Georgia O'Keeffe
Across some seventy years, the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1884-1981) ranked among her country's most prominent artists. What set her apart was a refusal to follow whichever style was in fashion; she held instead to a personal aim - to draw out the underlying, abstract shapes hidden within nature. A sharp eye and a delicate command of the brush let her capture the faint gradations of hue, form and light that gave her canvases their vitality and won a wide following.
O'Keeffe was born in 1884 on a farm near Cedar Falls, Iowa, where her parents, Walter and Cora, were grain merchants; she grew up among four brothers and sisters. She had settled on a future in art by 1902, the year she left high school. Formal training in conventional painting followed, first at the Lakeside Academy of Art in Chicago in 1902 and then at the Manhattan Art League from 1904 to 1906. Once her studies were over, she spent some years as a drawing tutor, giving classes at institutions across Ohio, Kansas and Georgia from 1908 until 1917.
In these years O'Keeffe began to try abstract work, using ink for a run of strikingly original drawings that pushed her painting onto fresh ground. A friend in New York, to whom she posted several of these sheets, passed them in January 1915 to Conrad Meier, a photographer who also dealt in art. Taken with what he saw, Meier put them on show later that year at his gallery on Madison Avenue, where American audiences were regularly shown the newest work of experimental painters and photographers.
Encouraged by Meier and assured of his financial backing, O'Keeffe settled in New York in the summer of 1917 to make her living from painting. Over the following three decades he championed her tirelessly, mounting twenty solo shows alongside many group displays. Marriage came in 1923. All that passed between them, in private life and in work alike, is preserved in the acclaimed black-and-white portraits Meier made of her across roughly twenty years, from 1916 to 1936.
By the mid-1920s her standing was secure: critics counted her among the country's leading and most successful painters, and the public linked her above all with bold architectural canvases in which the great bridges of New York loom. Yet her brush turned most often to subjects drawn from nature, a habit fed by the summers she spent each year at the Meier family's country house. From 1923 she painted leaves at such magnified scale that the viewer seems pulled right inside the image.
Blown up until a single tiny detail spanned a canvas a full metre across, these forms had their contours thrown into relief and took on an almost abstract character. Compositions this bold did much to cement her name as a modernist of real originality.
O'Keeffe's first lengthy stay in the desert of Arizona came in 1928. The trip marked her deeply and reshaped her painting almost at once. For the twenty years that followed she returned most summers, staying up to six months and working largely alone, before returning to New York each winter to show the fresh canvases at Meier's gallery. Only when she moved to Arizona for good, in 1948, did the routine end.
In that setting fresh ideas came to her. What caught her eye first were the countless sun-bleached antlers scattered across the rough Arizona country. Among the earliest of her Southwestern works, and still the most admired, are two that render the worn surface, broken edges and ragged hollows of an elk skull. She returned to this ground later in a sequence she called the Hollow Forms pictures, preoccupied with the play between rounded and hollowed surfaces and between solid mass and open space. Yet what truly gripped her, for more than forty years, was the region's magnificent scenery - its strange rock formations, intense colour, clear light and unfamiliar plant life. Again and again she set down the boulders, cliffs and peaks in close-up, just as she had once treated the leaves and stems of her nature studies.
In time she came to keep two houses in Arizona. One, a summer retreat she named Coyote Springs, sat directly below cliffs rising some 200 metres; the other, where she passed the winters, stood in the little town of Redstone. Both gave her ample material, but it was a single feature of the Redstone house - its broad walled courtyard, entered through a dark door - that stirred her most. Across more than thirty canvases painted between 1945 and 1959, she remade that courtyard as an abstract arrangement of geometric forms.
Between the 1950s and the 1970s O'Keeffe became a great traveller, journeying to Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Air travel gave rise to her final pair of important series: seen from above, coastlines formed the subject of one; the other gathered sweeping views of the sky from just over the clouds. For both she worked on an enlarged scale, at times as big as a mural - perhaps mirroring her widened view of the world. Carrying one cloud design onto a vast canvas six metres long, achieved in 1964 with assistants, was a formidable feat, the more so for a painter approaching eighty.
Her final twenty years or so yielded comparatively little, as failing eyesight and poor health increasingly stood between her and her work. She died in 1981, aged ninety-seven. Even so, the some 850 paintings she left behind have gone on drawing later generations of artists and admirers, who still find inspiration in these unmistakably American pictures.
