News Release: March 27, 2000

Backgrounder: Georgia O'Keeffe

Born in 1887 on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Georgia O’Keeffe began a direct, observant relationship with her immediate environment during her childhood. Perhaps as a result of spending her early years on a farm, she gained insight into the cycles of nature which would have an impact upon her life and would serve as one source for her work as an artist.

O’Keeffe was sent to boarding school in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains wen her family moved to Virginia in 1903. She spent long hours walking in the mountains, observing the landscape and communicating her observations through her work.

After spending a year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, O’Keeffe went to New York City for the first time in the fall of 1907 as a student at the Art Students’ League. The tone of the art world, set by such champions of the American school as William Merritt Chase, was conservative. Before the revolutionary Armory Show in 1913, when European avant garde artists such as Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne, and Pablo Picasso were introduced to the American public, Alfred Stieglitz’s "291" Gallery was the only outlet where work by such innovative artists could be seen. O’Keeffe visited "291" and was initially put off by Stieglitz’s abrasive, argumentative personal style. But she was, at the time, fascinated by his enthusiasm for the role of new arts for the new century.

After another year in Chicago, working as a commercial artist, O’Keeffe returned to her family’s home in Virginia. In the summer of 1912 at her sister’s urging she visited a drawing class at the University of Virginia taught by Alon Bement. His instruction, based on theories of design inspired by Columbia Teachers’ College professor Arthur Dow, greatly influenced O’Keeffe’s thinking. Thus Dow’s notions of filling a space in a beautiful way would become an element in her work. The following four summers O’Keeffe worked with Bement as a teaching assistant at the University.

From the fall of 1912 through the spring of 1914 O’Keeffe supported herself teaching art in Amarillo, Texas. She immediately felt at home in the prairie, despite the difference between the great empty spaces of Texas and the familiar green rolling hills of Virginia where she continued to spend her summers. She identified with the flat, barren landscape that became a frequent inspiration for drawings and paintings.

O’Keeffe returned to New York from the fall of 1914 through the spring of 1915 and again in the spring of 1916 for a few months of study at Columbia Teachers’ College. A more serious student than on previous visits, O’Keeffe began making critical decisions about her future as an artist. The art world, affected by the Armory show, was more sophisticated in 1915 than in 1907, the year of her first visit. New European and American artists, as well as collectors and critics, continued to meet in Stieglitz’s "291" Gallery. O’Keeffe made giant steps toward becoming an artist by developing a more original approach to art.

While in South Carolina teaching at a small college in 1915 and 1916, O’Keeffe decided to reject the influence of other artists and to paint and draw to please only herself. This resulted in a series of highly original black and white charcoal drawings. She sent the drawings to Anita Pollitzer (a friend and fellow student from New York) who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz. Organic, natural forms define these abstract drawings which visually incorporate O’Keeffe’s impressions of the only instruction which she didn’t totally reject -- an idea of drawing based on the elements of design.

Her returning in the fall of 1916 to the landscape where she felt most at home -- Texas -- provided inspiration for highly expressive images. She re-introduced brilliant color into her work, using it freely as a tool of expression, just as she had before used only line, form and composition. She began to utilize a technique which she would follow throughout her life: the repetition of one idea in a series of pictures dealing with the same subject until she has exhausted her interest in the image.

Stieglitz and O’Keeffe corresponded regularly from1916 to 1918. The drawings that the artist sent to Stieglitz from Canyon, Texas, formed the nucleus of her first one-woman show held at "291" during the spring of 1917. She traveled to New York to see the exhibition, which had been taken down and had to be re-hung. When the paintings and drawings were re-installed Stieglitz took his first photographs of O’Keeffe, beginning a study that would last until 1937. At Stieglitz’s urging O’Keeffe returned to New York in 1918. She and Stieglitz were married in 1924.

During her career, which spanned nearly 70 years, O’Keeffe’s art continually fluctuated between the real and abstract. She presented identifiable subjects, whether a flower, bone or a rock, and explored the idea of that object to its end.

Stieglitz supported her work with yearly solo exhibitions, first the Intimate Gallery, and subsequently at An American Place after "291" closed. In 1929, tiring of annual sojourns at Lake George with the large Stieglitz family and of the routine of her life, O’Keeffe began spending summers in New Mexico. There she continued to use her surroundings as her most frequent subject, creating innovative renderings of the magnificent beauty and mystery of the desert landscape. She continued with some of the same treatments she had used when painting the landscape of Lake George, New York, and Texas: isolation and magnification. O’Keeffe painted her impressions of and the feeling for the desert Southwest. By picking up pieces of the desert, bones and rocks, she painted the essence of the land she considered most well suited to her in works.

After Stieglitz’s death in 1946, O’Keeffe returned to New Mexico to live permanently. She traveled frequently and gained inspiration from new sited and experiences. To communicate the sensation of the tremendous height she experienced when flying, she created by far her largest canvas, Sky Above Clouds VI (1965).

Throughout her life Georgia O’Keeffe maintained an unusually close visual relationship to the world around her and to her direct experiences. By realistic rendering or by capturing the essence of the land by removing one element which becomes a symbol of the subject, O’Keeffe remains today, as we celebrate the centennial of her birth, one of America’s most independent and innovative artists.

General Information

The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times free to the public. They are located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, and are open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1. For information call (202) 737-4215 or the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) at (202) 842-6176, or visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov.

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