Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) is one of the most significant and original figures in the history of American art, a painter whose career spanned more than seven decades and whose work transformed how American artists engaged with the natural world and with abstraction. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, she received rigorous academic training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York, before a decisive encounter with the ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow — who emphasized personal expression and design principles over mere representation — reshaped her artistic direction.
O'Keeffe came to national attention through her relationship with the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited her work at his pioneering Gallery 291 beginning in 1916. Her early abstract charcoal drawings and luminous watercolors announced a sensibility unlike anything else in American art of the period. In the 1920s she developed her iconic large-scale paintings of flowers — magnified far beyond natural scale to reveal their abstract inner architecture — as well as precisely rendered New York cityscapes and organic forms that hovered at the boundary between representation and pure form.
In 1929 she first visited New Mexico, and the desert landscape of the American Southwest became the great obsession of her later career. From 1949 she lived permanently at her adobe home in Abiquiú, painting the sun-bleached bones, vast skies, and austere landforms of the region with a concentration that made her synonymous with the place itself. Works from this period — including her celebrated series of paintings based on animal skulls set against blue skies — are among the most recognizable images in American art.
O'Keeffe's legacy is immense. She is widely regarded as the mother of American modernism, and her insistence on a personal vision rooted in close observation of nature, rendered in a style of exceptional formal clarity, influenced generations of artists. She remained active into her nineties, and her long, determined life came to embody a model of artistic independence and creative longevity.
