best biography georgia o'keeffe

An expert’s guide to Georgia O’Keeffe: five must-read books on the American painter

All you ever wanted to know about o’keeffe, including a comprehensive biography, the artist’s “perfect” novice recipe book, and her letters to photographer alfred stieglitz—selected by the curator theodora vischer.

Georgia O’Keeffe Courtesy Alfred Stieglitz Collection/Bridgeman Images

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“O’Keeffe had exquisite and great taste, and I can see why she became a fashion icon during her lifetime”

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When the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe died in 1986, aged 98, she was feted by the New York Times as the “undisputed doyenne of American painting”. Although famed for her flower paintings, she also lived among, and painted, some of the country’s most emblematic landscapes—from the skyscrapers of New York to the deserts of New Mexico.

A major exhibition of O’Keeffe’s work opens this month at the Fondation Beyeler near Basel and the museum’s chief curator, Theodora Vischer, has selected five books that bring to life her varied career.

Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (1989) by Roxana Robinson

“Roxana Robinson’s comprehensive biography gives a vivid account of O’Keeffe’s remarkable artistic career. Robinson recounts the artist’s long life in great detail, which, though most commonly associated with the American Southwest, played out in so many different places throughout the United States.”

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern (2017) by Wanda M. Corn

“O’Keeffe’s art and way of life was shaped by a Modernist aesthetic. This is reflected in her wardrobe, as well as the design and furnishings of her two homes in New Mexico. Wanda Corn has researched this decisive unity between art and life and presents her findings in this brilliant, richly illustrated catalogue.”

My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Vol. 1, 1915-1933 (2011) by Sarah Greenough

“O’Keeffe was a prolific letter writer and her extensive correspondence with Alfred Stieglitz offers an intimate insight into her relationship with the photographer who was her greatest supporter and later became her husband. The letters testify to the deep bond between the two, as they inspired each other.”

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Wartime Texas Letters (2020) by Amy von Lintel

“This book features O’Keeffe’s letters written over two years, while working as an art teacher in Canyon, Texas. They are mostly addressed to Stieglitz and are accompanied by excellent commentary. In this entertaining read, I came to know a young, vibrant woman discovering her voice, participating in all that is happening [around her].”

A Painter’s Kitchen. Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe, New Edition (2009) by Margaret Wood

“When O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico, she grew a vegetable garden at her home. I have come across several cookbooks devoted to O’Keeffe’s cuisine, but this recently republished book, written by her personal chef, is the most authentic. The recipes, based on homegrown or otherwise local foods, are simple, tasty and look lovely when plated. This book is also perfect for novice cooks.”

• Georgia O’Keeffe , Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 23 January-22 May

Clarification (13 September): the final line about "novice cooks” was reinstated after being unintentionally deleted

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Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe was a 20th-century American painter and pioneer of American modernism best known for her canvases depicting flowers, skyscrapers, animal skulls and southwestern landscapes.

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(1887-1986)

Who Was Georgia O'Keeffe?

Quick facts, training as an artist, love affair with stieglitz, famous artwork, inspired by new mexico, death and legacy.

Artist Georgia O'Keeffe studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York. Photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz gave O'Keeffe her first gallery show in 1916, and the couple married in 1924. Considered the "mother of American modernism," O'Keeffe moved to New Mexico after her husband's death and was inspired by the landscape to create numerous well-known paintings. O'Keeffe died on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98.

FULL NAME: Georgia Totto O'Keeffe BORN: November 15, 1887 BIRTHPLACE: Sun Prairie, Wisconsin DEATH: March 6, 1986 ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Scorpio

O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, on a wheat farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents grew up together as neighbors; her father Francis Calixtus O'Keeffe was Irish, and her mother Ida Totto was of Dutch and Hungarian heritage. Georgia, the second of seven children, was named after her Hungarian maternal grandfather George Totto.

O'Keeffe's mother, who had aspired to become a doctor, encouraged her children to become well-educated. As a child, O'Keeffe developed a curiosity about the natural world and an early interest in becoming an artist, which her mother encouraged by arranging lessons with a local artist. Art appreciation was a family affair for O'Keeffe: her two grandmothers and two of her sisters also enjoyed painting.

O'Keeffe continued to study art, as well as academic subjects at Sacred Heart Academy, a strict and exclusive high school in Madison, Wisconsin. While her family relocated to Williamsburg, Virginia in 1902, O'Keeffe lived with her aunt in Wisconsin and attended Madison High School. She joined her family in 1903 when she was 15 and already a budding artist driven by an independent spirit.

In Williamsburg, O'Keeffe attended Chatham Episcopal Institute, a boarding school, where she was well-liked and stood out as an individual, who dressed and acted differently than other students. She also became known as a talented artist and was the art editor of the school yearbook.

After graduating from high school, O'Keeffe went to Chicago where she attended the Art Institute of Chicago, studying with John Vanderpoel from 1905 to 1906. She ranked at the top of her competitive class, but contracted typhoid fever and had to take a year off to recuperate.

After she regained her health, O'Keeffe traveled to New York City in 1907 to continue her art studies. She took classes at the Art Students League where she learned realist painting techniques from William Merritt Chase, F. Luis Mora and Kenyon Cox. One of her still lives, Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot (1908), earned her the prize of attending the League's summer school in Lake George, New York.

While she continued to develop as an artist in the classroom, O'Keeffe expanded her ideas about art by visiting galleries, in particular, 291, founded by photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Located at 291 5th Avenue, Steichen's former studio, 291 was a pioneering gallery that elevated the art of photography and introduced the avant-garde work of modern European and American artists.

After a year of study in New York City, O'Keeffe returned to Virginia where her family had fallen on hard times: her mother was bedridden with tuberculosis and her father's business had gone bankrupt. Unable to afford to continue her art studies, O'Keeffe returned to Chicago in 1908 to work as a commercial artist. After two years, she returned to Virginia, eventually moving with her family to Charlottesville.

In 1912, she took an art class at the summer school of the University of Virginia, where she studied with Alon Bement. A faculty member of Teachers College at Columbia University, Bement introduced O'Keeffe to the revolutionary ideas of his Columbia colleague, Arthur Wesley Dow, whose approach to composition and design was influenced by the principles of Japanese art. O'Keeffe began experimenting with her art, breaking from realism and developing her own visual expression through more abstract compositions.

As she experimented with her art, O'Keeffe taught art at public schools in Amarillo, Texas, from 1912 to 1914. She was also Bement's teaching assistant during the summers and took a class from Dow at Teacher's College. In 1915, while teaching at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina, O'Keeffe began a series of abstract charcoal drawings and was one of the first American artists to practice pure abstraction," according to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum .

O’Keeffe mailed a few of her drawings to Anita Pollitzer, a friend and former classmate, who showed the work to Stieglitz, the influential art dealer. Taken by O'Keeffe's work, he and O'Keeffe began a correspondence and, unbeknownst to her, he exhibited 10 of her drawings at 291 in 1916. She confronted him about the exhibit but allowed him to continue to show the work. In 1917, he presented her first solo show. A year later, she moved to New York, and Stieglitz found a place for her to live and work. He also provided financial support for her to focus on her art. Realizing their deep connection, the artists fell in love and began an affair. Stieglitz and his wife divorced, and he and O'Keeffe married in 1924. They lived in New York City and spent their summers in Lake George, New York, where Stieglitz's family had a home.

As an artist, Stieglitz, who was 23 years older than O'Keeffe, found in her a muse, taking over 300 photographs of her, including both portraits and nudes. As an art dealer, he championed her work and promoted her career. She joined Stieglitz's circle of artist friends including Steichen, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin and Paul Strand. Inspired by the vibrancy of the modern art movement, she began to experiment with perspective, painting larger-scale close-ups of flowers, the first of which was Petunia No. 2 , which was exhibited in 1925, followed by works such as B lack Iris (1926) and Oriental Poppies (1928). "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," O'Keeffe explained. "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."

O'Keeffe also turned her artist's eye to New York City skyscrapers, the symbol of modernity, in paintings including City Night (1926), Shelton Hotel, New York No. 1 (1926) and Radiator Bldg—Night, New York (1927). Following numerous solo exhibitions, O'Keeffe had her first retrospective, P aintings by Georgia O’Keeffe , which opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 1927. By this time, she had become one of the most important and successful American artists, which was a major achievement for a female artist in the male-dominated art world. Her pioneering success would make her a feminist icon for later generations.

In the summer of 1929, O'Keeffe found a new direction for her art when she made her first visit to northern New Mexico. The landscape, architecture and local Navajo culture inspired her, and she would return to New Mexico, which she called "the faraway," in the summers to paint. During this period, she produced iconic paintings including Black Cross, New Mexico (1929), Cow's Skull: Red, White and Blue (1931) and Ram’s Head, White Hollycock, Hills (1935), among other works.

In the 1940s, O’Keeffe’s work was celebrated in retrospectives at the Art Institute of Chicago (1943) and at the Museum of Modern Art (1946), which was the museum’s first retrospective of a female artist’s work.

O'Keeffe split her time between New York, living with Stieglitz, and painting in New Mexico . She was particularly inspired by Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiú, and she decided to move into a house there in 1940. Five years later, O'Keeffe bought a second house in Abiquiú.

Back in New York, Stieglitz had begun to mentor Dorothy Norman, a young photographer who later helped manage his gallery, An American Place. The close relationship between Stieglitz and Norman eventually developed into an affair. In his later years, Stieglitz's health deteriorated and he suffered a fatal stroke on July 13, 1946, at the age of 82. O'Keeffe was with him when he died and was the executor of his estate.

Three years after Stieglitz's death, O'Keeffe moved to New Mexico in 1949, the same year she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In the 1950s and 1960s, O'Keeffe spent much of her time traveling the world, finding new inspirations from the places she visited. Among her new work was a series depicting aerial views of clouds as is seen in Sky above Clouds, IV (1965). In 1970, a retrospective of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City renewed her popularity, especially among members of the feminist art movement.

In her later years, O'Keeffe suffered from macular degeneration and began to lose her eyesight. As a result of her failing vision, she painted her last unassisted oil painting in 1972, however, her urge to create didn't falter. With the help of assistants, she continued to make art and she wrote the bestselling book Georgia O'Keeffe (1976). "I can see what I want to paint," she said at the age of 90. "The thing that makes you want to create is still there."

In 1977, President Gerald Ford presented O'Keeffe with the Medal of Freedom and, in 1985, she received the National Medal of Arts.

O'Keeffe died on March 6, 1986, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and her ashes were scattered at Cerro Pedernal, which is depicted in several of her paintings. The pioneering artist produced thousands of works over the course of her career, many of which are on exhibit at museums around the world. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico is dedicated to preserving the life, art and legacy of the artist, and offers tours of her home and studio, which is a national historic landmark.

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• When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.
• I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

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Georgia O’Keeffe (born November 15, 1887, near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin , U.S.—died March 6, 1986, Santa Fe , New Mexico) was an American painter who was among the most influential figures in Modernism , best known for her large-format paintings of natural subjects, especially flowers and bones, and for her depictions of New York City skyscrapers and architectural and landscape forms unique to northern New Mexico .

O’Keeffe grew up with six siblings on a Wisconsin dairy farm and received art lessons at home as a child. Throughout her school years, teachers recognized and cultivated her ability to draw and paint. Upon graduation from high school , O’Keeffe determined to become a professional artist.

She first attended the Art Institute of Chicago (1905–06), and then she went to New York City to study at the Art Students League . O’Keeffe quickly became proficient at imitative realism , the approach to image making that formed the basis of all standard art-school curriculum at the time, and in 1908 she won the league’s William Merritt Chase still life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot) (1908). However, because she believed that she would never distinguish herself as a painter within the tradition of imitative realism, she abandoned her commitment to being a painter altogether and took a job in Chicago as a commercial artist.

While with her family in 1912, O’Keeffe attended a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia , Charlottesville , which was taught by Alon Bement of Teachers College , Columbia University , in New York City. Bement acquainted her with the then-revolutionary thinking of his colleague at Teachers College, artist and art educator Arthur Wesley Dow . Dow believed in the Modernist idea that the subject of artists’ work should be their personal ideas and feelings and that these could be visualized most effectively through the harmonious arrangement of line, colour, and notan (the Japanese system of arranging lights and darks).

Dow rejected imitative realism and, in espousing the aesthetic of an Asian culture , his ideas most probably struck a familiar chord with O’Keeffe. She seems to have had an intuitive appreciation for this aesthetic, having been introduced to it through the art manuals she used as a student in primary and secondary school. Dow’s approach, then, in offering an alternative to imitative realism, rekindled O’Keeffe’s desire to be a professional artist. She subsequently worked with these ideas when teaching art in a public school in Amarillo , Texas (1912–14), and when working as Bement’s assistant during the summer at the University of Virginia (1913–16).

In the fall of 1915, after a year of studying with Dow in New York , O’Keeffe accepted a teaching job in Columbia, South Carolina , at Columbia College. There, furthering her explorations of Dow’s principles, she sought a purely personal means of expression and turned to abstraction to produce works such as No. 3–Special (1915). In doing so, she transcended Dow’s teaching and became one of a handful of American and European Modernists who were working with this new and innovative approach to image making.

Late in 1915 she mailed some of these drawings to a former classmate at Teachers College, who received them early in 1916 and immediately took them to New York City’s famous avant-garde gallery, 291, operated by photographer and impresario Alfred Stieglitz . Impressed with what he saw, Stieglitz included 10 of O’Keeffe’s drawings in a group exhibition at 291 in May 1916, and in April 1917 he sponsored a solo show of her work.

In the fall of 1916 O’Keeffe moved to Canyon , Texas, as the head of the art department at West Texas State Normal College. The work she subsequently completed there demonstrates her profound response to the vast plains and open skies of West Texas and particularly to the dramatic landscape configurations of nearby Palo Duro Canyon. Above all, her paintings of the period—most notably her watercolours, such as Sunrise and Little Clouds II (1916), Evening Star No. VII (1917), and Light Coming on the Plains No. II (1917)—reveal her continuing fascination with abstraction as a means of expression.

Because of illness, O’Keeffe took a leave of absence from teaching in February 1918, and she later resigned her position to accept Stieglitz’s offer to support her painting activity for a year; she moved to New York that June. Although Stieglitz was married and nearly 24 years O’Keeffe’s senior, the two fell in love and began living together. They divided their time between the city and the Stieglitz family estate at Lake George , New York, and they were married in 1924 when Stieglitz received a divorce.

From 1916 to his death in 1946, Stieglitz worked assiduously and effectively to promote O’Keeffe and her art. He was alone among his peers in the 1910s in maintaining that American art could equal European art and in asserting that women could create art equal to that produced by men. However, he equated the creative process with sexual energies, and from the beginning he defined O’Keeffe’s work primarily in terms of gender, declaring her imagery the visual manifestation of a sexually liberated woman. In 1921 he provided visual equivalents for his ideas by exhibiting a large number of photographs he had made of O’Keeffe. Many presented her in the nude or in various stages of undress, sometimes posed in front of her abstract drawings and paintings while gesturing toward them with her arms and hands.

Stieglitz’s association of O’Keeffe’s abstractions with her body captured the imagination of the critics, whose reviews of her next exhibition—a retrospective organized by Stieglitz at the Anderson Galleries in 1923—were overwhelmingly Freudian . From then until his death, Stieglitz organized annual exhibitions of O’Keeffe’s work at the Anderson Galleries (1924–25), the Intimate Gallery (1925–29), and An American Place (1929–46), the latter two of which he operated himself. By the late 1920s O’Keeffe had become one of New York’s most celebrated Modernist artists, and Stieglitz had created a strong-enough market for her work that she enjoyed financial security and independence.

After her arrival in New York in 1918, O’Keeffe continued to produce abstract art , such as Red & Orange Streak / Streak (1919), which ranks among the most imaginative and provocative works of her career. However, in 1919 she also had begun to paint precisely delineated , recognizable forms, perhaps in response to her increasing awareness not only of photographic imagery but also of Stieglitz’s ideas about her work. O’Keeffe was a member of the National Woman’s Party , the most radical feminist organization of the early 20th century in the United States; as such, she rejected the essentialist notion that women inherently possess a set of particular character traits. Accordingly, she objected strongly to gendered interpretations of her work as well as to the sexualized public image that Stieglitz had created of her. In an attempt to reshape this public image, she began—after the Anderson Galleries exhibit of 1923—to promote herself as a serious, hardworking professional. In published interviews and in the photographs of her made by Stieglitz and other photographers, she began to cultivate a public image that was antithetical to the one Stieglitz had presented of her in his 1921 exhibition of her work.

Believing her abstractions to be the primary source of misreadings of her art, O’Keeffe moreover curtailed her production of such pieces and limited their inclusion in exhibitions of her work that Stieglitz organized after 1923. While she never abandoned Modernist abstraction as the underlying principle in her work, by the mid-1920s she had shifted its emphasis to redefine herself as a painter of recognizable forms, by which she remains best known today. Her subsequent depictions of recognizable subject matter were replete with the abstract shapes that she had earlier identified as her own in the 1910s, including ovals, hooked or V-shapes, and spirals. Her large-format paintings of flowers—precisely rendered and presented as if seen through a magnifying lens—were often declared by critics to be further proof of her female nature as the basis of her art; however, these works usually called attention to the centres of the flowers, which, for the most part, are androgynous and thus not exclusively feminine. As O’Keeffe addressed both natural and human-made forms in the 1920s, she produced some of her most distinctive paintings, such as Black Iris (1926) and Radiator Building—Night, New York (1927). Because all of her paintings speak to the Modernist aesthetic of “less is more,” and because many rely on manipulations intrinsic to photography, such as cropping and close-up views, they reveal her ongoing fascination with the photography, Modernist ideas, and the aesthetics of Asian art.

Despite the professional and artistic growth she experienced in New York, O’Keeffe knew by the end of the 1920s that neither the dynamism of the city nor the lushness of the Lake George landscape could sustain her creative efforts. Torn between her need to seek new stimuli for her art and her loyalty to Stieglitz, she decided to spend the summer of 1929 working on her art in New Mexico, which she had first visited briefly in 1917. There she rediscovered a landscape environment as exhilarating to her as the West Texas landscape had been in the 1910s; indeed, it would sustain her creativity for many years.

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About Georgia O’Keeffe

"I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it."

Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most significant artists of the 20 th  century, renowned for her contribution to modern art. Born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe grew up on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O’Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist. She studied at the  Art Institute of Chicago  and the  Art Students League in New York , where she learned the techniques of traditional painting. The direction of her artistic practice shifted dramatically four years later when she studied the revolutionary ideas of  Arthur Wesley Dow . Dow offered O’Keeffe an alternative to established ways of thinking about art. She experimented with abstraction for two years while she taught art in West Texas. Through a series of abstract charcoal drawings, she developed a personal language to better express her feelings and ideas.

O’Keeffe mailed some of these highly abstract drawings to a friend in New York City. Her friend showed them to  Alfred Stieglitz , the art dealer and renowned photographer, who would eventually become O’Keeffe’s husband. He became the first to exhibit her work, in 1916.

By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe was recognized 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.

O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings coincided with a growing interest in regional scenes by American Modernists seeking a distinctive view of the nation. 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.” Late in life, and almost blind, she enlisted the help of several assistants to enable her to continue creating art. In these works, she drew on favorite motifs from memory and her vivid imagination. Georgia O’Keeffe died in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98.

As an artist of national standing, Georgia O’Keeffe has been well known in America for many decades. More recently, her art has begun to attract similar attention and accolades abroad. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s collections include nearly 150 paintings and hundreds of works on paper (pencil and charcoal drawings, as well as pastels and watercolors). The collections also include personal property, from rocks and bones to dresses and paintbrushes, and a significant archive of documents and photographs relating to the artist’s life and times.

Recommended Reading

There are numerous publications on Georgia O’Keeffe and this guide contains select readings about the work and life of O’Keeffe. Resources can be checked out through the Museum library and some can be accessed electronically.

Explore O’Keeffe’s Homes in Northern New Mexico

Georgia O’Keeffe maintained two homes in Northern New Mexico. Her summer house, twelve miles from Abiquiú, sits on 12 acres at the edge of a 21,000-acre property called Ghost Ranch.

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Museum Collections

Dedicated to the artistic legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is the largest repository of O’Keeffe’s artwork, personal effects, and related archives, including important correspondence, ephemera, and photographs, as well as two historic homes. The Museum collections provide rich context for understanding the artist’s art, life, and times.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Georgia o’keeffe (1887–1986).

Drawing XIII

Georgia o'keeffe.

Alfred Stieglitz

Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue

White Canadian Barn II

From the Faraway, Nearby

Black Place II

Michael A. Vaccaro

Lisa Messinger Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

For seven decades, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) was a major figure in American art. Remarkably, she remained independent from shifting art trends and stayed true to her own vision, which was based on finding the essential, abstract forms in nature. With exceptionally keen powers of observation and great finesse with a paintbrush, she recorded subtle nuances of color, shape, and light that enlivened her paintings and attracted a wide audience. Her primary subjects were landscapes, flowers, and bones, explored in series over several years and even decades. The images were drawn from her life experience and related either generally or specifically to places where she lived.

Born in 1887 near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O’Keeffe received art training at the Art Institute of Chicago school (1905), the Art Students League of New York (1907–8), the University of Virginia (1912), and Columbia University’s Teachers College, New York (1914–16). She became an art teacher and taught in various elementary schools, high schools, and colleges in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina from 1911 to 1918. During this period, she produced a remarkable series of charcoal drawings that led her art—and her career—in a new direction. These daring works of 1915–16 ( 50.236.2 ) orchestrated line, shape, and tone into abstract compositions. It was through these drawings that O’Keeffe came to the attention of the prominent photographer and New York gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz in January 1916. After supposedly exclaiming, “At last, a woman on paper!” he exhibited her drawings at the 291 gallery, where the works of many avant-garde European and American artists and photographers were introduced to the American public.

With his encouragement and promise of financial support, O’Keeffe abandoned teaching and arrived in New York in June 1918, to begin a career as an artist. From then until his death in 1946, Stieglitz vigorously promoted her work in twenty-two solo exhibitions and numerous group installations. The two lived together almost immediately, and were married in 1924. The ups and downs of their personal and professional relationship were recorded in Stieglitz’s celebrated photographs of O’Keeffe ( 1997.61.12 ), taken over the course of twenty years (1917–37). As a new member of the Stieglitz circle , she associated with some of America’s most distinguished early modernists—painters such as Arthur Dove , John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth, and photographers such as Paul Strand and Edward J. Steichen , as well as influential art critics and writers. Their discussions about art, and the example of their work, both validated and influenced O’Keeffe’s own work.

During the 1920s, O’Keeffe painted a series of architectural pictures that dramatically depict the soaring skyscrapers and aerial views of New York City. But most often, she painted landscapes and botanical studies that were inspired by annual trips to the Stieglitz family summer home in Lake George, New York. In her magnified close-ups of flowers ( 69.278.1 ), begun in 1924, O’Keeffe brings the viewer right into the picture. Enlarging the tiniest petals to fill an entire 30 x 40 inch canvas emphasized their shapes and lines and made them appear abstract, when in fact they were based on her observations of nature. Such daring compositions helped establish O’Keeffe’s reputation as an innovative modernist.

Toward the end of the decade, the strains of dealing with the New York art world, her growing boredom with Lake George, and her deteriorating relationship with Stieglitz took their toll on her physical and emotional health. In response, she made her first extended trip to New Mexico in 1929. It was a visit that had a lasting impact on her life, and an immediate effect on her work. Over the next twenty years, from 1929 to 1949, she made almost annual trips to New Mexico, staying up to six months there, painting in relative solitude, then returning to New York each winter to exhibit the new work at Stieglitz’s gallery. This pattern continued until she moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949.

There, O’Keeffe found new subjects to paint in the sun-bleached animal bones and the rugged mountains that dominate the terrain. Two of her earliest and most celebrated Southwestern paintings— Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue ( 52.203 ) and Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses (Art Institute of Chicago) from 1931—exquisitely reproduce a skull’s weathered surfaces, jagged edges, and irregular openings. Rather than signifying death, O’Keeffe said that the bones symbolized the eternal beauty of the desert. Later, she painted fanciful canvases that combined skeletal objects and landscape imagery in the same composition ( 59.204.2 ). The results were provocative and unsettling, and the odd juxtapositions and discrepancies in size and scale led some to call these works surreal . Between 1943 and 1945, she also explored another variation on the bone theme in her large series of Pelvis pictures, which focused on the contrasts between convex and concave surfaces, and solid and open spaces ( 61.565.36 ).

Although the desert bones of New Mexico had initially sparked O’Keeffe’s imagination, it was the region’s majestic landscape, with its unusual geological formations, vivid colors, clarity of light, and exotic vegetation, that held her attention for more than four decades. Often she painted the rocks, cliffs, and mountains in dramatic close-up, just as she had done with her flower subjects. One of her favorite settings was a site she nicknamed the “Black Place” ( 59.204.1 ), which she interpreted both panoramically and in tight views emphasizing the ragged juncture of two hills.

O’Keeffe eventually owned two homes north of Santa Fe—the first, her summer retreat at Ghost Ranch, was nestled beneath 700-foot cliffs and looked out to the flat-topped Pedernal in the distance, while the second, used as her winter residence, was in the small town of Abiquiú. While both locales provided a wealth of imagery for her paintings, one feature of the Abiquiú house—the large walled patio with its black door—was particularly inspirational. In more than thirty pictures between 1946 and 1960 ( Black Door with Red , Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia), she reinvented the patio into an abstract arrangement of geometric shapes.

From the 1950s into the 1970s, O’Keeffe traveled widely around the world, making trips to the Far East, Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and Europe. Flying in airplanes inspired her last two major series—aerial views of rivers ( It Was Blue and Green , Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), and expansive paintings of the sky viewed from just above the clouds ( Sky Above Clouds IV , Art Institute of Chicago). In both series, as well as in the later patio door pictures, O’Keeffe increased the size of her canvases, sometimes to mural proportions, reflecting perhaps her newly expanded view of the world. The seven works in her Sky Above Clouds series (1962–65) are the most dramatic of her later years. When in 1965 she successfully translated this motif to a monumental canvas measuring 24 feet in length (with the help of assistants), it was an enormous challenge and a special feat for an artist nearing eighty years of age.

The last two decades of the artist’s life were relatively unproductive as ill health and blindness hindered her ability to work. When she died in 1986 at age ninety-eight, her ashes were scattered over the New Mexico landscape she had loved for more than half a century. Her rich legacy of some 900 paintings has continued to attract subsequent generations of artists and art lovers who derive inspiration from these very American images.

Messinger, Lisa. “Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/geok/hd_geok.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Cowart, Jack, Juan Hamilton, and Sarah Greenough. Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters . Exhibition catalogue. Washington, D.C.: The National Gallery of Art, 1987.

Messinger, Lisa Mintz. Georgia O'Keeffe . London: Thames & Hudson, 2001.

O'Keeffe, Georgia. Georgia O'Keeffe . New York: Viking, 1976.

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Artist or Maker

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Georgia O'Keeffe

American Painter

Summary of Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe played a pivotal role in the development of American modernism and its relationship to European avante garde movements of the early-20 th century. Producing a substantial body of work over seven decades, she sought to capture the emotion and power of objects through abstracting the natural world. Alfred Stieglitz identified her as the first female American modernist, whose paintings of flowers, barren landscapes, and close-up still lifes have become a part of the mythology and iconography of the American artistic landscape.

Accomplishments

• O'Keeffe incorporated the techniques of other artists and was especially influenced by Paul Strand's use of cropping in his photographs; she was one of the first artists to adapt the method to painting by rendering close-ups of uniquely American objects that were highly detailed yet abstract.
• O'Keeffe did not follow any specific artistic movement, but like Arthur Dove she experimented with abstracting motifs from nature. She worked in series, synthesizing abstraction and realism to produce works that emphasized the primary forms of nature. While some of these works are highly detailed, in others, she stripped away what she considered the inessential to focus on shape and color.
• Through intense observation of nature, experimentation with scale, and nuanced use of line and color, O'Keeffe's art remained grounded in representation even while pushing at its limits. From the 1940s through the 1960s in particular, O'Keeffe's art was outside the mainstream as she was one of the few artists to adhere to representation in a period when others were exploring non-representation or had abandoned painting altogether.

The Life of Georgia O'Keeffe

Defining the early New York avant-grade with Alfred Stieglitz, and meditations in vast and desolate New Mexico are some of the sites of O'Keeffe's artistic inspirations and explorations.

Important Art by Georgia O'Keeffe

Blue II is indicative of O'Keeffe's early monochromatic drawings and watercolors, which evoke the movement of nature through abstract forms. While the curvilinear form in Blue II is reminiscent of a plant form, O'Keeffe was playing the violin during this period, and the shape likely captures the scroll-shaped end of the neck of the violin that would have been in O'Keeffe's line of sight as she played. The intense blue color suggests that she may have been familiar with Wassily Kandinsky's notion that visual art, like music, should convey emotion through the use of color and line. The intense blue perhaps suggests the sound of the music and the mood it evokes or expresses.

Watercolor on paper - Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

Petunia No. 2

Petunia No. 2 , one of O'Keeffe's first large-scale renderings of a flower, represents the beginning of her exploration of a theme that would mark her career. In this painting, she magnifies the flower's form to emphasize its shape and color. She stated that "nobody really sees a flower - really - it is so small - we haven't time - and to see takes time... 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." Her flower images often received interpretations that O'Keeffe disagreed with, particularly from feminist critics who saw these paintings as veiled illusions to female genitalia. For O'Keeffe, there was no hidden symbolism, just the essence of the flower. In fact, the anatomy of the petunia is incredibly detailed, and O'Keeffe may have been emphasizing the androgyny of the reproductive parts in order to counter the idea that her subject matter was connected to her gender. Though American and European artists had experimented with abstraction for at least a decade, O'Keeffe, like Dove, focused on images from nature and O'Keeffe was the only artist to consistently use flowers as a motif.

Oil on canvas - Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe

Radiator Building - Night, New York

This painting illustrates O'Keeffe's skill in articulating architectural structures as well as her use of the highly realistic, yet simplified style of Precisionism. She uses the night backdrop to incorporate a play between structure and light, and between the straight lines of the architectural forms and the ethereal smoke, which is reminiscent of the folds of flowers. O'Keeffe's portrait of the Radiator Building, an Art Deco skyscraper that was completed just three years prior to the painting, presents an iconic image that captures the changing skyline of New York City that O'Keeffe often found claustrophobic. She depicts the building from a low vantage point to convey a sense of oppression with the building's towering presence over the viewer. The painting can also be read as a double portrait of Steiglitz and O'Keeffe; Stieglitz is represented by the Scientific American Building, as indicated by his name in red, and O'Keeffe by the Radiator Building. Object portraits of this type, influenced by the poetry of Gertrude Stein, were an important theme for artists of the Stieglitz Circle.

Oil on canvas - Fisk University, Nashville

Cow's Skull: Red, White and Blue

O'Keeffe became enamored with animal skulls after visiting New Mexico. Through the precise rendering of the weathered skull's surface and sharp edges, O'Keeffe captures the essential nature of the skull while also referencing the transience of life. Isolated on the canvas, divorced from its desert context, O'Keeffe uses the cow's skull and the red, white, and blue background to represent both naturalism and nationalism, or the relationship between the American landscape and national identity. Moreover, the subject could allude to the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, thereby making an environmental and economic statement. What is clear is that O'Keeffe has created a memento mori that elevates this relic of the New Mexico desert to the status of an American icon.

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Black Place, Grey and Pink

O'Keeffe's landscape paintings are similar to her flower paintings in that they often capture the essence of nature as the artist saw it without focusing on the details. In works such as Black Place, Grey and Pink , O'Keeffe emphasizes the wide open spaces and emptiness of the landscape around her New Mexico ranch that she purchased in 1940 - vistas that are the opposite of her claustrophobic cityscapes. Her paintings of the area capture this sense of place and her attachment to it: "When I got to New Mexico that was mine. As soon as I saw it that was my country. I'd never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly. It's something that's in the air, it's different. The sky is different, the wind is different." The often surprising reds and pinks of the land in these paintings are accurate renderings of the colorful desert scenery.

Oil on canvas - Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

Sky above Clouds, IV

O'Keeffe's subject matter was always inspired by her life and the series Sky above Clouds is no exception, as the painting speaks to her many travels in the 1950s and 1960s. While en route to the Far East, she became intrigued by the view of the clouds below the airplane and sought to render this aerial view in paint as if to symbolize her own expanded view of the world. Remarkably, as she was nearly 80 years old at the time, she began stretching enormous canvases, nearly 24 feet wide, to capture the expansiveness of the scene. This painting, with its high horizon line and simplified clouds that extend beyond the frame, shows the influence of Eastern landscape painting, which also often employs a high horizon line with a broad view of the land. The work underscores that O'Keeffe's art, whatever the motif, remains consistent over many decades: she renders a naturalistic scene or object in such a way as to focus on its essential formal elements and render it abstractly.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe

Childhood and education.

Georgia O'Keeffe was born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin in 1887, the second of seven children. She received early encouragement to study art from her mother and took watercolor lessons from a local artist, Sara Mann. O'Keeffe came from a family where female education was stressed and she was fortunate to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906 where she studied with John Vanderpoel.

In the fall of 1907, O'Keeffe moved to New York City and attended classes at the Art Students League, studying under the artist-teacher William Merritt Chase. A prize she won for one of her still lifes, allowed her to attend the League's summer school in Lake George, New York. While in NYC, she frequented exhibitions at Gallery 291, which was owned by photographer Alfred Stieglitz and was one of the few places in the United States where European avant-garde art was exhibited. For the first time O'Keeffe was exposed to popular European artists, such as Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse . She abandoned the pursuit of art as a career in 1908 for four years, taking a job in Chicago as a commercial artist.

She began focusing on her art again in 1912, after attending a drawing class at the University of Virginia's summer school. Her teacher, Alon Bement, professed an innovative teaching style that was heavily influenced by the artist Arthur Wesley Dow. While teaching at Columbia College in South Carolina in 1915, O'Keeffe began to experiment with Dow's theory of self-exploration through art. She took natural forms, such as ferns, clouds, and waves, and began a small series of charcoal drawings that simplified them into expressive, abstracted combinations of shapes and lines. After completing this series, O'Keeffe mailed a few of them to her friend Anita Pollitzer, a former classmate, who brought the drawings to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz in January 1916.

Mature Period

Recognizing her potential, Stieglitz began a correspondence with O'Keeffe. Unbeknownst to O'Keeffe, he exhibited ten of her charcoals at his Gallery 291. He sent her photographs of her drawings on exhibit and this began their professional relationship. While O'Keeffe continued to teach, she returned to New York in 1917 to view her first solo exhibition, arranged by Stieglitz at 291. During this time, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz began a love affair that would last until his death. In 1918, Stieglitz offered to financially support O'Keeffe for one year so that she could live and paint in New York. She took a leave of absence from her teaching position and for the first time dedicated herself solely to making art. Stieglitz divorced his first wife, and he and O'Keeffe married in 1924.

During the 1920s, Stieglitz introduced O'Keeffe to his friends and fellow artists - the Stieglitz Circle - that included Marsden Hartley , Arthur Dove , John Marin , and Paul Strand . Stieglitz and his Circle, as they were called, championed modernism in the United States. O'Keeffe was profoundly influenced by Strand's photography and the camera's ability to behave like a magnifying lens, as well as Charles Sheeler's Precisionism. Following these interests, she began making large-scale paintings of natural forms at close range, and, during this time, also switched from watercolors to oil paint. In addition to flowers, O'Keeffe depicted New York skyscrapers and other architectural forms. By the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe was recognized as one of the most significant American artists of the time and her art began to command high prices.

O'Keeffe's fascination with the landscape of New Mexico began in 1929, when she was a guest of famous arts patron, Mabel Dodge Luhan, at Dodge's ranch near Taos. O'Keeffe became enamored with New Mexico's landscape of vistas and barren land, returning every summer until 1949 to paint. Works produced from this landscape captured the beauty of the desert, its vast skies, distinctive architectural forms, and bones, which she collected in the desert. O'Keeffe's eventual purchase of two properties in New Mexico further connected her to the land.

During the 1930s and 1940s, O'Keeffe's popularity continued to grow and she was honored with two important retrospectives, the first in 1943 at the Art Institute of Chicago and the second in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art, their first retrospective of work by a woman.

Late Years and Death

In 1949, three years after Stieglitz's death, O'Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico. In the 1950s, she produced a series of works that featured the architectural forms of her patio wall and door at Abiquiu, one of her two homes near Santa Fe. O'Keeffe began to travel extensively, gathering inspiration for her work. She received many accolades, including membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Medal of Freedom, and the National Medal of Arts. Despite waning popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, a retrospective held by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970 revived her career and brought her to the attention of a new generation of women in the era of feminism. Despite failing eyesight, O'Keeffe continued to produce art, working in watercolor, pencil, and clay throughout the 1970s. Although she had lost her central vision by the age of 84, she continued to paint. Her last paintings consist of simple abstract lines and shapes and hearken back to her early charcoal drawings.

The Legacy of Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe spent 70 years making art and contributing to the development of American modernism. She was a prominent member of the creative Stieglitz Circle, influencing early American modernists. She is notable for her role as a pioneering female artist, and although she disavowed their interpretation of her work, she was a strong influence on the artists of the Feminist art movement, including Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro , who saw feminine imagery in O'Keeffe's flower paintings. A prolific artist, she produced more than 2000 works over the course of her career. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe is the first museum in the United States dedicated to a female artist, and its research center sponsors significant fellowships for scholars of modern American art.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Georgia O'Keeffe

• Georgia O'Keeffe A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz By Alfred Stieglitz
• Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe By Laurie Lisle
• Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life By Roxana Robinson
• Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe Our Pick By Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
• Some Memories of Drawings Our Pick By Georgia O'Keeffe, Doris Bry
• Georgia O'Keeffe By Georgia O'Keeffe, Bice Curiger
• Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonne By Barbara Buhler Lynes
• Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collection Our Pick By Barbara Buhler Lynes
• Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Our Pick Santa Fe, New Mexico
• Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
• Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction at the Whitney Museum of American Art Our Pick
• Modern Nature: Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George at the de Young Museum
• Before the Desert, A Greener Side By Jesse McKinley / The New York Times / August 8, 2013
• Stieglitz and O'Keeffe: Their Love and Life in Letters By Susan Stamberg / NPR / July 21, 2011
• In Full Flower, Before the Desert Our Pick By Holland Cotter / The New York Times / September 17, 2009
• Painting a New Picture of Georgia O'Keeffe By Candace Jackson / The Wall Street Journal / September 3, 2009
• The Undiscovered O'Keeffe By Hunter Drohojowska-Philp / ARTnews / April 1, 2000
• Georgia on His Mind By Hunter Drohojowska / The Los Angeles Times / June 28, 1992
• Georgia O'Keeffe Talking About Her Life and Work Our Pick
• Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life in Art Our Pick
• Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico
• "Georgia O'Keeffe's Modern Nature," Presented by Erin Coe
• Georgia O'Keeffe at Lake George
• Georgia O'Keeffe (2009) Biopic starring Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons
• Portrait of an Artist: Georgia O'Keeffe
• Great Women Artists: Georgia O'Keeffe

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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

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How Georgia O’Keeffe Became One of the Most Celebrated American Artists of the 20th Century

By Claire Selvin

Claire Selvin

Associate Editor, ARTnews

O’Keeffe came from humble beginnings. Georgia Totto O’Keeffe, born in 1887 to Francis Calyxtus O’Keeffe and Ida Totto O’Keeffe , was the second of seven children in her family. She was raised on a dairy farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and began studying art from an early age. After O’Keeffe graduated from high school in 1905, she headed to the Art Institute of Chicago, where she spent one year before attending the Art Students League in New York. Upon her graduation in 1908, the artist was awarded the William Merritt Chase still life prize for the painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot) . 

In her youth, O’Keeffe was influenced by the artist Arthur Wesley Dow . Artist and arts educator Arthur Wesley Dow’s theories and ideas had a significant impact on O’Keeffe early in her career. Known for his lyrical landscape paintings and detailed studies of plant life, Dow downplayed the importance of realism in favor of art works that were emotionally and spiritually expressive. His notions about what color and line could communicate would inspire O’Keeffe’s practice. 

O’Keeffe spent several years as an art teacher. The artist worked as an educator in Texas and South Carolina after she completed her own schooling. During those years, O’Keeffe continued working on her own pieces, and she completed the abstract charcoal drawing Drawing XIII in 1915. That work,  depicting four rounded protrusions in a shell-like encasement and now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was part of a series that soon reached the eyes of photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who organized many subsequent exhibitions of O’Keeffe’s work, and later married her.

Stieglitz helped cement O’Keeffe’s reputation in New York. In 1916 O’Keeffe’s charcoal drawings were included in a group exhibition at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York; she received her first solo show there the following year. During this period O’Keeffe also visited New Mexico, where she would frequently travel over the next 30 years, for the first time. The artist made a permanent move to New York in 1918, taking up residence in a studio apartment on East 59th Street that Stieglitz, its usual occupant, was not using at the time. Throughout her time in New York, O’Keeffe painted dynamic, eerie depictions of the city’s imposing skyscrapers.

That same year, Stieglitz left his first wife, Emmeline Obermeyer Stieglitz, whom he had married in 1893, to move in with O’Keeffe. Images of O’Keeffe appear in Stieglitz’s 1921 retrospective at the Anderson Galleries, and two years later the photographer organized an exhibition of 100 works by O’Keeffe at the same outpost. When Stieglitz’s divorce was finalized in 1924, the couple married in Cliffside Park, New Jersey.

O’Keeffe rose to fame during the 1920s. O’Keeffe got her first retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 1927, and her work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art for the first time two years later, when it appeared in a group show titled “Paintings by 19 Living Americans.” (O’Keeffe was the only woman whose work was included in that exhibition, which also featured pieces by Charles Demuth, Edward Hopper, and Pop Hart. In 1946 she became the first woman to have a major solo show at MoMA.) In these years, O’Keeffe also made her first visit to the town of Taos, in northern New Mexico, and the content of the artist’s work began to favor depictions of landscapes and flowers over more abstracted subjects.

Following Stieglitz’s death, O’Keeffe relocated full-time to New Mexico. In 1946, a few years after O’Keeffe’s retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, Stieglitz died at age 82. Three years later, in 1949, O’Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico, where she split her time between Abiquiú in the northern part of the state and Ghost Ranch, a spot north of Abiquiú that the artist had visited regularly since 1934. During the 1950s O’Keeffe began traveling internationally to Peru, Japan, Italy, India, and other places whose landscapes would figure in her paintings.

In the mid-1950s, O’Keeffe corresponded with Yayoi Kusama. Before Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama moved to the United States in 1957, she wrote a letter to O’Keeffe. Kusama, a young artist at the time, was seeking advice and opportunities to show her work in the US. In a 2016 interview with the Guardian , Kusama said that O’Keeffe “responded with great kindness and generosity” to her initial letter, adding that the exchange “gave me the courage I needed to leave for New York.”

The artist’s eyesight deteriorated in the 1970s. O’Keeffe’s vision took a turn for the worse in the early 1970s, and she created her last oil painting without assistance, The Beyond , which depicts an abstracted, glowing horizon line, in 1972. She would continue making watercolors, drawings, and sculptures in the following years. O’Keeffe notably received the Medal of Freedom from President Gerald Ford in 1977 and the National Medal of Arts from President Ronald Reagan in 1985. Having moved to Santa Fe in 1984, O’Keeffe died in 1986 at age 98.

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How I Met the Reclusive Georgia O’Keeffe

I once met Georgia O’Keeffe . This was not easy to do, and I considered it an achievement.

It was in the early nineteen-seventies, when I was in my early twenties. I was working at Sotheby’s, in New York, in the American paintings department. One of the things I did there was catalogue the works that we sold. I held each picture in my hands, felt its shape and weight. I measured and described it, recording the medium, condition, signature. The date. The provenance and exhibition history. I came to know the works very well.

During this time I had begun to write about American art. I was particularly interested in the modernists, those early-twentieth-century artists who were part of the rising tide of abstraction. I wrote about different members of this group—Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove. I wanted to write about O’Keeffe, but this was difficult. She held the copyright to many of her paintings, so it was necessary to ask permission from her in order to reproduce them. This was one reason that relatively little scholarship had appeared on her: How could you write a book about art without using images? Another reason was the confusion that permeated critical response to her work until well into the sixties. All those flowers! Was she a great artist or a cheap sentimentalist? The work was so easy to like—could it be important? She was scorned by the guys, and, if you wanted to be taken seriously as a scholar, it seemed risky to write about her.

Another reason for the paucity of writing about O’Keeffe was her own inaccessibility. She lived in a small village in rural New Mexico and rarely gave interviews. Seclusion and withholding were part of her persona. She was not interested in publicity, and it is said that she once refused a request for a one-person show at the Louvre. Here was a paradox: the work, so intimate and engaging, even accessible, and the artist, so remote and self-controlled, clothed in severe black and white. The mystery gave O’Keeffe a kind of charged glamour. A sighting was a significant event.

That season, Sotheby’s had received an O’Keeffe painting of Canadian barns. It had been done in the early nineteen-thirties: two dark gray buildings in a wintry landscape. I catalogued it, and asked Doris Bry—O’Keeffe’s private agent, who had once been the assistant to Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe’s former husband—for information on it. Later she called me.

“Mrs. Alger,” she said (for that was my name then), “this is Doris Bry.” Of course I knew who it was. She had a dry, gravelly voice, very distinctive, with a Waspy drawl. “I’m calling about the painting of Canadian barns.”

“Yes, Miss Bry.” I used my formal, fluty, professional tone. “How may I help you?”

“I’d like to have the painting brought over to my apartment.”

Doris Bry lived in an apartment in the Pulitzer mansion. This was a grand Beaux-Arts building, only a few blocks away from our offices on Madison Avenue. But it didn’t matter how close she was. “I’m so sorry, Miss Bry,” I said, “but our insurance policies don’t permit the works to leave the premises until they have legally changed hands. If you’d like to bring someone in to see the painting, I’ll be happy to have it brought out to the viewing room and put up on the easel. But I can’t allow the painting to leave our property.”

“Mrs. Alger,” Miss Bry said, “the artist is here. She would like to see the painting.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I said, in my normal voice.

I called storage to have the painting brought out. I had it under my arm and was walking down the hall on my way to the front door when I ran into my boss.

“What are you carrying?” he asked.

“Canadian barns,” I said, putting a hand over the frame protectively.

“Where are you going?” he asked. “It can’t leave the premises.”

“The artist wants to see it,” I said.

My boss put out his hand. “I’ll take it.”

“I answered the phone,” I said. “I’m taking it.”

With the painting under my arm, I walked down Madison Avenue to the Pulitzer mansion. Doris Bry ushered me into her apartment. She was a tall, stately woman, rather ponderous. She had dark eyes, pale, lightless skin, and a mass of short gray curls. She brought me into the living room, where there were three other people—two lawyers in dark suits and an older woman. Bry introduced me.

“This is Mrs. Alger, from Sotheby’s.” The woman nodded pleasantly but said nothing. She was much smaller than I, which surprised me. She had a lined face, dark, hooded eyes, and long silvery hair coiled into a low bun. She wore a gray cotton housedress with a white collar and a narrow self-belt. On her feet, she wore flat black Chinese slippers, with straps across the insteps.

Everyone watched as I carried the painting across the room and set it on the easel. The small woman came with me, but Bry and the lawyers stood at the back of the room, talking. Georgia O’Keeffe and I stood in front of the painting. She looked quietly at the canvas, as though it were part of her, as if she were alone with it.

I stood silently beside her. But that wasn’t enough. When people meet someone famous, often they want to inflect themselves upon the moment, to impose their own identities upon that of the famous person. They say, “I grew up in your town,” or, “I have that same scarf,” or, “I met you once in a train station.” It’s a hopeless venture.

“I hope you like the frame,” I said. I had ordered it myself. It was a simple silver half clamshell, the kind that Arthur Dove had used. I knew O’Keeffe had liked Dove and had admired his work. I knew she’d like the frame. She’d be grateful. This was my moment.

She answered without turning. “I like them best without frames.”

I said nothing more. She stood looking at the painting, calm and utterly self-possessed. I think she was wearing a black sweater, a thin little cardigan, not buttoned up.

She’d have been in her early eighties then.

Nearly twenty years later, in the spring of 1986, I was living in northern Westchester County. We had moved there ten years earlier, my family and I. We were out in the country, in an old farmhouse with a big barn and some fields. Living with us were four or five horses, two or three dogs, and some large cats. My daughter was fourteen. I had left the art world.

One evening, my husband, Tony, came home from the city and found me in the kitchen. He was in his business suit, still carrying his briefcase.

“I have something to tell you,” he said. On the train coming out, he’d sat next to a friend of ours, Edward Burlingame, who was the editor-in-chief and publisher at Harper & Row. Edward had said, “Georgia O’Keeffe has just died, and there isn’t a big biography of her. Who do you think we should ask to write it?”

Tony mentioned me. Edward said that he knew I wrote fiction, but he needed someone who knew about American art. Tony told him that I did. Edward said he’d keep it in mind.

When Tony finished the story, I shook my head. “Thanks for suggesting me, but he’s being polite. This is Harper & Row, and it’s a big deal. They’ll want a museum curator, or anyway someone with a graduate degree. Not someone who’s just published a few articles and catalogue essays. So he won’t ask me. And, if he did, I’d say no. I was writing about art because my fiction wasn’t being published, but now it is. I have a novel coming out, and I’m done with art. So, thank you for suggesting me, but, first, he won’t ask me, and, second, if he did I’d say no.”

Tony said, “Well, I wanted to tell you.”

“Thank you,” I said again.

That was on Friday. On Monday, Edward called and asked if I’d be interested in writing the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, and I said yes.

That was the beginning. After many conversations, and a written proposal, Harper & Row offered me a contract. Several other writers had begun writing books about O’Keeffe, and timing was key. “Your book must be the first one to come out,” Edward told me, “or within six months of the first, or it won’t be reviewed.”

And so I began the project. I did much of the archival research at the Beinecke Library, at Yale, which holds the vast O’Keeffe-Stieglitz archive. There, I worked in tranquil silence within the alabaster walls, leafing through papers and photographs; reading long, chatty, private, serious, funny, heartfelt, and thoughtful letters; learning a complicated network of kinship, friendships, and professional relationships. I enjoyed those times enormously. The other kind of research—interviews—was far more stressful, as it meant meeting with strangers. There were lawsuits under way, regarding O’Keeffe’s will and her inheritance, and feelings in the O’Keeffe community ran high. Some people took sides, and when they learned that I had spoken to someone on the opposing side, they refused to speak to me. Other friends and colleagues were loyal to O’Keeffe’s long tradition of silence toward strangers and refused to speak to me.

But her family, after they had met me and read other things I’d written, agreed to talk. I met various members, and then I was given the great honor of three days of interviews with O’Keeffe’s one remaining sister, Catherine O’Keeffe Klenert. Klenert was then in her nineties, frail and white-haired, but utterly cogent.

One afternoon, when I was asking her about the family’s early days, she looked up at me, baffled. “I don’t know why you’re asking me. Anyone could tell you about this. Everyone knows it.”

I smiled at her. “No one else could tell me. You’re the only one left.” She was the only one who could tell me about getting up in the dark during the winter in nineteenth-century Wisconsin, what it was like walking to school, celebrating a birthday, going to church. What the evenings were like in that household. Klenert was an invaluable source, and a deeply sympathetic presence.

Of course, I was sorry not to be able to interview my subject, Georgia O’Keeffe. But after I came to know some of her relatives, after I’d listened to their stories and heard their thoughts, I understood that I was absorbing the culture that had produced her. Courage, determination, and self-reliance were all part of the family culture. O’Keeffe drew on these resources, which enabled her to lead the life she wanted. And place was important to the book. I went to Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, to see the long swell of the dark-earth fields. I went to Amarillo and Canyon, Santa Fe and Abiquiu, to see what it felt like to stand beneath the wheeling sky, to watch the sun rising on the roseate cliffs.

Edward had told me that the book had to be first, and I was determined that it would be. I had already completed some of the scholarly research when I wrote about other members of the Stieglitz circle, but there was a lot more to learn, and then there was the writing. Toward the end, I thought of nothing else. One day, I was driving through our little village when I approached an old, black car. The driver was an older man with a bristly white mustache and round rimless glasses. I knew that I knew him, but I couldn’t place him until we had passed each other. Then I realized that my mind had turned him into Alfred Stieglitz, who had died before I was born. The book had taken me over.

My daughter was in boarding school by then, and we had sold the horses. I took over the guest room and laid my folders out on the bed. I put a tall file cabinet in the upstairs hall. I wrote the book on a desktop computer on a card table, set against the closet door. We couldn’t get into that closet for three years.

My book came out in the fall of 1989. It was the first biography to appear after her death.

O’Keeffe’s work has always evoked a mixture of praise and exasperation—praise from people who understand what her work does, exasperation from people who think it should do something else. She has been accused of being too accessible (though so is Monet), too obvious about gender (though so is Picasso), too arcane (though so is Braque), and too obvious (though so is Hieronymus Bosch.)

After O’Keeffe settled Stieglitz’s estate, in 1949, she left New York and moved full time to New Mexico. Without a cohort and without a gallery, her reputation declined, even as she continued to work. In the late fifties, she appeared in a Newsweek column called “Where Are They Now?” O’Keeffe was featured as a formerly famous artist, now forgotten, living among the mesas of the Southwest.

But, just as her decline preceded her death, so did her resurgence. In 1970, the scholar Lloyd Goodrich mounted a large and authoritative retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. The show introduced O’Keeffe to a new generation, and the result was a reflorescence of interest in her work. O’Keeffe’s most accessible images—the magnified flowers, the dreaming antlers and skulls, as well as the vast, mysterious cloudscapes—became hugely popular among the public. Her subjects, of course, were not only ecological, and forty years after the Goodrich retrospective, in 2009, Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney Museum, produced another groundbreaking show, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction.” Instead of the familiar images of flowers, bones, and mountains, Haskell presented over a hundred abstract images. The show began with the radical charcoal drawings of 1915 that declared O’Keeffe’s commitment to purely nonobjective art, and it posed an effective challenge to charges of sentimentality. As Haskell pointed out, abstraction was always a source for O’Keeffe; she saw it in the natural world, in patterns of light and shade, of shape and design. Her compositions came from both interior ideas and the distillation of what she saw before her.

The scholarship on O’Keeffe continues to expand, focussing on every aspect of her work and life. Recently, an exhibition presented the work of her sister Ida ; another presented O’Keeffe’s personal style. The art historian and O’Keeffe scholar Wanda Corn writes, “Today we have an expanded understanding of O’Keeffe’s creativity outside of the studio. She was a brilliant designer of her homes and gardens . . . and an early proponent of farm-to-table cooking. She created a personal style of dress and distinctive ways of modeling for the camera.” The New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins, one of the few journalists to have interviewed O’Keeffe , says, “I have a sense that, after a period of being more or less dismissed, she has regained her seat in the historical pantheon, and is revered for a lot of new reasons.”

Some of those reasons, one hopes, have to do with O’Keeffe’s determination, bravery, and commitment, as well as with her extraordinary body of work. It was an honor and a challenge to write the story of her life, to delve so deeply into the narrative of someone who has, through her art and her example, influenced my own life and the lives of so many others.

I still think of her lined face and coiled silver hair, her faint, amused smile, those flat black Chinese slippers.

This essay was drawn from “ Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life ,” which is being reissued, in an expanded edition, in October, by Brandeis University Press.

12 Things to Know about Georgia O’Keeffe

Inside an Exhibition

Carl Van Vechten. Georgia O'Keeffe (detail) , June 5, 1936. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of John Mark Lutz, 1965. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

May 22, 2024

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from a single thing that I wanted to do. —Georgia O’Keeffe

That fact alone is probably a good thing to start with. People often know Georgia O’Keeffe for her paintings of flowers, animal skulls, the Southwest, cityscapes, or abstractions. They might also know her persona as it was often presented in photographs—self-contained and stoic.

Alfred Stieglitz

Irving Penn

As an artist, she developed at her own pace, and knowing that she had to constantly overcome fear makes her life that much more inspiring. So here are a dozen other things we think you’d like to know about this fascinating and original American artist:

#1 Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, to a family of dairy farmers, and by the age of 12 had decided to become an artist.

#2 She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906 but had to pause her education for a year to recuperate from typhoid fever.

#3 In 1907, she studied painting with William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in New York and eventually saw works by Rodin and Matisse at 291, the avant-garde gallery owned by photographer Alfred Stieglitz .

Yes, contact with the city this way has certainly helped me as no amount of solitude in the country could. —Georgia O’Keeffe

#4 In 1908, driven by financial necessity, she stopped painting and went to work as a commercial artist back in Chicago, designing lace and embroidery. Over the next decade she traveled and worked as an art teacher in Virginia, South Carolina, and Texas.

#5 In 1912, she studied drawing at the University of Virginia, which offered a nontraditional and more experimental approach to art developed in part by Arthur Wesley Dow , who had been influenced by Japanese prints.

#6 She returned to New York City in 1914 to study with Dow at Columbia University and became more and more familiar with European modernism and abstraction, seeing works by Picasso and Braque at Stieglitz’s 291.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I said to myself, ‘I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me—shapes and ideas near to me—so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.’ I decided to start anew to strip away what I had been taught. —Georgia O’Keeffe

#7 She moved back to New York in 1918 after Stieglitz created a solo show of some of her abstract charcoal drawings and watercolor landscapes at his gallery.

#8 Between 1918 and 1949, she lived primarily in Manhattan. She married Stieglitz in 1924, and they moved into the Shelton Hotel, then the world’s tallest residential building, which inspired her with new views of the cityscape.

East River from the Shelton (East River No. 1), 1927–28

Georgia O’Keeffe. New Jersey State Museum Collection. Purchased by the Association for the Arts of the New Jersey State Museum with a gift from Mary Lea Johnson. Photo by Peter S. Jacobs. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Radiator Building—Night, New York, 1927

Georgia O’Keeffe. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Co-owned by Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, ASC.2012.73. Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at—not copy it. —Georgia O’Keeffe

#9 Around 1927, O’Keeffe began earning enough money from the sale of her paintings, including her New Yorks, to support herself as an artist. Stieglitz showed O’Keeffe’s work in his gallery every year until his death in 1946.

#10 Although she had spent most summers in Lake George in upstate New York, she traveled to New Mexico for the first time in 1929 and started to spend summers there, captivated by the landscape.

In 1943, the Art Institute purchased Black Cross, New Mexico., its first work by O'Keeffe.

Nothing is less real than realism… . It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things. —Georgia O’Keeffe

#11 In 1945, O’Keeffe set up a home and studio in Abiquiu near Santa Fe in New Mexico, and after settling Stieglitz’s estate in New York, she returned to New Mexico in 1949 and lived there until her death in 1986 at the age of 98.

#12 The Art Institute, which gave O’Keeffe her first museum retrospective in 1943 (purchasing Black Cross, New Mexico out of the show ), received a major gift from the artist in 1949: the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, which included paintings, sculptures, drawings, watercolors, and photographs by artists other than O’Keeffe. Between 1949 and her death, she gifted her own works, followed by a bequest of five works. 

#13 (A Baker’s Dozen) Not a thing you need to know but a thing to see: here’s O’Keeffe in 1967 standing beside three of her paintings during one of her frequent visits to the Art Institute.

Georgia O’Keeffe stands beside Blue and Green Music , 1919/21; Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses , 1931; and Red and Pink Rocks and Teeth , 1938.

The exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” opens June 2 and runs through September 22.

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Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986)

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An American Icon Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most significant and intriguing artists of the twentieth century, known internationally for her boldly innovative art. Her distinct flowers, dramatic cityscapes, glowing landscapes, and images of bones against the stark desert sky are iconic and original contributions to American Modernism— a style of art that departed significantly from the traditions of the past. In a career spanning more than sixty years, she produced more than a thousand artworks. O’Keeffe’s artworks were first exhibited in New York in 1916 by Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and internationally known photographer. He was America’s leading advocate for modern art and eventually became O’Keeffe’s husband. After the famous Armory Show of 1913, an art exhibit that introduced radically different art to American audiences, Stieglitz’s primary interest became exhibiting the work of innovative American painters such as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Edward Steichen, and Max Weber. O’Keeffe moved to New York in 1918 and joined the efforts of these artists to create a distinctly American style of modern art, a search for what O’Keeffe called “the Great American Thing.” O’Keeffe became famous for her large-scale flower paintings, as well as her images of the towering skyscrapers of New York City and the landscape of New Mexico. Above all, she was a pioneer of abstraction, creating images that were inspired by close observation of her surroundings but were products of her insight and imagination rather than imitative representations of the visual world.

Early Life and Education Born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe grew up on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. As a child she received art lessons at home. Her abilities were recognized and encouraged by teachers throughout her school years. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O’Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist. O’Keeffe studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905–1906) and the Art Students League in New York (1907–1908), where she learned the techniques of traditional realist painting. In 1908, she won the League’s William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot). The  direction of her artistic practice shifted dramatically four years later (1912) when she took a summer course at the University of Virginia, taught by Alon Bement of Teachers College, Columbia University. Bement introduced her to the revolutionary ideas of his colleague Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow encouraged an intellectual and imaginative process of making art that was grounded in personal expression and harmonious design. “This man had one dominating idea,” according to O’Keeffe, “to fill a space in a beautiful way— and that interested me.” Dow’s approach offered O’Keeffe an alternative to realism, and she experimented with it for two years, while she taught art in the Amarillo, Texas public schools (1912-14) and worked summers in Virginia as Bement’s assistant. O’Keeffe studied in New York from 1914 to 1915, at Teachers College, Columbia University and by the fall of 1915 she was teaching art at Columbia College, in South Carolina. She began a series of abstract charcoal drawings, to develop a personal language through which she could express her feelings and ideas.  ate in life she recalled, “I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught – not  ike what I had seen – shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.” She mailed some of these highly abstract drawings to a friend in New York City.  Her friend showed them to Stieglitz, who kept the drawings.

New York City and Alfred Stieglitz In 1916, O’Keeffe began corresponding with Stieglitz. That same year, he exhibited ten of her  abstract drawings in a group exhibition at his avant-garde gallery “291.” A year later, he presented  O’Keeffe’s artwork in a one-person exhibition. In the spring of 1918 he offered O’Keeffe financial support to paint for a year in New York. She accepted his invitation and moved from Texas, where she had been teaching at the West Texas State Normal College since the fall of 1916. In 1923, Stieglitz began organizing annual exhibitions of O’Keeffe’s work. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were married in 1924. In 1925 they moved to a two-room suite at the Shelton Hotel with a view of the New York City skyline. O’Keeffe adapted her life and art in New York to Stieglitz’s habits and his pattern of spending winter and spring in the city and retreating to his family compound at Lake George in the summer and fall. By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe was recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists, known for her paintings of New York skyscrapers—an essentially American image of modernity—as well as flowers. Stieglitz played a significant role in promoting O’Keeffe and her artwork, organizing annual exhibitions at The Anderson Galleries from 1923 until 1925; and later at The Intimate Gallery from 1925 to 1929; and finally at An American Place from 1929 until his death in 1946.

American Modernism in New Mexico In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico. For the next two decades she spent part of most years living and working in New Mexico, a pattern she rarely altered until she made it her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death. The stark landscape, distinct indigenous art, and unique regional style of adobe architecture inspired a new direction in O’Keeffe’s artwork. Over time, her New Mexico paintings became as well known as the work she had completed earlier in New York. During her first two summers O’Keeffe stayed in the Taos home of her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan. O’Keeffe painted the surrounding landscape, its weather-worn crosses and Hispanic adobe churches, as well as the lands sacred to the people of the Taos Pueblo. Mabel and her husband Tony, a member of the Taos Pueblo, introduced O’Keeffe to new experiences, and she found a new sense of independence as she learned to drive and explored the landscape and cultures of the Southwest. O’Keeffe’s new paintings coincided with a growing interest in regional scenes by American Modernists, who were seeking a distinctive view of America, beyond the urban center of New York City. O’Keeffe was not alone in finding inspiration in New Mexico. Many artists looked to the area’s diverse cultures and geography to lend their work a unique character independent of European influences. Other artists supported by Stieglitz, including John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Ansel Adams, spent time in New Mexico and shared her fascination with representing a specific sense of place. O’Keeffe alone returned repeatedly and made New Mexico her home. In so doing, she transformed her life and her art. Her simplified and refined representations of northern New Mexico express a deep personal response to the high desert terrain. She created enchanting visual experiences for viewers in paintings like Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory (1938), and Untitled (Red and Yellow Cliffs) (1940). Such New Mexico scenes have become her most iconic contributions to a uniquely American Modernism.

Creativity in her Late Years After Stieglitz’s death in 1946 and her move to New Mexico in 1949, O’Keeffe began to travel internationally. She created paintings that evoked a sense of the spectacular places she visited, including the mountain peaks of Peru and Japan’s Mount Fuji. Continuing to travel during the 1960s, she increasingly concentrated on the views from the airplanes that carried her around the world. At the age of seventy-three she embarked on a new series focused on the clouds in the sky and the rivers below. In 1961, she showed the river series, including Blue Black and Grey (1960), at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery in New York City. Five years later, she created Sky Above the Clouds IV (1965); at 8 x 24 feet it is her largest painting. Suffering from macular degeneration and discouraged by her failing eye sight, O’Keeffe painted her last unassisted oil painting, The Beyond, in 1972. But 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.” Late in life, and almost blind, she enlisted the help of several assistants to enable her to again create art. One such helper, Belarmino Lopez, recalls mixing her paints and following her careful instructions in preparing the canvas. In these works, like Sky Above Clouds/Yellow Horizon and Clouds, (1977), she returned to favorite visual motifs from her memory and vivid imagination. With a technique refined by decades of practice, she continued to “fill a space in a beautiful way” in abstract watercolors that activated the paper from edge to edge with simplified and intangible forms. She worked in watercolor and pencil until 1982 and produced objects in clay, encouraged by her friend and assistant, Juan Hamilton, from the mid-1970s until two years before her death, in Santa Fe, on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98.

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• Georgia O'Keeffe, Biography Brief biography of Georgia O'Keeffe created by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

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Georgia O’Keeffe Biography

One of the most respected and widely regarded American artists of the of last century, Georgia O’Keeffe was a modernist painter who cannot be tied down to that period — her work seems as timeless, vibrant and inspiring as it was fifty years ago.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe was born November 15 1887 on a dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. From a very early age she was drawn to art and was encouraged in the discipline by her parents; by the time she left high school she was convinced she wanted to be an artist.

Studying at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905 and the Art Students League in New York, she drew considerable praise from her instructors but was discouraged and uninspired by their emphasis on realism and “perfection” in painting.

She longed for a style of her own, to capture in her paintings the feelings and gracefulness she saw in the world.

In 1915, studying for a teachers degree in South Carolina, O’Keeffe met and took classes with Arthur Dow, an art enthusiast who worshiped oriental art rather than European art.

Dow helped expose Georgia’s mind to the possibility for different styles of art. “It was Arthur Dow who affected my start, who helped me to find something of my own.”

It was then that she began work on her series of small charcoal abstractions, which she was pleased with and sent to a friend in New York.

The drawings by chance found their way into the hands of Alfred Stieglitz, an obsessive photographer and influential participant in certain New York art circles.

The energy and confidence of these drawings from this “mystery woman” so excited Stieglitz that in 1916 he exhibited them at his Manhattan art gallery without her even knowing.

Two years later, Stieglitz had been introduced to O’Keeffe and had persuaded her to move to New York and devote herself to painting.

Shortly thereafter they fell in love and began a romance and artistic collaboration that would last for many years.

The story of Georgia O’Keeffe is inextricably tied up with the life of her husband and partner — and in many ways Stieglitz did for photography what she did for the American painting , championing photography as a display of personal expression.

Both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were artists eager to take their various art forms in a new direction. They lived and worked together, regularly showing their new work in the gallery.

For Stieglitz, O’Keeffe was a muse, and the many portraits he took of her are known to be some of his best work.

Moving between New York City and upstate Lake George,NY, O’Keeffe was inspired by the beauty of both the rural landscape and the less immediate beauty of the industrialized city.

The nineteen twenties were a time of love for O’Keeffe. Her flower paintings were filled with bright, expressive color and erotic passion. Critics were quick to interpret her paintings as expressions of the feminine, and see her flowers as yonic symbols.

O’Keeffe was able to paint abstract, intensely personal paintings without giving in to the self absorption of many other modernists — her paintings were bold and modern, but they were also very aesthetically beautiful.

She often sought to capture the unique beauty of the American landscape. Her paintings of flowers were both carefully precise in detail as well as abstract, with soft gradients and patches of color.

In 1929 O’Keeffe took a trip with her friend Becca Strand to New Mexico, first to Santa Fe and then to Taos. She fell in love with the location — the bright sunshine and open skies. She would journey there annually from then on, and later make it her home.

The New Mexico landscapes and still life’s, especially the desert paintings of brilliant white parched animal bones set against deep blue sky, are as highly regarded as her earlier flowers.

By the nineteen forties, Georgia O’Keeffe’s stature in the art world had grown tremendously. In 1946 she was given a one-woman exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first ever from that museum for a female artist.

When Stieglitz died in 1946, O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico permanently to work on her paintings in peace and solitude. She captured in these later paintings the long cloudscapes of the southwestern desert, the adobe walls of her home in Taos, and the shadows and natural curves of the bleached animal bones.

Some of her most famous works of art are centered around flowers.

By the end of the nineteen sixties, retrospectives all around the country and the world had cemented O’Keeffe as one of the most admired painters of her time.

However, by then her eyesight had failed to the point that she could barely see past her canvas. It was then that she befriended a local potter named Juan Hamilton, who assisted her with household chores and helped her with her art work.

Together they completed and published in 1976 a book about her art called Georgia O’Keeffe, and a companion video project where she talked about her feelings on art.

O’Keeffe continued to draw charcoal sketches for herself up until 1984. That year she moved in to Hamilton’s home to be closer to medical facilities. She died on March 6, 1986.

Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, Modernist American Artist

Tony Vaccaro / Getty Images 

• Art History
• Architecture

• M.A., History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art
• B.A. History of Art, Yale University

Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887–March 6, 1986) was an American modernist artist whose bold semi-abstract paintings pulled American art into a new era. She is best known for her stark images of flowers and iconic landscapes of the American Southwest, where she made her home for the latter half of her life. 

Fast Facts: Georgia O'Keeffe

• Full Name: Georgia Totto O'Keeffe
• Known For: American modernist artist, made most famous by her close up paintings of flowers and bones. 
• Born: November 15, 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
• Parents: Francis O’Keeffe and Ida Totto 
• Died: March 6, 1986 in Santa Fe, New Mexico
• Education: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Art Students League, Teachers College, Columbia University 
• Mediums: Painting 
• Art Movement: Modernism 
• Selected Works: Evening Star III (1917), City Night (1926), Black Iris (1926), Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931), Sky Above Clouds IV (1965)
• Awards and Honors: Edward MacDowell Medal (1972), Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), National Medal of Arts (1985)
• Spouse: Alfred Stieglitz (1924-1946) 
• Notable Quote: "When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not."

Though O’Keeffe often rejected the interpretation, her paintings have been described as the portrayal of an unleashed feminine desire, as the recesses of the flora she painted have been interpreted as a veiled reference to female sexuality. In reality, O’Keeffe’s oeuvre extends far beyond the facile interpretation of her flower paintings, and rather should be credited with her much more significant contribution to the formation of a uniquely American art form. 

Early Life (1887-1906)

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, to Hungarian and Irish immigrants, the eldest daughter of seven children. O’Keeffe’s parents were, to many observers, an odd pair––their marriage was the union between the hardworking Irish farmer Francis O’Keeffe and a sophisticated European lady (said to be descended from aristocracy), Ida Totto, who never shed the poise and pride she inherited from her Hungarian grandfather. Nevertheless, the two raised the young O’Keeffe to be independent and curious, an avid reader and explorer of the world.

Though the artistic life would eventually claim the eldest O’Keeffe daughter, she forever identified with the laid back, hardworking attitude of her father and always had affection for the open spaces of the American Midwest. Education was always a priority for her parents, and thus, all the O’Keeffe girls were well educated. 

O’Keeffe exhibited an artistic ability early on in life (though those who knew her in youth may have insisted her younger sister Ida––who went on to be a painter as well––was the more naturally gifted). She attended art school at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League, and Columbia Teachers’ College, and was taught by the influential painters Arthur Dow and William Merritt Chase. 

Early Work and Influences (1907-1916)

O'Keeffe moved to New York in 1907 to attend classes at the Art Students League, which would serve as her first introduction to the world of modern art.

In 1908, the sketches of Auguste Rodin were displayed in New York City by the modernist photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. The owner of the legendary Gallery 291, Stieglitz was a visionary and largely credited with introducing the United States to modernism, with the work of artists like Rodin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. 

While Stieglitz was worshipped in the artistic circles of which O’Keeffe was a part at Columbia Teachers College (where she began study in 1912), the pair was not formally introduced until almost ten years after the painter first visited the gallery. 

In 1916, while Georgia was teaching art to students in South Carolina, Anita Pollitzer, a great friend of O’Keeffe from the Teachers’ College with whom she frequently corresponded, brought a few drawings to show to Stieglitz. Upon seeing them, (according to myth) he said, “Finally a woman on paper.” Though probably apocryphal, this story reveals an interpretation of O’Keeffe’s work that would follow it beyond the artist’s lifetime, as if the femininity of the artist were undeniable by just looking at the work. 

Relationship With Alfred Stieglitz (1916-1924)

Though Stieglitz had been married to another woman for decades (with whom he had a daughter), he began a romantic affair with O’Keeffe, 24 years his junior. The couple fell deeply in love, as both were moved by their mutual commitment to art. O’Keeffe was embraced by the Stieglitz family, despite the illicit nature of their relationship. 

Before their relationship began, Stieglitz had largely given up his photography work. However, the love he found with O’Keeffe ignited in him a creative passion, and Stieglitz considered O’Keeffe a muse, producing over 300 images of her over their life together. He exhibited over 40 of these works in a gallery show in 1921, his first exhibition in many years. 

The couple was married in 1924, after Stieglitz’s first wife filed for divorce. 

Mature Career

O’Keeffe began to receive significant praise after only two years in New York. Her work was widely written up and often was the talk of the town, as the revelation of a woman’s perspective (however much that perspective was read into the work by the critics) on canvas was captivating. 

O’Keeffe, however, did not believe the critics had gotten her right, and at one point invited Mabel Dodge, a female acquaintance, to write about her work. She bristled at the Freudian interpretations of her work as expressions of a deep sexuality. These opinions followed her in her shift from abstraction to her iconic flower paintings, in which single blooms filled up the canvas at close range. (Dodge eventually did write on O’Keeffe’s work, but the result was not for what the artist had hoped.) 

Though 291 Gallery closed in 1917, Stieglitz opened another gallery, which he named The Intimate Gallery, in 1925. As O'Keeffe worked quickly and produced a lot of work, she exhibited annually in a solo show held by the gallery. 

Every year, O’Keeffe and her husband would spend the summer at Lake George with Stieglitz’s family, an arrangement that frustrated the artist, who preferred to control her environment and have long stretches of peace and quiet in order to paint. 

In 1929, O’Keeffe had finally had enough of these summers in upstate New York. Her latest show in New York had not been received with the same critical acclaim, and thus the artist felt the need to escape the pressures of the city, which she had never loved in the way she loved the American West, where she had spent much of her 20s teaching art. When an artist friend invited her to the town of Taos, already a thriving artist colony, she decided to go. The trip would change her life. She would go back each summer, without her husband. There she produced paintings of the landscape, as well as still lifes of skulls and flowers. 

In 1930, the Intimate Gallery closed, only to be replaced by another Stieglitz gallery called An American Place, and nicknamed simply “The Place.” O’Keeffe would also display her works there. Around the same time, Stieglitz began an intimate relationship with the gallery’s assistant, a friendship that caused Georgia great distress. She continued to show her work at the Place, however, and found that the Great Depression did not have a significant effect on her painting sales.

In 1943, O’Keeffe had her first retrospective at a major museum, at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she had taken art classes in 1905. As a native Midwesterner, the symbolism of showing in the region's most significant institution was not lost on the artist.

However, her success was tainted by difficulties with her husband's health. Twenty-four years O’Keeffe’s senior, Stieglitz began slowing down long before his wife. Due to his weak heart, he put down his camera in 1938, having taken his last image of his wife. In 1946, Alfred Stieglitz died. O’Keeffe took his death with expected solemnity and was tasked with dealing with his estate, which she managed to have placed in some of America's finest museums. His papers went to Yale University.

Ghost Ranch and Later Life

In 1949, Georgia O’Keeffe permanently moved to Ghost Ranch, where she had bought property in 1940, and where she would spend the rest of her life. The spiritual connection O’Keeffe had to this Western American land, of which she felt vibrations in her youthful stints as a teacher in Texas, cannot be underestimated. She described New Mexico as the landscape for which she had been waiting her entire life.

Success, of course, continued to follow her. In 1962, she was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Letters, taking the spot of the recently deceased poet E.E. Cummings. In 1970, she was featured on the cover of Life magazine. In fact, her image appeared so often in the press that she was often recognized in public, though she shied away from the direct attention. Museum shows (including a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970) where frequent, as well as numerous honors, including the Medal of Freedom from President Gerald Ford (1977) and the National Medal of Arts (1985) from President Ronald Reagan. 

In 1971, O’Keeffe began to lose her eyesight, a devastating development for a woman whose career depended on it. The artist, however, kept painting, sometimes with the help of studio assistants. Later in the same year, a young man named Juan Hamilton showed up at her door to help her with packing her paintings. The two developed a deep friendship, but not without causing scandal in the art world. O’Keeffe eventually severed ties with her old dealer Doris Bry, a result of her connection to the young Hamilton, and allowed much of her estate’s decisions to be made by her new friend. 

Georgia O’Keeffe died in 1986 at the age of 98. Much of her estate was left to Juan Hamilton, causing controversy among O’Keeffe’s friends and family. He bequeathed much of it to museums and libraries and serves in an advisory capacity to the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. 

Georgia O’Keeffe continues to be celebrated as a painter. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the first museum dedicated to the work of a single female artist, opened its doors in Santa Fe and Abiquiu, New Mexico, in 1997. The Georgia O'Keeffe papers are housed at the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library at Yale University, where Stieglitz's papers also reside.

There have been tens of museum shows dedicated to the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, including a large scale retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2016, as well as a survey of the artist’s clothing and personal effects at the Brooklyn Museum in 2017. 

• Lisle, Laurie.  Portrait of an Artist: a Biography of Georgia OKeeffe . Washington Square Press, 1997.
• “Timeline.”  Georgia O'Keeffe Museum , www.okeeffemuseum.org/about-georgia-okeeffe/timeline/.
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My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.

- Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe and her paintings

One of the first female painters to achieve worldwide acclaim from critics and the general public, Georgia O'Keeffe was an American painter who created innovative impressionist images that challenged perceptions and evolved constantly throughout her career. After studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago she attended the Art Students League in New York, studying under William Merritt Chase. Though she impressed the league with her oil painting "Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot," she lacked self-confidence and decided to pursue a career as a commercial artist and later as a teacher and then head of the art department at West Texas A&M University. At that time she became acquainted with a landscape that would become iconic within her work, the Palo Duro Canyon. O'Keeffe did not stop producing charcoal drawings and watercolors during her hiatus, some of which were seen by Alfred Stieglitz, her future husband. Stieglitz was a successful photographer and modern art promoter who owned the 291 Gallery in New York City. He was struck by the sincerity within her work and organized her first solo show in 2017, composed of oil paintings and watercolors completed in Texas. After their marriage, O'Keeffe became part of an inner circle of American modernist painters who frequently showed in Stieglitz's gallery. Many of the works produced by Georgia O'Keeffe during the 1920s and 1930s hover enticingly on the margins between figuration and abstraction. The notion that car could be entirely non-representational, or abstract, was widely explored in the decade from 1910, particularly in the works of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and the Dutchman Piet Mondrian . O'Keeffe's works shifted towards oil paintings which appeared to be magnified natural forms. In 1925, her first large-scale flower painting was exhibited in New York City. Petunia marked the beginning of a period of exploration on the flower theme that would continue throughout her career. By magnifying her subject, she emphasized shape and color and brought attention to the tiny details within the flower. During her life, the flower is a motif that Georgia O'Keeffe always returns to, as artists have always returned to their beloved themes - Van Gogh his Sunflowers , Monet his Water Lilies , and Rembrandt his self portrait . O'Keeffe's painting's subjects caught the attention of collectors and critics who responded with alacrity. Their discussion of the O'Keeffe's works were often colored by the popularized tenets of Sigmund Freud , which by the 1920s were widespread in America. In a cultural atmosphere initially titillated and gradually transformed by his theories, art and its critical reception - like many other aspects of modern life - where invariably, and indelibly colored by Freudian consideration. Many claims that the images which Georgia O'Keeffe created when painting flowers, was work which was highly sexual, and many went as far as to say it was an erotic art form; but O'Keeffe rejected that theory consistently. In an attempt to move the attention of her critics away from their Freudian interpretations of her work, she began to paint in a more representational style. In her series on New York, O'Keeffe excelled in painting architectural structures as highly realistic and expertly employed the style of Precisionism within her work. "Radiator Building-Night, New York" from 1927 can also be interpreted as a double portrait of Steiglitz and O'Keeffe. Object portraiture of this kind was popular amongst the Steiglitz circle at the time and greatly influenced by the poetry of Gertrude Stein. In 1929, seeking solitude and an escape from a crowd that perhaps felt artistically and socially oppressive, O'Keeffe traveled to New Mexico and began an inspirational love affair with the visual scenery of the state. For 20 years she spent part of every year working in New Mexico, becoming increasingly interested in the forms of animal skulls and the southwest landscapes. While her popularity continued to grow, O'Keeffe increasingly sought solace in New Mexico. Her painting Ram's Head with Hollyhock encapsulates so much novelty while still maintaining with her classic aesthetic of magnifying and showing the beauty in small, natural details. While her interest in the southwest increased, so did the value of her paintings in the New York galleries.

She was featured in two one-woman retrospectives at the Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in the 40's, becoming the first woman to ever have a retrospective at the latter. She developed an obsessive interest in formations of rock near her home in New Mexico and spent hours painting in the sun and wind.

In 1946 O'Keeffe's husband Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis and she moved back to New York for three years after his death to settle his estate before permanently settling in New Mexico. With the loss of Stieglitz came the lessening of her public exposure. O'Keeffe became once again interested in architectural forms, this time focusing on details like her patio wall and door. Her 1958 painting Ladder to the Moon marked yet another shift in her work which many interpreted as a self-portrait that depicted the transitory nature of her life. Others viewed it as a religious statement that showed a link between the earth and cosmic forces above it. Adding onto a history of abstraction, in the early 1960s O'Keeffe painted an extensive collection of aerial cloudscapes inspired from her view from the windows of airplanes. In 1970 the Whitney Museum of American Art began the first retrospective career of her work in New York since 1946 which greatly revived her career. Though her eyesight became compromised in the 1970s, she continued working in pencil and charcoal until 1984 and also produced clay pots and a watercolor series. In 1986 she died at her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico and requested her ashes be scattered over the top of Pedernal Mountain. While her work varied between the literal portraits, abstractions and landscapes, O'Keeffe's work is still most identified by her iconic flower paintings. In 2014 the Georgia O'Keefe Museum sold a floral painting for $44 million dollars at auction setting the record for artwork sold by a female artist. The piece, titled Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1 was painted in 1932 and is an iconic representation of a large-scale flower. Georgia O'Keeffe died in 1986, at the age of ninety-nine. In her lifetime, she received unprecedented critical acclaim. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts & Letters, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and received the United States Medal of Freedom. In 1946, she was the first woman honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and, twenty-five years later, the Whitney Museum's retrospective of this "Mighty Mother's" work garnered her renewed critical acclaim and an ardent feminist following. Following her death, a large portion of her estate's assets was transferred to the Georgia O'Keefe Foundation. Later when this foundation dissolved the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Assets from her estate included an immense body of work and archived materials. Her home in New Mexico was designated a National Historic Landmark is also owned by the O'Keeffe museum. Within her work and life, O'Keeffe was unapologetically true to her own vision. When she did attempt to supersede her intuition to complete hired work, she became troubled and always retreated back to what felt familiar and natural. She remains one of the most important and innovative artists of the twentieth century.

Cows Skull with Calico Roses

Jimson weed, ram's head with hollyhock, cow's skull: red, white, and blue, music pink and blue ii, oriental poppies, black place, sky above clouds, ladder to the moon, grey lines with black, blue and yellow, abstraction white rose, blue and green music, ram's head, blue morning glory, from the faraway nearby.

Georgia O'Keeffe

American, 1887 - 1986

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Robert Torchia, “Georgia O'Keeffe,” NGA Online Editions, https://purl.org/nga/collection/constituent/2311 (accessed September 07, 2024).

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Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She demonstrated an early aptitude for art and resolved to become an artist. After graduating from high school in 1905, O'Keeffe attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906, and the Art Students League in New York from 1907 to 1908. Although O’Keeffe won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize in 1908, she became disillusioned with academic realism. In 1912 she took a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, with an instructor who introduced her to the progressive ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow (American, 1857 - 1922)  O’Keeffe experimented with these concepts while teaching art in the public school system in Amarillo, Texas, from 1912 to 1914. She returned to New York and took courses at Columbia Teachers College for the academic year 1914–1915, and later began teaching art at Columbia College in South Carolina. She produced a series of innovative abstract charcoal drawings that attracted the attention of the photographer and gallery director Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864 - 1946) who exhibited them at his 291 gallery in 1916. He gave O’Keeffe a solo exhibition the following year, and in 1918 provided financial support that enabled her to leave her position at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, Texas, and move to New York. She and Stieglitz began living together shortly thereafter.

The relationship between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe profoundly affected the course of their professional and personal lives. In March 1924 Stieglitz arranged for major exhibitions of his photographs and O’Keeffe’s paintings and works on paper to be shown simultaneously at the Anderson Galleries. Later that year Stieglitz divorced his wife Emmeline and soon after married O’Keeffe. They lived in New York City and summered at his family’s house in Lake George, New York. Until his death in 1946, Stieglitz ardently promoted O’Keeffe and held annual exhibitions of her work at his galleries. By the late 1920s her representations of New York skyscrapers and large, close-up views of flowers earned her recognition as one of the most significant American artists of the time. Although O’Keeffe was not associated with any particular art movement other than her affiliation with Stieglitz’s circle, her work can be related to surrealism, regionalism, and precisionism.

O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico during the summer of 1929 and was deeply inspired by its people, landscape, architecture, and the animal bones and other natural souvenirs she found in the desert, which figured prominently in her paintings. She moved there permanently in 1949, dividing her time between Ghost Ranch, which she had purchased in 1940, and an adobe house she bought in Abiquiú in 1945. O’Keeffe’s fame continued to grow. A major retrospective of her work was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, and her illustrated autobiography Georgia O’Keeffe (1976) was a best seller. In 1977 she received the Medal of Freedom from President Gerald Ford, and in 1985 the Medal of the Arts from President Ronald Reagan. In 1984 failing eyesight forced her into retirement. O’Keeffe died in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98. The National Gallery organized an exhibition in 1987 to celebrate the centennial of her birth.

Robert Torchia

September 29, 2016

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Who are they?

Who is Georgia O'Keeffe?

Mountains, skulls and flowers. Take the time to look at the world with Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe, Abstraction White Rose , 1927, Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 (91.4 x 76.2) Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Burnett Foundation and Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Who is she and what is she famous for?

Born in 1887, Georgia O'Keeffe was an American artist who painted nature in a way that showed how it made her feel. She is best known for her paintings of flowers and desert landscapes.

She played an important part in the development of modern art in America, becoming the first female painter to gain respect in New York's art world in the 1920s. Her unique and new way of painting nature, simplifying its shapes and forms meant that she was called a pioneer.

What inspired her?

The artwork below is a landscape. Can you see how she has simplified the shapes of the hills in the painting?

Georgia O'Keeffe, Rust Red Hills 1930, oil on canvas, 40.6 x 76.2 cm © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/DACS 2016, courtesy Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University

As well as the shapes of the landscape itself, O'Keeffe was fascinated by the bones and skulls she found in the desert landscapes near where she lived. She said:

'To me they are as beautiful as anything I know…The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho’ it is vast and empty and untouchable.'

Do you agree? Why do you think she painted the bones so large in front of the landscape?

Georgia O’Keeffe From the Faraway, Nearby 1937 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA) © Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1959

How did she develop her style?

Georgia knew from the age of 12 that she wanted to be an artist. She went to art school but what she was taught there didn’t seem relevant to the way she wanted to paint. Then in 1912 she discovered the revolutionary ideas of an artist and designer called Arthur Wesley Dow. He emphasised the importance of composition – which means how you arrange shapes and colours.

As O’Keeffe explained: ‘His idea was, to put it simply, fill a space in a beautiful way’. This was a light-bulb moment for her and from then on she began to experiment with shapes, colours and marks.

Georgia O'Keeffe, No.12 Special 1916, charcoal on paper, 61 x 48.3 cm © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/DACS 2016, photo © 2015 Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

Georgia met other artists who, like her, were experimenting with abstract art. Art in the 1920s was exciting. Artists didn’t just want to show how something looked but were using colours, shapes and brush-marks in unexpected ways to express meanings, ideas and feelings. This encouraged Georgia to develop her own unique style – a combination of abstract and realistic.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie’s II 1930, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (Santa Fe, USA). Gift of The Burnett Foundation © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/DACS, London

Look at this painting of hills, above. Although you can recognise what it is, it also has a strange and powerful atmosphere that a photograph of the landscape, or a more traditional, straightforward realistic painting, wouldn’t have. What words would you use to describe this landscape?

It was painted in New Mexico, USA. Georgia first visited New Mexico in 1916 and fell in love with the dramatic desert landscape with its rugged mountains. This is what she said about the landscape:

‘As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I’d never seen anything like it before but it fitted to me exactly. There’s something that’s in the air, its just different. The sky is different the stars are different, the wind is different’.

On the Road

Georgia wanted to stay as close as possible to the remote landscape places she loved, she travelled around the desert drawing and painting. She battled the heat and heavy wind and camped out under the stars. Luckily she had favourite mobile studio with her – her car – which she’d specially adapted as a place to work!

Tony Vaccaro, Georgia O'Keeffe, Taos Pueblo, New Mexico 1960, gelatin silver print on paper, 16.7 x 23.5 cm. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; photo courtesy Michael A. Vaccaro Studios

Have you ever visited a landscape that has taken your breath away? Next time try putting those feelings across using shapes and colours and try, (as Georgia says) to ‘fill the space in a beautiful way’.

Kids explore Georgia O'Keeffe

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Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life Paperback – Illustrated, October 1, 2020

• Print length 679 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Brandeis University Press
• Publication date October 1, 2020
• Dimensions 6 x 1.7 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1684580323
• ISBN-13 978-1684580323
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brandeis University Press; Second Edition, Enlarged, Expanded (October 1, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 679 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1684580323
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1684580323
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.2 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.7 x 9.25 inches
• #1,303 in Biographies of Artists, Architects & Photographers (Books)
• #2,597 in Arts & Photography Criticism

About the authors

Roxana robinson.

Roxana Robinson is the author of eleven books: seven novels, three story collections, and the biography of Georgia O'Keeffe. Four of these were New York Times Notable Books.

Robinson was born in Kentucky, but grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She attended Bennington College and graduated from the University of Michigan. She worked in the art world, specializing in the field of American painting, before she began writing full-time. Her novel, Cost, was a finalist for the NEBA, was named one of the five best fiction books of the year by the Washington Post and received the Fiction Award from the Maine Publishers and Writers Association.Her novel, Sparta, was named one of the ten best books of the year by the BBC, and won the James Webb Award for Distinguished Fiction from the USMC Heritage Foundation, and the Fiction Award from the Maine Publishers and Writers Association. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bookforum, Harper's, and elsewhere. She was twice a finalist for the NBCC Balakian Award for Criticism and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at Hunter College, has twice served on the board of PEN, and was President of the Authors Guild, where she continues to serve as a member of the Council. She lives in New York and Connecticut, and spends as much time as she can in Maine.

Georgia O'Keeffe

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Customers find the author's biography very good, with depth and breadth. They also describe the writing style as well-written, methodical, and joyous to read. Readers also mention the background as unbelievable and beautiful.

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Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Presents First Major Exhibition to Explore Connections Between Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore

Left to right: Georgia O'Keeffe, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3 , 1930. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O'Keeffe, 1987.58.2. © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1959–64. Elmwood. The Henry Moore Foundation: gift of Irina Moore. Photo: Jonty Wilde.

BOSTON (September 5, 2024)—American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) and British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986) are among the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. They have long been admired for their extraordinary distillations of natural forms into abstraction—O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of flowers and Moore’s monumental public sculpture. Opening at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) this fall, the major exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is the first to bring these two artists together, using compelling visual juxtapositions to explore their common ways of seeing. Each artist experimented with unusual perspectives, shifts in scale, and layered compositions to produce works that were informed by their surroundings—O’Keeffe in New Mexico and Moore in Hertfordshire, England.

Featuring over 150 works—including about 60 works by O’Keeffe and 90 by Moore—the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, as well as faithful recreations of each of the artists’ studios containing their tools and found objects. Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is an unprecedented collaboration with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Henry Moore Foundation.

“Looking at O’Keeffe and Moore together, we can see how both artists were inspired by and also made use of natural forms. O’Keeffe hoped that her paintings would make people pay attention to things they usually overlooked—the soft gradations of a flower petal, the patterns within a landscape, or the shapes between two objects. As O’Keeffe said herself, ‘to see takes time.’ The chance to see her work in person is not to be missed,” said Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is on view at the MFA from October 13, 2024 through January 20, 2025 in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery. Timed-entry tickets, which include general admission, are required for all visitors and can be reserved in advance on mfa.org or purchased at the Museum. Member Preview takes place October 9–12.

“While many of our visitors here in Boston will know O’Keeffe’s work and reputation well, they might be less familiar with Moore, one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. The generous loans from the Henry Moore Foundation allow us to recreate the artist’s studio and will really help bring Moore alive and show how found objects played a role in the creation of his large-scale public sculpture,” said Courtney Harris, Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture.

Through careful observation of their surroundings and the objects they collected, O’Keeffe and Moore reimagined natural forms—bones, stones, shells, flowers, and the land itself—into dynamic abstractions. Each played with scale, exploring the effects of making small things large. They twisted and turned pieces in space, searching for balance, looking within their complex interiors, and exploring how objects transform the spaces around them. The exhibition presents their works both individually and in dialogue, presenting unique juxtapositions such as:

• O’Keeffe’s Red Tree, Yellow Sky (1952, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Moore’s Working Model for Standing Figure: Knife Edge (1961, The Henry Moore Foundation): O’Keeffe often envisioned how miniature forms might become monumental. In this painting she juxtaposed a small piece of wood against a distant landscape, conflating near and far, large and small. Moore similarly made a small thing enormous, inspired by the breastbone of a bird to create a figurative sculpture that twists in space and encourages viewers to walk around it.
• Moore’s Helmet (1939–1940, The Henry Moore Foundation) and O’Keeffe’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3 (1930, National Gallery of Art, Washington): This work by Moore was the first in a series of small sculptures with hollow shells that encased unique interior forms. O’Keeffe similarly used a technique of enclosure in her painting of a deep purple flower with its complex interior and billowing leaves.
• O’Keeffe’s Pelvis IV (1944, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum) and Moore’s Reclining Figure Bone (1975, The Henry Moore Foundation): O’Keeffe plays with scale, depth, and perspective by showing an entire vista through the aperture of a sun-bleached pelvic bone. Her interest in simplification and negative space is mirrored in Moore’s reduction of the human figure to a simple curve. His choice of travertine, with its porous texture and off-white color, maintains its connection to his inspiration in a weathered animal bone.

There were many other artists active in the U.S. and Europe in the mid-20th century who also looked to nature. The MFA’s presentation of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore draws upon the Museum’s modernist collection to provide a broader context. O’Keeffe and Moore’s works are put into dialogue with photographs, prints, sculpture, and paintings by artists including Edward Weston (1886–1958), Alexander Calder (1898–1976), Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), Arthur Dove (1880–1946), Jean Arp (1886–1966), Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976), and Maria Montoya Martinez (Poveka or Water Pond Lily), (Powhogeh Owingeh [San Ildefonso Pueblo]) (1887–1980).

At the core of the exhibition are recreations of the artists’ studios, built with original contents from O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch studio in the hills of New Mexico and Moore’s Bourne Maquette Studio in Perry Green, a small hamlet surrounded by sheep fields in Hertfordshire, England. Though both O’Keeffe and Moore remained within reach of city life, the two artists worked in rural settings, both amassing large personal collections of animal bones, stones, seashells, and other natural materials that served as key sources of inspiration. These found objects can be seen in these spaces alongside tools, unfinished works, and plaster maquettes. The studio installations illuminate the heart of O’Keeffe and Moore’s artistic practices—something rarely made visible in museum spaces—and create richer portraits of the artists by encouraging visitors to imagine how they worked and lived.

Artist Biographies

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 and grew up in rural Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She first studied art in Chicago and then, in New York, with the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase. But she pursued a more modern approach, inspired by Arthur Wesley Dow, whose compositional theories were rooted in Japanese art. In the 1910s, O’Keeffe, then an art teacher in West Texas, began to make nature-based abstractions, learning to love the landscapes of the southwest.

O’Keeffe came to New York in 1916. Without her knowledge, a friend had sent her drawings to the New York art dealer, photographer, and champion of modernism Alfred Stieglitz, who gave O’Keeffe her first show at his gallery 291. With Stieglitz’s support, she came back to New York in 1918. They began a romantic relationship, marrying in 1924. O’Keeffe painted flowers, skyscrapers, and, following trips to New Mexico, bones, which she shipped back in barrels to New York. But the stark beauty of the southwest always beckoned. O’Keeffe visited for long periods and began to acquire property, first at Ghost Ranch and then in Abiquiú. She moved to New Mexico permanently after Stieglitz’s death in 1946.

O’Keeffe carefully nurtured her art, her career, and her persona, earning a place in the center of the New York art world. Her work was featured in a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1946—the museum’s first show devoted to a woman artist. She gained public recognition after a 1968 cover story in Life magazine. In 1997, The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico opened to the public.

Henry Moore was born in 1898 in Castleford, a mining town in the northern English county of Yorkshire. He served in World War I and upon his return, enrolled at the Leeds School of Art as the first student of a new sculpture department. Through the 1920s and ’30s he exhibited at shows in London and worked in a studio in Hampstead in northern London. During the World War II, he served as an Official War Artist, making drawings of Londoners sheltering in the Underground during the Blitz.

In 1940, after his London home was damaged by German bombs, Moore settled permanently at Hoglands, a cottage in Perry Green in Hertfordshire, about 35 miles north of London. He spent the next four decades creating some of the most recognizable works of public sculpture of the 20th century. He was enormously successful and well known. He was honored with a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1946, the same year as O’Keeffe’s. He was appointed to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1948, and participated in the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Today, Moore’s legacy lives on through the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green and in Leeds. His work is also celebrated in an important suite of galleries at Tate Britain in London and in the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. His sculpture can be found in public spaces across the world.

Public Programs

Organized in conjunction with the exhibition, the five-session course “Abstracting Nature: Exploring Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore” takes an in-depth look at the artists, tracing their innovative interpretations of nature and investigating how their distinct styles and shared fascinations with organic forms shaped the trajectory of modern art in the 20th century. The course, offered in person and virtually, takes place on Wednesdays from October 30 through December 4.

Additional programming includes an art-making activity inspired by the exhibition that will be offered at MFA Late Nites —the Museum’s signature after-hours event—on October 25, when Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore will be open for visitors to explore from 8 pm to 1 am. On December 7, the Museum will present a screening of the documentary Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light.

Generously supported by the Bafflin Foundation. Additional support from the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Exhibition Fund, the Robert and Jane Burke Fund for Exhibitions, Lynn Dale and Frank Wisneski, the Eugenie Prendergast Memorial Fund, and the Patricia B. Jacoby Exhibition Fund.

The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

About the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The MFA brings many worlds together through art. Showcasing masterpieces from ancient to contemporary, our renowned collection of nearly 500,000 works tells a multifaceted story of the human experience—a story that holds unique meaning for everyone. From Boston locals to international travelers, visitors from across the globe come to experience the MFA. Through both art and audience, the Museum brings together diverse perspectives—revealing connections, exploring differences, creating a community where all belong.

Open six days a week, the MFA’s hours are Saturday through Monday, 10 am–5 pm; Wednesday, 10 am–5 pm; and Thursday–Friday, 10 am–10 pm. Plan your visit at mfa.org .

Lisa Colli 617-369-3447 [email protected]