An American Artist

Over a career spanning more than 70 years, Georgia O’Keeffe painted the things she saw in the places where she lived. She filled her canvases with images of the city, the desert, flowers, and bones and experimented with color, line, and shape. O’Keeffe’s sharp observational skills and unique, modern style made her one of the most important American artists of the 20th century.

In 1917, a friend of O’Keeffe’s showed some of O’Keeffe’s abstract charcoal drawings to Alfred Stieglitz (STEE-glits), a photographer and influential gallery owner in New York City. He loved them and within one year gave O’Keeffe a solo exhibition.

Stieglitz encouraged O’Keeffe to move to New York so she could focus on succeeding as an artist. The two fell in love and eventually married. During their 22-year marriage, their lives and work complemented one another. Stieglitz took more than 300 photographs of O’Keeffe, and O’Keeffe exhibited nearly every year at Stieglitz’s various galleries.

During the 1920s, giant skyscrapers were changing the look of New York City. The uniquely urban structures inspired O’Keeffe. She created nearly 20 paintings of the city. New York Street With Moon (above) was her first such cityscape.

The artist once said, “One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.” In this painting, O’Keeffe used simplified shapes to create the tall buildings. The low angle draws our attention up to the night sky, and the circular glow of the large artificial streetlight contrasts with the natural light of the tiny moon above. How does O’Keeffe’s view of the city make you feel about the place?

In 1929, O’Keeffe traveled to New Mexico. This vacation changed her life and her art. For the next 20 years, she often visited the state to paint the Southwestern sky and the vast desert landscape. After Stieglitz died in 1946, O’Keeffe moved permanently to the state.

O’Keeffe often created paintings of her New Mexico home. In the Patio, VIII (right) is of the view looking up at the sky from her patio. In contrast to the constricting, enclosed sky in the New York painting, O’Keeffe’s vision of the New Mexico sky is wide and expansive. How can you tell what is important to the artist about her home?

O’Keeffe lived in New Mexico for the rest of her life. She stopped painting in her 80s when her eyesight began to fail, but she continued drawing and making art into her 90s. She died on March 6, 1986, at age 98.