Georgia O'Keeffe

1887 - 1986
US

Georgia O'Keeffe was born on a dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her first interest in the arts was music, but by the time she was ten she had decided to become a painter. Her formal training began at a Madison convent school in 1901. In 1905 she moved to Chicago to study anatomical drawing with John Vanderpoel at the Art Institute of Chicago. She made her first trip to New York in 1907 and attended classes at the Art Students League.

She returned to Chicago and supported herself by working as a commercial artist. In the summer of 1912 she studied abstract design with Alon Bement, a follower of the art educator Arthur Wesley Dow. The oriental mysticism of Dow's theories of composition had a deep influence on O'Keeffe. She developed a distinctive form of landscape abstraction over the next four years while teaching in Western Texas.

Her work came to the attention of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and he featured it at his Gallery 291 in 1916. O'Keeffe, who had not been consulted about this, came to New York to close the exhibition, but she found in Stieglitz a sympathetic friend and supporter.

He gave her a solo exhibition in 1917 and in the following year granted her financial assistance to permit her to paint full-time. They were married in 1924. Although O'Keeffe lived and worked in New York, she felt her true source of inspiration lay in the landscape of the American West. She began regular visits to Taos, New Mexico in 1929 and settled near there after Stieglitz death in 1949. She has become one of America's most respected artists, and was among the first to exploit the full possibilities of abstraction allied to nature.