Women's History Month: Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe was born November 15, 1887, in a farmhouse near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents were dairy farmers.

She decided at an early age that she wanted to be an artist, and was lucky enough to receive art lessons from a local watercolor artist named Sara Mann.

After graduating high school Georgia went to the Art Institute of Chicago for a few years, and then the Art Students League in New York City. There, she studied under an American impressionist painter named William Merritt Chase (he ended up establishing Parsons The New School for Design). Georgia did well there, winning a prestigious scholarship to go study at an outdoor summer school in Lake George, New York. Also while in New York City, she was able to see a Rodin exhibition at a gallery owned by her future husband.

Soon Georgia lost faith in herself becoming a successful fine artist, so she started doing commercial work in Chicago. She took a four-year break from painting, until she attended a summer school at the University of Virginia. There, Georgia was introduced to the revolutionary and expressive ideas of painter Arthur Wesley Dow, an inspiration for her future work. After her time there, she taught art in a public school in Texas, and continued teaching at various places for quite awhile.

Georgia's first gallery show was in 1917. Her friend, photographer Anita Pollitzer, had sent some of her charcoal works to a New York gallery behind her back -- the gallery where the Rodin exhibition had been, owned by a man named Alfred Stieglitz. He loved Georgia's work and put it up immediately. Georgia was surprised to find this out.

Alfred and Georgia fell in love; Georgia moved to New York and took up painting full-time. They even moved in together. But, there was scandal: Alfred was 23 years older than her AND married. Yeesh. But he eventually got divorced and the two married.

Alfred was a photographer and loved taking pictures of Georgia. He took more than 350 of her... some of them erotic and nude, which was a bit scandalous for the time.

Georgia worked in oil and watercolor. She perfected the art of large scale paintings of natural objects seen at a close range, as if zoomed in on a particular detail. This is called Precisionism.

Critics took on a Freudian view of these paintings, believing that specifically the close up of centers of flowers represented female genitalia, which Georgia denied. Nevertheless, later feminist artists commended Georgia as the originator of "female iconography." Georgia did not agree with this, and was kind of pissed about their hullabaloo, thinking that it sounded like what male critics had written about her work. They were overlooking the larger issue: "her paintings reveal vital parallels between animate and highly sensual forces in nature and humans."

Georgia was super successful during her career, earning good money and important recognition in the American art world.

She loved painting in New Mexico; she would hike and camp in the terrain and collect rocks and bones from the desert landscape.

In 1932, Georgia had a nervous breakdown because she was not able to finish a commissioned mural for the Radio City Music Hall. She recuperated in Bermuda.She returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1934. In August of that year, she visited Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiu, for the first time and decided immediately to live there; in 1940, she purchased a house on the ranch property. The varicolored cliffs of Ghost Ranch inspired some of her most famous landscapes. Among guests to visit her at the ranch over the years were Charles and Anne Lindbergh, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, poet Allen Ginsberg, and photographer Ansel Adams.

Known as a loner, Georgia explored the land she loved often in her Ford Model A, which she purchased and learned to drive in 1929.

In 1946, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Manhattan held a retrospective for her, the first retrospective MOMA held for a woman artist.

In 1972, Georgia's eyesight was compromised by macular degeneration, leading to the loss of central vision and leaving her with only peripheral vision. She stopped oil painting without assistance in 1972, but continued working in pencil and charcoal until 1984.

She died on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_O'Keeffe