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Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986)
Biography
Blog Georgia O'Keeffe
Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven't time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time.
If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.
...Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.
- Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe was born on a dairy farm in in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. In her long life she became one of the great painters of our time. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League in New York, the University of Virginia, and Columbia University. In 1962 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
O'Keeffe is best known for her dramatic paintings of gigantic flowers and sun-bleached desert bones. Early in her career she placed all the art she created in a room to evaluate it. She destroyed them all because she thought each work was derivative of someone else's style. She started all over hoping the art would reflect only herself. Over the years she won many awards and had several major one-person shows at Stieglitz's galleries and major museums. Despite deteriorating eyesight in her later years, she continued to paint and work with clay.
In 1916 and 1917, O'Keeffe taught Dow's theories at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon. She discovered her extraordinary skill as a colorist using arcs of crimson and gold watercolor to emulate the Panhandle sunsets. Stieglitz closed her first sale, a spare sepia watercolor of a train puffing across the plains, for $200. But Stieglitz realized that O'Keeffe could never achieve parity with male artists if she did not work on a large scale in oil. In 1918 O'Keeffe moved to New York City and began living with Stieglitz in a small Midtown apartment. The quantity of her watercolors and drawings fell off dramatically as she devoted herself to producing substantial oil paintings. Most biographers have assumed that she rarely returned to drawing, pastel, or watercolor. Because she never mentioned doing preparatory sketches, even in her 1978 autobiography, most scholars believed that O'Keeffe worked directly on canvas from some sort of mental image. Others were dubious about her skill at drafting, assuming that she could not render the human figure or face because there was so little evidence that she pursued these subjects.
Georgia O'Keeffe painted her best-known works in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, but she remained an active painter until the 1980s. Her later works frequently celebrate the clear skies and desert landscapes of New Mexico. She went blind in later life, and turned to making pottery. A retrospective exhibition of her art, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, assured her reputation as one of the most original and important artists in modern American painting. In the early 1980s O'Keeffe moved in with Juan Hamilton and his family, and in 1985 she received the Medal of the Arts from President Ronald Reagan. In March of the next year, at the age of 98, O'Keeffe passed away at St. Vincent's Hospital in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Georgia O'Keeffe's work remains a prominent part of major national and international museums. For many, her paintings represent the beginnings of a new American art free from the irony and cynicism of the late 20th century. [Adapted from ArtCyclopedia]
The Great Books: Georgia O'Keeffe
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Georgia O'Keeffe
The Road to Expressionism
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