|
Paintings by Georgia O'Keefe (1887-1986).
Born near Sun
Prairie, Wisconsin,
O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades
before women had gained access to art training in America¶s colleges and
universities, and before any of its women artists were well known or highly
celebrated. Within a decade, she had distinguished herself as one of America's most
important modern artists, a position she maintained throughout her life. As a
result, O¶Keeffe not only carved out a significant place for women painters in
an area of the American art community that had been exclusive to and is still dominated
by men, but also she had become one of America¶s most celebrated cultural icons
well before her death at age 98 in 1986.
Her abstract imagery
of the 1910s and early 1920s is among the
most innovative of any work produced in the period by American artists. She
revolutionized the tradition of flower painting in the 1920s by making large-format
paintings of enlarged blossoms, presenting them close up as if seen through a
magnifying lens. And her depictions of New
York buildings,
most of which date from the same
decade, have been recognized as among the most compelling of any paintings of
the modern city. Beginning in 1929, when she first began working part of the
year in Northern
New Mexico — which she
made
her permanent home in 1949—O¶Keeffe depicted
subjects specific to that area. Through paintings of its unique landscape
configurations, adobe churches, cultural objects, and the bones and rocks she
collected from the desert floor, she ultimately laid claim to this area of the American
Southwest, which earlier had been celebrated primarily by male artists; the
area around where she worked and lived has become known as “O¶Keeffe Country." From Wikipedia.
|
