom she absorbed the principles of abstract composition based on the aesthetics of Japanese prints. O’Keeffe financed her studies with Dow at Columbia University in New York by teaching for periods in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina.

In 1916, O’Keeffe’s experimental abstract drawings came to the attention of gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), a champion of modernism, who became her mentor and, in 1924, her husband. With exhibitions at Stieglitz’s galleries, O’Keeffe became the foremost woman artist in the avant-garde art world in New York, where she settled in 1918 to devote herself to painting full-time. Working in oils, watercolor, and pastel, she made abstract images based on natural forms, as well as views of the city’s skyscrapers. But she became best known for her monumental, close-up studies of flowers. She received critical recognition in 1927 for her solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Beginning in 1929, O’Keeffe began to work in New Mexico, a setting that soon dominated her work. Following Stieglitz’s death, she began, in 1949, to live full-time in the Southwest. There explored a new range of subjects, from the vast desert landscape and its typical architecture to such individual natural motifs as bones and desiccated trees. Her treatments of each drew on both naturalistic and abstract traditions.