Georgia O'Keeffe

Background

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in a farmhouse in the town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on November 15, 1887, to Francis and Ida. Her mother had Dutch and Hungarian ancestry, while her father was Irish. Her parents had a dairy farm and she was the second of seven children. Her parents arranged for her to take lessons from a local artist because she had a passion for art from a young age. She graduated from Virginia’s Chatham Episcopal Institute in 1905. She belonged to the Kappa Delta sorority. From 1905 to 1906, she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before transferring to the Art Students League in New York City. She was given a scholarship to attend The League’s outdoor summer school in Lake George, New York, where she studied under William Merritt Chase.

After enrolling in a course at the University of Virginia Summer School, O’Keeffe began painting in 1912. There, she discovered Arthur Wesley Dow’s ground-breaking concepts. She then taught art in the public schools in Amarillo, Texas, for the following two years. She enrolled in Teachers College at Columbia University in 1914 and began taking classes with Dow, who would have a significant impact on O’Keeffe’s paintings. She continued to teach while beginning to produce her own art in 1915, finishing a series of highly innovative charcoal abstractions. Some of her abstract drawings were delivered to a friend in New York City, who then showed Alfred Stieglitz, a well-known art dealer and renowned photographer, the artwork. The sketches were also very well received by Stieglitz, who displayed 10 of them in 1916 at his gallery, 291. The next year, he produced O’Keeffe’s first solo exhibition at 291, which featured watercolors and oil paintings created in Texas. By 1918, he had persuaded O’Keeffe to go to New York so that she could focus solely on her artwork.

During the 1920s, she produced several important works, such as “Petunia, No. 2 (1924),” “City Night and New York—Night (1926),” and “Radiator Bldg—Night, New York (1927).” She had established herself as one of the most significant American artists by the middle of the 1920s. When she visited New Mexico for the first time in 1929, she was profoundly touched by the landscape, artistic expression, and architectural design of the state. Between 1929 and 1949, she made yearly trips to New Mexico to paint churches, structures, and other interesting artifacts before relocating there permanently. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, her reputation as an artist grew, and her works were displayed in several shows in and around New York. In the 1940s, she had two solo exhibitions, the first in 1943 at the Art Institute of Chicago and the second in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art (M.O.M.A.) in Manhattan. One of O’Keeffe’s most well-known paintings, “Summer Days,” depicts a deer’s skull covered in colorful wildflowers on a background of a desert. She also has a popular artwork called “Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory,” which shows a ram’s skull and a blue morning glory side by side.

O’Keeffe initially met Alfred Stieglitz, a well-known photographer and gallery owner, in 1908; but, they didn’t start communicating until a few years later, in the middle of the 1910s. Even though Stieglitz was married and 23 years her senior, they started dating. In 1924, Stieglitz wed O’Keeffe after divorcing his first spouse. On March 6, 1986, she passed away at the age of 98.