Georgia O'Keeffe Biography Quotes 27 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Georgia Totto O Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, to Francis Calyxtus O Keeffe and Ida Totto O Keeffe. Raised on a farm in the Midwest, she grew up within a large, close-knit family that valued education and perseverance. One of her sisters, Ida Ten Eyck O Keeffe, would later become an artist as well, underscoring the creative atmosphere that formed part of her early world. By her teens, Georgia had declared that she would be an artist, and her family supported that goal.

She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905 and then at the Art Students League in New York, where she worked with William Merritt Chase and F. Luis Mora. Though she absorbed the tenets of academic realism, she was already searching for a more personal, expressive language. A turning point came when she encountered the teaching of Arthur Wesley Dow, first through Alon Bement at Teachers College, Columbia University, and at summer sessions associated with the University of Virginia. Dow emphasized design, line, and harmony over imitation, opening O Keeffe to abstract structure and the expressive potential of simplification.

Forming a Modernist Vision
Between 1912 and 1916, O Keeffe taught art in Virginia and South Carolina and then at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, Texas. The Texas plains, wind-carved canyons, and wide skies left a deep visual imprint on her imagination. In 1915 she created a series of radical charcoal abstractions that embodied Dow s principles and her own emerging vision. She shared some of these drawings with her friend Anita Pollitzer, who in turn showed them to the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz in New York. Struck by their originality, Stieglitz exhibited them in 1916 at his gallery 291, placing O Keeffe within a circle of American modernists that included Arthur Dove, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Paul Strand.

This early recognition set O Keeffe on a path toward a distinctly American modernism. She pursued abstraction with watery colors and sinuous lines, transforming observed forms into distillations of rhythm, shape, and space. While some viewers sought literal subjects or symbolic meanings, O Keeffe steered attention toward how things felt and appeared when reduced to essentials. The foundational relationships she formed during this period with Anita Pollitzer and with the artists promoted by Stieglitz gave her community, visibility, and a demanding critical context.

New York, Stieglitz, and Recognition
By 1918, O Keeffe had moved to New York at the encouragement of Stieglitz, who became both her champion and, eventually, her husband. They married in 1924 after years of collaboration and dialogue that shaped her career. Stieglitz photographed her extensively, and through his galleries 291, the Intimate Gallery, and later An American Place, he organized solo shows that presented her work annually from 1923 onward. He introduced her art to collectors, critics, and fellow artists, and he positioned her as a leading force in American art. The couple divided time between New York City and Lake George in upstate New York, whose orchards, hills, and lake views gave rise to series of landscapes and still lifes.

In the mid-1920s, O Keeffe painted skyscrapers and nocturnes from her Manhattan windows, including views of the Shelton and the Radiator Building, conveying the modern city as an emblem of energy and verticality. Her enlarged flower paintings, such as Red Canna and Black Iris, presented petals and forms at monumental scale, inviting viewers to see familiar subjects anew. While some critics imposed Freudian interpretations on these works, O Keeffe rejected reductive readings, insisting on the primacy of vision and perception.

Encouraged in part by artists within the Stieglitz circle such as Arthur Dove and John Marin, and in conversation with photographers including Paul Strand, O Keeffe emphasized structure and clarity. She also built friendships with figures like Ansel Adams, whose approach to the Western landscape paralleled her own sense of vastness and distilled form.

Southwest and Mature Work
In 1929, O Keeffe made her first extended trip to New Mexico, accepting an invitation from the patron Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos. The light, adobe architecture, and high desert geology altered her palette and expanded her imagery. Over subsequent summers she returned to paint mountains, mesas, and the forms of bleached bones, transforming skulls and antlers into emblems silhouetted against wide skies. She forged working relationships with local friends and collaborators, among them Maria Chabot, who later helped her secure and restore properties at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu and assisted with logistics for exhibitions and publications.

The Southwest became central to her art throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Even as she navigated a taxing schedule of New York exhibitions orchestrated by Stieglitz, she pursued subjects that fused abstraction with observation: the Pedernal, the Chama River valley, cottonwoods, kivas, doorways, and ladders. After a period of illness and exhaustion in the early 1930s, time in New Mexico helped her reset her working rhythms. The desert s clarity gave her a setting that matched her drive for distilled, essential forms.

Stieglitz died in 1946, a loss that marked a profound transition. O Keeffe helped settle his estate and organized exhibitions honoring his legacy while consolidating her own. By 1949 she had moved permanently to New Mexico, dividing time between Ghost Ranch and a house and studio in Abiquiu that she renovated with a sculptor s eye for light, material, and view. Photographers, writers, and artists continued to visit. She maintained friendships with Ansel Adams and others who photographed the region, and she deepened her collaboration with Maria Chabot to shape the Abiquiu compound as a working studio and a coherent work of design.

Exhibitions, Honors, and Public Presence
Her stature grew steadily. The Art Institute of Chicago organized a major retrospective in 1943, and the Museum of Modern Art presented a retrospective in 1946, the first such MoMA show dedicated to a woman artist. In 1970 the Whitney Museum of American Art assembled a large retrospective that introduced new audiences to the breadth of her achievement, and museums across the United States continued to circulate her work in influential exhibitions.

National recognition followed. In 1977 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 1985 the National Medal of Arts. She published her book Georgia O Keeffe in 1976, pairing her reflections with photographs of her paintings and life, helping to fix an image of an artist who had shaped an autonomous path through American modernism.

Late Work and Final Years
By the early 1970s O Keeffe experienced significant vision loss from macular degeneration. Determined to continue, she turned to sculpture and ceramics and worked with studio assistants to translate her ideas into new mediums and to revisit motifs on a larger scale. A central figure during these years was Juan Hamilton, a younger artist who became her studio assistant and close companion. He supported her in the studio, managed practical demands, and helped maintain her independence in remote New Mexico. Their association, alongside longstanding ties with friends like Ansel Adams, sustained her work and her daily life.

Despite visual limitations, O Keeffe continued to travel, including a memorable journey by air over the world s landscapes that further affirmed her fascination with horizon lines, rivers, and geological structure. She remained engaged with exhibitions and with the stewardship of her homes and art. Her disciplined routines, careful diet, and walks on the land reflected an ethic of attention that paralleled her painting practice.

Georgia O Keeffe died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98. Her estate, managed with input from close associates including Juan Hamilton, supported the establishment of organizations devoted to preserving her legacy and homes. The breadth of her influence, evident in artists who pursue clarity of form and a direct engagement with place, affirms her standing as a defining figure in American art.

Legacy
O Keeffe reshaped what modern painting in the United States could be, grounding abstraction in close looking and in the specifics of American sites from New York to Lake George to northern New Mexico. Through her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz and his circle, she joined and helped define a generation that forged a distinctively American modernism. Through friendships and collaborations with Anita Pollitzer, Ansel Adams, Maria Chabot, Juan Hamilton, and others, she sustained an independent studio life across seven decades. The flower canvases, the New York cityscapes, the bones, stones, and adobe walls, and the mountains seen as if cut from the air, remain emblematic not only of her personal vision but of an American landscape of the mind, approached with discipline, audacity, and enduring clarity.

Our collection contains 27 quotes who is written by Georgia, under the main topics: Motivational - Friendship - Live in the Moment - Deep - Freedom.

Other people realated to Georgia: Yousuf Karsh (Photographer), Bob Balaban (Actor)