Georgia O’Keeffe was born on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on November 15, 1887. She decided to become an artist early and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York.
She rejected traditional painting after discovering Arthur Wesley Dow’s ideas about art. She wanted to express feelings through shape and color, not just copy what she saw.
In 1916, photographer Alfred Stieglitz exhibited her abstract charcoal drawings, launching her career. They married in 1924.
By the mid-1920s, she was famous for paintings of New York skyscrapers and magnified flowers. She said she painted flowers large so people would take time to look at them.
In 1929, she first visited New Mexico and was transfomed by the stark desert landscape. She collected sun-bleached bones and skulls, which became iconic subjects in her paintings.
After Stieglitz died in 1946, she moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949. She lived and worked in Abiquiú for the rest of her life.
“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.”
She was called the “Mother of American modernism” and became the first woman artist with a solo show at MoMA. Her work blended abstraction and representation in a way nobody else did.
She continued painting into her nineties, even after losing her eyesight. She died in Santa Fe in 1986 at the age of ninety-eight.
Q: Why did O’Keeffe paint flowers so large?
A: She magnified them so people would stop and really look. She thought most people didn’t take time to see the beauty in flowers.
Q: What subjects did Georgia O’Keeffe paint?
A: She is famous for flowers, animal skulls, New York skyscrapers, and the New Mexico desert. She also painted clouds from airplanes later in life.