2. Georgia O’Keeffe is famous for her abstract and
seemingly personal paintings but the personality
she paints into her work isn’t directly associated
with her femininity as many critiqued, but
instead the events in her life like her relationship
and break up with Alfred Stieglitz and
consistently changing surroundings influence
and manifest in her work, making her biography
an important aspect of her art making.
8. Train at Night in the Desert
Georgia O’Keeffe
1916 watercolor
Fall Leaves
Georgia O’Keeffe
1924
9. Lake George with Crows
Georgia O’Keeffe
1921 oil on canvas
Lake George Barns
Georgia O'Keeffe
1926 oil on canvas
10. New York with Moon
Georgia O’Keeffe
1925 oil on canvas
11. “The pulsing celestial
orb and throbbing
land forms took their
inspiration not from
Lake George nor
Manhattan but from
O’Keeffe’s Texas
years.”
-Eldredge
The Red Hills with Sun
Georgia O’Keeffe
1927 oil on canvas
12. Grey Tree
Georgia O’Keeffe
1925
"I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.”
--Georgia O'Keeffe.
Cottonwoods near Abiquiu
Georgia O’Keeffe
1942
13. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait—Hands and Bones
Alfred Stieglitz
1930
“These photographs are simultaneously erotic
and self mocking. O’Keeffe’s hands make
intimate contact with the skull,
but it is only lifeless bone.”
-Wienburg
14. Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue
Georgia O'Keeffe
1931 oil on canvas
“It therefore celebrates
the discovery of the
southwest as the next
great theme of her art.”
-Weinburg
15. “New Mexico proved to be a
source of seemingly endless
inspiration for O’Keeffe….Working
with often richly saturated colors
and simplified natural forms, she
strove to translate the ecstatic
feelings she had when she
contemplated the landscape that
affected her, she told Stieglitz, like
music, because ‘it moved and
changed constantly.’”
-from My Faraway One
Blue and Green Music
Georgia O’Keeffe
1919-1921
16. Ram's Head White Hollyhock
Georgia O’Keeffe
1935
From the Faraway, Nearby
Georgia O’Keeffe
1937
17. “She wears too much
white; she is impaled
with a white
consciousness. It is
not without
significance that she
wishes to paint red in
white and still have it
look like red.”
-Marsden Hartley
American Indian Symbols
Marsden Hartley
1914 oil on canvas
20. Bibliography
Primary Sources
1. Greenough, Sarah. My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georiga O'Keefe and Alfred
Stieglitz. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2011.
2. Hartley, Marsden. Adventures in the Arts. New York, NY: Boni & Liveright, 1921.
3. Fisher, Willian and Stieglitz, Alfred. "The Georgia O'Keeffe Drawings and Paintings at
'291'." Camera Work, June 1917.
Secondary Sources
1. Balken, Debra. Dove/O'Keefe. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2009.
2. Dickerman, Leah. Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925. New York, NY: The Museum of
Modern Art, 2012.
3. Dilworth, Leah. Imagining Indians in the Southwest : persistent visions of a primitive past
. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.
4. Eldredge, Charles. Georgia O'Keeffe. New Haven, CT: Yale Publishing Company, 1993.
5. Lynes, Barbara. O'Keefe, Stieglitz, and the Critics 1916-1929. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI
Research Press, 1989.
6. Pyne, Kathleen. Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O'Keefe and the Women of the
Stieglitz Circle. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2008.
7. Weinberg, Jonathan. Ambition & Love in Modern American Art. New Haven, CT: Yale
University, 2001.
8. Wagner, Anne. Three Artists (Three Women). Los Angeles, CA: University of California
Press, 1996.
Editor's Notes
Stieglitz, NYC, March, 31, 1917 “How is the Little Girl this morning?”“Less prone to hyperbole, more pragmatic and down to earth, O’Keeffe did not use such terms nor did she share this grandiose understanding of herself.”
“She also grew steadily more disturbed by Stieglitz’s belief that her art was fundamentally an expression of her gender. In the early 1920s she was not only stunned by the overtly sexual interpretations of her art that appeared in the press but troubled to realize that Stieglitz fostered them. She came to see that his nude photographs of her, which he had exhibited in 1921 before he showed her work in 1923, added fuel to the Freudian fire.”
“New Mexico proved to be a source of seemingly endless inspiration for O’Keeffe. Its trees, crosses, and churches; its brilliant blue sky; and especially the land itself, with its lustrous red earth, arroyos, mesas and rugged mountains—all became the subjects of her frequently luminous, occasionally playful paintings. Working with often richly saturated colors and simplified natural forms, she strove to translate the ecstatic feelings she had when she contemplated the landscape that affected her, she told Stieglitz, like music, because “it moved and changed constantly.” As she “hunted for something of myself out there,” she sought “something in myself that will give me a symbol for all this—a symbol for the sense of life I get out there.” Noting that O’Keeffe was once again “the wild child of the soil,” Stieglitz recognized that he was still very much “of the city” and he found in New York the same inspiration that O’Keeffe discovered in New Mexico.”
December 1933 at Lake George “Despite the snow, bitter cold, frozen pipes, and slippery driving conditions, O’Keeffe remained at Lake George. She was still not ready for the pace of the city and recognized that she seemed “to thrive on these winter difficulties and surprises.”
Leah Dilworth “Imagining Indians”“Modernist primitivism was never about practicing Native American belief systems. It was, rather, about an aesthetic practice that would lead to spiritual experience.”
