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A look at the world of O’Keefe

by William Lehman on March 9th, 2007

Born to humble dairy farmers, Georgia O’Keefe is famous for her sexualized flower portraits and her view of the western culture of America.

Her marriage to photographer Alfred Stieglitz was the element that catapulted her to widespread recognition as a serious artist. Though a very exceptional artist, she did represent a unique artistic genre to the New York art scene in the early throughout the early 1900’s.

Soon after she moved to New York, she began working primarily in oil, which represented a shift away from her having worked mainly in watercolor in the 1910s, and by the mid-1920s, she began making large scale paintings of natural forms from close up, as if seen through a magnifying lens.

Soon after painting her first large scale flower portrait her work began to be recognized more broadly bringing prices in excess of $25,000

O’Keefe eventually recognized the quiet atmosphere of the southwest as her refuge after her husbands death. It was here she had retreated to from the confines of the city after her episodes of psychoneurosis after rehabilitating in Bermuda.

This seemingly barren landscape of beauty became the muse by which many of her paintings portrayed in her later years.

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