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, that long have been icons of American art. Partly inspired by both of her grandmothers’ activities as amateur flower painters, O’Keeffe decided to become an artist while yet 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 the important gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), a champion of modernism, who became her mentor and, in 1924, her husband. With her shows at Stieglitz’s gallery, 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. Critical recognition was demonstrated by the 1927 solo exhibition of her work at the Brooklyn Museum.

Beginning in 1929, O’Keeffe began to work in New Mexico, a setting that soon dominated her work. Her pattern of dividing the year between New York and Taos was interrupted in 1939, when financial hardship encouraged her to accept a commission from the Dole Pineapple Company for a series of works depicting Hawaii. Following Stieglitz’s death, she began, in 1949, to live full-time in the Southwest. Under its influence, O’Keeffe 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. She rendered animal skulls and bones she found in the desert not as symbols of death but as aesthetic objects whose purity and severity, tokens of natural order, inspired her unique style of clear color, subtly rippling surfaces, and clean, precise lines. A similar approach informs O’Keeffe’s close-up floral paintings. Many viewers, including artistic associates, saw in her enlarged images of botanical petals and folds unmistakable references to female sexuality, but O’Keeffe resolutely resisted interpretation of her art, insisting her identity as an artist was not inextricable with her identity as a woman. In her last decades, living in relative isolation on her New Mexico ranch, O’Keeffe maintained an aloof persona that only heightened popular interest in her reserved yet highly personal art.