O'Keeffe, Georgia (1887-1986)

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O'Keeffe, Georgia (1887-1986)

A renowned American woman artist, Georgia O'Keeffe was among the first generation of modernists in this country. She translated a love of nature and a feeling for form into some of the most advanced paintings and drawings of the twentieth century.

Born outside of Madison, Wisconsin, into a family of farmers, O'Keeffe decided to be an artist at the age of ten. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905-1906 and, after her move to New York the following year, at the Art Students League under William Merritt Chase and Kenyon Cox. Chase was an important American Impressionist who encouraged O'Keeffe's love of landscape. She was more stylistically influenced, however, by Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University. Dow had studied with the post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin and greatly admired Japanese art. O'Keeffe was moved by Dow's orientalizing landscapes, arranged simply in flat, saturated color.

Alfred Stieglitz, the most passionate promoter of art photography and modern art in America at this time, exhibited O'Keeffe's remarkably advanced watercolors—without her permission—in 1916. Stieglitz's gallery "291," named for its Fifth Avenue address, also hosted her first solo exhibition the following year. Along with artists such as John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Max Weber, O'Keeffe became one of the artists in Stieglitz's stable of talented modernists. The young painter (age 29) and the older photographer/impressario (age 52) were married in 1924.

In 1916 O'Keeffe had accepted a position as supervisor of art in the public schools of Amarillo, Texas. The landscape and light there inspired her to create some radically reductive abstractions. A series of watercolors and charcoal drawings she made at this time, for example Light Coming on the Plains III (1917, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas), rivals the most abstract art of any made in the twentieth century.

Throughout the 1920s, O'Keeffe painted the sharp architectural forms of Manhattan and the soft landscapes around Lake George, in the foothills of the Adirondacks. Though she often said that she was "not a joiner," her works of the 1920s shared affinities with contemporary painting. The art of Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, and other "Precisionists," consisted of precisely rendered architectural forms, industrial landscapes, and machine subjects. Although O'Keeffe depicted cavernous city streets and painted in crisp forms, her touch was never quite as dry as theirs. Moreover, she eschewed specifically industrial subjects in favor of more natural ones. In 1924 she began painting her renowned series of large-scale flowers—viewed closely and filling the entire canvas. At once realistic and abstract, these works often reveal explicit vaginal shapes, as in Black Iris III (1926, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Though the artist vehemently denied any sexual readings of these works, they may safely be said to express a generalized feminine principle.

Wintering in New York and summering in the west, O'Keeffe made annual visits to New Mexico beginning in 1929. That summer, she stayed in Taos where she painted Black Cross, New Mexico (1929, Art Institute of Chicago). Explaining their appearance in her art, she recalled, "I saw the crosses so often—and often in unexpected places—like a thin dark veil of the Catholic church spread over the New Mexico landscape." Three years after Stieglitz's death in 1946 she moved to remote Abiquiu, New Mexico, to a ruined adobe called Ghost Ranch. Here she spent the last four decades of her life. On intimate terms with the land, and ever sensitive to the shapes of things, she began collecting the bones she found in the desert. One is featured in Cow's Skull—Red, White, and Blue (1931-1936, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Characteristically, she denied that the bones reflected a personal preoccupation with death.

In 1953, when O'Keeffe was in her mid-sixties, she traveled throughout Europe. Five years later she took a three-and-a-half-month trip around the world by air, and in 1960 she visited the Far East. The experience of flying was an epiphany for O'Keeffe; she was entranced by the topography below and cloud formations seen from the air. Her works of this period reflect this new visual preoccupation. For instance, her Sky Above Clouds IV (1965, Art Institute of Chicago), a mural measuring eight-by-twenty-four feet, was painted for a major retrospective exhibition of her work in 1966.

As attested by photographs—showing her determined face, her hair tightly pulled back, dressed in black—O'Keeffe's last years saw no decline in energy or creativity. Extending her range of artistic expression, she took up pottery in the last decade of her life. In 1976 she produced a lavishly illustrated self-titled autobiography. On the occasion of her ninetieth birthday, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., hosted a tribute to her. In 1987, it was also the site of the first large-scale posthumous retrospective of her work after her death at age 98.

Although her greatest contribution to avant-garde art occurred in the years between 1915 and 1920, she had in subsequent decades come to embody the notion of the uncompromising artist and was regarded as the very icon of the independent woman.

—Mark B. Pohlad