women in art, part one: abstract painter georgia o'keeffe - art is larger than life

briefly

By and large, Georgia O'Keeffe is considered the preeminent woman painter of the 20th Century. She was born on November 15, 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin but went to Chicago to study art at the Art Institute and later on to the Art Students League of New York City. She traveled to Texas where she taught art from 1913 to 1918. Photography forerunner Alfred Stieglitz, who was also then an art gallery director, 'discovered' O'Keeffe's work in 1916 and became very interested. He exhibited her abstract drawings at his 291 gallery in New York City and annually since then in all his galleries until his death in 1946. Stieglitz and O'Keeffe married in 1924.

Like many of O'Keeffe's followers, I too was immediately taken to her large paintings of desert flowers at first sight. I remember being drawn to these flowers and other still-life compositions for their sheer purity and incomparable lucidity while in the dark room for one of my art studies classes back in college. Her combination of stark, bold lines and thin colors produced works that could be best described as both realistic and abstract - thorough detailing and abstract rendering. And literally they are larger than life for she painted them mostly in close-ups which sometimes make them unfamiliar to the viewer at first glance. But once the surprise dies down, one can almost sense the heart of a dessert blossom or feel the texture of a sun-bleached skull.

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timeline

• 1908 – At age 21, O’Keeffe was awarded the Art Students League of New York City's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot)

• 1912 – 1914 - O’Keeffe taught drawing and penmanship in Amarillo, Texas and at the University of Charlottesville in Virginia

• 1914 – O’Keeffe went to the Columbia Teachers College in New York City

• 1915 – 1916 - O’Keeffe taught art in Columbia, South Carolina and at the West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, Texas

• 1917 – O'Keeffe's water colors inspired by West Texas were exhibited by Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 Gallery

• 1918 – O’Keeffe and Stieglitz started living together and in...

• 1924 - O'Keeffe married Stieglitz

• 1929 – O’Keeffe fell in love with the landscape of New Mexico and started spending her summers there

• 1939 – At the New York World Fair, O’Keeffe was chosen as one of the twelve most outstanding women of the past fifty years.

• 1940 - O’Keeffe bought an isolated ranch in New Mexico

• 1945 – An O’Keeffe retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first woman to be given that distinct honor
  

• 1946 - O'Keeffe was widowed by Stieglitz

• 1949 – O’Keeffe decided to make Abiquiu, New Mexico her permanent home

• 1951 – O’Keeffe started traveling the world which would last a decade

• 1962 - O’Keeffe was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters, considered as the most prestigious group of artists in the US

• 1972 – O’Keeffe’s eyesight deteriorated and she stopped painting, she channeled her art through clay, becoming a multi-dimensional artist in the process
  

• 1976 – “Georgia O’Keeffe” became a best-seller. The book consists of reproductions of O'Keeffe's works with texts by her

• 1977 – O’Keeffe was awarded the Medal of Freedom

• 1986 – Georgia O’Keeffe died in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the age 98

On March 17, 1997, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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from the great woman

"When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not."

"I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty."

" I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it – I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers."

"Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower -- and what is my experience if it is not the color?"

"I think I am one of the few who gives our country any voice of its own."

"Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realise that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary."

"Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished."

" You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare."

"I feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore."

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