Georgia O’Keeffe 1887-1986

By Aliza Wall

Georgia O’Keefe, Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue, 1931, oil on canvas, 101.3 x 91.1 cm., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/52.203/.

To know American painter and draughtsman Georgia O’Keeffe only as a painter of flowers is to underestimate her grossly. Born November 15, 1887, on a Wisconsin dairy farm, O’Keeffe displayed artistic talent from a young age. Throughout her school years, teachers noted and encouraged her drawing and painting abilities. At age 12, O’Keeffe was already determined to become an artist. From 1905 to 1906 O’Keefe attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Shortly thereafter she moved to New York, where she studied oil, pastel, and watercolour under William Merritt Chase, showing an incredible proficiency in realist painting. However, O’Keeffe rejected realism, and painting altogether, as she believed she could not distinguish herself as an artist painting in an imitative style. From 1908 to 1910, O’Keeffe worked as a freelance commercial artist in Chicago. In 1912, O’Keeffe was introduced to the anti-academic system of art education developed by Ernest Fenollosa and Arthur Dow. They believed in the Modernist notion that art should not be imitative but rather represent the personal ideas and feelings of the subject using line, colour, and notan (the Japanese system of arranging lights and darks). 

 The ideas of modernism revitalized O’Keeffe’s interest in painting and for the next few years, O’Keeffe worked as an art teacher. In 1915, O’Keeffe produced a pivotal series of charcoal abstractions including No. 3-Special, which reference natural motifs like plants and waves. Such motifs anticipate O’Keeffe’s later fixation on the natural world. In 1916, ten drawings from this series were exhibited by gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In 1918, O’Keeffe moved to New York with the promise of Stieglitz’s financial support. O’Keeffe continued to create abstract works but, in 1919, made a definitive shift towards recognizable forms. In 1924, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were married. Stieglitz would promote O’Keeffe’s work until his death in 1946, exhibiting her work frequently. 

By 1925, O’Keeffe’s style, marked by a combination of Symbolism, abstraction, and photography, had solidified. It was during this period that she created her famous flower paintings, exemplified by Black Iris (1926). The popular reading of such paintings, which was encouraged and promoted by Stieglitz, was that they evoked female genitalia. O’Keeffe, however, rejected such interpretations, reviling at sexist oversimplifications of her sophisticated and rather abstract paintings. To combat her sexualized image, O’Keeffe curated a minimalist, androgynous aesthetic that she would embrace until her death. From 1930 until 1949 (when she moved permanently) O’Keeffe frequented New Mexico, her painting reinvigorated with the colours and themes of the Southwest. Pieces from this era like Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931) reflect both the sparsity of the dessert and uniquely Americana iconography. 

In 1949 O’Keeffe moved permanently to Santa Fe, where she would continue to create semi-abstract paintings of the natural world. In 1959, O’Keeffe began to travel and was fascinated by the views from the windows of aeroplanes. Works like Blue, Black, and Grey (1960), while perceived as abstractions, actually represent O’Keeffe’s views from an aeroplane. From this point forward, O’Keeffe painted largely in an abstract style that recalled her earliest works from the 1910s and 1920s. In 1971 O’Keeffe was forced to abandon oil painting due to failing vision, able to work only in watercolour and clay until her death in 1986. O’Keeffe, although often reduced to a portion of her oeuvre, was a modernist, feminist, and architect of her own image. 

Bibliography 

Lynes, Barbara Buhler. “Georgia O’Keeffe: American Painter.” Encyclopedia Britannica. October 22, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georgia-OKeeffe. 

Peters, Sarah Whitaker. “O’Keeffe, Georgia.” Grove Art Online. October 16, 2003. https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000063367?rskey=xttlIh&result=1. 

Smith, Roberta. “Georgia O’Keeffe, Stylist and Curator of Her Own Myth.” New York Times Online. March 2, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/arts/design/georgia-okeeffe-stylist-and-curator-of-her-own-myth.html. 

“What do you see in Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers?” Phaidon. Accessed November 9, 2019. https://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2014/february/05/what-do-you-see-in-georgia-okeeffes-flowers/.