Georgia O'Keeffe

The artist Georgia O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on November 18, 1887.

In 1905, O'Keeffe attended the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York City to study at the Art Students League in New York City in the period 1907-08. After working as a commercial artist in Chicago, she became interested in Oriental design.

From 1912 to 1914, she worked as a public school art supervisor in Amarillo, Texas, and then moved back to New York City to attend Columbia, where she took art classes conducted by Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow's system of art education was rooted in Oriental art themes.

In 1916, she was appointed department head of art-teacher training at West Texas State Normal College, where she used Dow's philosophy in her teacher-training.

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. Their relationship also became sexual, and in time, Stieglitz left 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. Shew 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.

She remained at the college through 1918.

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 had a nervous breakdown and wound 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 focused 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.

"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.

Abandoned painting due to failing eyesight in 1972.

She was awarded the American National Medal of the Arts in 1985 by the National Endowment of the Arts in Washington, DC.

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives." Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 672-674. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.

"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.

Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.