An American Icon

Abstract

Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most significant and intriguing artists of the twentieth century, known internationally for her boldly innovative art. Her distinct flowers, dramatic cityscapes, glowing landscapes, and images of bones against the stark desert sky are iconic and original contributions to American Modernism— a style of art that departed significantly from the traditions of the past. In a career spanning more than sixty years, she produced more than a thousand artworks. O’Keeffe’s artworks were first exhibited in New York in 1916 by Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and internationally known photographer. He was America’s leading advocate for modern art and eventually became O’Keeffe’s husband. After the famous Armory Show of 1913, an art exhibit that introduced radically different art to American audiences, Stieglitz’s primary interest became exhibiting the work of innovative American painters such as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Edward Steichen, and Max Weber. O’Keeffe moved to New York in 1918 and joined the efforts of these artists to create a distinctly American style of modern art, a search for what O’Keeffe called “the Great American Thing.” O’Keeffe became famous for her large-scale flower paintings, as well as her images of the towering skyscrapers of New York City and the landscape of New Mexico. Above all, she was a pioneer of abstraction, creating images that were inspired by close observation of her surroundings but were products of her insight and imagination rather than imitative representations of the visual world.