Biography georgia keefe o painting

1916

Blue #2

Blue II is indicative of O'Keeffe's early monochromatic drawings and watercolors, which evoke the movement of nature through abstract forms.

Now, as part of the Forum’s twentieth anniversary celebrations, the Smithsonian American Art Museum is proud to offer Variations on America, a volume of seventy-two treasured artworks collected by members of the Forum. It was, after all, through painting that O'Keeffe filtered all experience. That same year, he exhibited ten of her  abstract drawings in a group exhibition at his avant-garde gallery “291.” A year later, he presented  O’Keeffe’s artwork in a one-person exhibition.

I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.” She mailed some of these highly abstract drawings to a friend in New York City.  Her friend showed them to Stieglitz, who kept the drawings. In 1918, Stieglitz offered to financially support O'Keeffe for one year so that she could live and paint in New York.

Stieglitz played a significant role in promoting O’Keeffe and her artwork, organizing annual exhibitions at The Anderson Galleries from 1923 until 1925; and later at The Intimate Gallery from 1925 to 1929; and finally at An American Place from 1929 until his death in 1946.

American Modernism in New Mexico
In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico.

Reducing her flowers to symbols of female sexuality is however, a trivializing mistake, for the sexual particulars matter less in art with the aspiration that the vivid and more universal sensation of a joyful release into another world beyond the usual distinctions. For the next two decades she spent part of most years living and working in New Mexico, a pattern she rarely altered until she made it her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death.

By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe was recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists, known for her paintings of New York skyscrapers—an essentially American image of modernity—as well as flowers. unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone.”

At her request, there was no funeral or memorial service, though her ashes were scattered from the top of the Pedernal over the landscape she had loved for more than half a century.

Unbeknownst to O'Keeffe, he exhibited ten of her charcoals at his Gallery 291. She created enchanting visual experiences for viewers in paintings like Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory (1938), and Untitled (Red and Yellow Cliffs) (1940). In these works, like Sky Above Clouds/Yellow Horizon and Clouds, (1977), she returned to favorite visual motifs from her memory and vivid imagination.

Her last paintings consist of simple abstract lines and shapes and hearken back to her early charcoal drawings.

The Legacy of Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe spent 70 years making art and contributing to the development of American modernism.

Alfred Stieglitz identified her as the first female American modernist, whose paintings of flowers, barren landscapes, and close-up still lifes have become a part of the mythology and iconography of the American artistic landscape.

Accomplishments

• O'Keeffe incorporated the techniques of other artists and was especially influenced by Paul Strand's use of cropping in his photographs; she was one of the first artists to adapt the method to painting by rendering close-ups of uniquely American objects that were highly detailed yet abstract.
• O'Keeffe did not follow any specific artistic movement, but like Arthur Dove she experimented with abstracting motifs from nature.

  Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were married in 1924. Such New Mexico scenes have become her most iconic contributions to a uniquely American Modernism.

  Creativity in her Late Years
  After Stieglitz’s death in 1946 and her move to New Mexico in 1949, O’Keeffe began to travel internationally. Following these interests, she began making large-scale paintings of natural forms at close range, and, during this time, also switched from watercolors to oil paint.

  Some 1,000 paintings, an equal number of drawings and watercolors on paper, and just a few sculptures, have been documented in a catalogue raisonne of the artist's work published in 1999, and still others are unrecorded because they were destroyed by the artist. In addition to flowers, O'Keeffe depicted New York skyscrapers and other architectural forms.