Georgia O’Keeffe (Scorpio, 1887 – 1986) was an American modernist painter whose career spanned seven decades. Her work blurred the lines between representational and abstraction and stood independent of modern art movements. Gaining international recognition for her large-scale flower paintings and modern lifestyle, O’Keeffe caused a cultural sensation that rippled far beyond the art world.
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Developing Her Signature Style
Georgia O’Keeffe spent her childhood on a dairy farm in a small town in Wisconsin. She inherited her father’s love for travel and sense of adventure and her mother’s practical determination and independence. By age 10, she had decided to become an artist. Her supportive mother took Georgia and her twin sisters to art lessons in town.
At 13 she was sent to Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia, where she gained a reputation for her unique personality and style. She was described in the Chatham Episcopal Institute yearbook –
“A girl who would be different in habit, style, and dress. A girl who doesn’t give a cent for men and boys still less.”
-Adage about young O’Keeffe
Art School Days
In 1905 O’Keeffe began her formal art education, first at the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by the progressive Art Students League in New York.
During her short tenure at the League, she was a force of intrigue and inspiration. She produced award winning work and became a muse for fellow students, many of whom painted her portrait.
O’Keeffe quickly realized that she was not interested in a career as a painter based on the mimetic tradition that preceded her. Following her practical side, she started teaching art to fund her continuing education, with clarity and determination to cultivate a way of art and life that was totally true to herself.
“I made up my mind to forget all that I had been taught and to paint exactly how I felt.”
-Georgia O’Keeffe
Who Influenced Georgia O'Keeffe
The most influential teacher in O’Keeffe’s art studies was Arthur Wesley Dow. She totally devoted herself to his central principle of “filling space in a beautiful way.”
In 1915 while teaching in South Carolina, her abstract style fully emerged. Influenced by her studies on Composition with Dow and Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, she began to attune to “inner necessity” over art styles and techniques. She followed her desire to fully own her artistic expression, and what emerged was ground-breaking.
In 1917 Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and photographer, held an exhibit of her abstract works at his avant garde gallery in New York City. The following year began working seriously as an artist in NYC and married Stieglitz in 1924.
“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
Georgia O'Keeffe's Flower Paintings
In 1919 Georgia O’Keeffe began painting a series of red canna lillies. She had a practice in painting the same subjects over and over, with increasing simplicity and abstraction emerging as she got to know their essence. Influenced by the grandeur of New York City, Each canna lily painting also grew larger in size.
Studied in modernist photography, she applied the techniques that she learned with the camera, like close-cropping and viewing subjects through multiple perspectives to her painting compositions. O’Keeffe also applied her studies with Dow and love of Eastern aesthetics to her canvases, putting as much emphasis on the negative space as the subject. The result was seeing beyond the flowers, into beautiful forms of color, shape, and emotion. She gave the world a new way to experience one of the most traditional subjects in art, flowers.
“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. 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.”
-Georgia O’Keeffe
What Inspired Georgia O'Keeffe
O’Keeffe was inspired by the natural world around her, and the aesthetic beauty of singular objects – flowers, bones, clouds. Each place she traveled and lived gave her different sources of inspiration and flowers to paint. She preferred to paint subjects from life, and in the wild, which resulted in many painting adventures and later in life turning her car into a portable studio that she could take into the desert for long painting days.
Many of her summers were spent in Lake George, Wisconsin, where she painted jack-in-the-pulpits and corn stalks. The environment around the lake offered rich vegetation of plant life, and her color palette reflects this mood, with darker colors and rich tones of purples, reds, greens, and blues.
In 1939, Dole Pineapple Company offered O’Keeffe an all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii, in exchange for a painting they could use in their advertising. However, since she wasn’t allowed to go into the pineapple fields alone, she spent most of her trip painting the island flowers and landscape.
“Painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.”
-Georgia O’Keeffe
Lifestyle at Ghost Ranch
As an escape from her strained marriage with Stieglitz and the pressure of the New York art world, O’Keeffe started taking annual trips New Mexico in 1929. It was a place that had the most profound effect on her work and spirit. For the next twenty years she would spend a portion of the year there, painting in relative solitude, then return to New York to exhibit her work.
By 1949 she made New Mexico her permanent home. The eternal beauty of the desert captivated her imagination for more than four decades. She found new subjects to paint, like the famous desert bones, rugged mountains, and big blue skies. She purchased two homes in New Mexico. Ghost Ranch was her summer and fall retreat, a simple adobe home with views of majestic cliffs and mesas that she fell in love with.
At Ghost Ranch, O’Keeffe composed a life of simplicity and self-sufficiency. This was a place for her to live her minimalist aesthetic and ideals. Her studio was a tranquil, whitewashed room with an adobe fireplace and a bleached skull above the mantle and filled with beautiful desert objects that she collected, gnarled branches, rocks, and animal bones.
Her main objective was to distill her experience of the world around her to its essence. The solitude and raw, elemental beauty she found at Ghost Ranch brought her closer to that essence.”
-Barbara Buhler Lynes
Georgia O'Keeffe's Final Years
For the next two decades, O’Keeffe traveled all around the world. The view of the world from above inspired her famous series from her later years, Sky Above Clouds (1962–65) done on monumental scale measuring 24 feet in length, an enormous feat. During her final two decades of life poor health and blindness hindered her ability to work. Her ashes were scattered over the New Mexico landscape when she died, at 98 years old.
O’Keeffe changed the landscape of modern life and painting, inspiring countless contemporary artists that followed. In her wake she left a legacy of over 900 paintings, and the spirit of a true American pioneer, to forge a life of her own creation.
“Georgia O’Keeffe has never allowed her life to be one things and her painting another.”
-Francis O’Brian
Artworks by Georgia O'Keeffe
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