Georgia O'Keeffe

(1887 - 1986)

 

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was an American modernist painter and

draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades.

 

She grew up on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the second of seven children. By the age of 10 she had decided she wanted to become an artist. After graduating from high school, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Virginia. Over the next couple of years, she taught and continued her studies at the Teachers College, Columbia University.

 

Photographer Alfred Stieglitz was the first to exhibit O'Keeffe's art in 1916 in the 291 Gallery he co-founded in New York, he who would eventually go on to become her husband.

 

By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe was recognised as one of America’s most important and successful artists, known for her paintings of New York skyscrapers, an essentially American symbol of modernity, as well as her equally radical depictions of flowers.

 

In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico. The stark landscape and Native American and Hispanic cultures of the region inspired a new direction in O’Keeffe’s art. For the next two decades she spent most summers living and working in New Mexico. She made the state her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death.

 

In the 1950s, O’Keeffe began to travel internationally. She painted and sketched works that evoke the spectacular places she visited, including

the mountain peaks of Peru and Japan’s Mount Fuji. At the age of

seventy-three, she took on a new subject: aerial views of clouds and sky.

 

Suffering from macular degeneration and failing vision, O’Keeffe painted her last unassisted oil painting in 1972. However, O’Keeffe’s will to create did not diminish with her eyesight. In 1977, at age ninety, she observed, “I can see what I want to paint. The thing that makes you want to create is still there.” She died in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98.