O'Keeffe, Georgia (1887–1986), painter.Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe attended high school in nearby Madison until her family moved to Williamsburg, Virginia. After graduating from Chatham Episcopal Institute she attended the Chicago Art Institute, the Art Students League in New York, the University of Virginia, and Teachers College, Columbia University, where she studied with the well‐known art educator Arthur Wesley Dow. During the 1910s she held a variety of teaching jobs, including supervisor of the art program for the public schools in Amarillo, Texas.
In 1916 she met Alfred
Stieglitz, who exhibited her latest work—primarily watercolor abstractions—in his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. By 1924, when they married, her nonfigurative oil paintings of the climate, light, and space of West Texas influenced his
photography, as he abandoned urban‐realist subjects for cropped sky studies called “Equivalents.” During the mid‐1920s, O'Keeffe created her best‐known works, the magnified flower blossoms. Beneath their decorative abstractness these are commonly viewed as expressing a provocative sexuality. In 1929 she spent her first summer in Taos, New Mexico, as a guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan. By 1940 she had settled in the area; in 1945 she bought an isolated house in nearby Abiquiu, where she lived the rest of her life.
Avoiding the influence of Picasso's cubism in any form, O'Keeffe epitomized the independence of the American avant‐garde. Whether referring to
New York City skyscrapers, Lake George barns, parched pelvic bones, skulls, distant mountains, adobe buildings, or clouds, her paintings project precisely contoured configurations of sharply contrasting color. Extracting a given object from its immediate setting, she suspended it in space, or in what she termed “a wonderful emptiness.” Thereby, she advanced an expansive tendency in American art, as opposed to a European tradition of containment.
See also
Painting.
Bibliography
Georgia O'Keeffe , Georgia O'Keeffe, 1976.
Laurie Lisle , Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, 1986.
Peter H. Hassrick, ed., The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum; introduction by Mark Stevens; essays by Lisa Mintz Messinger, Barbara Novak, and Barbara Rose, 1997.
Jeffrey Hogrefe , O'Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend, 1999.
James M. Dennis
