Georgia O'Keeffe
The painter of flowers and the desert.
Georgia O'Keeffe painted enlarged flowers, skyscrapers and the New Mexico desert. She is one of the great figures of American modernism.
Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1887 on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, but grew tired of traditional teaching. The ideas of the art educator Arthur Wesley Dow, about building a picture with line, colour and the arrangement of light and dark, became important to her. For some years she worked as a teacher, including in Texas.
In 1915 she made a series of abstract charcoal drawings. The photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz exhibited them in his gallery 291 in New York in 1916. They became a couple, married in 1924, and Stieglitz photographed her in hundreds of pictures. He also became the one who promoted her art.
From the mid-1920s she painted flowers on a large scale, so close up that a single bloom fills the entire canvas. Critics interpreted them as sexual symbols, something she firmly rejected. At the same time she painted the skyscrapers of New York. Her style is clean and clear, with soft transitions, few details and strong forms.
In 1929 she travelled to New Mexico, and its landscape became her great subject. She painted red hills, crosses and bleached animal skulls she found in the desert, as in Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue of 1931 in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. After Stieglitz's death in 1946 she moved there for good and lived in Abiquiú and at Ghost Ranch. In later life she painted the sky seen from aeroplanes, and Sky Above Clouds IV of 1965 is in the Art Institute of Chicago.
When her eyesight deteriorated in the 1970s, she worked more in ceramics and with the help of assistants. She died in Santa Fe in 1986, aged 98. A museum devoted to her opened there in 1997. She is now one of the best-known artists in the United States and a model of how a woman could carve out an independent place in modernism.