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By Paul Dunwell, writing for EasyFrame
© Copyright EasyFrame 2020
Born in Wisconsin as Georgia Totto O'Keeffe, the American artist was already a living legend in the 1920s, when she was in her mid-thirties. Her versatility makes her hard to define. She has been called an exponent of 'precisionism' (a smooth but sharp American approach of the 1920s, with roots in cubism, futurism and the French variant 'orphism'), and also of modernism, surrealism and abstract art. She combined attention to detail with abstraction and resists being pigeonholed, though she is sometimes simply called 'The Mother of Modernism'.
Left: O'Keeffe's record-breaking 'Jimson Weed / White Flower No. 1'. Centre: 'Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills'. Right: 'Rotunda at University of Virginia'.
She had a very long career and was the most highly paid woman artist in America in her lifetime. In 2014 'Jimson Weed / White Flower No. 1' sold for US.4 million, the highest price then achieved for a painting by a woman and triple the previous record. Her own previous auction record had been just US.2 million, set at Christie's in New York in 2001.
In the USA she is the object of lasting adulation. She has appeared on postage stamps. Her birthplace, home and studio are tourist destinations. She is regarded as a feminist icon, and has been the subject of a biopic in which Jeremy Irons played Alfred Stieglitz, her lover and then husband, her mentor, a noted photographer and owner of the '291' gallery in midtown Manhattan. Even a dinosaur has been named after her.
Four portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe, who generally avoided self-portraits. Left: as a teaching assistant to Alon Bement at the University of Virginia in 1915. Centre left: in 1918, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz. Centre right: in 1966, photographed by Cecil Beaton. Right: a self-portrait.
O'Keeffe was born into an Irish-American dairy-farming family that counted a Hungarian count among its ancestors on her mother's side, which is where the name Totto came from. She was one of seven children, or 11, depending on whom you believe. Her parents later moved to Virginia to make concrete blocks, but the business never took off and her father eventually went bust. Yet from these beginnings, and perhaps because both grandmothers painted, Georgia and two of her sisters, Ida and Anita, emerged as artists.
Left: 'New York Street with Moon'. Centre: 'From the Lake No. 1'. Right: 'Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie's II'.
Georgia was first taught by a watercolourist called Sara Mann. She kept painting at two boarding schools, then studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League of New York and the teacher-training college at Columbia University. She began her career as an art teacher at a women's college in South Carolina.
While she was there, in 1916, a friend from New York, Anita Pollitzer, sent some of her charcoal experiments to Alfred Stieglitz. O'Keeffe was 28. He was almost twice her age and married to somebody else. More to the point, his gallery showed the foreign modernists Picasso, Cézanne and Matisse at a time when America had none to speak of.
Stieglitz saw her potential. In 1917 he gave her a life-changing break, the first of 22 solo shows in his New York gallery, and as her mentor he encouraged her talent for the rest of his life. His promotion of her, and his sponsorship of her first year out of the classroom, let her escape teaching. Within a couple of years they were a couple. They married in 1924 and stayed together until he died in 1946, when she was 58 and he was 82. But he had affairs, notably with his gallery assistant.
Left: 'Drawing XIII'. Centre: 'Blue and Green Music'. Right: 'Cow's Skull with Calico Roses'. Many viewers have read female forms into works like these.
Apart from Stieglitz, his gallery co-owner Edward Steichen and the 'Stieglitz Circle' (John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, George Seeley, Arthur Dove, Arthur Beecher Carles and Charles Demuth), O'Keeffe had many influences:
Stieglitz unintentionally prompted her growth as an artist. When she learned of his affair with his much younger assistant, only five years after their wedding, she went off into the New Mexico desert to be alone with her thoughts and to paint. She moved there permanently after his death. Many have seen female forms in the bones and flowers she painted from then on.
O'Keeffe had no children, but she had strong opinions on how being a woman shaped her art. She once said: 'Woman feels the world differently than man feels it. The woman receives the world through her womb. Mind comes second'.
She began with little colour and on a small scale. As her ideas developed she used a stronger palette, focused on the nature that fascinated her and worked on bigger canvases. Some, like the one below right, were as much as 24 feet across, quite an undertaking for a woman who was by then nearly 80!
Left: 'Black Place Green'. Right: 'Sky Above Clouds IV'.
O'Keeffe is an inspiration to today's women artists, and all of us can admire her legacy. You can buy unframed prints of her work easily and affordably. Try Georgia O'Keeffe | Tate, for example.
You'll want to frame whatever you buy. Any good framer will show you a range of solutions and advise on what suits the work and where it will hang. EasyFrame is on 01234 856 501 and sales@EasyFrame.co.uk, and they'll always chat even if you don't want to buy!
Article Posted: 18/12/2020 09:17:24