Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887. She lived in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Georgia was the second of seven children. Her parents were Frank and Ida Totto O'Keeffe.
O'Keeffe went to several schools. As a little girl O'Keeffe and her sisters had art and music classes as well as regular school. At the age of 14, O'Keeffe entered a private Catholic school in Madison, Wisconsin. When her family moved to Virginia she finished school there. After graduation, O'Keeffe went to the Art Students League in New York. After the school year she didn't return because her family had no money.
O'Keeffe took jobs to help her family. In Chicago she would draw cleaning products for newspaper ads. In 1911, she took a job teaching art at a girls school. In 1912, she accepted another teaching job in Amarillo, Texas.
O'Keeffe returned to New York to get her degree at Columbia Teachers' College in 1914. New York had changed. People were open to new ideas in art, music, and politics. Alfred Stieglitz owned an art gallery called 291. This was the first gallery to display O'Keeffe's art work in 1916.
O'Keeffe's most famous paintings are of her flowers, skulls, landscapes, and skyscrapers. Others are coal sketches, the Evening Star series, the Blue Period, paintings of the sky, and her sculptors.
In 1949, she moved to New Mexico. There
she spent the rest of her life on a ranch called Ghost Ranch. In 1979 she
was awarded the Medal of Freedom. Several years later she moved to Santa
Fe because she was too weak and ill to stay on her ranch. Georgia O'Keeffe
died on March 6, 1986 at the age of 98.
Ladder to the Moon. 1958. Oil on canvas 101.6/76.2 cm
New York, Collection Emily Fisher Landau
In 1958, O'Keeffe painted Ladder to the Moon. The painting shows a handmade wooden ladder suspended in the turquoise sky. In the background are the pitch black Pedernal Mountains and a pearl colored half moon. This painting was very similar to a picture taken of O'Keeffe and her surroundings at Ghost Ranch. In the picture, a large wooden ladder is leaned against an outer wall of a patio from where it rises up into the sky with the Pedernal Mountains in the background. Some say her immediate surroundings at Ghost Ranch were the inspiration of this piece of art. Others interpret the painting as a religious work. In Pueblo culture the ladder is used to symbolize the link between the Pueblos and cosmic forces. The fact that the ladder is pointed up in the sky may represent the link between nature and the cosmos.
From the Faraway Nearby. 1937. Oil on canvas.
91.4/101.9 cm New York,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1959.
In the summer of 1937, O'Keeffe painted From the Faraway Nearby. This piece of art shows a panorama of crimson colored desert hills with a huge stag skull. The antlers of the stag cover the entire surface of the painting seeming to make the desert sky appear endless.The inspiration for From the Faraway Nearby probably arose during a trip to Colorado with friend and photographer, Ansel Adams. The painting uses some of Adams' own reactions to the desert. In a letter to a friend he wrote: " The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite, that wherever you are, you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro- where everything is sideways under you, and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago." O'Keeffe's fascination with painting skulls comes from her love for life. She said, " I have picked flowers where I have found them- have picked up sea shells and pieces of rock and wood that I liked... When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too... I have used these things to say to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it." In pieces like this, O'Keeffe captures vivid detail of the desert that are almost "photographic."
New York, Night. 1929
Oil on canvas, 101.6/ 48.3 cm Lincoln (NE) Collection of the
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery
University of Nebraska Art Galleries
O'Keeffe's painting were not only of skulls and flowers. O'Keeffe grew
fond of painting cityscapes. The subjective quality grew when O'Keeffe dominated
her paintings by the artificial lights of the big city: brightly lit windows,
fluorescent spotlights on towering spires, radiant headlights, advertisements
in illuminated letters, traffic lights and neon signs. One of these fine
pieces of art was O'Keeffe's New York, Night, painted in 1929.
The painting is of the Berkeley Hotel in New York. Windows in the background
are dimly lit and lights of traffic are seen along Lexington Avenue. This
was the view from a window of O'Keeffe's high-rise apartment. O'Keeffe may
have been inspired to paint the birds-eye perspective by the optical angles
used in photography. Or, she could have been inspired by the philosophy
of photographers around her, which was that a camera could capture one moment
in time, with every detail, forever.
Bibliography
1. Ball, Jacqueline A. & Conant, Catherine. Georgia O'Keeffe Painter of the Desert. New York :
Blackbirch, 1991.
2. Castro, Jan Garden. The Art & Life of Georgia O'Keeffe. New York : Crown Publishers, 1985.
3. Hogrefe, Jeffrey. O'Keeffe The Life of an American Legend. New York : Bantam, 1976.
4. Taschen, Benedikt. O'Keeffe. Germany : Britta Benke,1995.
Links
1. Unknown. The Georgia O'Keeffe Online Gallery. http://www.happyshadows.com/okeeffe/ ,13 February 1998.
2. Business Revolutions, Inc. Great American Women. http://www.greatamericanwomen.com/, 13 February 1998.
3. Unknown. Georgia O'Keeffe. http://www.ionet.net/~jellenc/okeeffe1.html ,13 February 1998.
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