Pioneer of 20th Century Art | American Icon | Trailblazer
Georgia O’Keeffe is renowned internationally for her bold innovative art. Her distinctive flowers, dramatic cityscapes, glowing landscapes, and images of animal bones against the stark desert sky are her pivotal contribution to American Modernist expression.
Born in Wisconsin in 1887, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York. Throughout her artistic journey she sought to find a personal visual language in which to express her feelings and ideas. In 1915 she began a series of abstract charcoal drawings that represented a radical break with tradition and made O’Keeffe one of the first American artists to practice pure abstraction.
Alfred Stieglitz, art dealer and eminent photographer, was the first to exhibit her work the following year. He would eventually become her husband. By the mid-1920s O’Keeffe was recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists distinguished by her paintings of New York skyscrapers; quintessential images of the American modernist movement as well as her enlarged flowers.
O’Keeffe passed on in 1986 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her ashes were scattered at Cerro Pedernal, a landscape featured in several of her paintings. Her works can be found on exhibit at museums around the world. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico is dedicated to preserving her art and legacy and offers tours of her home and studio which is a national historic landmark.
“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
