American Artist Georgia O'Keeffe

O'Keeffe Painted New Mexico Light Effects Despite Failing Vision.

Apr 3, 2008

The artwork of Georgia O'Keeffe reflects her refusal to be defined; her work focuses on the contrast between light and dark, and includes both nature and cityscapes.

Born on 15 November 1887, Georgia O’Keeffe’s career as an artist spanned over half a century. Yet she hardly personified the typical expectations of females; she flatly refused to be defined, and her artistic career, lasting until her death in 1985, spanned from cityscapes to abstract art to paintings reflecting her intimacy with nature.

She claimed that her first memory was of the brightness of light, and many of her paintings represent her focus on the contrast between light and dark. She discovered at the age of eight that she wanted to be an artist, and her parents indulged her talent by sending her to art school.

She enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, studying under John Vanderpoel, who taught her that line and shading should be used with the awareness that both represented the external appearance of a complete living entity.

In an attempt to more narrowly define her artistic focus, O’Keeffe attended a summer course at the University of Virginia in 1912 taught by Alon Bement, who, using the theories of Arthur Dow, emphasized the careful arrangement of all elements in a composition, and stressed the significance of the relationship between light and dark.

Her paintings began to evolve into an evident tension between light and dark; motion and stasis; and weight and levity, all of which led to a sense of vitality in her art. Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art, which Bement had recommended, became her justification for pursuing the intellectual in artistry, and for completely breaking with traditional painting conventions.

New York Years

While in New York in 1917, O’Keeffe met Alfred Stieglitz, whom she would marry in 1924. Coincidentally, since much of her artwork mirrored her life, her paintings in the 1920s featured flowers, perhaps to celebrate her happiness.

O’Keeffe would often present a single, centrally-positioned object, many times a flower, enlarged to an unnatural size. Yet, she still struggled to find her own way; she had to essentially free herself from Stieglitz’s shadow. She knew that she was an enigma in the art world, and that her male peers felt she could not compete with their work, or that they did not take her work seriously.

Often critics would degrade her work by misconstruing it as sexually based, and would compare her flower artistry to human genitalia. She flatly denied any such accusations, despite the sort of sensuality and exotic flavor that her artwork exudes. She believed her art represented the whole psyche, not just one aspect.

In New Mexico

O’Keeffe found inspiration in the southwest, particularly in New Mexico, an enthusiasm not shared by Stieglitz, and their emotional separation is reflected in O’Keeffe’s work during the 1930s. Her paintings throughout this period reveal a sense of yearning to reveal nature, and often featured isolated animal skulls, painted with wave patterns and zig-zag lines.

The symbolic juxtaposition of life (flower imagery) and death (skulls) was a dramatic feature of many of her paintings. O’Keeffe rejected the critic’s rather morbid metaphor of death in describing her paintings; to her, these were images of life and happiness.

While O’Keeffe’s career was flourishing in New Mexico, Stieglitz suffered his third heart attack, and passed away on 13 July 1946, in O’Keeffe’s arms. She spent two years settling their estate in New York, and then moved permanently to Abiquiu, New Mexico.

After her eyesight began to deteriorate, she enlisted the assistance of a sculptor, Juan Hamilton, as well as Sarah Greenough, a research curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to help preserve elements of her life. After her death in 1985, her ashes were scattered on the grounds of her home by Hamilton, emblematic of the life of the woman who spent her life as an artist attempting to explain the unexplainable.

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