Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American modernist painter whose career spanned seven decades. She remains one of the most revolutionary painters of the 20th century. Called the “Mother of American modernism,” O’Keeffe gained international recognition for her paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers, hills and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived. Although she was a figure associated with interpretations regarding feminism, she did not want to be seen as a “woman artist.” She wanted to be seen as an artist.
Georgia O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, in Wisconsin, Her parents, Francis and Ida O’Keeffe, were dairy farmers. O’Keeffe was the second of seven children. By age 10, she knew she wanted to become an artist. She received art instruction from a local watercolorist. Her development towards art had taken place during a movement called “New Woman,” which focused on educational and professional opportunity expansion for women in the early twentieth century.
From 1905 to 1906, O’Keeffe was enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he ranked at the top of her class. As a result of contracting typhoid fever, she had to take a year off from her education. In 1908, O’Keeffe discovered that she would not be able to finance her studies. Her father had gone bankrupt and her mother was seriously ill with tuberculosis.
O’Keeffe taught and headed the art department at a Texas college.. From 1905, when O’Keeffe began her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Until about 1920, she studied art or earned money as a commercial illustrator or teacher to pay for further education. Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and photographer, held an exhibit of her works in 1916. Over the next couple of years, she taught and continued her studies at Teachers College, Columbia University.
1915
When she took a summer art class in 1912 at the University of Virginia, she began to experiment with abstract compositions and develop a personal style that veered away from realism. She mailed charcoal drawings to a friend and former classmate at Teachers College, who shared them with photographer Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 Gallery early in 1916. Stieglitz found them to be the “purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while.”
Georgia O’Keeffe 1915
In June of 1918 O’Keeffe was invited by Stieglitz to live and work in New York City and accepted this invitation as well as his offer to underwrite her year of painting in the city. Stieglitz and O’Keefe developed a professional and personal relationship that led to their marriage on December 11, 1924. In New York, O’Keefe created many reflections of her perception of the city through oil paint, charcoal, pastel, and watercolor. She looked back fondly at her pieces from this time, calling them ‘My New Yorks.’
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz lived together in New York until 1929. According to art historian Charles Eldredge, “The couple enjoyed a prominent position in the ebullient art of New York throughout the 1920s.”
In February 1921, Stieglitz’s photographs of O’Keeffe were included in a retrospective exhibition. Stieglitz started photographing O’Keeffe when she visited him in New York City. When he retired from photography in 1937, he had made more than 350 portraits and more than 200 nude photos of her. In 1978, she wrote about how distant from them she had become, “When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives.”
After having moved into a 30th floor apartment in NYC in 1925, O’Keeffe began a series of paintings of New York skyscrapers and skyline. One of her most notable works, which demonstrates her skill at depicting the buildings in the Precisionist style, is the Radiator Building – Night.
The Brooklyn Museum held a retrospective of her work in 1927. As a result of the press attention, O’Keeffe’s paintings sold at a higher price from that point onward. She received unprecedented acceptance as a woman artist from the fine art world due to her powerful graphic images and within a decade of moving to New York City, she was the highest-paid American woman artist.
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz had an open relationship, which could be painful for O’Keeffe. In 1928, Stieglitz began a long-term affair with photographer Dorothy Norman. O’Keeffe was hospitalized for depression in 1929. At the suggestion of friends, O’Keeffe began to spend the summers painting in New Mexico. In 1933, O’Keeffe was hospitalized for two months after suffering a nervous breakdown, largely due to Stieglitz’s affair. O’Keeffe did not paint for a year.
By 1929, she traveled to Santa Fe for the first time. From her room, she had a clear view of the Taos Mountains. She subsequently visited New Mexico on a near-annual basis, often staying there for several months at a time. O’Keeffe went on many pack trips, exploring the rugged mountains and deserts of the region that summer and later visited the nearby D.H. Lawrence Ranch. Stieglitz never came to New Mexico himself. “What, and be 50 miles from a doctor?” O’Keeffe visited and painted the nearby historical SanFrancisco de Asis Mission Church at Ranchos de Taos. She made several paintings of the church, as had many artists, and her painting of a fragment of it silhouetted against the sky captured it from a unique perspective.
In New Mexico, she collected rocks and bones from the desert floor and made them and the distinctive architectural and landscape forms of the area subjects in her work.
Known as a loner, O’Keeffe often explored the land she loved in her Ford Model A, which she purchased and learned to drive in 1929.
She often talked about her fondness for Ghost Ranch and northern New Mexico, as in 1943, when she explained, “Such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the ‘Faraway.’ It is a place I have painted before . . . even now I must do it again.”
O’Keeffe began creating simplified images of natural things, such as leaves, flowers, and rocks. The essence of very womanhood permeates her pictures,” citing her use of color and shapes as metaphors for the female body. While her work is often interpreted to be about female sexuality, she rejected this idea numerous times. For fifty years O’Keeffe maintained that there was “no connection between vulvas and her artwork.” O’Keeffe stated, “When people read erotic symbols into my paintings, they’re really talking about their own affairs.” She attributed other artists’ attacks on her work to psychological projection.
In 1945, O’Keeffe bought a second house, an abandoned hacienda in Abiquiú, which she renovated into a home and studio. She moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death in 1946, where she lived for the next 40 years at her home and studio or Ghost Ranch summer home in Abiquiu, and in the last years of her life, in Santa Fe.
Cerro Pedernal from Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu
This was a favorite subject for O’Keeffe, who once said, “It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. G_d told me if I painted it enough, I could have it” Among guests to visit her at the ranch over the years were Charles and Anne Lindbergh, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, poet Allen Ginsberg, and photographer Ansel Adams.
After her death, O’Keeffe’s ashes were spread along the top of Cerro Pedernal.
During the 1940s, O’Keeffe had two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago (1943). Her second was in 1946, when she was the first woman artist to have a retrospective at theMuseum of Modern Art(MoMA) in Manhattan. The Whitney Museum began an effort to create the first catalogue of her work in the mid-1940s.
O’Keeffe broke free of “strict gender roles” and adopted “gender neutral” clothing, as did other professional women in Santa Fe and Taos who experienced “psychological space and sexual freedom” there. Shortly after O’Keeffe arrived for the summer in New Mexico in 1946, Stieglitz suffered a stroke. He died on July 13, 1946. She buried his ashes at Lake George, where they had lived.
In 2014, O’Keeffe’s 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44,405,000—at the time, by far the largest price paid for any painting by a female artist, to Walmart heiress Alice Walton, more than three times the previous world auction record for any female artist.
By 1972, O’Keeffe had lost much of her eyesight due to macular degeneration, leaving her with only peripheral vision. She stopped oil painting without assistance in 1972. However, in 1973, O’Keeffe hired John Hamilton as a live-in assistant and then a caretaker. Hamilton was a potter and taught O’Keeffe to work with clay, encouraged her to resume painting despite her deteriorating eyesight, and helped her write her autobiography. He worked for her for 13 years. The artist’s autobiography, Georgia O’Keeffe became a bestseller.
O’Keeffe became increasingly frail in her late nineties. She died in 1986, age 98. Her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered, as she wished, on the land around Ghost Ranch. Following O’Keeffe’s death, her family contested her will because codicils added to it in the 1980s had left most of her $65 million estate to Hamilton.
Her works are in the collections of several museums, and following her death, the Georgian O’Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe.
Awards and honors
Honorary degree of “Doctor of Fine Arts” from the College of William and Mary.
Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts
M. Carey Thomas Award at Bryn Mawr College
Honorary degree from Harvard University
The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to American civilians
The National Medal of Arts
The National Women’s Hall of Fame
A substantial part of her estate’s assets were transferred to the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, a nonprofit. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe in 1997. The assets included a large body of her work, photographs, archival materials, and her Abiquiú house, library, and property. The Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú was designated a National Historic Landmark.
