Georgia O’Keeffe 1887 – 1986

Biography

Georgia O’Keeffe was an American modernist painter known as the Mother of American modernism. Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1887, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, then taught art in Texas and Virginia. Her abstract charcoal drawings caught the eye of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited them in 1916 and later became her husband. She became famous for her enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and the stark landscapes of New Mexico, where she first visited in 1929 and settled permanently in 1949 at Abiquiú. Working in oil with bold colour and simplified form, she remained fiercely independent of art movements and resisted being labelled a woman artist. She died in Santa Fe in 1986 at the age of ninety-eight.