GEORGIA TOTTO O’KEEFE
• Georgia Totto O’Keefe was born un 1887 near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
• O’Keefe´s mother made her and her sister attend art classes. • And because her parents believed she did very well, they suggested she attend art school and in 1905 she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago • And two years later she attended the Art Students League in New York City.
• In 1916 Anita Pollitzer took some of O’Keefe Charcoal drawings to ALFRED STIEGLITZ at his 291 gallery. • He told Anita the drawings were the “Purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered his gallery in a long while”. And that he would like to show them. • So in 1916 he exhibited ten of her drawings. • And the following year 1917 she had her first solo show in this gallery with the majority being watercolors from Texas.
• She falled in love with Alfred Stieglitz and they married in 1924. They spent winter in Manhattan, New York and summer and autumm at the Stieglitz family house at Lake George, New York. She produced many paintings of the Lake George countryside.
• Stieglitz had started photgraphing O’Keefe when she visited New York to see her exhibition in 1917 and he continued taking photgraphs of her, taking more than 300 hundred portraits.
• By the mid-twenties O´Keefe had become known as one of America’s most important artists. Her work commanded high prices- six of her calla lily paintings were sold for the largest sum ever paid for a group of paintings by a living American artist. This drew media attention to O’Keefe as never before.
• Later in her life she began to travel and find inspiration for her artwork. The stories from the south-west stimulated her desire to see and explore new places. And she became fascinated with the American Southwest. So she used to spend most of the year in New Mexico and in autumm she returned to New York. But in 1949 O’Keefe moved permanently to New Mexico.
• In 1971 she realized that her eyesight was failing, so she stopped painting in 1972.
• In 1977 President of the United States gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom which is the highest honor awarded to American citizens. In 1985 she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
• She moved to Santa Fe where she died in 1986 at the age of 98 years old.
• Georgia T. O’Keefe was a major figure in American art from the 1920s. She received widespread recognition for her technical contributions, as well as for challenging the boundaries of modern American Artistic style.
• She is famous for her paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones, and landscapes. • O’Keefe brought an American art style to Europe at a time when the majority of influence moved in the opposite direction.