74 Facts About Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements.

From 1905, when Georgia O'Keeffe began her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, until about 1920, she studied art or earned money as a commercial illustrator or a teacher to pay for further education.

Georgia O'Keeffe moved to New York in 1918 at Stieglitz's request and began working seriously as an artist.

Georgia O'Keeffe created many forms of abstract art, including close-ups of flowers, such as the Red Canna paintings, that many found to represent vulvas, though Georgia O'Keeffe consistently denied that intention.

Georgia O'Keeffe's works are in the collections of several museums, and following her death, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe.

Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15,1887, in a farmhouse in the town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.

Georgia O'Keeffe's mother's father, George Victor Totto, for whom O'Keeffe was named, was a Hungarian count who came to the United States in 1848.

Georgia O'Keeffe attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin, as a boarder between 1901 and 1902.

Georgia O'Keeffe stayed in Wisconsin attending Madison Central High School until joining her family in Virginia in 1903.

Georgia O'Keeffe completed high school as a boarder at Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia, graduating in 1905.

Georgia O'Keeffe taught and headed the art department at West Texas State Normal College, watching over her youngest sibling, Claudia, at her mother's request.

From 1905 to 1906, Georgia O'Keeffe was enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with John Vanderpoel and ranked at the top of her class.

Georgia O'Keeffe's prize was a scholarship to attend the League's outdoor summer school in Lake George, New York.

In 1908, Georgia O'Keeffe discovered that she would not be able to finance her studies.

Georgia O'Keeffe's father had gone bankrupt and her mother was seriously ill with tuberculosis.

Georgia O'Keeffe was not interested in a career as a painter based on the mimetic tradition that had formed the basis of her art training.

Georgia O'Keeffe took a job in Chicago as a commercial artist and worked there until 1910, when she returned to Virginia to recuperate from the measles and later moved with her family to Charlottesville, Virginia.

Georgia O'Keeffe did not paint for four years and said that the smell of turpentine made her ill.

Georgia O'Keeffe took a summer art class in 1912 at the University of Virginia from Alon Bement, who was a Columbia University Teachers College faculty member.

Georgia O'Keeffe began to experiment with abstract compositions and develop a personal style that veered away from realism.

Georgia O'Keeffe took classes at the University of Virginia for two more summers.

Georgia O'Keeffe took a class in the spring of 1914 at Teachers College of Columbia University with Dow, who further influenced her thinking about the process of making art.

Georgia O'Keeffe taught at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina in late 1915, where she completed a series of highly innovative charcoal abstractions based on her personal sensations.

In early 1916, Georgia O'Keeffe was in New York at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Georgia O'Keeffe mailed the charcoal drawings to a friend and former classmate at Teachers College, Anita Pollitzer, who took them to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery early in 1916.

Georgia O'Keeffe, who enjoyed sunrises and sunsets, developed a fondness for intense and nocturnal colors.

Georgia O'Keeffe began a series of watercolor paintings based upon the scenery and expansive views during her walks, including vibrant paintings of Palo Duro Canyon.

Georgia O'Keeffe "captured a monumental landscape in this simple configuration, fusing blue and green pigments in almost indistinct tonal gradations that simulate the pulsating effect of light on the horizon of the Texas Panhandle," according to author Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall.

In 1918, Georgia O'Keeffe moved to New York as Stieglitz offered to provide financial support, a residence, and place for her to paint.

Georgia O'Keeffe came to know the many early American modernists who were part of Stieglitz's circle of artists, including painters Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and photographers Paul Strand and Edward Steichen.

Georgia O'Keeffe began creating simplified images of natural things, such as leaves, flowers, and rocks.

Georgia O'Keeffe painted her first large-scale flower painting, Petunia, No 2, in 1924 and it was first exhibited in 1925.

Georgia O'Keeffe made a cityscape, East River from the Thirtieth Story of the Shelton Hotel in 1928, a painting of her view of the East River and smoke-emitting factories in Queens.

Georgia O'Keeffe subsequently visited New Mexico on a near-annual basis from 1929 onward, often staying there for several months at a time, returning to New York each winter to exhibit her work at Stieglitz's gallery.

Georgia O'Keeffe visited and painted the nearby historical San Francisco de Asis Mission Church at Ranchos de Taos.

Georgia O'Keeffe made several paintings of the church, as had many artists, and her painting of a fragment of it silhouetted against the sky captured it from a unique perspective.

Georgia O'Keeffe was a popular artist, receiving commissions while her works were being exhibited in New York and other places.

In 1933 and 1934, Georgia O'Keeffe recuperated in Bermuda and returned to New Mexico in 1934.

Georgia O'Keeffe arrived in Honolulu on February 8,1939, aboard the SS Lurline and spent nine weeks in Oahu, Maui, Kauai, and the island of Hawaii.

Georgia O'Keeffe completed a series of 20 sensual, verdant paintings based on her trip to Hawaii; however, she did not paint the requested pineapple until the Hawaiian Pineapple Company sent a plant to her New York studio.

In 1945, Georgia O'Keeffe bought a second house, an abandoned hacienda in Abiquiu, which she renovated into a home and studio.

Georgia O'Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, spending time at both Ghost Ranch and the Abiquiu house that she made into her studio.

Georgia O'Keeffe's stated preference was for her works to be free of dirt, even if removing such soiling caused abrasion to her colors.

Keck encouraged Georgia O'Keeffe to begin applying acrylic varnishes to her works in order to facilitate their cleaning.

Georgia O'Keeffe's second was in 1946, when she was the first woman artist to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

In 1973, Georgia O'Keeffe hired John Bruce "Juan" Hamilton as a live-in assistant and then a caretaker.

The artist's autobiography, Georgia O'Keeffe, published in 1976 by Viking Press, featured Summer Days on the cover.

Georgia O'Keeffe continued working in pencil and charcoal until 1984.

Georgia O'Keeffe moved to Santa Fe in 1984, where she died on March 6,1986, at the age of 98.

Georgia O'Keeffe's body was cremated and her ashes were scattered, as she wished, on the land around Ghost Ranch.

Later, Georgia O'Keeffe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1966 was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In June 1918, Georgia O'Keeffe accepted Stieglitz's invitation to move to New York from Texas after he promised to provide her a quiet studio where she could paint.

Georgia O'Keeffe's wife returned home while their session was still in progress and gave him an ultimatum.

Also around this time, Georgia O'Keeffe became sick during the 1918 flu pandemic.

In February 1921, Stieglitz's photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe were included in a retrospective exhibition at the Anderson Galleries.

In 1928, Stieglitz began a long-term affair with Dorothy Norman, who was married, and Georgia O'Keeffe lost a project to create a mural for Radio City Music Hall.

At the suggestion of Maria Chabot and Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe began to spend the summers painting in New Mexico in 1929.

Georgia O'Keeffe traveled by train with her friend the painter Rebecca Strand, Paul Strand's wife, to Taos, where they lived with their patron who provided them with studios.

In 1933, Georgia O'Keeffe was hospitalized for two months after suffering a nervous breakdown, largely due to Stieglitz's affair with Dorothy Norman.

Georgia O'Keeffe continued to visit New Mexico, without her husband, and created a new body of works based upon the desert.

Shortly after Georgia O'Keeffe arrived for the summer in New Mexico in 1946, Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis.

Georgia O'Keeffe immediately flew to New York to be with him.

Georgia O'Keeffe spent the next three years mostly in New York settling his estate.

Georgia O'Keeffe traveled and camped at "Black Place" often with her friend, Maria Chabot, and later with Eliot Porter.

Georgia O'Keeffe was a legend beginning in the 1920s, known as much for her independent spirit and female role model as for her dramatic and innovative works of art.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe in 1997.

In November 2016, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum recognized the importance of her time in Charlottesville by dedicating an exhibition, using watercolors that she had created over three summers.

Lifetime Television produced a biopic of Georgia O'Keeffe starring Joan Allen as O'Keeffe, Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz, Henry Simmons as Jean Toomer, Ed Begley Jr.

Georgia O'Keeffe came of age as a woman and an artist in the 1910s, at the height of the women's suffrage movement and the intense artistic ferment of modernism.

Grasso notes that "Modernists championed rupture, innovation, and daring in art forms, styles, and perspectives," and that Georgia O'Keeffe "first created herself as an artist when feminism and modernism were interlinked".

Georgia O'Keeffe was in active dialogue with her suffragist friend Anita Pollitzer, with whom she exchanged letters on the subject.

Georgia O'Keeffe was reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner, among others, alongside the radical magazine The Masses, and lecturing on modernist dancer Isadora Duncan.

Georgia O'Keeffe received unprecedented acceptance as a woman artist from the fine art world due to her powerful graphic images and within a decade of moving to New York City, she was the highest-paid American woman artist.

Georgia O'Keeffe was known for a distinctive style in all aspects of her life.