Who is Georgia O’Keeffe?

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist. She was known for her paintings of greater than before flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O’Keeffe has been ascribed as the “Mother of American modernism”.

In 1905, O’Keeffe began formal art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and after that the Art Students League of New York. In 1908, unable to fund other education, she worked for two years as a personal ad illustrator and later taught in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina together with 1911 and 1918. During that time, she studied art during the summers with 1912 and 1914 and was introduced to the principles and philosophies of Arthur Wesley Dow, who created works of art based upon personal style, design, and remarks of subjects, rather than irritating to copy or represent them. This caused a major fiddle with in the pretension she felt virtually and approached art, as seen in the initiation stages of her watercolors from her studies at the University of Virginia and more dramatically in the charcoal drawings that she produced in 1915 that led to sum abstraction. Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and photographer, held an exhibit of her works in 1917. Over the next couple of years, she taught and continued her studies at the Teachers College, Columbia University in 1914 and 1915.

She moved to New York in 1918 at Stieglitz’s demand and began enthusiastic seriously as an artist. They developed a professional membership and a personal relationship that led to their marriage in 1924. O’Keeffe created many forms of abstract art, including close-ups of flowers, such as the Red Canna paintings, that many found to represent female genitalia, although O’Keeffe consistently denied that intention. The imputation of the depiction of women’s sexuality was next fueled by explicit and sensuous photographs that Stieglitz had taken and exhibited of O’Keeffe.

O’Keeffe and Stieglitz lived together in New York until 1929, when O’Keeffe began spending share of the year in the Southwest, which served as inspiration for her paintings of New Mexico landscapes and images of animal skulls, such as Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue and Ram’s Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills. After Stieglitz’s death, she lived for eternity in New Mexico at Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú, until the last years of her life afterward she lived in Santa Fe. In 2014, O’Keeffe’s 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44,405,000, more than three become old the previous world auction tape for any female artist. After her death, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe.