Revisiting Georgia O’Keeffe on Her Birthday

By Francesca O’Connor, Second Year English and History

Born on 15 November 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Georgia O’Keeffe is remembered as one of the most prominent artists of the twentieth century, whose evolution is marked by almost 70 years of painting.

O’Keeffe began her art studies at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905, but later moved to the Art Students League School in New York. Here she studied under Arthur Dow who would become one of her biggest artistic inspirations.

O’Keeffe was particularly intrigued by Dow’s employment of orientalist techniques, such as the Japanese design concept, Notan, which focused on harmonising light and dark. Additionally, Dow’s ethos, to “fill a space in a beautiful way” can be identified within O’Keeffe’s famous close-ups of flowers.

In 1908 O’Keeffe won the Art Student League’s William Merritt Chase Prize for her still life of a Dead Rabbit and Copper Pot. In a later interview with Katharine Kuh she reflected on how her sense of the work’s unoriginality led her to take a two-year long pause from non-commercial painting.

Untitled, (Dead Rabbit and Copper Pot), 1908

O’Keeffe’s career can be seen as a constant search for artistic identity, which she conducted through experimentation with different techniques. Her abstract works in charcoal captured photographer, and future husband, Alfred Stieglitz’s attention, who insisted on exhibiting ten of these drawings at his 291 Gallery in 1916.

Charcoal abstractions, 1915

Her diverse oeuvre can also be seen as a result of her constant movement and interaction with new environments. After moving to New York City, O’Keeffe immersed herself in Stieglitz’s modernist circle, employing the leitmotif of the city skyline in her New York series. The various moods O’Keeffe constructs through her landscapes can be regarded as an attempt to give a “sense of the place” (Hartley, 2016) through her artworks. 

Locations memorialise in O’Keeffe’s art. The artist’s condemnation of Lake George – a frequent holiday spot for O’Keeffe and Stieglitz – as “not really painting country” (Hartley, 2016) is evidence of this. Hartley interprets O’Keefe’s disdain as a conflation of the location and the couple’s troubled relationship during this period, especially since the Lake George series had in fact led to much critical acclaim for O’Keeffe.

In 1929 O’Keeffe traded Lake George in for an escape to Taos, New Mexico, with Rebecca Salsbury James. Here, O’Keeffe was united with the artistic possibilities of the vast, dry landscape, which would inspire many of her later paintings. She collected rocks and animal bones from the desert floor and often paired these with the open terrain.

In 1962 O’Keeffe was elected into the prestigious Academy of Arts and Letters but stopped painting in 1972 after losing most of her eyesight to macular degeneration.  She died on 6 March 1986, aged 98. Despite her commercial success and legacy as a great American artist, persisting misogyny within the art world meant that O’Keeffe was frequently misunderstood.

In Port of New York (1924), Rosenfeld pictured O’Keeffe as a sentimental woman who “shows no sign of intellectualisation”, whilst Koots described O’Keeffe as the only prominent woman artist, but ascribed the perceived sexual imagery in her flower artworks (which she denied) to a feminine preoccupation with sexuality (Mitchell, 1978).

Pelvis with the Distance, 1943

O’Keeffe fought to be considered as an artist first rather than just a woman. Art historian, Wanda M. Corn, noted that Stieglitz played a large role in pushing the psychosexual reading of O’Keeffe’s flower close-ups and his sensuous photography of the artist only encouraged this view of the artist. Thus, O’Keeffe’s career was also marked by a long battle to be taken seriously as a woman. Discourse on her works was dismissed by O’Keeffe, who famously stated that “I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free”.

Therefore, O’Keeffe should be remembered for her fearless individuality and constant transition, which made her art unlike any other.