Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe

Works by the phenomenal artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) were first exhibited in 1916 at the 291 Gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, whom she later married. Vigorously productive throughout her life, she differs from other pioneers of American Modernism in that her work displays little influence from European Modernists.

Born in Wisconsin, she did a brief stint as a commercial artist in Chicago and studied abstract design at Columbia Teachers College but much of her life was spent in New Mexico.

From the beginning of her career, her imagery -- whether the subject was the bridges and skyscrapers of New York City, hugely enlarged details of flowers, or the bleached bones and barren rolling hills of the Southwest -- involved a linear presentation that somehow turned each painting into an abstraction. Using strong, clear colors to create her sculptural, organic forms, she never failed to sense the new and respond to it in her own inimitable, even magnificent, fashion.

(c)1995 Graphique de France