GEORGIA TOTTO O'KEEFFE
November 15, 1887 — March 6, 1986
Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, and grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. As a child she received art lessons at home, and her abilities were quickly recognized and encouraged by teachers throughout her school years. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O'Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist.
O'Keeffe pursued studies at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905–1906) and at the Art Students League, New York (1907–1908), where she was quick to master the principles of the approach to art-making that then formed the basis of the curriculum—imitative realism.
In 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot). Shortly thereafter, however, O'Keeffe quit making art, saying later that she had known then that she could never achieve distinction working within this tradition.
Photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was keen on modernism and modernist artists, discovered O'Keefe's work and exhibited some of her abstract drawings in New York in 1916. By the following year, the United States had become embroiled in World War One, and Stieglitz's professional commitments were nullified. He began to used O'Keeffe as a photographic model, creating works that engendered emotion and meaning through the conscious used of shape, line and tone.
Stieglitz began a cycle of cloud photographs he called "Equivalents," claiming that form conveyed emotional and psychological meaning in the visual arts, not the specific subject of the artist. As New York City thrust its way into the sky in its metamorphosis into the greatest and most important city on earth in the early 20th Century, Stieglitz shot cityscapes of New York during different time periods. These works great influenced O'Keeffe as there's was a synergistic relationship.
From 1923 until his death in 1946, Stieglitz worked assiduously and effectively to promote O'Keeffe and her work, organizing annual exhibitions of her art at The Anderson Galleries (1923–1925), The Intimate Gallery (1925–1929), and An American Place (1929–1946). As early as the mid-1920s, when O'Keeffe first began painting large-scale depictions of flowers as if seen close up, which are among her best-known pictures, she had become recognized as one of America's most important and successful artists.
Their relationship also became sexual, and in time, Stieglitz would leave his wife for O'Keeffe, who was 24 years his junior.
Their love was deep but their relationship was often stormy; Stieglitz liked city life, with all its noise and broiling activity, while O'Keeffe loved open space and solitude. Stieglitz's cycle of photographs of her extended arguably is his most lasting work.
Married to Stieglitz, the proponent of modernism, O'Keeffe's early style featured intrinsically abstract subject matter such as details of flowers and architectural motifs. A common trope in her paintings were enlargements of botanical details.
She was developing her own distinctive, and distinctively American style, an iconography that includes featuring details of plant forms that would one day embrace bleached bones and New Mexican desert landscapes, all sharply rendered.
In 1924, O'Keeffe married Steiglitz. Though Stieglitz masterfully shaped her career, there was resentment as O'Keeffe was the epitome of what was then called "the modern woman," i.e. independent, while her husband, of German Jewish stock, had old time European patriarchal prejudices. He at first tried to control O'Keeffe, until they reached an understanding. The bisexual O'Keeffe eventually would have a nervous breakdown and wind up a sanatorium. But always, there was the art.
From 1926 to '29, O'Keeffe painted a cycle of New York City views, but her life's work generally would focus on simple buildings rather than skyscrapers. Her paintings further simplified the buildings into an archetypal folk architecture that exuded permanence and tranquility.
O'Keeffe eschewed criticism that found symbolism in her work, such as the sexual imagery allegedly found in paintings such as "Black Iris" (1926).
Her botanicals subjects in close-up begged an interpretation focused on their generative capacity, and the possibility inherent in these works generates their force and mystery. Her botanical works were full of energy and exalted life.
O'Keeffe began spending time in New Mexico in 1929. She became enthralled with the mesas, Spanish architecture, wooden crucifixes, fauna, and desert terrain. These all became elements in her work, which are characterized by clarity and unity, her subjects exist in their own solipsistic worlds.
"I simply paint what I see," O'Keeffe is quoted as saying, from O'Keeffe's own essays published in Georgia O'Keeffe in 1987.
Arguably her most famous visual trope, the sun-bleached skull of a cow, were eternalizations of Thanatos, a counterpoint to her early botanical work suffused with Eros. O'Keeffe did not go in for symbolism and argued that the skulls were merely symbols of the desert and of nothing else.
"To me, they are strangely more living than the animals walking around - hair, eyes and all, with their tails switching."
O'Keeffe bought an old adobe house in New Mexico in 1945 and moved there after Steiglitz's death in 1946. The house became one of her most frequent subjects. Her style simplified details of doors, windows, and walls to where they seemed like unmodified planes of color, an abstraction
In the 1960s, patterns of clouds and landscapes seen from the air became a trope of her work, evoking the romantic view of nature that was par of her early work. Her work in the 1970s featured intense portrayals of a black rooster.
The nearly 100-year-old O'Keeffe continued to paint until a few weeks before her death.
She died on March 6, 1986 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Permanent collections:
Museum of Modern Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
The Art Institute of Chicago
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts
The Philadelphia Museum of Art
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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