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Georgia
O'Keeffe Biography
Georgia
O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986) Georgia O'Keefe is known for her brilliantly
colored paintings with confident shapes and simple patterns. She painted
a great many floral paintings which were large pieces with the flower
exaggerated and enlarged to completely fill the canvas, then stylized
to their most essential forms. She is also known for her Southwest
paintings which include adobe buildings, desert mountain panoramas
or floating cow skulls against rich blue skies. The emphasis on the
simplest aspects of the shapes created a surrealistic dynamic that
is captivating. You May Be Owed Unclaimed Money To Find Out, Enter
Your Last Name Here: O'Keefe was born on November 15, 1887 in Sun
Prairie, Wisconsin. She knew from a young age that she would be an
artist when she grew up. She studied first at the Art Institute of
Chicago. After stopping her education due to a bout of typhoid, she
resumed study in 1907 at the Art Student League in New York. She was
following a family tradition of educated women- an idea not prevalent
at that time. Even as she excelled in her studies it was believed
that she would end up teaching art rather than making it. Georgia
moved for a time with her family to Virginia, but in 1914, when a
teaching job opened in Amarillo, Texas, she took it. After two years
she went to New York's Columbia Teacher's College, and took a job
at Columbia College in South Carolina. Georgia O'Keefe's friend Anita
Pollitzer was taken by O'Keefe's works and took some samples to show
Alfred Steiglitz at the 291 Gallery in New York. Some sources say
that she did so without O'Keefe's permission. Steiglitz was a respected
Gallery curator and artist himself, and O'Keefe respected his opinion,
but even though he loved them it took some negotiations with O'Keefe
to convince her to let him exhibit her work. O'Keefe returned to Texas
and worked at the West Texas Normal College while painting the scenes
she loved, and hiking the Palo Duro Canyon. An illness caused her
to quit her job- or perhaps it was her radical political views clashing
with her colleagues. In any case, she returned to New York at Alfred
Steiglitz's urging. After several years of cohabitation, Steiglitz
divorced his wife and they married when she was 23 and he was 54.
O'Keefe was not enthusiastic, however. Their many trips to the Steiglitz
family home in the Adirondacks were the inspiration for many paintings.
They spent several years living in a New York City hotel, and her
view there also served as inspiration. It was in New York that she
painted her first large flower paintings. Beck Strand was a friend
who invited O'Keefe on a trip to Taos New Mexico at a time when the
artist was craving new scenery to paint. Steiglitz didn't like travel
and firmly stayed in New York except for occasional uncomfortable
forays elsewhere with O'Keefe. She spent all her summers in Taos from
then on, and when Steiglitz died in 1946, she moved there permanently.
She purchased a hacienda at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico and it became
her lair for much of the remainder of her life. Her eyesight began
to fail in the early seventies and by 1972 she could no longer see
well enough to paint. A young man named Juan Hamilton, a potter, came
to do odd jobs for O'Keefe and ultimately became her closest companion
in her later years. Many felt he was using her for his own ends, but
O'Keefe liked him and he stayed. She even did a bit of pottery herself
while knowing him. At the very end of her life she moved to Santa
Fe, New Mexico. It was there that she died in 1986 at the age of 98.
She was cremated the next day and Juan Hamilton scattered her ashes
from Pedernal Mountain as she had requested.
Georgia O'Keeffe Painting Gallery
To buy
Georgia O'Keeffe prints framed click the Framed
Link or Mounted Link
