Georgia O’Keefe
Artist
Georgia O’Keefe was one of the first female painters to achieve worldwide acclaim from critics and the general public. She created innovative impressionist images that challenged the perceptions of the day and evolved constantly throughout her career. As one of the most significant artists of the 20th century, she is still recognized for her contributions to modern art.
Born in 1887, the second of seven children, O’Keefe grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. After graduating from high school, she attended the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where she learned the traditional techniques of painting. Thereafter, she taught art in West Texas, where she began experimenting with art forms such as abstraction. She produced a series of charcoal abstract drawings and mailed them to a friend. Her friend showed them to an art dealer, Alfred Stieglitz, who would later become O’Keefe’s husband. He was the first person to exhibit her art in 1916.
Her art was well-conceived by the collectors of the day, and by the mid-1920s, she was renowned as one of America’s most important and successful artists, known for her paintings of New York skyscrapers.
Her works shifted towards oil paintings of magnified natural forms. In 1925, her large-scale flower painting was exhibited in New York City. By magnifying her subject, she emphasized the shape and color and brought attention to the tiny details of the flower. This marked the beginning of a period of exploration on the flower theme that would continue throughout her career.
In 1929 she traveled to New Mexico. The stark landscapes and Hispanic influences in the region inspired a new direction in her art. For the next 20 years, she would spend most of her summers in the region, and made it her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death.
In the 1950s she began to travel internationally. She sketched and painted works depicting the scenes she saw, including the mountain peaks of Peru and Japan’s Mount Fuji. In the 1970s her eyesight started to degenerate, and she painted her last unassisted oil painting in 1972. She continued working in charcoal and pencil until 1984, and also produced clay pots and a watercolor series. Georgia O’Keeffe died in 1986, at the age of 98.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s collections include nearly 150 paintings and hundreds of works on paper. In 2014 the Georgia O'Keefe Museum sold a floral painting for $44 million dollars at an auction, setting the record for artwork sold by any female artist.