O'Keeffe, Georgia, 1887-1986

She first attended the Art Institute of Chicago (1905–06); then she went to New York City to study at the Art Students League. O’Keeffe quickly became proficient at imitative realism, the approach to image making that formed the basis of all standard art-school curriculum at the time, and in 1908 she won the league’s William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot) (1908). However, because she believed that she would never distinguish herself as a painter within the tradition of imitative realism, she abandoned her commitment to being a painter altogether and took a job in Chicago as a commercial artist.


While with her family in 1912, O’Keeffe attended a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, which was taught by Alon Bement of Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. Bement acquainted her with the then-revolutionary thinking of his colleague at Teachers College, artist and art educator Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow believed in the Modernist idea that the subject of artists’ work should be their personal ideas and feelings and that these could be visualized most effectively through the harmonious arrangement of line, colour, and notan (the Japanese system of arranging lights and darks).

Dow rejected imitative realism and, in espousing the aesthetic of an Asian culture, his ideas most probably struck a familiar chord with O’Keeffe. She seems to have had an intuitive appreciation for this aesthetic, having been introduced to it through the art manuals she used as a student in primary and secondary school. Dow’s approach, then, in offering an alternative to imitative realism, rekindled O’Keeffe’s desire to be a professional artist. She subsequently worked with these ideas when teaching art in a public school in Amarillo, Texas (1912–14), and when working as Bement’s assistant during the summer at the University of Virginia (1913–16).

Georgia O'Keeffe
QUICK FACTS
O'Keeffe, Georgia
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BORN
November 15, 1887
near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
DIED
March 6, 1986 (aged 98)
Santa Fe, New Mexico
POLITICAL AFFILIATION
National Woman’s Party
MOVEMENT / STYLE
Precisionism
NOTABLE FAMILY MEMBERS
Spouse Alfred Stieglitz

Born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe grew up on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905-1906 and the Art Students League in New York in 1907-1908. Under the direction of William Merritt Chase, F. Luis Mora, and Kenyon Cox she learned the techniques of traditional realist painting. The direction of her artistic practice shifted dramatically in 1912 when she studied the revolutionary ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow ...

In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico. The stark landscape, distinct indigenous art, and unique regional style of adobe architecture inspired a new direction in O’Keeffe’s artwork. For the next two decades she spent part of most years living and working in New Mexico. She made the state her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death. O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings coincided with a growing interest in regional scenes by American Modernists seeking a distinctive view of America. Her simplified and refined representations of this region express a deep personal response to the high desert terrain.

Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, in a farmhouse located at 2405 Hwy T in the town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents, Francis Calyxtus O'Keeffe and Ida (Totto) O'Keeffe, were dairy farmers. Her father was of Irish descent. Her maternal grandfather George Victor Totto, for whom O'Keeffe was named, was a Hungarian count who came to the United States in 1848.

O'Keeffe taught and headed the art department at West Texas State Normal College, was a member of the Kappa Delta sorority, and watched over her youngest sibling, Claudia, at her mother's request. In 1917, she visited her brother, Alexis, at a military camp in Texas before he shipped out for Europe during World War I. While there, she created the painting, The Flag, which expressed her anxiety and depression about the war.

O'Keeffe studied and ranked at the top of her class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906, studying with John Vanderpoel. Due to typhoid fever, she had to take a year off from her education. In 1907, she attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied under William Merritt Chase, Kenyon Cox and F. Luis Mora.