Know the Artist: Georgia O'Keeffe

Know the Artist: Georgia O'Keeffe

American Painter 1887- 1986

"Fill a space in a beautiful way" ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

Biography Featured Works Internet Links Lesson Plans

Brief biography

Georgia O'Keeffe was an American abstract painter, famous for the purity and lucidity of her still-life compositions. O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League of New York. She taught art in Texas from 1913 to 1918. In 1916 the American photographer and art gallery director Alfred Stieglitz (whom she married in 1924) became interested in her abstract drawings and exhibited them at "291," his gallery in New York City; her work was shown annually in Stieglitz's galleries until his death in 1946 and was widely exhibited in other important institutions. O'Keeffe, who moved to New Mexico in 1949, is best known for her large paintings of desert flowers and scenery, in which single blossoms or objects such as a cow's skull are presented in close-up views. Although O'Keeffe handles her subject matter representationally, the starkly linear quality, the thin, clear coloring, and the boldly patterned compositions produce abstract designs.

Photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe

Photograph credit was not given on site where this was obtained.

See photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz

A number of her works have an abstracted effect, the flower paintings in particular—such as Black Iris (1926, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)—in which the details of the flower are so enlarged that they become unfamiliar and surprising. In the 1960s, inspired by a series of airplane flights, O'Keeffe introduced motifs of sky and clouds, as seen from the air, into her paintings. One of her largest works is the mural Sky above Clouds (1965, collection of the artist), which is 7.3 m (24 ft) wide. O'Keeffe's paintings hang in museums and private collections throughout the United States.
Special thanks to the Microsoft Corporation for permission to use biographical information from Microsoft® Encarta '97 - Obtained from Carol Gerten Fine Arts For a more complete biography see links below.

Featured works:

Horse's Skull on Blue, 1930
Oil on canvas,
30" x 16"
Arizonia University Art Museum

Georgia O'Keeffe's A Sunflower From Maggie. MFA. Prints available at many Art Print poster shops. See more Georgia O'Keeffe Sunflower Prints online. Compare to Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers

Georgia O'Keeffe
Evening Star No. VI - 1917
watercolor 23x31cm
Georgia O'Keeffe Art Museum
Try some watercolor landscape studies of your own.

"When I found the beautiful white bones in the desert I picked them up and took them home too... I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it." ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

"Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven't time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time.

If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

...Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't. "
~ Georgia O'Keeffe (hear Georgia say this in the interview below from PBS)

Links on the Web:

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Santa Fe, New Mexico, features the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, placing her artistic achievement in the history of American art. Biography (use this biography for research).

Artcyclopedia: Georgia O’Keeffe on the Internet

Georgia O'Keeffe - Biography and images. Award winning personal web site by Ellen. Excellent site!

Georgia O'Keeffe - National Gallery of Art Ten high quality images Jack in the Pulpit Brief Biography

Georgia O'Keeffe ArtsConnect Ed-Minnesota - Lesson on Environment - Oriental Poppies.

Georgia O'Keeffe PBS American Masters. Biographical information.

Georgia O'Keeffe - by Michelangelo.com. commercial site - has beautiful images - Flowers, Ghost Ranch and bones. Image resources are given

Stieglitz-O’Keeffe and American Modernism – Wadsworth Museum -- selected photographs from the exhibit.

Georgia O'Keeffe - PBS Portrait of an Artist Georgia O'Keeffe was ahead of her time -- not only as an artist, but as a woman. Paul Solman of WGBH-Boston examines the life and art of this true American master. You can listen to a portion of this program online with Real Player. Hear Georgia O'Keeffe talk about her owrk.

Georgia O’Keeffe Carol Gerten’s Fine Art. Biography and eleven images - flowers - bones - cityscape. Use Firefox (Mozilla or Netscape browser to block advertising.

Georgia O'Keeffe Fine Art Presentations High quality images (no offensive advertising) -good for PowerPoint images (for educational purposes)

Georgia O'Keeffe Mark Harden’s Artchive- Biography/essay and links to images (I no longer recommend this site for student - there are pop-under ads when using Internet Explorer. Use FireFox browser (Mozilla or Netscape) to block advertising.

Georgia O’Keeffe (twelve nice images to use for PowerPoint –click on the small images to get higher resolution) Not a site to use for research.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Online Gallery Over 100 O'Keeffe images sorted by subject available for your viewing pleasure. sorted by flowers, bones, abstractions, landscapes and more. This site has become quite commercial. Good source for teachers to find images - I don't recommend it to students

Learn Greg Percy's song "Georgia"

This page was designed by an 8th grade student May 2001. It was updated by Judy Decker August 2004. Student obtained permission from websites at the time to use images shown. Some of those websites were no longer online so I selected different web sites to reference. Images will be removed at the request of the copyright owners. Email Judy Decker

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