Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 March 6, 1986) was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers, hills and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived. Although she was a figure associated with interpretations regarding feminism, she did not want to be seen as a "woman artist", she wanted to be seen as an artist.

From 1905, when O'Keeffe began her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, until about 1920, she studied art or earned money as a commercial illustrator or teacher to pay for further education. Influenced by Arthur Wesley Dow, she began to develop her unique style through her watercolors during her studies at the University of Virginia and, more dramatically, through the charcoal drawings she produced in 1915 that marked her move toward abstraction. Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and photographer, held an exhibit of her works in 1916. Over the next couple of years, she taught and continued her studies at the Teachers College, Columbia University.

In June of 1918 O’Keeffe was invited by Stieglitz to live and work in New York City and accepted this invitation as well as his offer to underwrite her year of painting in the city. She resigned from teaching at West Texas State to do so. Stieglitz and O'Keefe developed a professional and personal relationship that led to their marriage on December 11, 1924. In New York, O’Keefe created many reflections of her perception of the city through oil paint, charcoal, pastel, and watercolor. She looked back fondly at her pieces from this time, calling them ‘My New Yorks’. O'Keeffe created many forms of abstract art besides those of the city, including close-ups of flowers, such as the popular Red Canna paintings.

O'Keeffe and Stieglitz lived together in New York until 1929, when O'Keeffe began spending part of the year in the Southwest, which served as inspiration for her paintings of New Mexico landscapes and images of animal skulls, such as Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931) and Summer Days (1936). She moved to New Mexico in 1949, three years after Stieglitz's death in 1946, where she lived for the next 40 years at her home and studio or Ghost Ranch summer home in Abiquiú, and in the last years of her life, in Santa Fe. In 2014, O'Keeffe's 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44,405,000—at the time, by far the largest price paid for any painting by a female artist. Her works are in the collections of several museums, and following her death, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe.

Early life and education (1887–1916)

thumb|left|175px|[[Hilda Belcher, The Checkered Dress, 1907, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. The painting is likely a portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe.]]

Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, in a farmhouse in the town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents, Francis Calyxtus O'Keeffe and Ida (Totto) O'Keeffe, were dairy farmers. Her father was of Irish descent. Her mother's father, George Victor Totto, for whom O'Keeffe was named, was a Hungarian count who came to the United States in 1848.

O'Keeffe was the second of seven children. By age 10, she had decided to become an artist. With her sisters, Ida and Anita, she received art instruction from local watercolorist Sara Mann. O'Keeffe attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin, as a boarder between 1901 and 1902. In late 1902, the O'Keeffes moved from Wisconsin to the close-knit neighborhood of Peacock Hill in Williamsburg, Virginia, where O'Keeffe's father started a business making rusticated cast concrete block in anticipation of a demand for the block in the Virginia Peninsula building trade, but the demand never materialized. O'Keeffe stayed in Wisconsin attending Madison Central High School until joining her family in Virginia in 1903. She completed high school as a boarder at Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia (now Chatham Hall), graduating in 1905. At Chatham, she was a member of Kappa Delta sorority.

O'Keeffe taught and headed the art department at West Texas State Normal College, watching over her youngest sibling, Claudia, at her mother's request. In 1917, she visited her brother, Alexis, at a military camp in Texas before he shipped out for Europe during World War I. While there, she created the painting The Flag, which expressed her anxiety and depression about the war. and later moved with her family to Charlottesville, Virginia.

First abstractions

She took a summer art class in 1912 at the University of Virginia from Alon Bement, who was a Columbia University Teachers College faculty member. Under Bement, she learned of the innovative ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow, Bement's colleague. Dow's approach was influenced by principles of design and composition in Japanese art. She began to experiment with abstract compositions and develop a personal style that veered away from realism. She also took a class in the spring of 1914 at Teachers College of Columbia University with Dow, who further influenced her thinking about the process of making art. Her studies at the University of Virginia, based upon Dow's principles, were pivotal in O'Keeffe's development as an artist. Through her exploration and growth as an artist, she helped to establish the American modernism movement.

File:Drawing No. 2 by Georgia O'Keeffe 1915 NGA.tif| Special Drawing No. 2, 1915, charcoal on laid paper, National Gallery of Art

File:Georgia O'Keefe, No. 8 Special, 1916.jpg|Special No. 8, 1916, charcoal on paper, Whitney Museum

File:Georgia O'Keeffe, Sunrise, watercolor, 1916.tif|Sunrise, 1916, watercolor on paper

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She taught at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina in late 1915, where she completed a series of highly innovative charcoal abstractions Stieglitz found them to be the "purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while" and said that he would like to show them. In April that year, Stieglitz exhibited ten of her drawings at 291. O'Keeffe, who enjoyed sunrises and sunsets, developed a fondness for intense and nocturnal colors. Building upon a practice she began in South Carolina, O'Keeffe painted to express her most private sensations and feelings. Rather than sketching out a design before painting, she freely created designs. O'Keeffe continued to experiment until she believed she truly captured her feelings in the watercolor, Light Coming on the Plains No. I (1917). including vibrant paintings of Palo Duro Canyon. She "captured a monumental landscape in this simple configuration, fusing blue and green pigments in almost indistinct tonal gradations that simulate the pulsating effect of light on the horizon of the Texas Panhandle," according to author Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall. a residence, and place for her to paint. They developed a close personal relationship, and later married, while he promoted her work.

O'Keeffe came to know the many early American modernists who were part of Stieglitz's circle of artists, including painters Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and photographers Paul Strand and Edward Steichen. Strand's photography, as well as that of Stieglitz, inspired O'Keeffe's work. Stieglitz, whose 291 Gallery closed down in 1917, was now able to spend more time on his own photographic practice, producing a series of photographs of natural forms, cloud studies (a series known as Equivalents), and portraits of O'Keeffe.

Flower paintings

O'Keeffe began creating simplified images of natural things, such as leaves, flowers, and rocks. Inspired by Precisionism, The Green Apple, completed in 1922, depicts her notion of simple, meaningful life. Blue and Green Music expresses O'Keeffe's feelings about music through visual art, using bold and subtle colors.

Also in 1922, journalist Paul Rosenfeld commented "[the] Essence of very womanhood permeates her pictures", citing her use of color and shapes as metaphors for the female body. This same article also describes her paintings in a sexual manner.O'Keeffe, most famous for her depiction of flowers, made about 200 flower paintings, which by the mid-1920s were large-scale depictions of flowers, as if seen through a magnifying lens, such as Oriental Poppies and several Red Canna paintings. She painted her first large-scale flower painting, Petunia, No. 2, in 1924 and it was first exhibited in 1925. O'Keeffe began a series of paintings of the New York skyscrapers and skyline. One of her most notable works, which demonstrates her skill at depicting the buildings in the Precisionist style, is the Radiator Building – Night, New York. Other examples are New York Street with Moon (1925), The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. (1926), and City Night (1926). As a result of the press attention, O'Keeffe's paintings sold at a higher price from that point onward. accompanied by her friend Rebecca (Beck) Strand and stayed in Taos with Mabel Dodge Luhan, who provided O'Keeffe and Strand with studios. She subsequently visited New Mexico on a near-annual basis from 1929 onward, often staying there for several months at a time, returning to New York each winter to exhibit her work at Stieglitz's gallery. O'Keeffe went on many pack trips, exploring the rugged mountains and deserts of the region that summer and later visited the nearby D. H. Lawrence Ranch, where she completed her now famous oil painting, The Lawrence Tree, currently owned by the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut. O'Keeffe visited and painted the nearby historical San Francisco de Asís Mission Church at Ranchos de Taos. She made several paintings of the church, as had many artists, and her painting of a fragment of it silhouetted against the sky captured it from a unique perspective.

In New Mexico, she collected rocks and bones from the desert floor and made them and the distinctive architectural and landscape forms of the area subjects in her work. Like Ram's Head with Hollyhock, it depicts desert scenery with a skull and vibrant wildflowers.

File:Georgia O'Keeffe Summer Days 1936.jpg|Summer Days, 1936, oil on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art

File:O'Keeffe Georgia Ram's Head.jpg|Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills, 1935, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum

File:Jawbone and Fungus.jpg|Jawbone and Fungus, 1931, oil on canvas, Memorial Art Gallery

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Hawaii series

In 1938, the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son approached O'Keeffe about creating two paintings for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company) to use in advertising. Other artists who produced paintings of Hawaii for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company's advertising include Lloyd Sexton Jr., Millard Sheets, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Isamu Noguchi, and Miguel Covarrubias. The offer came at a critical time in O'Keeffe's life: she was 51, and her career seemed to be stalling (critics were calling her focus on New Mexico limited, and branding her desert images "a kind of mass production").

She arrived in Honolulu on February 8, 1939, aboard the SS Lurline and spent nine weeks in Oahu, Maui, Kauai, and the island of Hawaii. By far the most productive and vivid period was on Maui, where she was given complete freedom to explore and paint. She painted flowers, landscapes, and traditional Hawaiian fishhooks. O'Keeffe completed a series of 20 sensual, verdant paintings based on her trip to Hawaii; however, she did not paint the requested pineapple until the Hawaiian Pineapple Company sent a plant to her New York studio.

Abiquiú and landscapes

thumb|Photo of the Plaza Blanca cliffs and [[badlands near Abiquiú, O'Keeffe's "White Place"]]

In 1945, O'Keeffe bought a second house, an abandoned hacienda in Abiquiú, which she renovated into a home and studio. She moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, spending time at both Ghost Ranch and the Abiquiú house that she made into her studio. While O'Keeffe was known to have a "prickly personality," Webb's photographs portray her with a kind of "quietness and calm" suggesting a relaxed friendship, and revealing new contours of O'Keeffe's character.

In the 1940s, O'Keeffe made an extensive series of paintings of what is called the "Black Place", about west of her Ghost Ranch house. In 1946, she began making the architectural forms of her Abiquiú house—the patio wall and door—subjects in her work. It was in this period that O'Keeffe also worked seriously with photography, providing striking counterparts to her patio and door paintings. Another distinctive painting was Ladder to the Moon, 1958. In the mid-1960s, O'Keeffe produced Sky Above Clouds, a series of cloudscapes inspired by her views from airplane windows.|name=Clouds Worcester Art Museum held a retrospective of her work in 1960

During the 1940s, O'Keeffe had two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago (1943). In 1973, O'Keeffe hired John Bruce "Juan" Hamilton as a live-in assistant and then a caretaker. Hamilton was a potter. Hamilton taught O'Keeffe to work with clay, encouraged her to resume painting despite her deteriorating eyesight, and helped her write her autobiography. He worked for her for 13 years. She continued working in pencil and charcoal until 1984.

O'Keeffe became increasingly frail in her late nineties. She moved to Santa Fe in 1984, where she died on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98. Her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered, as she wished, on the land around Ghost Ranch. Following O'Keeffe's death, her family contested her will because codicils added to it in the 1980s had left most of her $65million estate to Hamilton. The case was ultimately settled out of court in July 1987. The case became a famous precedent in estate planning.

Reception

Awards and honors

In 1938, O'Keeffe received an honorary degree of "Doctor of Fine Arts" from the College of William & Mary. Later, O'Keeffe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters Among her awards and honors, O'Keeffe received the M. Carey Thomas Award at Bryn Mawr College in 1971 and two years later received an honorary degree from Harvard University. In 1985, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Ronald Reagan.

To also add she had a major role when it had came to shaping how modern visual art is. This was through her being abstract, using natural forms, and doing large-scale artworks, which had a challenging feature towards what was traditional.

Art criticism and scholarship

O'Keeffe's lotus paintings may have deeper ties to vulvar imagery and symbolism. Feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, the author of the influential 1971 essay titled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", also interpreted Black Iris III (1926) as a morphological metaphor for a vulva.

Art dealer Samuel Kootz was one of O'Keeffe's critics who, although considering her to be "the only prominent woman artist" (in the words of Marilyn Hall Mitchell), considered sexual expression in her work (and other artists' work) artistically problematic. Kootz stated that "assertion of sex can only impede the talents of an artist, for it is an act of defiance, of grievance, in which the consciousness of these qualities retards the natural assertions of the painter". She attributed other artists' attacks on her work to psychological projection. O'Keeffe was also seen as a revolutionary feminist; however, the artist rejected these notions, stating that "femaleness is irrelevant" and that "it has nothing to do with art making or accomplishment."

Personal life

upright|thumb|left|[[Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, platinum print, 1920]]

In June 1918, O'Keeffe accepted Stieglitz's invitation to move to New York from Texas after he promised to provide her a quiet studio where she could paint. Within a month he took the first of many nude photographs of her at his family's apartment while his wife was away. His wife returned home while their session was still in progress and gave him an ultimatum. Stieglitz left immediately and moved into an apartment in the city with O'Keeffe. In mid-August when they visited Oaklawn, the Stieglitz family summer estate in Lake George in upstate New York, they behaved like two teenagers in love. Also around this time, O'Keeffe became sick during the 1918 flu pandemic. In 1978, she wrote about how distant from them she had become, "When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives."

thumb|[[My Shanty, Lake George, 1922, oil on canvas, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.]]

Owing to the legal delays caused by Stieglitz's first wife and her family, it would take six years before he obtained a divorce. O'Keeffe and Stieglitz were married on December 11, 1924. They lived primarily in New York City, but spent their summers at his father's family estate, Oaklawn, in Lake George in upstate New York.]]

O'Keeffe and Stieglitz had an open relationship, which could be painful for O'Keeffe when Stieglitz had affairs with women. She traveled by train with her friend the painter Rebecca Strand, Paul Strand's wife, to Taos, where they lived with their patron who provided them with studios. She did not paint again until January 1934.

Shortly after O'Keeffe arrived for the summer in New Mexico in 1946, Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis (stroke). She immediately flew to New York to be with him. He died on July 13, 1946. She buried his ashes at Lake George. She spent the next three years mostly in New York settling his estate.