Georgia O’Keeffe was part of the post World War I American Modernist Movement, which attempted to prove American exceptionalism. The movement was part of the growing emphasis on nationalism in this country. O’Keeffe was a leading female painter who was first well-known for her representational depictions of “flowers, leaves, shells, bones, and other architectural and natural subjects” but was also a huge influence upon abstraction as an American aesthetic (Lynes 1-2). O’Keefe was strongly influenced by the “curvilinear and organic vocabulary” of the Art Nouveau movement, by anti-traditional, individually expressive and sensual Japanese designs, and by photography’s use of space, perspective, and line (2-3).
Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born in November of 1887 to dairy farmers in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents considered art to be an important part of her education from elementary to high school. In her early life, she was tutored in art at home and by a local watercolorist. Throughout high school in Madison and then in Chatham, Virginia, her teachers encouraged her art. After high school, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then became part of the Art Students League in New York, where she first met Alfred Stieglitz who later became her husband. The Art League granted her a Still-Life Scholarship in 1907 to attend the Outdoor School at Lake George, New York. She spent two years in Chicago from 1908 to 1910 as a commercial artist prior to teaching art in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina.
O’Keeffe began dabbling in abstracts with charcoal in 1915, and her husband-to-be included these as part of a group show in New York at his famous gallery 291 in late spring and summer of 1916; he arranged the first one-artist exhibition of her work in April of 1923, simply entitled Georgia O’Keeffe. Working with abstracts made O’Keeffe part of a small, elite American group of artists, and she considered abstraction to be her primary style. However, when critics misinterpreted her work as a representation of her sexuality, she turned to “recognizable subject matter” for which she is most known (www.okeeffemuseum.org/art–exhibitions).
Flowers as the subject of her paintings became an obsession beginning in 1924 and continued for decades. O’Keeffe created paintings of all sizes, and she emphasized the center of a flower and its sexuality. The critics really had fun with this, and later O’Keeffe would boldly tell the critics, and I loosely translate, “Get your minds out of the gutter, because my mind is not in there.”
Petunia No. 2 was first exhibited in the famous “Seven Americans” show organized by Stieglitz in 1925 and was one of O’Keeffe’s first large-scale paintings. The painting illustrates her fascination with the principles of photography and her respect for mentor Arthur Wesley Dow’s focus on composition as all-important. The influence of Asian expressionism is also indicated (www. okeeffemuseum.org/art–exhibitions). O’Keeffe’s mastery of color is highlighted by the “two-dimensionality (rather than focus on perspective)” in her flower studies (Stern 3).
In December of 2011, O’Keeffe’s Canna Red and Orange (1926) was auctioned at Christie’s for $1.43 million. It was a a very colorful 20 X 16-inch oil on canvas.
This sale was totally eclipsed by Christie’s auction in 2001 of Calla Lilies with Red Anemone (1928) for an amazing $6.17 million. In an article in 1989, art expert Nicholas Callaway wrote that some found O’Keeffe’s flowers to be “sensual” and others found them to be “chaste,” but the most amazing fact is that the paintings were done by a woman “at a time when the art world was almost exclusively male.” One fact is painfully but blissfully true: controversy brings notoriety (“Big Art” 2).
Leaving his wife of 25 years, Stieglitz moved in with O’Keeffe in 1918 and married her in 1924. Stieglitz, a prominent photographer, began a study in portraiture of O’Keeffe which spanned nearly three decades (www.okeeffemuseum.org/art–exhibitions). During this time, Stieglitz made more than 330 photographs of O’Keeffe, including her hands, face, feet, and torso. His aim was to show her humanity–the “strengths and vulnerabilities.” She was depicted both “clothed and nude, intimate and heroic, introspective and assertive.” He “almost singlehandedly defined her public persona for generations to come.” The pictures were radical with unique angles, lighting, close-ups, colors, and abstractions; and the world perceived O’Keeffe as radical, also (Celebrating three giants 2-3).
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz spent the seasons in New York City and at Lake George, but she spent brief times each year working in New Mexico. In New York, she worked with oils to capture her impressions of flowers, leaves, and trees. Throughout her career, she loved depicting trees as “living and lifeless.” Her love of photography influenced her to study scale, perspective, and color. She painted buildings with “optical distortion” (www.okeeffemuseum.org/art–exhibitions).
After her husband’s death in 1946, O’Keeffe settled down in New Mexico, living at her homes in Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch and also making trips into Navajo territory. The hills, cliffs, and mountains, the cedar and cottonwood trees, the dessert bones of her collection, the very simple architecture of the homes, and the various landscapes became the subjects of her work for the next 40 years. She was also inspired by traveling the world. During this time, she continued representational and abstract works using oil paints, watercolors, pastels, and charcoal. She continued to strive to build a “body of work whose aesthetic [was] modern in its precision, clean lines and elegant simplicity” (www.okeeffemuseum.org/art–exhibitions).
Without a doubt, Georgia O’Keeffe was one of the most prolific painters in history, having painted over 2,000 pieces. Hundreds of her works are exhibited in more than 100 public art galleries in Asia, Europe, and North and Central America. President Gerald Ford presented her with the Medal of Freedom Award in 1977, and President Ronald Reagan awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 1985. Even though she is shown all over the world, O’Keeffe’s passion was a personal one: “I have but one desire as a painter–that is to paint what I see, as I see it, in my own way, without regard for the desires or taste of the professional dealer or the professional collector” (www.okeeffemuseum.org/art&exhibitions).
Early in 1971, Georgia O’Keeffe lost her central vision and was left to struggle with limited peripheral vision. Surprisingly, she was able to work in watercolors and charcoal without any assistance until 1978 and with graphite until 1984. From 1972, she depended upon an assistant to help her paint with oils until 1977 when she had to give it up. Juan Hamilton, a potter-sculptor, was that assistant. Juan became her traveling companion, editor, and close friend until O’Keeffe’s death in 1986 at the age of 98 years old.
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Lynes, Barbara Buhler. “Georgia O’Keeffe: abstraction.” Veranda Mar. 2010: 24+. General
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Stern, Fred. “Legendary modern American artists.” World and I Nov. 2013. General OneFile.
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www.okeeffemuseum.org