Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born in 1887 on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and became the most important female American artist of the twentieth century and one of the central figures of American modernism. She first gained attention in 1916 when the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz exhibited her abstract charcoal drawings at his 291 gallery in New York, declaring them the purest expression of a woman’s experience he had ever seen. The two began a personal and professional partnership that lasted until Stieglitz’s death in 1946.
O’Keeffe’s flower paintings of the 1920s — enormous, close-up views of irises, callas, poppies, and jimsonweeds that fill the entire canvas — are her most famous works. Seen at such magnified scale, the flowers become abstract landscapes of colour and form, their petals and stamens opening into mysterious, luminous spaces. Critics insisted on reading them as erotic metaphors, an interpretation O’Keeffe consistently and forcefully rejected: “When people read erotic symbols into my paintings, they’re really talking about their own affairs.”
From 1929 onward, O’Keeffe spent increasing time in New Mexico, whose desert landscape — bleached bones, adobe churches, red and purple hills, vast skies — became her defining subject. She settled permanently at Ghost Ranch after Stieglitz’s death, painting the landscape around her with a stripped-down clarity and monumental simplicity that anticipated Minimalism. She continued working until failing eyesight forced her to stop in the 1970s, and she died in Santa Fe in 1986 at the age of ninety-eight.