Georgia O'Keeffe
1887 – 1986 · United States
Known for: American modernist painter, mother of American modernism: flowers, bones and desert light
“A painter who made the desert and a single flower large enough to hold a whole world.”
Biography
Georgia O'Keeffe was born on 15 November 1887 on a dairy farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the second of seven children of Francis and Ida O'Keeffe. She had decided to become an artist by the age of ten and took her first lessons from a local watercolourist, then studied from 1905 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and from 1907 at the Art Students League in New York, where a still life won her the League's Chase prize. Her father's bankruptcy and her mother's illness brought that training to an end, and for several years she worked as a commercial artist in Chicago and taught school in Virginia and Texas, painting very little. A summer course in 1912 introduced her to the ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow, whose emphasis on design and composition rather than imitation showed her a way forward.
In 1915 she made a series of charcoal drawings that gave up resemblance altogether; a friend showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited them at his New York gallery 291 in 1916. Stieglitz invited her to New York in 1918 and paid for a year in which she did nothing but paint, and the two married in 1924. From then she worked in oil, pastel, charcoal and watercolour on subjects that became unmistakably her own: flowers enlarged until a single blossom filled the canvas, among them the Red Canna paintings, and the towers and skies of the city she called her New Yorks. From 1929 she spent part of each year in New Mexico, whose light, bones and eroded hills reshaped her work into paintings such as Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue of 1931 and Summer Days of 1936. She kept clear of the movements of her century and refused to be described as a woman artist, wanting to be judged simply as an artist.
Stieglitz died in 1946, and once his estate was settled O'Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, dividing her time between the house at Abiquiú and the summer place at Ghost Ranch. She travelled widely in later life, and as her eyesight failed during the 1970s she turned increasingly to work in clay and to paintings made with the help of assistants. She died in Santa Fe on 6 March 1986 at the age of ninety-eight. Called the mother of American modernism, she had worked for seven decades largely outside the currents around her. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe after her death, and in 2014 her Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for more than forty four million dollars, then the highest price paid for a painting by a woman.