Background

Ethnicity: Georgia Totto O'Keeffe’s father was Irish, her mother had Dutch and Hungarian roots.

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, United States. She was a second child of Francis Calyxtus O'Keeffe and Ida O'Keeffe who were dairy farmers. She was named after her Hungarian maternal grandfather, a count George Victor Totto, who moved to the United States in 1848.

O'Keeffe had four sisters and two brothers.

Education

The first who persuaded the young Georgia to study art was her mother. Georgia received her first art lessons with her sisters, Ida and Anita, at home and from Sara Mann, a local watercolor painter.

Georgia had attended the Town Hall School, Sun Prairie, which he entered in 1892 and a high school at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin for one year.

In 1902, the family of O'Keeffe moved to Williamsburg, Virginia. The girl pursued her studies at Madison Central High School in Wisconsin where she lived with her aunt. Later, O'Keeffe rejoined her family in Virginia where she finally ended her secondary education at Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia (now Chatham Hall School) graduating in 1905.

The same year, O'Keeffe enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. One of her instructors there was an artist John Vanderpoel.

In 1907, Georgia came to New York City and became a student of the Art Students League where she studied the methods of traditional realist painting under William Merritt Chase, Francis Luis Mora, and Kenyon Cox. O'Keeffe was a brilliant student. Her still-life painting, Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot, was marked by the prize of William Merritt Chase and provided the young artist with the scholarship according to which O'Keeffe attended League’s Outdoor School at Lake George, New York. Unfortunately, she had to left the Art Students League because of financial difficulties in 1908.

Four years later, O'Keeffe attended drawing summer course at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. The course was taught by Columbia University Teachers College faculty member Alon Bement who introduced O'Keeffe to Arthur Wesley Dow, head of the Art Department at Teachers College. The latter had a great influence on her artistic mindset.

Career

The first position in Georgia O'Keeffe's career was the post of the art editor of the school yearbook Mortar Board at Chatham Hall School in 1903.

Then, she worked as a freelance commercial artist in Chicago, Illinois, United States for some time, and then, in 1912, she revealed her interest to the principles of Oriental design and started to teach art in Chatham Hall School. In August of the same year, O'Keeffe moved to Amarillo, Texas, and became an art supervisor of drawing and penmanship in a public school. She held this position till spring 1914 combining it with the duties of Alon Bement's assistant at the University of Virginia.

A year later, O'Keeffe pursued her teaching carrer at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina where she began to incorporate abstract elements in her works, such as No. 3-Special (1915), becoming one of the first pure abstract artists. These early charcoal paintings impressed Alfred Stieglitz and were presented at his gallery in New York City, 291, in May 1916. The exhibition was followed by O'Keeffe's solo show sponsored by Stieglitz in 1917.

In the fall of 1916 O’Keeffe became the chair of the art department at the West Texas State Normal College, in Canyon and had held this post for two years. She created there many watercolors, Sunrise and Little Clouds II (1916), Evening Star No. VII (1917), and No. II Light Coming on the Plains (1917), which depicted the area landscape in an abstract way.

On June 1918, Georgia moved to New York City. One of the paintings of this period, Lake George, Coat and Red (1919), a salient example of her early abstract style, was a roughly brushed composition in which a twisted, enigmatic form looms against a rainbow-hued sky.

In 1921, Alfred Stieglitz, whom O'Keeffe married four years later, organized the exhibition of his photographs most of which showed O'Keeffe nude. The exhibition impressed the critics a lot and the next retrospective of O'Keeffe's works at the Anderson Galleries in 1923 received many positive reviews. Many exhibitions were organized the following years, and by the 1920s O'Keeffe had a reputation of the most popular New York modernists.

Though O'Keeffe insisted that there was no symbolism behind her work, art critics continued to speculate about the sexual imagery in such paintings as Black Iris (1926) and Jack in the Pulpit No. 6 (1930). Indeed, this generative tension includes the most optimistic and successful.

Between 1926 and 1929 O'Keeffe painted a group of views of New York City. New York Night (1929) transformed skyscrapers into patterned, glittering structures that deny their volume. More architecturally characteristic were such paintings as Lake George Barns (1926) and Ranchos Church, Taos (1929).

In search of new inspiration for her works, O'Keeffe travelled the summer of 1929 to New Mexico. Its dramatic mesas, ancient Spanish architecture, vegetation and the dried landscape became the artist's permanent themes. Full clarity characterizes its spontaneous prospects, and its subjects existed in closed worlds. Even O'Keeffe's allegories of death in the desert, a fragmentary skull lying on the sand or attached to a pillar (as in the cow's skull with red, 1936), was eternal. She considered these whitewashed relics as symbols of the desert, nothing more.

The commission to create a mural for the Radio City Music Hall in New York City the painter received in 1932 wasn't finished because of some technical problems. As a result, O'Keeffe had nervous breakdown early in 1933 and stopped painting for some time.

From 1934 until 1949, the artist lived and worked in New Mexico. In 1938, she received an invitation from the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son to took part in the creation of advertising paintings for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company). According to the commission, O'Keeffe travelled to Honolulu where she explored the landscape which inspired her on the series of 20 spectecular paintings.

In 1945, O'Keeffe bought an old house in Abiquiu, New Mexico. She moved there after the death of her husband in 1946. The house was a frequent object in paintings such as Black Patio Door (1955) and Patio with Cloud (1956) – details of doors, windows and walls were radically reduced to almost unchanged color planes. A year later, in May, O'Keeffe's works were represented at The Museum of Modern Art. She was the first women to have an exhibition there.

O'Keeffe started to travel around the world in 1959. So, many of her paintings from the 1960s, large-scale examples of clouds and landscapes seen from the air, reflected a romanticized view of nature, evoking memories of her early themes. "Blue, Black and Grey" (1960) used a more impressionistic color, and the drawing technique was more free, with less reliance on sharp contours. These large paintings reached a culmination in a 24-foot painting on the canvas "The Sky over the Clouds IV" (1965).

In the 1970s, Georgia O'Keeffe had some problems with eyesight what pushed her to have an assistant in painting, a sculptor Juan Hamilton who helped her to finish her autobiography and take part in the film about her life, Georgia O'Keeffe (1977). O'Keeffe's paintings of this period were intense, powerful performances of a black cock. Hamilton introduced her to work with clay, so O'Keeffe created some sculptures the last years of her life.

Georgia O'Keeffe drew up to several weeks before her death.

Achievements

• 

  The American painter Georgia O'Keeffe created a distinctive iconography that includes startling details of plant forms, bleached bones, and landscapes of the New Mexico desert, all rendered with pristine clarity.
  
  O'Keeffe's work was widely recognized. So, she was the first woman to have an exhibition at Museum Modern Art, New York City. In 1933, Georgia was included into the National Women's Hall of Fame in New York City.
  
  Among many other awards, Georgia O'Keeffe was marked twice by the awards from Presidents – the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to American civilians, by President Gerald R. Ford in 1977 and the National Medal of Arts.
  
  There is The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States, founded in 1997 which preserves O'Keeffe heritage. The Museum owns The Georgia O'Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiu which was named a National Historic Landmark in 1998.
  
  O'Keeffe’s painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932) broke the selling record for a painting by a woman. It was bought for $44.4 million by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Bentonville, Arkansas, United States, on November 20 in 2014 at Sotheby's.
  
  Fossilized species of archosaur, Effigia okeeffeae ("O'Keeffe's Ghost"), was named in the artist’s honor in January 2006.
  
  Georgia O'Keeffe's personality and life inspired cineasts to create their movies, such as A Marriage: Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz (1991) and a biopic Georgia O'Keeffe (2009) by Lifetime Television.
  
  

Works

More photos

• drawing

  • Drawing III

  • Drawing XIII

  • Banana Flower

  • Drawing IX

  • Eagle Claw and Bean Necklace

  • Drawing V

  • Drawing XII

• painting

  • Brown Sail, Wing on Wing, Nassau

  • Misty - A Memory

  • Lake George Barns

  • Only One

  • Melting Volcano

  • An Orchid

  • Abstraction White Rose

  • Purple Petunias

  • From the Plains I

  • Petunia

  • Shadow with Pelvis and Moon

  • Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV

  • Black and Purple Petunias

  • Canna Red and Orange

  • From the Old Garden No. 2

  • Morning Glory with Black

  • Squash Blossoms

  • Music Pink and Blue

  • Black Place I

  • Bob Steer Head

  • Autumn Trees - Chestnut Tree

  • Church Steeple

  • Nude Series

  • Hollyhock Pink with Pedernal

  • Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue

  • Street of New York II

  • East River from the Thirtieth Story of the Shelton Hotel

  • Blue Morning Glories

  • Cow's Skull with Calico Roses

  • Jack-in-the-Pulpit II

  • New York Night

  • Petunia No. 2

  • Kachina

  • Pansy

  • Abstraction White

  • Series 1, No. 8

  • Red Poppy

  • A Sunflower from Maggie

  • Dead Tree with Pink Hill

  • Dead Cottonwood Tree

  • Oriental Poppies

  • Oak Leaves Pink and Grey

  • Nude Series 2

  • Bleeding Heart

  • My Shanty, Lake George

  • Maple and Cedar, Lake George

  • Flower of Life

  • Mountains and Lake

  • Green, Yellow and Orange

  • Canna Leaves

  • Pedernal

  • Shelton Hotel New York No. 1

  • Pattern of Leaves

  • Pelvis

  • Gerald's Tree

  • Apple Family II

  • Black Iris III

  • Calla Lily Turned Away

  • Ram’s Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills

  • Flower of Life II

  • Flower Abstraction

  • Pink Sweet Peas

  • Blue-04

  • Nude Series VIII

  • Blue and Green Music

  • Blue Line

  • Jack-in-the-Pulpit III

  • Coxcomb

  • Dark Iris No.3

  • City Night

  • Pedernal - From the Ranch I

  • Corn No. 2

  • Only One

  • Grey Hills

  • Red Hill and White Shell

  • Calla Lily in Tall Glass

  • Black Place II

  • Music Pink and Blue II

  • From the Lake

  • Plums

  • Black Iris

  • It was Yellow and Pink III

  • Black Lava Bridge, Hana Coast-No. I

  • From the Plains II

  • Jimson Weed 3

  • New York with Moon

  • From the White Place

  • Cliffs Beyond Abiquiu, Dry Waterfall

  • In the Patio VIII

  • Black Lava Bridge, Hana Coast-No. II

  • Pattern Leaves

  • Jimson Weed

  • Sunrise

  • Pink Dish and Green Leaves

  • Black Place IV

  • Mule's Skull with Pink Poinsettias

  • Above the Clouds I

  • Grey Line with Black, Blue and Yellow

  • My Backyard

  • Cottonwood Tree in Spring

  • Green and White

  • Kokopelli with Snow

  • Iris 7

  • Ghost Ranch Painting

  • Road to the Ranch

  • From the Faraway, Nearby

  • A Black Bird with Snow Covered Red Hills

  • Slightly Open Clam Shell

  • Blue I

  • Seated Nude

  • Papaya Tree-Iao Valley

  • Hibiscus with Plumeria

  • Calla Lily (Lily-Yellow No. 2)

  • Apple Blossoms

  • Ends of Barns

  • Kachina

  • Pelvis II

  • Calla Lily on Grey

  • Black Place, Grey and Pink

  • East River No. 1

  • Series I, No. 8

  • Oriental Poppies II

  • Horse's Skull on Blue

  • Pink Shell with Seaweed

  • Apple Family

  • Head with Broken Pot

  • Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose

  • Autumn Leaves - Lake George, N.Y.

  • Cottonwood III

  • Inside Red Canna

  • Cup of Silver Ginger

  • Gray Line with Black, Blue, and Yellow

  • Black Hills with Cedar

  • It was a Man and a Pot

  • Autumn Trees - The Maple

  • Clam and Mussel

  • Blue 2

  • Corn, Dark I

  • Pelvis Series - Red with Yellow

  • Blue-02

  • Goat's Horn with Red

  • Dark Tree Trunks

  • Sky Above Clouds III

  • Red Hills and Pedernal

  • Little House with Flagpole

  • Black Hollyhock - Blue Larkspur

  • Spring Tree No. 1

  • Ranchos Church, New Mexico

  • Purple Leaves

  • Special No. 32

  • Pelvis IV

  • Black Lines 1

  • Lake George (formerly Reflection Seascape)

  • Patio Door with Green Leaf

  • Shell No. I

  • Birch and Pine Tree No. 1

  • Large Dark Red Leaves on White

  • Fishhook From Hawaii - No. I

  • Dark Iris No. 2

  • Kachina

  • Bare Tree Trunks with Snow

  • Grey Blue and Black, Pink Circle

  • Bella Donna

  • Blue-03

  • Nature Forms Gasp

  • Sky Above the Clouds II

  • Series I, No. 3

  • Pelvis with the Distance

  • Abstraction

  • Light of Iris

  • Blue-01

  • Radiator Building – Night, New York

  • Sky Above Clouds IV

  • Jimson Weed 2

  • Jack-in-the-Pulpit №V

  • Blue Sky

  • Pelvis III

  • Red Snapdragons

  • Manhattan

  • Abstraction No. 77 (Tulip)

  • Blue Morning Glory

  • Leaf Motif 2

  • Black Place Green

  • Leaves of a Plant

  • Ram's Skull with Brown Leaves

  • Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico - Out Back of Mary's II

  • Summer Days

  • Lake George, Autumn

  • Black Spot No. 2

  • Deers Skull with Pedernal

  • Red Canna

  • Modern Flowers (after Heade?)

  • Red Canna

  • Jimson Weed, White Flower No.1

Politics

As a fervent antagonist of any gendered interpretations of her work, Georgia O'Keeffe was the member of the most radical feminist organization of the early 20th century, the National Woman's Party.

Views

Quotations: "To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage."

"Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time – like to have a friend takes time."

"I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty."

"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."

"Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint."

"I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down."

"One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work."

Membership

Georgia O'Keeffe was a member of Kappa Delta sorority, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• American Academy of Arts and Letters , United States

• American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

  1906

• Kappa Delta , United States

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Nancy and Jules Heller: "The most remarkable thing about O'Keefe was the audacity and uniqueness of her early work."
  
  Elizabeth May Willis, O'Keeffe's art teacher: "When the spirit moves Georgia, she can do more in a day than anybody can do in a week."

Connections

Georgia O'Keeffe married Alfred Stieglitz, famed photographer and gallery owner, on December 11, 1924. O'Keeffe never had children.

Father:

Francis Calyxtus O'Keeffe

(14 January 1864 – 2 May 1916)

Mother:

Ida Ten Eyck O'Keeffe

(née Totto; 13 January 1864 – 2 May 1916)

Sister:

Ida O'Keeffe

(October 23, 1889 – September 27, 1961)

Ida O'Keeffe was a well-known American artist, who gained prominence for her oil paintings, watercolors and monotypes. Among her colorful, abstract landscapes and naturalistic still lifes, there are many works that feature lighthouses.

Friend:

Maria Chabot

(1913 – 2001)

Chabot was a rancher proponent of Native American arts. She was the author of Women Who Rode Away photography depicting O'Keeffe on the back of a motorcycle driven by Maurice Grosser.

Sister:

Catherine Blanche O'Keeffe

(February 1895 – 1987)

Sister:

Anita Ten Eyck Young

(née O'Keeffe; 21 February 1892 – 19 February 1985)

Sister:

Claudia Ruth O'Keeffe

(10 February 1899 – 24 September 1984)

Brother:

Alexis Wyckoff O'Keeffe

(10 June 1892 – 7 January 1930)

Brother:

Francis Calyxtus O'Keeffe, Jr.

(19 May 1885 – June 1959)

husband:

Alfred Stieglitz

(1 January 1864 – 13 July 1946)

Stieglitz was an American photographer. Celebrated for his photo works, he was also an owner of art galleries in New York City at the beginning of the 20th century where he promoted a lot of avant-garde European artists.

Grandfather:

George Victor Totto

(6 June 1820 – 16 November 1894)

George Victor Totto came from Hungary. He relocated to the United States in 1848.

aunt:

Alletta Totto

teacher:

Elizabeth May Willis

instructor:

John Vanderpoel

(born Johannes (Jan) van der Poel; 15 November 1857 – 2 May 1911)

Vanderpoel was a Dutch-American artist and educator who taught primarily figure drawing. He gathered his teaching expirience received at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in a 1907 book The Human Figure.

teacher:

William Chase

(1 November 1849 – 25 October 1916)

Chase was an American painter of the late 19th century. He produced his still lifes, landscapes and portraits in Impressionism and Realism. The painter was also known as an eminent teacher.

teacher:

F. Luis Mora

(full name Francis Luis Mora; 27 July 1874 – 5 June 1940)

Mora was an Uruguayan-born American figural artist and educator. His watercolors, oil canvases, various drawings, etchings and monotypes depicted American life in the early 20th century, Spanish lifestyle, historical and allegorical topics.

teacher:

Kenyon Cox

(27 October 1856 – 17 March 1919)

Cox was an American artist, muralist, writer, and educator. He was associated with the Art Students League of New York.

teacher:

Alon Bement

(1876 – 1954)

A civilian ship camoufleur at World War I, Bement was later associated with the Maryland Institute College of Art (the Maryland Institute School of Fine and Practical Arts at the time), the William E. Harmon Foundation and the National Alliance of Art and Industry (as its director).

teacher:

Arthur Westley Dow

(1857 – 13 December 1922)

Dow was an American artist, printmaker, photographer and educator. He was associated with such art institutions as Pratt Institute, the Art Students League of New York, the Ipswich Summer School of Art, Massachusetts (as its founder and director), and Columbia University Graduate School of Education.

Friend:

Rebecca Salsbury James

(1891 – 1968)

James was a London-born American autodidact artist. She was married to a photographer Paul Strand and to a businessman William James. Celebrated for her "large scale flower blossoms and still lifes painted on glass," Rebecca also dealt with colcha embroidery.

References

• Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe In a dazzling work of historical fiction in the vein of Nancy Horan's Loving Frank, Dawn Tripp brings to life Georgia O'Keeffe, her love affair with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and her quest to become an independent artist.
  2017
• Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern The book explores how Georgia O'Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle. Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O'Keeffe's clothes.
  2017
• Georgia O'Keeffe at Home A fascinating glimpse into the world of one of the most significant and intriguing artists of the 20th century.
  2017
• Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life The richly detailed and moving biography of Georgia O'Keeffe named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review.
  1999
• Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe Recollections of more than one hundred of O'Keeffe's friends, relatives, colleagues, and neighbors as well as published and previously unpublished historical records and letters are used to provide the first full-length biography and in-depth study of the celebrated painter's life.
  1997
• Georgia O'Keeffe Part of the critically acclaimed Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover the incredible life of Georgia O'Keeffe, one of America's greatest artists, in this true story of a talented painter who broke boundaries.
  2018
• My Name is Georgia A book by Jeanette Winter.
  2003
• Through Georgia's Eyes A gorgeous, evocative biography of one of America's most beloved artists.
  2006
• My Faraway One Based on the selected letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, it's the first extensive publication from the extraordinary archive of private correspondence between two of this country's most famous artists.
  2011
• Great Women Artists: Georgia O'Keefe A documentary on the artist directed by Dominique Mougenot.
  2006