Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe (born November 15, 1887, near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, U.S.—died March 6, 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico) was an American painter who was among the most influential figures in Modernism, best known for her large-format paintings of natural subjects, especially flowers and bones, and for her depictions of New York City skyscrapers and architectural and landscape forms unique to northern New Mexico.

Early years

O’Keeffe grew up with six siblings on a Wisconsin dairy farm and received art lessons at home as a child. Throughout her school years, teachers recognized and cultivated her ability to draw and paint. Upon graduation from high school, O’Keeffe determined to become a professional artist.

She first attended the Art Institute of Chicago (1905–06), and then she went to New York City to study at the Art Students League. O’Keeffe quickly became proficient at imitative realism, the approach to image making that formed the basis of all standard art-school curriculum at the time, and in 1908 she won the league’s William Merritt Chase still life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot) (1908). However, because she believed that she would never distinguish herself as a painter within the tradition of imitative realism, she abandoned her commitment to being a painter altogether and took a job in Chicago as a commercial artist.

While with her family in 1912, O’Keeffe attended a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, which was taught by Alon Bement of Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. Bement acquainted her with the then-revolutionary thinking of his colleague at Teachers College, artist and art educator Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow believed in the Modernist idea that the subject of artists’ work should be their personal ideas and feelings and that these could be visualized most effectively through the harmonious arrangement of line, colour, and notan (the Japanese system of arranging lights and darks).

Dow rejected imitative realism and, in espousing the aesthetic of an Asian culture, his ideas most probably struck a familiar chord with O’Keeffe. She seems to have had an intuitive appreciation for this aesthetic, having been introduced to it through the art manuals she used as a student in primary and secondary school. Dow’s approach, then, in offering an alternative to imitative realism, rekindled O’Keeffe’s desire to be a professional artist. She subsequently worked with these ideas when teaching art in a public school in Amarillo, Texas (1912–14), and when working as Bement’s assistant during the summer at the University of Virginia (1913–16).

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An emerging Modernist

In the fall of 1915, after a year of studying with Dow in New York, O’Keeffe accepted a teaching job in Columbia, South Carolina, at Columbia College. There, furthering her explorations of Dow’s principles, she sought a purely personal means of expression and turned to abstraction to produce works such as No. 3–Special (1915). In doing so, she transcended Dow’s teaching and became one of a handful of American and European Modernists who were working with this new and innovative approach to image making.

Late in 1915 she mailed some of these drawings to a former classmate at Teachers College, who received them early in 1916 and immediately took them to New York City’s famous avant-garde gallery, 291, operated by photographer and impresario Alfred Stieglitz. Impressed with what he saw, Stieglitz included 10 of O’Keeffe’s drawings in a group exhibition at 291 in May 1916, and in April 1917 he sponsored a solo show of her work.

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In the fall of 1916 O’Keeffe moved to Canyon, Texas, as the head of the art department at West Texas State Normal College. The work she subsequently completed there demonstrates her profound response to the vast plains and open skies of West Texas and particularly to the dramatic landscape configurations of nearby Palo Duro Canyon. Above all, her paintings of the period—most notably her watercolours, such as Sunrise and Little Clouds II (1916), Evening Star No. VII (1917), and Light Coming on the Plains No. II (1917)—reveal her continuing fascination with abstraction as a means of expression.

New York

Because of illness, O’Keeffe took a leave of absence from teaching in February 1918, and she later resigned her position to accept Stieglitz’s offer to support her painting activity for a year; she moved to New York that June. Although Stieglitz was married and nearly 24 years O’Keeffe’s senior, the two fell in love and began living together. They divided their time between the city and the Stieglitz family estate at Lake George, New York, and they were married in 1924 when Stieglitz received a divorce.

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From 1916 to his death in 1946, Stieglitz worked assiduously and effectively to promote O’Keeffe and her art. He was alone among his peers in the 1910s in maintaining that American art could equal European art and in asserting that women could create art equal to that produced by men. However, he equated the creative process with sexual energies, and from the beginning he defined O’Keeffe’s work primarily in terms of gender, declaring her imagery the visual manifestation of a sexually liberated woman. In 1921 he provided visual equivalents for his ideas by exhibiting a large number of photographs he had made of O’Keeffe. Many presented her in the nude or in various stages of undress, sometimes posed in front of her abstract drawings and paintings while gesturing toward them with her arms and hands.

Stieglitz’s association of O’Keeffe’s abstractions with her body captured the imagination of the critics, whose reviews of her next exhibition—a retrospective organized by Stieglitz at the Anderson Galleries in 1923—were overwhelmingly Freudian. From then until his death, Stieglitz organized annual exhibitions of O’Keeffe’s work at the Anderson Galleries (1924–25), the Intimate Gallery (1925–29), and An American Place (1929–46), the latter two of which he operated himself. By the late 1920s O’Keeffe had become one of New York’s most celebrated Modernist artists, and Stieglitz had created a strong-enough market for her work that she enjoyed financial security and independence.

After her arrival in New York in 1918, O’Keeffe continued to produce abstract art, such as Red & Orange Streak / Streak (1919), which ranks among the most imaginative and provocative works of her career. However, in 1919 she also had begun to paint precisely delineated, recognizable forms, perhaps in response to her increasing awareness not only of photographic imagery but also of Stieglitz’s ideas about her work. O’Keeffe was a member of the National Woman’s Party, the most radical feminist organization of the early 20th century in the United States; as such, she rejected the essentialist notion that women inherently possess a set of particular character traits. Accordingly, she objected strongly to gendered interpretations of her work as well as to the sexualized public image that Stieglitz had created of her. In an attempt to reshape this public image, she began—after the Anderson Galleries exhibit of 1923—to promote herself as a serious, hardworking professional. In published interviews and in the photographs of her made by Stieglitz and other photographers, she began to cultivate a public image that was antithetical to the one Stieglitz had presented of her in his 1921 exhibition of her work.

Believing her abstractions to be the primary source of misreadings of her art, O’Keeffe moreover curtailed her production of such pieces and limited their inclusion in exhibitions of her work that Stieglitz organized after 1923. While she never abandoned Modernist abstraction as the underlying principle in her work, by the mid-1920s she had shifted its emphasis to redefine herself as a painter of recognizable forms, by which she remains best known today. Her subsequent depictions of recognizable subject matter were replete with the abstract shapes that she had earlier identified as her own in the 1910s, including ovals, hooked or V-shapes, and spirals. Her large-format paintings of flowers—precisely rendered and presented as if seen through a magnifying lens—were often declared by critics to be further proof of her female nature as the basis of her art; however, these works usually called attention to the centres of the flowers, which, for the most part, are androgynous and thus not exclusively feminine. As O’Keeffe addressed both natural and human-made forms in the 1920s, she produced some of her most distinctive paintings, such as Black Iris (1926) and Radiator Building—Night, New York (1927). Because all of her paintings speak to the Modernist aesthetic of “less is more,” and because many rely on manipulations intrinsic to photography, such as cropping and close-up views, they reveal her ongoing fascination with the photography, Modernist ideas, and the aesthetics of Asian art.

Despite the professional and artistic growth she experienced in New York, O’Keeffe knew by the end of the 1920s that neither the dynamism of the city nor the lushness of the Lake George landscape could sustain her creative efforts. Torn between her need to seek new stimuli for her art and her loyalty to Stieglitz, she decided to spend the summer of 1929 working on her art in New Mexico, which she had first visited briefly in 1917. There she rediscovered a landscape environment as exhilarating to her as the West Texas landscape had been in the 1910s; indeed, it would sustain her creativity for many years.