Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe was an abstract painter, famous for for her large paintings of desert flowers and scenery. O'Keeffe is quoted as saying;

' I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it – I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers'.
(source: http://www.lilithgallery.com/arthistory/modern/Georgia-OKeeffe.htm).

O'Keeffe is considered as an artist who has made a signifcant contribution to the development of Modern Art in America.
The daughter of dairy famers, Georgia O'Keeffe was born in a farmhouse in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin in 1887. One of seven children, O'Keeffe & her sisters were made to attend art classes by their mother. Upon her promising ability it was decided that O'Keeffe should attend art school.

In 1905 she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in 1907 she went to the Art Students League in New York where she was inspired by the growing community of abstract abstractionists. In 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting mona shehab (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot). Her prize was a scholarship to attend the League's outdoor summer school at Lake George, New York.

In 1909 she had stopped painting due to finanical issues as her family could not afford to support her. She first became a commercial artist in Chicago and then went on to teach in Texas in 1912.
O'Keeffe's time in Texas triggered a long life fascination with the stark and powerful western landscape. This fascination lead her to paint works that drew on the natural forms of the canyons and plains that surrounded her. O'Keeffe's paintings of cow skulls and calla lilies gained particular attention.

Around her time in Texas, O'Keeffe attended classes at the Teachers College of Columbia University in South Carolina. There she encountered teacher, Arthur Dow, a specialist in Oriental Art. Dow’s interest in non-European art helped O’Keeffe move away from the forms she had found so restrictive in her previous studies. Dow believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist's personal ideas and feelings and that such subject matter was best realized through harmonious arrangements of line, color, and notan (the Japanese system of lights and darks).
(source: http:///www.okeeffemuseum.org).

O'Keeffe then made charcoal drawings upon her return to Texa which she sent to a friend, Anna Pollitzer, in New York. Pollitzer showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and gallery owner. He was enthused with the work, and asked to show them. So, without her knowledge, Georgia O’Keeffe had her first exhibition in 1916 at Steiglitz’s “291 Gallery.”

A relationship with then married Alfred Steilgetz had blossomed and as an avid supporter of O'Keeffe, he exhibited her work and practically moulded her career. Stielgetz left his wife and married O'Keeffe, 24 years his junior, in 1924.
For the next twenty years the two would live and work together, Steiglitz creating an incredible body of portraits of O’Keeffe, while O’Keeffe showed new drawings and paintings nearly every year at the gallery. Living in Lake George, New York, and in New York City, O’Keeffe painted some of her most famous work.
By the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe had become known as one of America's most important artists. Her work commanded high prices; in 1928 six of her calla lily paintings sold for $25,000 US dollars, which was at the time the largest sum ever paid for a group of paintings by a living American artist.
O'Keeffe began spending time in New Mexico in 1929. She became enthralled with the mesas, Spanish architecture, wooden crucifixes, fauna, and desert terrain. These all became elements in her work.
In 1934 she discovered Ghost Ranch, an area north of Abiquiu, whose painted desert of dramatically colored, enormous cliffs and hills inspired some of her most famous landscapes.
In the 1930s and 1940s O'Keeffe's reputation and popularity continued to grow, and she received numerous commissions. Her work was included in exhibitions in and around New York, and in the 1940s, and she was given two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943 and another in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first ever given by that museum to a woman. She was also awarded honorary degrees by numerous universities, the first by the College of William and Mary in 1938, and in the mid-1940s, the Whitney Museum of American Art sponsored a project to establish the first catalogue of her work.
In 1945, she bought a second home, an abandoned hacienda in Abiquiu (renovated through 1948), some 16 miles (26 km) south of Ghost Ranch. Located on 3 acres, O'Keeffe battled with the owners (the Catholic Church) for 15 years to purchase the decrepit hacienda. With spetacular views, the Abiquiu home was the setting for many later paintings. O'Keeffe moved there permanantly after Steiglitz's death in 1946.
The nearly 100-year-old O'Keeffe continued to paint until a few weeks before her death. She died on March 6, 1986.

http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/

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