Georgia O'Keeffe

One of the most celebrated modernists of the last century, Georgia O’Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York. In 1916 her work was seen by photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who encouraged her to pursue painting and introduced her to his circle of New York modernists, which included painters such as Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth. Stieglitz gave O’Keeffe her first one-person show at his gallery in 1917, and the pair married in 1924. O’Keeffe became famous for the boldly colored, simplified abstractions of landscape and floral subjects that she often produced in series. Her career took a major turn when she visited New Mexico in 1929 and found new inspiration in the arid landscape bathed in a rich light and scattered with scrubby vegetation and animal bones. After that 1929 trip she visited New Mexico almost yearly. After Stieglitz died in 1946 and she had settled his estate, she made it her permanent home in 1949. O’Keeffe’s career spanned seven decades and she produced some 900 paintings. She lived near Santa Fe until her death in 1986.