Georgia O’KeeffeRediscovering the Light

Bonnie BrownFinal PresentationAmerican Moderns

Jimson Weed 2/Georgia O’Keeffe/1936

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.

O’Keeffe’s Constant Movement

No. 13 SpecialGeorgia O'Keeffe

1916/1917Charcoal on paper

Letter from Alfred Stieglitz to Georgia O’KeeffeOctober 1922

My Faraway OneBook CoverAuthor Sarah Greenough

Georgia O’Keeffe Alfred Stieglitz1918

Georgia O’Keeffe Alfred Stieglitz

1918

Black IrisGeorgia O’Keeffe1925

Slightly Open Clam ShellGeorgia O’Keeffe

1926 pastel on artistboard

Train at Night in the DesertGeorgia O’Keeffe1916 watercolor

Fall LeavesGeorgia O’Keeffe

1924

Lake George BarnsGeorgia O'Keeffe

1926 oil on canvas Lake George with CrowsGeorgia O’Keeffe 1921 oil on canvas

New York with MoonGeorgia O’Keeffe1925 oil on canvas

The Red Hills with SunGeorgia O’Keeffe1927 oil on canvas

“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

Cottonwoods near AbiquiuGeorgia O’Keeffe

1942

Grey TreeGeorgia O’Keeffe 1925

"I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.” --Georgia O'Keeffe.

Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait—Hands and BonesAlfred Stieglitz1930

“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

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

Blue and Green Music Georgia O’Keeffe1919-1921

“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

From the Faraway, NearbyGeorgia O’Keeffe1937

Ram's Head White HollyhockGeorgia O’Keeffe

1935

“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 SymbolsMarsden Hartley

1914 oil on canvas

My BackyardGeorgia O’Keeffe1937

Entrance to Georgia O’Keeffe Ranch1960

BibliographyPrimary Sources1. 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 Sources4. Balken, Debra. Dove/O'Keefe. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2009.5. Dickerman, Leah. Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925. New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art,

2012.6. Dilworth, Leah. Imagining Indians in the Southwest : persistent visions of a primitive past .

Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.7. Eldredge, Charles. Georgia O'Keeffe. New Haven, CT: Yale Publishing Company, 1993.8. Lynes, Barbara. O'Keefe, Stieglitz, and the Critics 1916-1929. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press,

1989.9. Pyne, Kathleen. Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O'Keefe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle.

Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2008.10. Weinberg, Jonathan. Ambition & Love in Modern American Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University,

2001.11. Wagner, Anne. Three Artists (Three Women). Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996.