Georgia O'Keeffe was an American painter, born on a Wisconsin dairy farm in 1887, who died in Santa Fe in 1986 at the age of 98. She is famous for flowers painted far larger than life, for the skyscrapers of New York and for the bones and mountains of New Mexico. She is also famous for a fight she never stopped having: critics saw sex in her petals, and she told them they were talking about themselves.
Her fame began with something she never agreed to. In April 1916 the photographer Alfred Stieglitz hung ten of her charcoal drawings in his New York gallery without asking her. She learned about it from a friend, walked into the gallery and scolded him. Two years later she moved to New York at his invitation.
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That man shaped how the world saw her, and not only as her dealer. Between 1918 and 1925 Stieglitz made more than 350 mounted photographs of O'Keeffe, many of them nudes, and in 1921 he showed a selection in public. Her first giant flower, Petunia No. 2, followed in 1924. By then New York knew her face and her body from his camera before it knew her mature paintings.
So when she blew a petal up to the size of a doorway, critics saw the woman in the photographs. The reading spread and never left. O'Keeffe answered it for the rest of her life: "When people read erotic symbols into my paintings, they're really talking about their own affairs."
She had a plainer reason for the scale. She said she painted flowers big so that people, surprised, would take the time to look at them. And the flowers were a small part of her work. About 200 of her more than 2,000 paintings are flowers.
What You'll Discover
Who carried her charcoals to New York.
What her flowers were really for.
What she was told not to paint.
What she carried home from the desert.
Why one canvas needed a garage.
Who she left her estate to.