Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe was an influential American artist known for her distinctive paintings that captured the essence of flowers, landscapes, and urban scenes. Born in 1887 in Wisconsin, she was the second of seven children and developed a passion for painting at a young age. O'Keeffe's formal art training began with local teachers and continued at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York City, where her innovative approach began to take shape. In the early 1910s, she moved to Texas, where the vast landscapes deeply influenced her work.
Her relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz became a pivotal aspect of her career, leading to her first major exhibitions. O'Keeffe's work is characterized by bold colors and dynamic compositions, often showcasing the interplay of light and form. Throughout her life, she defied artistic conventions, insisting on her identity as an artist rather than a "woman artist." Her later years were spent primarily in New Mexico, where she created some of her most famous works reflecting the desert’s stark beauty. O'Keeffe's legacy continues to inspire contemporary artists, and her work remains significant in the exploration of both modernism and femininity in art.
Subject Terms
Georgia O'Keeffe
Fine Artist
- Born: November 15, 1887
- Birthplace: Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
- Died: March 6, 1986
- Place of death: Santa Fe, New Mexico
American painter
Breaking with European traditionalism, O’Keeffe pointed to new ways to perceive the world, creating precise and sometimes stark depictions of nature and of urban scenes.
Area of achievement Art
Early Life
For her first twenty-eight years, Georgia O’Keeffe was an artistic revolution waiting to erupt. Georgia, the second of seven children born to Francis O’Keeffe and Ida Totto O’Keeffe, was fascinated by art. By age ten, she wanted to be a painter, although she did not know what that entailed. When people pressed her to tell them what kind of painter she wanted to be, she invariably replied, “A portrait painter.”
O’Keeffe’s early training in art began with a local art teacher and continued in a parochial school. When the nun who taught art told the impressionable child that she was painting things too small, Georgia obliged by painting her subjects large, sometimes so large that her pictures overflowed their boundaries, as many of her later floral paintings would.
In 1905–06, O’Keeffe attended the Art Institute in Chicago, where she was embarrassed to paint nude men and where she was schooled in an ultraconservative, highly traditional European style of painting. She spent the following year at the Art Students League in New York City, where, as had been the case in Chicago, her painting received favorable comment and won prizes.
O’Keeffe, however, was not receiving the kind of instruction she needed or desired. Unwilling to go through life painting dead rabbits and pastoral scenes, she gave up painting in 1908, becoming a commercial artist in Chicago. She designed the rosy-cheeked girl who still graces cans of Dutch Cleanser. O’Keeffe hated commercial art but, needing to earn a living, she stayed with it until she fell ill, suffering a temporary impairment to her vision. She returned to her family, who had relocated in Virginia in 1903.
During this interval, O’Keeffe took a summer course at the University of Virginia, which did not admit women but allowed them to study in summer school. The instructor, Alon Bement, was a disciple of Arthur Dow of Columbia University, an artist who, influenced by Asian art, had broken away from European artistic conventions. O’Keeffe eventually studied with Dow, who changed forever the way she saw things and recreated them.
From 1912 to 1914, O’Keeffe taught art in Amarillo, Texas, where she was intrigued by the big sky and the broad, seemingly endless plains. In 1915, she spent an abortive semester teaching at Columbia College in South Carolina, but the following fall she became an art instructor at West Texas State Normal School in Canyon.
It was during this teaching stint that O’Keeffe sent some of her charcoal drawings to her New York friend Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to photographer Alfred Stieglitz. He exhibited them in 1916 without O’Keeffe’s knowledge or consent at his 291 Gallery. This showing marked the beginning of Georgia O’Keeffe’s future as an artist.
Life’s Work
When O’Keeffe, recently arrived from Texas to continue her studies with Arthur Dow, learned that Stieglitz had shown her work without authorization, she stormed into his studio to confront him. When the two met, however, Stieglitz’s enthusiastic assessment of her work mollified her.
Stieglitz, whose reputation in the art world was solid, held another exhibition of O’Keeffe’s work in 1917. She was in Texas when this exhibition was held, but Stieglitz won O’Keeffe’s heart by rehanging the entire exhibition for her alone when she arrived in New York shortly after the closing.
During her years in west Texas, O’Keeffe imbibed its stark landscape and intense colors, regularly painting the nearby Palo Duro Canyon, a favorite subject. Her artwork, always precise, began to show a new depth and originality in both its use of light and its angularity.
O’Keeffe was developing one of her most significant skills, an ability to paint something as static as a tree or flower yet imbue the painting with incredible motion and dynamism. Nothing in an O’Keeffe still life is at rest; everything moves. The charcoal sketches that first attracted Stieglitz’s attention reflect this motion, but as O’Keeffe experimented with color and light, the motion in her still life work became explosive.
By 1918, O’Keeffe was ready to leave west Texas. When Stieglitz arranged for her to receive a subvention in support of her painting, she willingly moved to New York and soon was living with Stieglitz. Her years in west Texas did much to shape O’Keeffe’s later work. She had discovered the unique quality of light in the southwestern desert. Also, in search of objects for her students to paint, she stumbled on the notion of using sun-bleached animal bones, which were plentiful in the surrounding desert.
Although she did not herself begin to paint animal skulls and pelvises until more than a decade later, she had gained an appreciation for the kind of patina that sun-drenched bones acquire and for their translucence. For the next decade, however, O’Keeffe, who had first visited Santa Fe, New Mexico, just before her return to New York, remained in the East. In 1924, she was married to Stieglitz, now divorced from the wife he had left in 1918.
The life O’Keeffe and Stieglitz had established in 1918—which included summers at the Stieglitz family home at Lake George in New York’s Adirondack Mountains and winters in New York City—continued throughout the 1920s. O’Keeffe, Stieglitz’s favorite model, spent much of her time and creative energy posing for his photographs, which he exhibited widely.
O’Keeffe was finding subjects for her own painting both at Lake George and in New York City. In 1925, the couple moved into an apartment on the thirtieth floor of Lexington Avenue’s Shelton Hotel, which gave O’Keeffe a view that extended to the East River. Here she painted her famed New York cityscapes.
Her paintings of industrial scenes along the East River and of various buildings in New York City marked a new direction in O’Keeffe’s career as an artist and reflected the influence of John Marin, whose paintings of industrial scenes impressed her when she first saw them in 1915.
In the 1920s, O’Keeffe also painted many still life pieces, particularly flowers and scenes from the Lake George summers. Perhaps the most interesting of her urban paintings is The Shelton with Sunspots (1926). The towering building in which O’Keeffe and Stieglitz lived springs from the bottom of the canvas like the prow of a ship, many of its details obscured by blinding sunspots that bounce off the hotel’s windows. O’Keeffe imbues this painting of a bland, commonplace skyscraper with conflict. It has been suggested that O’Keeffe, who suffered from migraine headaches, replicated in this picture the play of light that sometimes accompanies that malady.
In 1929, Mabel Dodge Luhan invited O’Keeffe, who by now was well known, to visit her ranch in Taos, New Mexico. Because Stieglitz refused to venture west of the Hudson River, O’Keeffe went to New Mexico alone, remaining at the Luhan ranch from April until August. This trip heralded a new direction in O’Keeffe’s life and work.
From that point on, she would spend most of her summers in New Mexico, doing so until 1946, when Stieglitz died. O’Keeffe moved permanently to Abiquiu, north of Santa Fe, in 1949. She had bought a house at Ghost Ranch, fifteen miles north of Abiquiu, in 1940 and occupied both houses until encroaching feebleness necessitated her final move to Santa Fe in 1984.
In Taos, O’Keeffe learned to drive and bought a car. Every day during her New Mexican summers, she packed her equipment into her car, which rode high off the ground, and drove into the desert to paint. When the desert heat oppressed O’Keeffe, she stretched out beneath the car’s chassis.
The desert paintings represent a large portion of O’Keeffe’s most celebrated work. Her paintings of animal bones Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931), Ram’s Head with Hollyhock (1937), and Pelvis with Moon (1943) representing an extended period in her artistic career, are among her most puckish works.
O’Keeffe enjoyed painting the soft, flowing lines and angles of adobe buildings, as seen in such paintings as her Ranchos Church (1930) or Black Patio Door (1955), to which such Lake George paintings as her Stables (1932) and Barn with Snow (1933) contrast sharply.
After Stieglitz’s death, O’Keeffe became a world traveler. Many thought she had now entered her abstract period. Actually, many of the paintings she produced between 1946 and 1980 were photographically realistic representations of scenes she observed from more than 30,000 feet up as she jetted across the sky. Among her most famous paintings of this period is an enormous canvas, Sky Above Clouds II (1963).
Living to be nearly a hundred, O’Keeffe painted until failing eyesight forced her into a brief retirement with her companion, Juan Hamilton, and his family in Santa Fe. There she died on March 6, 1986.
Significance
Georgia O’Keeffe always insisted that she was an artist, not a woman artist. She denied that gender had much to do with accomplishment and, from her earliest exhibitions, demonstrated that she could hold her own with her masculine competitors. Indeed, as an artist, she was superior to most of them.
During nearly a century of life, O’Keeffe continually grew professionally. She constantly tried new things. She considered no subject lacking in artistic potential, as her preoccupation with bones, paper flowers from New Mexican graveyards, conventional urban buildings, and scenes of smokestack industries clearly demonstrates.
O’Keeffe saw things as no one else saw them. Many subsequent artists have tried to imitate her floral paintings, for example, producing huge flowers crammed into canvases too small to accommodate them. Somehow, O’Keeffe could do that and, in the process, communicate something about the essence of a flower that no one had captured before. Her imitators end up with crowded canvases that look cramped. Perhaps an artist’s imitators suggest more accurately than words can the true greatness of the artist they seek to copy.
In O’Keeffe’s work, one finds the zeal for life that so well characterized her as a person. She left a legacy of hope to artists in all fields who dare to deviate drastically from artistic convention. She neither disparaged her predecessors nor imitated them. She was truly and completely her own person, and her artwork continued to inspire others long after her death. A new exhibition of her work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 2023. Called "Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time," the show sought to increase female representation at the museum while also bringing attention to some of the artist's lesser known pieces.
Further Reading
Ciboire, Clive, ed. Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Georgia O’Keeffe maintained a correspondence with Anita Pollitzer, a classmate at Columbia University, for more than forty years. Much of it is reproduced here.
Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Exhaustively detailed biography.
Eisler, Benita. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Eisler provides crucial insights into the sometimes stormy but always symbiotic relationship that existed between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz for the forty years they knew each other. Contains many of Stieglitz’s photographs of O’Keeffe.
Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. A sensitive and accurate biography of O’Keeffe. The author understands the artist’s artistic orientation and how she uses her environment artistically.
Messinger, Lisa Mintz. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988. This book, aside from O’Keeffe’s autobiography, contains the best reproductions of O’Keeffe’s work. It offers reproductions of the twenty-nine works in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Well written and insightful.
O’Keeffe, Georgia. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Viking Press, 1976. If one could read only one book relating to O’Keeffe, this autobiography would be the sensible choice. An indispensable book for anyone seriously interested in O’Keeffe.
Peters, Sarah Whitaker. Becoming O’Keeffe: The Early Years. Rev. ed. New York: Abbeville Press, 2001. Peters offers a sensitive and spirited look into the making of an artist. Excellent illustrations.
Pyne, Kathleen. Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Describes how O’Keeffe and the other women in Alfred Stieglitz’s circle developed their artistic voices and how Stieglitz’s image of O’Keeffe as the pure “woman in art” affected her self-identity.
Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. The most comprehensive biography of Georgia O’Keeffe to date. Well written and amply illustrated. The illustrations, however, do not include reproductions of O’Keeffe’s work, which are readily available in the autobiography.
Shuman, R. Baird. Georgia O’Keeffe. Vero Beach, Fla.: Rourke, 1993. Intended for the nonspecialist, this book contains excellent illustrations, a chronology, and an annotated bibliography. Accurate coverage of O’Keeffe’s life and work.
Smith, Roberta. "Georgia O'Keeffe, 'Modernized' by MoMA." The New York Times, 27 Apr. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/arts/design/georgia-okeeffe-moma-review.html. Accessed 22 June 2023.