Georgia O'Keeffe

Her parents kept a dairy farm at Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and the Hungarian count she was named for was her mother's father. She entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905, finished at the top of her class, and lost a year to typhoid. At the Art Students League in New York she took the Chase still-life prize in 1908 for a painting of a dead rabbit and a copper pot. Then her father went bankrupt and her mother was dying of tuberculosis and the school money was gone. She took a commercial art job in Chicago, stopped painting, went back to Virginia with measles in 1910, and did not return to it until a summer class in 1912 showed her another way to build a picture.

The charcoal abstractions she made in South Carolina at the end of 1915 reached Alfred Stieglitz through a friend, and he hung ten of them at his gallery the following spring. What came after was seven decades of work that never joined a movement. She painted her first large flower, Petunia No. 2, in 1924, and the enlargements that followed made her famous and misread. From the 30th floor of the Shelton Hotel she painted the New York skyline at night. In 1929 she went to New Mexico and found the subject that held her for the rest of her life — bones on the desert floor, the red hills above Ghost Ranch, a mountain she called her own. In 1946 the Museum of Modern Art gave her the first retrospective it had ever given a woman.

Within a month of her arrival in New York in 1918, Stieglitz was photographing her naked in his family's apartment. His wife walked in on a session and gave him an ultimatum, and he left that day. He went on photographing her for nineteen years — more than 200 nudes and over 350 portraits — and when the pictures were shown at the Anderson Galleries in February 1921 they caused a sensation that fixed how her paintings were read. Critics called her canvases metaphors for the female body. She denied any connection for fifty years and never dislodged the reading. The marriage, when it came in 1924, was open on his side and painful on hers. In late 1932 she stopped working altogether, spent 1933 and 1934 recovering in Bermuda, and did not paint again until January 1934.

In 1973 she hired a potter named Juan Hamilton as an assistant. He taught her to work in clay, pushed her to keep painting as macular degeneration took her sight, helped produce the 1976 book of her own words that became a bestseller, and stayed 13 years. She died in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986, at 98. Codicils added in the 1980s left most of a 65 million dollar estate to Hamilton, her family sued, and the case settled out of court in July 1987, most of it going to a foundation. The museum in Santa Fe opened in 1997. In 2014 Jimson Weed sold for 44,405,000 dollars, more than three times the previous auction record for a woman artist.

Georgia O'Keeffe's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Charcoal abstractions artwork
  Made in South Carolina — the drawings Stieglitz hung at 291 1915
• Petunia, No. 2 artwork
  Her first large-scale flower, exhibited in 1925 1924
• Black Iris artwork
  The painting critics keep reading as anatomy and she said was a flower 1926
• Radiator Building — Night, New York artwork
  From the skyscraper years at the Shelton Hotel 1927
• Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue artwork
  The desert bones, arranged as an American flag 1931
• Georgia O'Keeffe book
  Her own account, produced with Juan Hamilton — a bestseller 1976

• 1908 aged ~21 Wins the Chase still-life prize, then runs out of money for school Her father had gone bankrupt and her mother was seriously ill with tuberculosis.
• 1912 aged ~25 A summer class at the University of Virginia turns her toward abstraction Alon Bement taught her the composition principles of Arthur Wesley Dow.
• 1916 aged ~29 Stieglitz shows ten of her charcoal drawings at 291 He called them the purest and sincerest things that had come into the gallery in a long while.
• February 1921 aged 33 The nude photographs of her go on public view at the Anderson Galleries
• December 11, 1924 aged 37 Marries Alfred Stieglitz after six years of waiting on his divorce
• 1929 aged ~42 Goes to New Mexico for the first time and buys a Ford Model A She learned to drive that year and used it to get out into country nobody else was painting.
• 1946 aged ~59 The Museum of Modern Art gives her its first retrospective of a woman Stieglitz died of a stroke that July and she spent three years settling his estate.
• 1973 aged ~86 Hires Juan Hamilton, who will run her working life for 13 years
• March 6, 1986 aged 98 Dies at Santa Fe at 98

• Alfred Stieglitz 1864–1946
  Photographer and gallerist who established photography as fine art and promoted American modernists. married to
• Ansel Adams 1902–1984
  Landscape photographer whose Western images and zone system shaped American photographic practice. photographed her at Ghost Ranch
• Charles Lindbergh 1902–1974
  Aviator who made the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927. guest at Ghost Ranch
• Alice Walton b. 1949
  Daughter of Sam Walton and art patron who founded the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. bought her record-setting painting
• Mary Cassatt 1844–1926
  Impressionist painter and printmaker who depicted the intimate bonds between mothers and children. the American woman painter before her