Eyes and Ears 

Georgia O'Keeffe

Gen1:1 

 "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

 

Twin water lilies stand tall against a glistening backdrop, as the sun brightly illuminates their petals of pink.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia Totti O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887—March 6,1986) was an American artist. She is typically associated with the American Southwest and particularly New Mexico where she settled late in life. O'Keeffe has been a major figure in American art since the 1920s. She is chiefly known for paintings in which she synthesizes abstraction and representation in paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes. Her paintings present crisply contoured forms that are replete with subtle tonal transitions of varying colors, and she often transformed her subject matter into powerful abstract images.

Early life

O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887 in a farmhouse on a large dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents, Francis Calyxtus O'Keeffe and Ida Totto O'Keeffe, were dairy farmers. Ida Totto O'Keeffe's father, George, for whom Georgia was named, was a Hungarian immigrant.^[1] She was the first girl and the second of seven O'Keeffe children. She attended Town Hall School in Wisconsin and received art instruction from local watercolorist, Sara Mann. She attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin as a boarder between 1901 and 1902. In fall 1902 the O'Keeffes moved from Wisconsin to Williamsburg, Virginia, Georgia stayed in Wisconsin with her aunt and attended Madison High School, and joined her family in Williamsburg in 1903. She completed high school as a boarder at Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia (now Chatham Hall), graduating in 1905.

Education for women was a family tradition. Georgia's mother, Ida had been educated in the East. All the daughters but one became professional women, attesting to her influence on them.

In 1905, O'Keeffe enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1907 she attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied with William Merritt Chase. In 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting mona shehab (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot). Her prize was a scholarship to attend the League's outdoor summer school at Lake George, New York. While in the city in 1908, she had attended an exhibition of Rodin's watercolors at the 291, owned by her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

No. 13 Special, 1916/1917, Charcoal on paper

In the fall of 1908, discouraged with her work, she did not return to the League but moved to Chicago and found work as a commercial artist. During this period Georgia did not pick up a brush, and said that the smell of turpentine made her sick. She became an elementary school art teacher near Amarillo, Texas ^[2]. She was inspired to paint again in 1912, when she attended a class at the University of Virginia Summer School, where she was introduced to the innovative ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow by Alon Bement. Dow's teachings encouraged artists to express themselves through harmonious compositions and contrasts of light and dark. Dow's teaching strongly influenced O'Keeffe's thinking about the process of making art. She served as a Teaching Assistant to Bement for several years after, before returning to Texas to teach in the art department of the fledgling West Texas State Normal College. ^[3]

New York

Alfred Stieglitz photograph of O'Keefe. New York City, 1918

Early in 1916, Anita Pollitzer took some of Georgia's drawings to Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery. He told Anita the drawings were the "purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while.", and that he would like to show them. Georgia had first visited 291 in 1908, and later on several occasions, but had never talked with Stieglitz although she had high regard for his opinions as a critic. In April 1916 Stieglitz exhibited 10 of her drawings. She had not been consulted before the exhibit and only learned about it through an acquaintance. She confronted Stieglitz for the first time over the drawings. She later agreed to let them hang. Georgia's first solo show opened at 291 in April 1917. Most of the exhibit were the watercolors from Texas.

Shortly after her arrival, Alfred took Georgia up to the Stieglitz family home at Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains. They would return to the lake home each summer for years to come. Georgia produced many paintings of the Lake George countryside during these years.

Stieglitz arranged for O'Keeffe to live in his niece's unoccupied studio apartment, and by July, he and O'Keeffe had fallen deeply in love, and he left his wife Emmeline Obermeyer Stieglitz to live with O'Keeffe. In 1924, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz married, following the finalization of his divorce, and they spent winter and spring in Manhattan and summer and fall at the Stieglitz family house at Lake George in upstate New York. He had started making photographs of O'Keeffe when she visited him in New York to see her 1917 exhibition. He continued making photographs of her, and in February, 1921, forty-five of his photographs, including many of O'Keeffe, some of which presented her in the nude, were exhibited in a retrospective exhibition of his work held at the Anderson Galleries. The photographs of O'Keeffe created a public sensation.

Stieglitz had become obsessed with photographing Georgia since the beginning of their relationship. He would take over 300 portraits of her between 1918 and 1937. Most of the more erotic poses would be in the first few years of their marriage.

During O'Keeffe's early years in New York City she got to know the many early American modernists who were part of Stieglitz's circle of friends, including Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Paul Strand and Edward Steichen. Strand's photography, as well as that of Stieglitz and his many photographer friends, inspired O'Keeffe's work. Soon after she moved to New York, she began working primarily in oil, which represented a shift away from her having worked mainly in watercolor in the 1910s, and by the mid-1920s, she began making large scale paintings of natural forms from close up, as if seen through a magnifying lens.

During the 1920s, O'Keeffe made both natural and architectural forms the subject of her work. She painted her first large-scale flower painting in 1924, Petunia, No. 2,, which was first exhibited in 1925, and completed a significant body of paintings of New York buildings, such as City Night, and New York--Night, 1926, and Radiator Bldg--Night, New York, 1927.

Beginning in 1923, Stieglitz organized exhibitions of O'Keeffe's work annually, and by the mid-1920s, she had become known as one of America's most important artists. Her work commanded high prices; in 1928 six of her calla lily paintings sold for $25,000 US dollars, which was at the time the largest sum ever paid for a group of paintings by a living American artist. This drew media attention to Georgia like never before.

New Mexico

Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills, 1935 Georgia O'Keeffe

By 1928, Georgia began to feel the need to travel and find other sources for painting. The demands of an annual show needed new material. Friends returning from the West with stories stimulated Georgia's desire to see and explore new places. In May of 1929, Georgia would set out by train with her friend Beck Strand to Taos, New Mexico...a trip that would forever change her life.

In the summer of 1929, O'Keeffe went to New Mexico with Beck Strand. They went to Santa Fe and then to Albuquerque. Soon after their arrival, Georgia and Beck where invited to stay at Mable Dodge Luhan's ranch outside of Taos for the summer. She would go on many pack trips exploring the rugged mountains and deserts of the region. On one trip she visited the D.H. Lawrence ranch and spent several weeks there.

While in Taos, New Mexico in 1929 she visited the historical mission church at Ranchos de Taos. Although she painted the church as many artists had done before, her painting of only a fragment of the mission wall silhouetted against the dark blue sky would portray it as no artist had before.

O'Keeffe had first visited New Mexico in 1917, where she spent several days on her return to Texas from vacationing in Colorado. Between 1929 and 1949 she spent part of almost every year working in New Mexico. During her second summer there, she began collecting and painting bones, and she started painting the area's distinctive architectural and landscape forms, returning to New York every fall. O'Keeffe suffered a nervous breakdown in 1932 following an uncompleted Radio City Music Hall mural project that had fallen behind schedule. She was hospitalized for psychoneurosis in early 1933. She did not paint again until January 1934. She recuperated in Bermuda in the spring of 1933 and 1934, and returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1934. That summer, she discovered Ghost Ranch, an area north of Abiquiu, whose varicolored cliffs inspired some of her most famous landscapes. She would purchase a house on the ranch property in 1940.

Being the loner that she was, Georgia explored this place she loved on her own. She bought a Model A Ford and asked others to teach her how to drive. After one particularly exasperating moment, one of her teachers declared that she was unable to learn the art of driving. Only her determination was to lead to mastering her machine.

In June of 1934 Georgia would visit Ghost Ranch for the first time, and knew immediately that she would live here. The ranch is located in a remote area approximately 120 miles north of Albuquerque. Among other guests to visit the ranch were, D.H. Lawrence, Charles and Anna Lindbergh, and Ansel Adams.

In the 1930s and 1940s O'Keeffe's reputation and popularity continued to grow, and she received numerous commissions. Her work was included in exhibitions in and around New York, and in the 1940s, and she was given two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943 and another in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first ever given by that museum to a woman. She was also awarded honorary degrees by numerous universities, the first by the College of William and Mary in 1938, and in the mid-1940s, the Whitney Museum of American Art sponsored a project to establish the first catalogue of her work.

In 1945, she bought a second home, an abandoned hacienda ^[4] in Abiquiu (renovated through 1948), some 16 miles (26 km) south of Ghost Ranch.^[4] The Abiquiu home was the setting for many later paintings.

While Georgia was spending the summer of 1946 in New Mexico, Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis. She quickly flew to New York to be by his side where he died on July 13, 1946. She took his ashes to Lake George and buried them at the foot of a tall pine tree beside the lake. Although separated for long periods of time through the years, Stieglitz had taken care of many business details for Georgia. She would now have to take on these responsibilities.

In 1949 she moved to New Mexico permanently. During the 1950s, O'Keeffe produced a series of paintings featuring the architectural forms --patio wall and door--of her adobe house in Abiquiu. Another distinctive painting of the decade is Ladder to the Moon, 1958, and as a result of her first world travels in the late 1950s, she produced an extensive series of paintings of clouds, such as Above the Clouds I, 1962/1963, inspired by what she saw from the windows of airplanes. Below is an external link to a color image of one of these aerial cloudscape canvases.

In 1962, she was elected to the fifty-member American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Georgia O'Keeffe Retrospective Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the fall of 1970 -- the first major showing of her work since 1946, the year Stieglitz died -- did much to revive her public career, bringing her to the attention of a new generation of women raised on the principles of feminism.

In 1971 Georgia became aware that her eyesight was failing. At the age of 84, she was losing her central vision and only had peripheral sight, an irreversible eye degeneration disease. She would stop painting in 1972. Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at Georgia's ranch house in 1973 looking for work. She hired him for a few odd jobs and would employ him full time shortly thereafter. He became her closest confidante, companion, and business manager until her death.

She later dabbled in pottery herself, and had a large kiln installed at the ranch for firing pots. Even with her dimming eyesight she was inspired by Hamilton and others to paint again. She hired a studio assistant to execute some of her ideas. During this time she agreed to accept interviews and other opportunities. In 1976 she would write a book, with Juan's help, about her art. She also allowed a film crew to do a documentary at Ghost Ranch.

Georgia became increasingly frail in her late 90's and moved to Santa Fe where she would die on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98. Per her instructions, she was cremated the next day. Juan Hamilton walked to the top of the Pedernal Mountain and scattered her ashes to the wind...over her beloved "faraway".

Legacy

Following O'Keeffe's death her family contested her will because codicils to it made in the 1980s had left all of her estate to Hamilton. The case was ultimately settled in July of 1987 ^[5]. The case, which was settled out of court, became famous as case law in estate planning.^[6][7] A substantial part of her estate's assets were transferred to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, established in Santa Fe in 1997 to perpetuate O'Keeffe's artistic legacy. These assets included a large body of her work, photographs, archival materials, and her Abiquiu house, library, and property.

The Warren Zevon song "Splendid Isolation" mentions how Zevon, in his search for solitude wants to "be like Georgia O'Keeffe"


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