Georgia O'Keeffe
1887-1986
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist. She is typically associated with the American southwest and particularly New Mexico where she settled late in life. O'Keeffe has been a major figure in American Modernism since the 1920s. She is chiefly known for paintings in which she synthesizes abstraction and representation in paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes. Her paintings present crisply contoured forms that are replete with subtle tonal transitions of varying colors, and she often transformed her subject matter into powerful abstract images.
O'Keeffe was born on 1887 in a farmhouse on a large dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents, Francis Calyxtus O'Keeffe and Ida Totto O'Keeffe, were dairy farmers of Hungarian origin. She was the first girl and the second of seven O'Keeffe children. She received art instruction from local watercolorist, Sara Mann.
In 1905, O'Keeffe enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; in 1907, the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied with William Merritt Chase. In 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting "Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot". Her prize was a scholarship to attend the League's outdoor summer school at Lake George, New York. When she attended a class at the University of Virginia Summer School, she was introduced to the innovative ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow by Alan Bement. Dow's teaching strongly influenced O'Keeffe's thinking about the process of making art.
Stieglitz married O'Keeffe in 1924. He had started making photographs of O'Keeffe and in 1921, forty-five of his photographs, including many of O'Keeffe, were exhibited in his retrospective exhibition held at the Anderson Galleries. The photographs of O'Keeffe created a public sensation. During O'Keeffe's early years in New York City she met many early American modernists from the Stieglitz's circle of friends, including Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Paul Strand and Edward Steichen.
Soon after she moved to New York, she began working primarily in oil, which was a shift away from her watercolor from the 1910s, and by the mid-1920s, she began making large scale paintings of natural forms from close up, as if seen through a magnifying lens.
During the 1920s, O'Keeffe made both natural and architectural forms the subject of her work. She painted her first large-scale flower painting in 1924, "Petunia, No. 2", which was first exhibited in 1925. She completed "City Night", and "New York-Night", 1926, and "Radiator Bldg-Night", "New York", 1927. Beginning in 1923, Stieglitz organized exhibitions of O'Keeffe's work annually, and by the mid-1920s, she had become known as one of America's most important artists. Her work commanded high prices.
O'Keeffe had first visited New Mexico in 1917. Between 1929 and 1949 she spent part of almost every year working in New Mexico. She began collecting and painting bones, and area's distinctive architectural and landscape forms. She was returning to New York every fall. In New Mexico she discovered Ghost Ranch, an area north of Abiquiu, whose varicolored cliffs inspired some of her most famous landscapes. She would purchase a house on the ranch property in 1940.
After Stieglitz's death in 1946, O'Keeffe moved to New Mexico permanently. During the 1950s, O'Keeffe produced a series of paintings featuring the architectural forms. Another distinctive painting of the decade is "Ladder to the Moon", 1958.
In 1984 O'Keeffe moved to Santa Fe to be closer to medical facilities. She died 1986 at the age of 98.
|
|
