Georgia O'Keeffe

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Alfred Stieglitz : Georgia O'Keeffe (1918)

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (born November 15, 1887 in Sun Prairie , Dane County , Wisconsin , † March 6, 1986 in Santa Fe , New Mexico ) is one of the most famous American painters of the 20th century. Motifs of her works, which are located on the border with non-representational painting and understood as an interpretation of the world in feminine terms, are often flowers, flames and later also cityscapes, desert landscapes or bones. At the same time, an erotic charisma is perceived in O'Keeffe's pure pictorial landscapes. She is one of the well-known women in art in the 20th century. Some of your works are sold very highly.

Life

Plaque for O'Keeffe in her birthplace, Sun Prairie

childhood and education

O'Keeffe was born the second of seven children to farmers Francis and Ida O'Keeffe. After the farm at Sun Prairie, Wisconsin was sold, the family moved to Williamsburg, Virginia in 1903 . Although she had numerous siblings, O'Keeffe grew up quite isolated, preferring the outdoors, which stimulated her imagination, to society. Early on, she expressed her desire to become a painter. With the help of her mother, she received drawing lessons as a child from the local watercolourist Sara Mann. In the fall of 1902, the O'Keeffes moved from Wisconsin to near Peacock Hill in Williamsburg, Virginia. Georgia stayed in Wisconsin with her aunt, attended Madison High School, and did not follow her family to Virginia until 1903. She finished high school at Chatham Episcopal Institute (now Chatham Hall) in 1905.

After finishing high school, she attended art school at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906 . For financial reasons she had to drop out of her studies there; subsequently she was enrolled as a student at the Art Students League in New York for a year from 1907 to 1908 . Here she sat as a model for Eugene Speicher , who found his first formal recognition as a portrait painter with her portrait.

1908 saw a visited by O'Keeffe exhibition at Gallery 291 of Alfred Stieglitz for terror that the French sculptor a series of drawings Auguste Rodin showed. The apparently simple drawings made a claim that went beyond working sketches and thus contradicted the objective demands of conservative New York. Stieglitz was known for his provocative exhibitions of European avant-garde artists. The avant-garde works exhibited in Galerie 291, alongside Rodin, for example by Picasso, Matisse or Cézanne, gave O'Keeffe impetus to find her own artistic signature. In the final thesis of the first year of study, O'Keeffe still orientated himself on the conservative demands of her teachers and received the William Merritt Chase Prize for the still life in oil Untitled (Dead Rabbit in front of a copper pot), which includes a summer course at Lake George was.

Artistic breakthrough and relationship with Alfred Stieglitz

Financial difficulties forced O'Keeffe to leave the university. Between 1908 and 1910 she worked initially as a commercial artist and later as an art teacher. During a summer course in 1912 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, she learned the theories of Arthur Wesley Dow through her teacher Alon Bement , in particular his theory of composition ( Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers ). Dow's composition theory offered O'Keeffe a first access to abstract art . He encouraged artists to express themselves using lines, colors and harmonious shades.

After further teaching she was from 1914 to 1915 a student of Dow at Columbia Teachers College in New York. Since Galerie 291 was the only gallery that dared to exhibit modern artists, O'Keeffe used, at least superficially, to associate with Alfred Stieglitz. She also joined the National Woman's Party through a fellow student and remained a member for over three decades.

After another summer course in 1915 at Bement in Virginia, O'Keeffe took another position as a teacher in the fall, now at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina, which, however, left her with plenty of time for her own work. Under the impression of a love affair with a fellow student in New York, at the same time impressed by the landscape around her place of work and isolated apart from contact with her friend Anita Pollitzer by letter , she fell into a creative crisis that led to a break with almost all of her previous works . A phase of self-discovery followed in which she only drew on paper with charcoal pencils. Her friend Anita Pollitzer brought some of the work she had sent to Stieglitz. He immediately recognized the outstanding artistic quality and exhibited the works in late spring 1916 as part of a group exhibition. Through this he helped O'Keeffe to make his first breakthrough. Despite his advice to continue working in black and white, O'Keeffe returned to working in color. This was followed by a series of around 50 watercolors, predominantly in blue.

Alfred Stieglitz: Georgia O'Keeffe (1918)

In 1917 Stieglitz arranged the first solo exhibition for O'Keeffe with oil paintings and watercolors, which she had completed in Texas, but which was closed again only three days after the opening because of the USA's entry into the First World War. On this occasion O'Keeffe made the acquaintance of John Marin and Paul Strand .

Stieglitz asked O'Keeffe to model for him, and the first photos were taken with her as a subject. After another stay in Texas, she returned to New York at Stieglitz's request. An intense love relationship developed between the two, although Stieglitz was 23 years older, during which Stieglitz divorced in 1918 after 24 years of marriage to Emmeline Obermeyer. They married in a small, private ceremony in 1924 at the home of John Marin. There was no reception, celebration, or honeymoon. From 1918 to 1937 Stieglitz made over 300 photographs of O'Keeffe. He made most of the erotic photographs in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1978, O'Keeffe wrote, “When I look at the photographs Stieglitz took of me - some of them over 60 years ago - I wonder who this person is. It's like I've lived many lives in my one life. If the person in the photographs lived in this world today, they would be a completely different person - but it doesn't matter - Stieglitz photographed them back then. "

Marion H. Beckett: Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe , 1923 at the latest

By early 1918, O'Keeffe had met many early American modernists who were part of Stieglitz's circle of artists, including Charles Demuth , Arthur Dove , Marsden Hartley , John Marin, Paul Strand, and Edward Steichen . Soon after 1918, O'Keeffe began working primarily in oils, a step away from her watercolors, which she had mainly worked on in the early 1910s. In the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe began painting large-format natural forms at close range, like through a magnifying glass. In 1924 she painted her first large-format flower painting, Petunia, No. 2 , which was first issued in 1925. She also completed an extensive work of paintings of New York buildings such as City Night , New York Night , 1926 and Radiator Building - Night , New York, 1927.

O'Keeffe turned more and more to the representational. Her earlier work had mostly been abstract, but works like Black Iris III (1926) evoke the interpretation as a veiled representation of the female genitalia and at the same time a precise representation of the center of an iris. O'Keeffe always denied the validity of Freud's interpretations of her art, but even 50 years later, many well-known feminist artists rated their work similarly. Feminist artist Judy Chicago gave O'Keeffe a prominent place in her work The Dinner Party .

Although the feminists of the 1970s celebrated O'Keeffe as the originator of "female iconography," O'Keeffe dismissed their glorification of their work and refused to participate in any of their projects.

Gaston Lachaise : Bust of Georgia O'Keeffe , 1927

By the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe had become one of the most famous American artists. Their work achieved high prices. In 1938 the advertising agency commissioned NW Ayer & Son O'Keeffe to produce two paintings for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now the Dole Food Company). Other artists who worked for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company's advertisement included Lloyd Sexton Jr., Millard Sheets , Yasuo Kuniyoshi , Isamu Noguchi, and Miguel Covarrubias . The offer came at a critical time in O'Keeffe's life: she was 51 and her career appeared to be stagnating (critics felt her focus on New Mexico was too limited). She arrived in Honolulu aboard the SS Lurline on February 8, 1939 and spent nine weeks in Oahu, Maui, Kauai and the island of Hawaii. She painted flowers, landscapes, and traditional Hawaiian fish hooks. When she returned to New York, O'Keeffe completed a series of 20 sensual, lush green images. However, she didn't paint the pineapple she wanted until the Hawaiian Pineapple Company sent a plant to their New York studio.

New Mexico

Some time after the marriage there was a quarrel with Goldfinch. The summer vacations at Lake George regularly spent with the Goldfinch family aroused their reluctance; furthermore, she was increasingly bothered by the puritanical mentality prevailing on the east coast of the USA. Stieglitz rejected her desire to have children. Following an invitation, she traveled to Taos , New Mexico , in the spring of 1929 . The unspoilt nature left strong impressions on her. For the next three years, O'Keeffe suffered depressive episodes and finally a nervous breakdown in 1933. She had to seek psychiatric help, was admitted to hospital in early 1933, and then recovered in the Bermuda Islands. After the nervous breakdown, it was a year before she returned to painting.

Carl van Vechten : Alfred Stieglitz , 1935

From 1933 she regularly stayed in New Mexico about half of the year, collecting stones and bones in the desert and making them and the unmistakable architectural and landscape forms of the area the subject of her work. She first visited the Ghost Ranch north of Abiquiu in the summer of 1934 and moved to a house on the farm property in 1940. The area's multi-colored cliffs inspired some of her most famous landscapes. In 1977, O'Keeffe wrote, "You think [the] cliffs there are almost painted for you until you try to paint them." Among the guests who toured their ranch over the years were Charles and Anne Lindbergh , who Singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell , the poet Allen Ginsberg and the photographer Ansel Adams .

In the 1930s and 1940s, O'Keeffe's reputation and popularity continued to grow, which earned her numerous commissions. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in and around New York. She completed Summer Days , a painting depicting a deer skull adorned with various wildflowers, one of her most famous and well-known paintings. In the 1940s, O'Keeffe had two retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago (1943). The second in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan was the first retrospective the MoMA organized for an artist. In the mid-1940s, the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan sponsored a project to publish the first catalog of works.

As early as 1936, O'Keeffe developed an intense interest in the so-called Black Place , which was about 150 miles west of her Ghost Ranch building, and she made an extensive series of paintings of this place in the 1940s. O'Keeffe said Black Place "was like a herd of elephants a mile long, with gray hills and white sand at their feet."

White Place , the Plaza Blanca Cliffs near Abiquiú

At times the wind when she was painting was so strong that she had trouble keeping her canvas on the easel. When the sun got too hot, she would crawl under her car to find shade. The Black Place is still inaccessible and uninhabited.

Carl van Vechten : Georgia O'Keeffe in Abiquiú, 1950

She also painted White Place , a white rock formation near her home in Abiquiú , which she bought as a second home in 1945. It was an abandoned hacienda then, about 16 miles south of the Ghost Ranch.

Shortly after O'Keeffe arrived in New Mexico for her summer stay in 1946, Goldfinch suffered a brain thrombosis. He died in New York on July 13, 1946, and she buried his ashes on Lake George. O'Keeffe spent the next three years mostly in New York regulating his estate, and moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949. From 1946 she made the architectural forms of her Abiquiu house the subject of her work. Another distinctive painting in that decade was Ladder to the Moon , 1958. She continued to go on long hikes, this time in the desert and mountains around Santa Fe. Inspired by this barren, inhumane landscape, O'Keeffe expanded her motifs to include bones polished by the wind and the rocks in the vicinity.

Next life

At the age of over 80, O'Keeffe went on her first trip around the world. Once again, a new motif found its way into her work: cloud formations viewed from the window of an airplane. With the support of her then partner Juan Hamilton, she worked - more and more deprived of her eyesight - on her last pictures, all of which thematized oversized cloud landscapes. In the fall of 1970, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized the Georgia O'Keeffe - Retrospective exhibition , the first retrospective of her work in New York since 1946. From the mid-1970s she experimented with clay works. O'Keeffe died blind at the age of 98 on March 6, 1986 in Santa Fe.

Honors

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe

O'Keeffe has received honorary degrees from numerous universities and many awards. In 1962 she was elected fiftieth member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1966 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

It found its way into the visual arts of the 20th century. The feminist artist Judy Chicago dedicated one of the 39 place settings at the table to her in her work The Dinner Party .

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico opened its doors to the public on July 17, 1997. It currently shows over 1000 objects from the period from 1902 to 1984 as well as photographs, archive material and her house in Abiquiu. It holds the largest permanent collection of their works in the world.

An extinct reptile (a Poposauroidea ) is named after her, Effigia okeeffeae , found in 1947/48 during excavations by Edwin H. Colbert at the Ghost Ranch in Texas, but only identified in 2006.

plant

Georgia O'Keeffe left over 2000 papers. Much of her work can be seen at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

Her painting Jimson Weed / White Flower No. 1 was auctioned at Sotheby’s , New York City, in November 2014 for $ 44.4 million. This made her the most expensive painter in art history. On the art market, she leads the rankings of the most expensive female artists. In the USA today she is considered an "art icon".

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1946: Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art , New York City, May 14 to August 25, 1946. It was the first solo exhibition the museum dedicated to an artist.
  • 2012: Georgia O'Keeffe: Life and Work . (Retrospective), Hypo-Kunsthalle , Munich, February 3, 2012 to May 13, 2012. 
  • 2016: Georgia O'Keeffe . Tate Modern , London, in cooperation with the Folkwang Museum , 6 July to 30 October 2016. 
  • 2016/17: Georgia O'Keeffe . Kunstforum Wien , December 7, 2016 to March 26, 2017. 

Filmography

Literature (selection)

Web links

Commons : Georgia O'Keeffe  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Georgia O'Keeffe  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot. In: museum-reproductions.com , accessed on May 16, 2019.
  2. ↑ About Georgia O'Keeffe. ( Memento from February 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: Georgia O'Keeffe Museum .
  3. ↑ Barbara Lynes, O'Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929 , UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1989, ISBN 0-8357-1930-8 , pp. 55-56.
  4. ^ A b Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: The Dinner Party. Place Setting: Georgia O'Keeffe. Brooklyn Museum, accessed September 22, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Jennifer Saville, Georgia O'Keeffe: Paintings of Hawaiʻi , Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu 1990, ISBN 978-0937426111 , p. 13;
    Patricia Jennings & Maria Ausherman, Georgia O'Keeffe's Hawaiʻi , Koa Books, Kihei, Hawaii, 2011, p. 3;
    Theresa Papanikolas, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams, The Hawaiʻi Pictures , Honolulu Museum of Art, 2013.
  6. ↑ Don R. Severson et al. a., Finding Paradise: Island Art in Private Collections , Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2002, ISBN 9780824826574 , p. 119, excerpt.
  7. ↑ Tony Perrottet: O'Keeffe's Hawaii. In: New York Times , November 30, 2012.
    Severson 2002, p. 128.
  8. ↑ Severson 2002, p. 128.
  9. ↑ a b Rotating O'Keeffe exhibit . In: National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame , Fort Worth, Texas, 2010; Review of Georgia O'Keeffe and the Faraway: Nature and Image , February 12 to September 6, 2010: Never Before Seen Georgia O'Keeffe Exhibition Opens in Fort Worth. In: artdaily.org , 2010.
  10. ↑ a b Exhibition: Georgia O'Keeffe • May 14 - August 25, 1946. In: MoMA , accessed May 16, 2019.
  11. ↑ O'Keeffe - "the faraway" continued (history). ( Memento of July 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). In: ellensplace.net , 2000, (engl.)
  12. ↑ Katharina Cichosch: Last pictures. Above the clouds. In: Schirn Magazin , April 10, 2013.
  13. ↑ Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter O. ( Memento June 16, 2018 in the Internet Archive ). In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences , p. 402, with photo, (PDF; 227 kB), (English)
  14. ↑ O'Keeffe is the most expensive female artist in the world. In: n-tv , November 21, 2014.
  15. ^ Retrospective: Georgia O'Keeffe • Life and Work. In: Hypo-Kunsthalle , 2012.
  16. ^ Rose-Maria Gropp: Georgia O'Keeffe in Munich. The beauty of a horse's skull. In: FAZ , March 2, 2012, p. 33.
  17. ^ Exhibition: Georgia O'Keeffe. In: Tate Modern , 2016.
  18. ↑ Exhibition review by Laura Cumming: Georgia O'Keeffe at Tate Modern review - the sensuous and the dust-dead. In: The Guardian , July 10, 2016.
  19. ^ Exhibition: Georgia O'Keeffe. In: Kunstforum Wien , 2016.
  20. ↑ Stefan Dege: Georgia O'Keeffe, the pioneer of US art, is a guest at the Kunstforum Wien. In: Deutsche Welle , January 2, 2017, with pictures.
personal data
SURNAME O'Keeffe, Georgia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES O'Keeffe, Georgia Totto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Sun Prairie , Wisconsin, USA
DATE OF DEATH March 6, 1986
Place of death Santa Fe, New Mexico , USA