5 Essential Facts About Georgia O’Keeffe
Discover why the iconic artist is known as the "Mother of American modernism"
Georgia O’Keeffe was more than an American painter. Most remembered for her evocative portraits of flowers, she fiercely rejected being referred to as a “woman painter,” as her work was far more than that. O’Keeffe, a Wisconsin-born artist, made waves in modern art throughout the early 20th century and is often called the “Mother of American modernism” for her wide-ranging work.
When O’Keeffe traveled from New York to New Mexico for the first time in the summer of 1929, she immediately felt at home. “As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fit me exactly. It’s something that’s in the air; it’s just different,” she once said in an interview.
She began dividing her time between New York, where she lived with her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, up until his death in 1946, and New Mexico. There, she took to using the southwestern landscape as inspiration for her paintings, like 1936’s Summer Days. O’Keeffe’s work, from wispy landscapes to portraits and still lifes, created a new world that existed between realism and abstraction, as in her works Sunrise from 1916 and Blue and Green Music from 1921. Here are five essential facts about the iconic artist.
1. O’Keeffe was a Pioneer of American Modernism
Her work turned away from the traditional postwar realism of the time and opted for expressive, abstracted portraits of flowers and minimal landscapes, which drew a parallel to the minimalist approach of Bauhaus design methods.
2. O’Keeffe Changed the Way We Look at New Mexico
O’Keeffe captured the beauty of the desert in her paintings. She used the Southwest as inspiration for her art, turning adobe architecture, mountains, and badlands into visual masterpieces. Her painting of the Cerro Pedernal made the mountain famous, and now it is often referred to as “O’Keeffe Country.”
3. O’Keeffe was Also a Designer
She was an expert fashion designer in her own right and a seamstress. O’Keeffe made her own clothes, and had a minimal style, dressing in black and white and wearing fabrics like cotton, wool, and silk, in garments from blouses to nightgowns and dresses. She designed the signage and logo for the Ghost Ranch Lodge & Restaurant in Tucson, which was founded in 1941 and closed in 2005. She also designed her famous 18th-century Abiquiú home in New Mexico from scratch in 1945, redesigning the structure with Maria Chabot.
4. O’Keeffe’s Travels Informed Her Art
Throughout her life, O’Keeffe traveled extensively, and her travels that informed her motifs and the imagery in her paintings. She made over 200 paintings of flowers throughout her life, but she also painted skyscrapers during the 1920s, while living in an apartment on the 30th floor of the Shelton Hotel in New York City. She painted ram’s head skulls and desert motifs while living in New Mexico and made charcoal drawings of her time in Bermuda. She also painted a series based on her time in Hawaii, traveling by boat to Honolulu in 1939 and traveling through Oahu, Maui, and Kauai.
5. A 1970 Whitney Museum Retrospective Solidified O’Keeffe’s Legacy
She was the first woman artist to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, curated by James Johnson Sweeney. It featured 57 pieces, including her flowers, New Mexico landscapes, and abstract paintings. For her Whitney Museum retrospective in 1970, O’Keeffe showed over 125 paintings, sculptures, and drawings showing her role as a pioneering artist. She received the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Edward MacDowell Medal as well. Today, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which opened in 1997, showcases a vast array of her paintings and photos.