Wisconsin farm girl who made flowers fill whole canvases
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe lived from 15 November 1887 to 6 March 1986 and spent seven decades painting on her own terms. Later dubbed Mother of American modernism, she magnified blooms and desert bones until they felt like landscapes, then refused to be boxed as a woman artist.
Born on a Sun Prairie dairy farm as the second of seven children, she decided by age ten to become an artist. Chicago's Art Institute and New York's Art Students League trained her; a 1908 Chase still-life prize led to Lake George summers. Money and typhoid interrupted study, so she taught, illustrated commercially, and absorbed Arthur Wesley Dow's Japanese-influenced design ideas at Virginia and Columbia. Charcoal abstractions mailed from South Carolina reached Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery in 1916; by April he showed ten drawings. Ranked at the top of Vanderpoel's Chicago class before illness forced a pause, she briefly quit painting when turpentine nauseated her after family bankruptcy.
Stieglitz underwrote her move to New York in June 1918; they married on 11 December 1924. City oils she later nicknamed My New Yorks sat beside roughly two hundred flower paintings, including the large Petunia canvas of 1924. From 1929 she summered in the Southwest; after Stieglitz died in 1946 she settled in New Mexico in 1949, painting Ghost Ranch country and animal skulls such as the 1931 patriotic cow skull composition. She rejected sexual readings of the blooms that critics pushed from 1922 onward, insisting selection and emphasis revealed meaning rather than autobiography.
At seventy-seven, in summer 1965, she finished a monumental cloud canvas roughly eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide, working dawn to night in an unheated Abiquiu garage so the paint would set before cold. The airborne series begun around 1963 grew from airplane windows over world travel. A 1932 jimson weed painting later fetched more than forty-four million dollars in 2014, then a peak price for work by a woman. A Santa Fe museum now carries her name; she died at ninety-eight after decades on the high desert.
Source: Georgia O'Keeffe
