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Georgia O’Keeffe
(1887-1986), American abstract painter, famous for the purity and lucidity of
her still-life compositions. O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and
studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students
League of New York City. She taught art in Texas from 1913 to 1918. In 1916 the
American photographer and art gallery director Alfred Stieglitz
(whom she married in 1924) became interested in her abstract drawings and
exhibited them at 291, his gallery in New York City; her work was shown annually
in Stieglitz's galleries until his death in 1946 and was widely exhibited in
other important institutions.
O'Keeffe is best known for her large paintings of desert
flowers, sun-bleached animal skulls, and New Mexico landscapes. On her first
visit in 1929, she fell in love with the stark beauty of the New Mexican desert,
and moved there in 1949. In her paintings she typically presented single
blossoms or objects such as a cow's skull in close-up views. Although O'Keeffe
handled her subject matter representationally, the starkly linear quality, the
thin, clear coloring, and the boldly patterned compositions produce abstract
designs. A number of her works have an abstracted effect, the flower paintings
in particular—such as Black Iris (1926, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York City)—in which the details of the flower are so enlarged that they become
unfamiliar and surprising.
In the 1960s, inspired by a series of airplane flights,
O'Keeffe introduced motifs of sky and clouds, as seen from the air, into her
paintings. One of her largest works is the mural Sky Above Clouds IV
(1965, Art Institute of Chicago), which is 2.4 m (8 ft) tall by 7.3 m (24 ft)
wide. O'Keeffe's paintings hang in museums throughout the United States. In 1997
the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with the world’s
largest public collection of works by O’Keeffe. |
