Encyclopedia, Difference between revisions of "Georgia O'Keeffe" - New World
Kathy Sabo (talk | contribs) |
(→Legacy: saving this image) |
||
| Line 35: | Line 35: | ||
1908 was the first time she visited the 291—where she saw an exhibition of Rodin's watercolors. More significantly, the 291 was owned by her future husband, the famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and this would be where they eventually met. | 1908 was the first time she visited the 291—where she saw an exhibition of Rodin's watercolors. More significantly, the 291 was owned by her future husband, the famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and this would be where they eventually met. | ||
| − | + | [[Image:180px-Georgia_O'Keeffe,_1915.jpg|right|thumb|180px|No. 13 Special, 1916/1917, Charcoal on paper]] | |
| − | Image: | ||
| − | No. 13 Special, 1916/1917, Charcoal on paper | ||
| − | |||
That fall, O'Keeffe returned to Chicago and worked as an illustrator. She had stopped painting in 1908, when she realized she could not distinguish herself as a painter working in the tradition of her academic training. | That fall, O'Keeffe returned to Chicago and worked as an illustrator. She had stopped painting in 1908, when she realized she could not distinguish herself as a painter working in the tradition of her academic training. | ||
| Line 67: | Line 64: | ||
==New Mexico== | ==New Mexico== | ||
In the summer of 1929 O'Keeffe went to [[New Mexico]] with [[Rebecca Strand]], who was married to Paul Strand. They went to [[Santa Fe, New Mexico|Santa Fe]] and then to [[Taos, New Mexico|Taos]]. 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 became ill late in 1932 and was hospitalized 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 fall, she discovered [[Ghost Ranch]], an area north of [[Abiquiu, New Mexico|Abiquiu]], whose painted desert of dramatically colored, enormous cliffs and hills inspired some of her most famous landscapes. | In the summer of 1929 O'Keeffe went to [[New Mexico]] with [[Rebecca Strand]], who was married to Paul Strand. They went to [[Santa Fe, New Mexico|Santa Fe]] and then to [[Taos, New Mexico|Taos]]. 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 became ill late in 1932 and was hospitalized 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 fall, she discovered [[Ghost Ranch]], an area north of [[Abiquiu, New Mexico|Abiquiu]], whose painted desert of dramatically colored, enormous cliffs and hills inspired some of her most famous landscapes. | ||
| − | [[Image:O' | + | [[Image:180px-O'Keeffe_Georgia_Ram's_Head.jpg |right|thumb|180px|Ram's Head White Hollyhock —Hills, 1935]] |
In the 1930's and 1940's 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 the 1930's and 1940's 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, | ||
| Line 80: | Line 77: | ||
==Legacy== | ==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 lawsuit was settled out of court and a not-for-profit foundation was established to oversee the disposition of her works over the next twenty years. In March 2006, the Foundation dissolved, and its 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. {{ref|PressRelease}} | 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 lawsuit was settled out of court and a not-for-profit foundation was established to oversee the disposition of her works over the next twenty years. In March 2006, the Foundation dissolved, and its 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. {{ref|PressRelease}} | ||
| − | [[Image: | + | [[Image:180px-Okeefe_stamp.jpg|right|thumb|180px|United States postage stamp featuring the 1927 O'Keeffe painting ''Red Poppy'']] |
O'Keeffe was inducted into the [[National Women's Hall of Fame]], and during her lifetime, she received 10 honorary doctorates and numerous books have been written about her life and her work. The [[United States Postal Service]] honored O'Keeffe by issuing a stamp of ''Red Poppy'' (1927). | O'Keeffe was inducted into the [[National Women's Hall of Fame]], and during her lifetime, she received 10 honorary doctorates and numerous books have been written about her life and her work. The [[United States Postal Service]] honored O'Keeffe by issuing a stamp of ''Red Poppy'' (1927). | ||
Revision as of 15:57, 23 June 2006
| Georgia Totto O'Keeffe |
|---|
 Georgia O’Keeffe in Abiquiu, New Mexico, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1950.
|
| Born |
| November 15, 1887 Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, USA |
| Died |
| March 6,1986 Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA |
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887—March 6,1986) was an American artist,
widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. 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.
“Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest…I have picked flowers where I found them…sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood …that I liked…beautiful white bones on the desert I…took 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…The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big— far beyond my understanding—[I attempt] to understand, maybe, by trying to put it into form [and] to find the feeling of infinity on the horizon or just over the next hill.” “I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing that I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at—not copy it.“ Georgia O’Keeffe
==Early Life== O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin to Francis O'Keeffe and Ida Totto O'Keeffe, who were successful dairy farmers. She was the first girl and the second of seven O'Keeffe children. When she was twelve years old, she announced that she would become an artist. Although she did not know how she got that idea, she said it "as if I had thought it all out and my mind was made up."
Because of Ida O’Keefe’s cultural interests, Georgia and her sisters took drawing and painting lessons from local artists, learning perspective, shading and watercolor. Later on, she wrote of many visual memories of her home and the surrounding country—places she explored both in art as well as in her mind’s eye.
She attended high school both in Madison, and then at the Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia, where she graduated in 1905. She said, “I loved [walking in that] country, and always on the horizon, far away, was the line of the Blue Ridge Mountains—calling—as the distance has always been calling me.” Her remarks about the Blue Ridge Mountains could just as well have been about her future home in New Mexico.
Georgia later spoke about learning from one of her art teachers at Madison High. She "[held] a Jack-in-the-pulpit high and pointed out the strange shapes and variations in color…the purplish hood and…the Jack inside. I was a little annoyed at being interested because I didn’t like…her, but maybe she started me looking at things—looking very carefully at details. It was certainly the first time my attention was called to the outline and color of any growing thing with the idea of drawing or painting it.”
In 1905, O'Keeffe enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. She endured Anatomy Class, but was especially pleased with her figure-drawing teacher, John Vanderpoel. She later wrote that John Vanderpoel was “one of the few real teachers I have known.” So when his lectures were put into a book called The Human Figure, she read it and “treasured [it] for many years.”
In 1907 she attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied with William Merritt Chase. “There was something fresh and energetic and fierce and exacting about him that made him fun. His love of style—color—paint as paint—was lively. I loved…the things we painted for him.” Then, in 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot). Her prize was a scholarship to attend the League's outdoor summer school at Lake George, New York.
1908 was the first time she visited the 291—where she saw an exhibition of Rodin's watercolors. More significantly, the 291 was owned by her future husband, the famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and this would be where they eventually met.
That fall, O'Keeffe returned to Chicago and worked as an illustrator. She had stopped painting in 1908, when she realized she could not distinguish herself as a painter working in the tradition of her academic training.
But 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 cutting edge ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow's teachings encouraged artists to express themselves through harmonious designs of line, color, and shape, and emphasized that art should also fill space in a beautiful way. These concepts strongly influenced O'Keeffe's thinking about the process of making art.
After she taught art and penmanship in the public schools in Texas for two years, she met and studied with Dow at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York in the fall of 1914. She also taught at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina in the fall of 1915.
“…It was in the fall of 1915 that I first had the idea that what I had been taught was of little value to me except for the use of my materials as a language...I had become fluent in them when I was so young that they were simply another language that I handled easily. But what to say with them? I said to myself, “I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me—shapes and ideas so near to me—so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.” I decided to start anew…to accept as true my own thinking…”
She began to explore her own style. She used only charcoal. “I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white.” Six months later, she found she needed the color blue. She used it for a watercolor painting she called "Blue Lines."
At the same time, she determined to put Dow's ideas to the test, and in turning to abstraction, created a series of charcoal drawings that are among the most innovative of any art produced in that period. She mailed some of these abstract charcoals to her friend in New York, Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to Stieglitz early in 1916. He was immediately impressed and began corresponding with O'Keeffe. He exhibited 10 of her drawings in a group exhibition that opened in that spring at 291; more of her work was shown there in an informal group show in August, and in April, 1917, Steiglitz organized O'Keeffe's first one-person show there.
O'Keeffe moved to Texas in the fall of 1916, where she taught for the next 18 months. Becoming ill in 1917, she took a leave of absence from teaching and moved from Canyon to the warmer climate of San Antonio. She and Stieglitz had exchanged letters on an ongoing basis since 1916 and were becoming increasingly fond of one another. In May 1918, she received an invitation from him to move to New York to paint for a year and arrived there on 10 June.
New York
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. He left his wife Emmeline Obermeyer Stieglitz to live with O'Keeffe.
Stieglitz became O'Keeffe's strongest supporter. She in turn wanted her art to please Stieglitz more than anyone else. Seven years later, in 1924, they married. He was twenty-four years older than she. 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 in her birthday suit, were exhibited in a retrospective exhibition of his work held at the Anderson Galleries. The photographs of O'Keeffe created a public sensation.
During O'Keeffe's early years in New York 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, John Marin, 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 ‘20s, 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 US$25,000, which was at the time the largest sum ever paid for a group of paintings by a living American artist.
New Mexico
In the summer of 1929 O'Keeffe went to New Mexico with Rebecca Strand, who was married to Paul Strand. They went to Santa Fe and then to Taos. 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 became ill late in 1932 and was hospitalized 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 fall, she discovered Ghost Ranch, an area north of Abiquiu, whose painted desert of dramatically colored, enormous cliffs and hills inspired some of her most famous landscapes.
In the 1930's and 1940's 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,
After Stiegitz's death in 1946, O'Keeffe spent the next three years mostly in New York settling his estate, and 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 Above the Clouds I, 1962/1963, inspired by what she saw from the windows of airplanes.
In 1962, she was elected to the 50 member American Academy of Arts and Letters, but by the early 1970s, O'Keeffe's eyesight began to be compromised by macular degeneration. O'Keeffe met potter Juan Hamilton in 1973, who began doing household jobs for the artist and soon became her friend and close companion. He taught her to work with clay and helped her complete her book, Georgia O’Keeffe, published in 1976, as well as the Perry Miller Adato video project, Georgia O'Keeffe, which aired on national television in 1977. She completed her last unassisted work in oil in 1972, The Beyond, and worked unassisted in watercolor and charcoal until 1978 and in graphite until 1984.
In 1984 O'Keeffe moved to Santa Fe to be closer to medical facilities. She died at St. Vincent's Hospital, Santa Fe on March 6, 1986 at the age of 98. She was cremated and her ashes scattered around the Pedernal, the mountain that she could see from the patio of her Ghost Ranch house. She had painted it many times and called it her own.
A fossil found at Ghost Ranch by Edwin H. Colbert in the 1940s was named Effigia okeeffeae in O'Keeffe's honor.
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 lawsuit was settled out of court and a not-for-profit foundation was established to oversee the disposition of her works over the next twenty years. In March 2006, the Foundation dissolved, and its 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. [1]
O'Keeffe was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, and during her lifetime, she received 10 honorary doctorates and numerous books have been written about her life and her work. The United States Postal Service honored O'Keeffe by issuing a stamp of Red Poppy (1927).
Major collections of O'Keeffe's work include those at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
In 1999 the two volume Georgia O'Keeffe : Catalogue Raisonné was published, which was written by Barbara Buhler Lynes now curator at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and The Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center. The catalogue authenticates, reproduces, and describes 2,029 objects dating from 1901 to 1984.
In 1993, a series of 28 watercolours said to be painted by O'Keeffe in Texas from 1916 to 1918, collectively known as "The Canyon Suite," was bought by Kansas banker and philanthropist R. Crosby Kemper Jr. for US$5.5 million from art dealer Gerald Peters. Kemper gave the works to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. They were not included in Georgia O'Keeffe : Catalogue Raisonné, and Peters refunded Kemper's purchase in 2001.
Notes
- ^ The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation to Transfer Assets to Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Press Release. May 31, 2005.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Roxana Robinson. 2000. O'Keeffe, Georgia. American National Biography Online
- Roxana Robinson. 1990. Georgia O'Keeffe: A life. Bloomsbury, London. ISBN 0747505578
- Barbara Buhler Lynes. 1999. Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné. London. ISBN 0300087166
- Lisa Mintz Messinger. 2001. Georgia O'Keeffe. Thames & Hudson, London. ISBN 0500203407
- Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. About Georgia O'Keeffe
- Steve Paul and Mike McGraw. 2001. Art Sale: The Selling of the Canyon Suite, Kansas City Star
External links
Credits
New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:
The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:
Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.
