Georgia O’Keeffe was an American artist who is best known for her paintings of magnified flowers, animal skulls, and New Mexico desert landscapes. She has been recognised as the “Mother of American modernism”.
O’Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She grew up on a dairy farm, and showed a talent for art from a young age.At the age of 10, she had set her heart on becoming an artist and both she and her sister were taught art by local watercolorist Sara Mann. After completing high school, O’Keeffe continued her education at the Art Institute of Chicago. She then became a member of the Art Students League in New York City, studying under William Merritt Chase, F. Luis Mora, and Kenyon Cox. O’Keeffe learned the techniques required for traditional realist painting, and in 1908 won the League’s William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot. Later that year, O’Keeffe abandoned her artistic career plans and did not paint for four years.
In 1912, O’Keeffe was introduced to the work of Arthur Wesley Dow, and was inspired to begin exploring an alternative to realism. She continued to experiment with her style for two years, while teaching art in South Carolina and west Texas. In 1915, O’Keeffe became one of the first American artists to work in pure abstraction when she created a series of abstract charcoal drawings. In 1916, her work was show in public for the first time at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291 while she studied at Teachers College in New York. A year later, Stieglitz organised O’Keeffe’s first solo show at his gallery and in 1918 convinced her to move to New York to focus on her work. The two began a personal and professional relationship that led to their marriage in 1924.
By the mid-1920’s, O’Keeffe was recognised as one of America’s most important and successful artists for her paintings of New York skyscrapers and large-scale, close up painting of natural forms, including flowers. One of her best known pieces from this time is Black Iris III (1926), which, along with the many of her other flower painting, critics felt represented female genitalia. In 1929, O’Keeffe began travelling to northern New Mexico, inspiring a series of stark landscape paintings. In 1949, she moved there permanently following the death of her husband. Her simplified representations of New Mexico landscapes, including Black Cross, New Mexico (1929) and Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses (1931) grew in popularity due to a growing interest in regional depictions by American Modernists.
In the 1950’s, O’Keeffe started to travel internationally and her painting reflected this, depicting a variety of scenes including the mountain peaks of Peru and Japan’s Mount Fuji. In 1962, O’Keefe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and four years later she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1972, she painted her last oil painting without the help of others as her eyesight began to fail. O’Keeffe continued to create art, utilising several assistants to paint. She said she could “see what I want to paint. The thing that makes you want to create is still there.” She continued to draw in charcoal and branched out into ceramics during this time, and in 1976 she wrote a book about her art.
O’Keeffe was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, and in 1985 she was awarded the National Medal of Arts. A year later, she died at the age of 98. O’Keeffe was fundamentally important to the history of modernism, and her work continues to grow in popularity and inspire others. In 1995, the George O’Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe to celebrate her artistic legacy. In 1998, the Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú was designated a National Historic Landmark and is now part of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. In 2014, O’Keeffe’s 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44,405,000, more than three times the previous world auction record for any female artist.