Georgia O'keeffe Biography Georgia O'Keeffe was an American abstract painter, famous 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 City; 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 coloring, 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 City)—in which the details of the flower are so enlarged that they become unfamiliar and surprising. In the 1960s, inspired by a series of airplane 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. "When I found the beautiful white bones in the desert I picked them up and took them home too... I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it." ~ Georgia O'Keeffe "Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven't time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers. ...Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't. " ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

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