Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), American abstract painter, noted for the purity and lucidity of her still-life compositions. O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League of New York. She taught art in Texas from 1913 to 1918. In 1916 the American photographer and art gallery director Alfred Stieglitz (whom she married in 1924) became interested in her abstract drawings and exhibited them at 291, his gallery in New York; her work was shown annually in Stieglitz's galleries until his death in 1946 and was widely exhibited in other important institutions.

O'Keeffe, who moved to New Mexico in 1949, is best known for her large paintings of desert flowers and scenery, in which single blossoms or objects such as a cow's skull are presented in close-up views. Although O'Keeffe handles her subject matter representationally, the starkly linear quality, the thin, clear colouring, and the boldly patterned compositions produce abstract designs. A number of her works have an abstracted effect, the flower paintings in particular—such as Black Iris (1926, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)—in which the details of the flower are so enlarged that they become unfamiliar and surprising.

In the 1960s, inspired by a series of aircraft flights, O'Keeffe introduced motifs of sky and clouds, as seen from the air, into her paintings. One of her largest works is the mural Sky above Clouds (1965, collection of the artist), which is 7.3 m (24 ft) wide. O'Keeffe's paintings hang in museums and private collections throughout the United States.