Georgia O'Keeffe
American painterKnown for her larger than life paintings of flowers
Early Years / Family Life
Georgia O'Keeffe was born the second of seven children to parents Francis Calyxtus and Ida Totto O'Keeffe. Named amed after her maternal grandfather, George Totto, Gergia grew up on a dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin and received private art lessons at home, as a child.Education
1905 to 1906 / Art Institute of Chicago1907 to 1908 / Art Students League, New York
1912 / University of Virginia, Charlottesville
1914 to 1915 / Teachers College, Columbia University
Influences
Arthur Wesley Dow - Dow believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist's personal ideas and feelings and that such subject matter was best realized through harmonious arrangements of line, color, and notan (the Japanese system of lights and darks).Oriental art
New Mexico
Themes in Artwork
flowersnature
landscapes
cityscapes
the American west
Timeline
- 1887 / born on Novermber 15 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
- 1903 / moves to Virginia
- 1905 / graduates from high school
- 1905 to 1906 / attends Art Institute of Chicago
- 1907 to 1908 / attends Art Students League, New York
- 1908 / won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot
- 1912 / attends summer course for art teachers at University of Virginia, Charlottesville
- 1914 to 1915 / takes courses at Teachers College, Columbia University
- 1915 / teaches art at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina
- 1915 / sends charcoal drawings to a former Columbia classmate who shows them to Alfred Stieglitz
- 1916 / begins a correspondence with Stieglitz
- 1916 / teaches at West Texas State Normal College
- 1916 / first solo show, at Stieglitz's Gallery 291
- 1917 / first visit to New Mexico
- 1918 / moves in with Stieglitz in New York
- 1921 / photographs of her, taken by Stieglitz, are shown in a retrospective exhibition of his work
- 1924 / paints her first large scale flower painting, Petunia, No. 2
- 1924 / marries Alfred Stieglitz
- 1925 / begins cityscape paintings
- 1928 / six of her calla lily paintings sell for $25,000, which was at the time the largest sum ever paid for a group of paintings by a living American artist
- 1932 / suffers a nervous breakdown following an uncompleted Radio City Music Hall mural project that had fallen behind schedule
- 1933 / hospitalized for psychoneurosis
- 1933 to 1943 / recuperation in Bermuda
- 1934 / discovers Ghost Ranch, an area of north Abiquiu, whose cliffs inspired some of her most famous landscapes
- 1938 / awarded honorary degree by the College of William and Mary
- 1940 / purchases a house on the Ghost Ranch property
- 1943 / retrospective exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago
- 1945 / purchases an abandoned hacienda in Abiquiu, 16 miles from Ghost Ranch
- 1946 / retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first ever given by that museum to a woman
- 1946 / Stieglitz dies
- 1949 / moves to New Mexico permanently
- 1962 / elected to the 50-member American Academy of Arts and Letters
- 1970 / The Georgia O'Keeffe Retrospective Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art- the first major showing of her work since 1946
- 1972 / eye site deteriorates, completes her last unassisted work in oil
- 1976 / writes a book about her work and allows a film crew to do a documentary at Ghost Ranch
- 1984 / health fails
- 1986 / death, age 98
Examples of Work
Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills / 1935
Pink Sweet Peas / 1927 / pastel on paper
New York, Night / 1929 / oil on canvas / 40 1/8 x 19 1/8 inches