Georgia O'Keeffe
Black Cross with Stars and Blue, 1929
Towards the end of the 1920s, O'Keeffe began to move away from Stieglitz's dominance in her life. In 1929 she accepted an invitation to New Mexico, which opened up a new phase in her life as an artist. She explored different images by which to capture this desert country - the Spanish mission church of Ranchos de Taos, the black crosses of the Penitentes that are scattered through the region.
She found inspiration in the solitude and quiet of the desert, and from that time regularly spent part of each year in New Mexico. She painted the pink and red sand hills, and began a new series of still lives drawn from the bones and skulls which she found in the desert.
I have picked flowers where I found them - have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood... When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too... I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it
From the Faraway Nearby, 1937
In New York, her relationship with Stieglitz became increasingly tense, and O'Keeffe suffered a breakdown in 1933, and stopped painting for a full year. In 1934 she explored a new region of New Mexico, near the Chama river valley, and bought her own house in the small village of Abiquiu in 1940.
In 1946, the Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted a retrospective to O'Keeffe - the first time a woman artist had been given this recognition. The same hear Stieglitz, aged 82, suffered a heart attack and died shortly afterwards. O'Keeffe spent most of the next three years in New York, sorting his extensive art collection, before moving permanently to New Mexico in 1949.
From the 1940s, O'Keeffe adopted an increasingly minimalist style in her art. A significant series from the 1940s was the pelvis bones, presented in extreme close-up, and set against the New Mexico sky.
When I started painting the pelvis bones I was most interested in the holes in the bones - what I saw through them - particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky... They were most wonderful against the Blue - the Blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.
It was Yellow and Pink II, 1960
She also began a series based around the original adobe architecture of her New Mexico home, particularly the dark doorway in her patio wall, which remained one of her major motifs into the 1960s. At the start of the 1950s she travelled beyond the borders of America for the first time, visits which culminated in a three-month world tour in 1959. Views from the aircraft inspired a new series of semi-abstract works, depicting rivers from the air, and the sky above clouds.
Another major retrospective of O'Keeffe's art in 1970, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, marked her adoption as an 'icon' of American art. Critics saw her as an important fore-runner of contemporary developments in abstract expressionism and colour-field painting. She also became an idol for a new generation of feminists, as a model of a modern, independent and successful woman.
In 1971, her eyesight began to deteriorate. The young potter, Juan Hamilton, encouraged her to experiment with sculpture, and also to continue painting the colours and forms which she could see with her peripheral vision. He became her assistant, helping with the preparation of exhibitions, and also accompanying her on numerous trips. In 1984 her health became too poor to continue her travels, and she also left her home in Abiquiu to spend her final years with Hamilton's family in Sante Fe. She died on 6 March 1986, aged 98.
Georgia O'Keeffe, ca. 1960
Sources:
Britta Benke, O'Keeffe, Taschen 1995
Charles C. Eldredge, Georgia O'Keeffe: American and Modern, Yale 1993