Georgia O'Keeffe: The Complete Story
Georgia O'Keeffe was the American artist who painted flowers so large they filled the whole canvas, and the bones and deserts of New Mexico with the same still, monumental calm. Often called the mother of American modernism, she built one of the most recognizable styles in 20th century art and lived almost a century doing it.
Everyone knows the giant blooms. Fewer know she spent decades fighting the way people read them, and that her greatest subject was not the flower at all but the empty desert.
Born: Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887
Known for: magnified flowers, New Mexico landscapes, bleached bones
Died: Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1986, aged 98
The giant flowers, and the argument about them
In the 1920s O'Keeffe began painting single flowers blown up to fill the frame. She said she did it so busy New Yorkers would be forced to stop and really look, the way you cannot ignore something the size of a wall.
Critics insisted the flowers were really female anatomy, sexual symbols. O'Keeffe rejected that reading firmly for the rest of her life, saying people were writing their own ideas onto her work. The debate still follows the paintings.
Stieglitz and sudden fame
The photographer Alfred Stieglitz discovered her drawings, exhibited her, and became her husband. He also photographed her many times, including nude, and those images made her famous as much as her own art at first.
It was a complicated marriage of two strong artists. He promoted her brilliantly and strayed often. She eventually found her freedom far away, out West.
The pull of New Mexico
From 1929 O'Keeffe spent more and more time in New Mexico, finally settling there. The desert light, the red hills and the sun bleached animal skulls became her great subject. She would carry bones back to paint, floating against vast skies.
She bought a remote house at Ghost Ranch and another in the village of Abiquiu, and the landscape shaped everything she made for the rest of her life.
A very long career
O'Keeffe kept working into old age, even as her eyesight failed in her eighties, turning to clay and to assistants who helped her paint. She died in Santa Fe in 1986 at 98.
A whole museum in Santa Fe is now devoted to her, one of the few in the United States dedicated to a single woman artist.
The O'Keeffe questions, answered plainly
What is Georgia O'Keeffe famous for?
Magnified flowers and New Mexico desert landscapes. See what is abstract art and what is landscape painting.
How did she die?
She died in 1986 at 98. More in how did Georgia O'Keeffe die.
Were the flowers meant to be sexual?
She always said no. More surprising details in interesting facts about Georgia O'Keeffe.
The independence she carved out
O'Keeffe carved out total independence as a woman artist when that was rare, and made the American desert into iconic art. Her flowers are everywhere, but the deserts are the deeper achievement.
One last fact. In 2014 her painting Jimson Weed sold for 44.4 million dollars, at the time the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a woman artist.