Georgia O'Keeffe

1887-1986

Georgia O'Keeffe shaped American modernism through paintings that enlarged flowers and plants to monumental scale, rendered in bold, precise color, and through starkly beautiful images drawn from the American Southwest landscape. She studied briefly at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before illness interrupted her training, yet she remained committed to the institution, holding her first retrospective there in 1943. After her husband Alfred Stieglitz—photographer and influential art dealer—died, she donated his collection to the Art Institute. O'Keeffe synthesized elements from various modernist movements into a style entirely her own, one that fused natural and abstracted forms with visual and spiritual intensity. Trained wholly in the United States, she lived in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina before settling in New Mexico, where she worked until her death at ninety-eight.