2. •Georgia
O’Keeffe was
born in Sun
Prairie,
Wisconsin in
1887. and is
The second of
seven
children,
O’Keeffe knew
she want too
be an artist
3. An artist by the name Stieglitz had
convinced O’Keeffe to move to New
York and devote all of her time to
painting. His regular presentations of
her work had begun to cause a buzz,
and create for a her a small following.
Six years later the two were married,
beginning one of the most fruitful and
well-known collaborations of the
modernist era. For the next twenty
years the two would live and work
together, Stieglitz creating an
incredible body of portraits of
O’Keeffe, while O’Keeffe showed new
drawings and paintings nearly every
year at the gallery.
4. The American artist Georgia
O'Keeffe is best known for her
large-scale paintings of flowers
as well as for the use of color in
depicting the vistas and objects
of the American Southwest. She
first drew attention as a member
of the avant-garde movement in
New York,
5. In 1912, Alon Bement of
Teachers College introduced
O'Keeffe to the ideas of his
colleague Arthur Wesley Dow,
who saw art as a representation
of the artist's personal feelings
—an expression in line, color,
and the balance of light and
dark. While O'Keeffe had
studied at both the Art Institute
of Chicago and New York's Art
Students League—where she
won a prize in 1908 for an oil
painting—she had not painted in
four years, having concluded
that she could not improve upon
the work of artists who had
come before her
6. In 1985 she received the Medal
of the Arts from President
Ronald Reagan. In March of the
next year, at the age of 98,
O’Keeffe passed away at St.
Vincent’s Hospital in Santa Fe,
New Mexico. Georgia O’Keeffe’s
work remains a prominent part
of major national and
international museums. For
many, her paintings represent
the beginnings of a new
American art free from the irony
and cynicism of the late 20th
century.
7.
8. ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
First retrospective show of a woman's art at the Museum of Modern Art
Awarded the Gold Medal of Painting by the National Institute of Arts and Letters
Awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor
President Ronald Reagan presented the National Medal of Arts in 1985.
