Georgia O’Keefe

Ladder to the Moon, 1958 original image
30-1/2 x 24"

Georgia O’Keeffe (1987-1986) was born on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and began receiving art lessons at an early age. She was educated at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906, and at the Art Students League in New York from 1907 to 1908. She learned the techniques of traditional realist paintings, but soon shifted direction in 1912 to abstraction, due in part to studying under Arthur Wesley Dow. O’Keeffe began her career as an art teacher, but after moving to New York City in 1918, where she met and eventually married Alfred Stieglitz, she was able to devote herself solely to her art. Stieglitz, an influential photographer and collector at the time, encouraged and promoted O’Keeffe’s art, and was the first to exhibit her work. In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to New Mexico, which later became her permanent home. O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of abstract flowers and of the landscapes of the Southwest are collected in many of the world’s leading art museums. Her work has been celebrated in retrospectives at the Art Institute of Chicago (1943) and at the Museum of Modern Art (1946), which was the Museum’s first retrospective of a female artist’s work. O’Keeffe died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of 98.

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