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For seven decades, Georgia O'Keeffe was a major figure in American art. She was a female artist
who refused to be pigeonholed, an artist who stayed true to her unique vision and remained
independent from all the shifting art trends of her time. Her paintings now loom so large
in the collective imagination, that it is easy to forget just how radical she was for her time.
In 1935, O'Keeffe produced this groundbreaking image. The artist was already known for her
series of sensuous flower paintings, but this was different. That year her life and the type
of work she created would drastically change. Yet only three years before she painted this, at
the height of her Fame, she had quit painting. Her life in New York City had fallen apart,
she suffered a series of nervous breakdowns, she found it impossible to create anything.
During the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 30s, a sense of
unease - and disillusion seeped through into art.
It was an era, where people were searching for symbols of strength and stability. Artists
who sought to define modern America appeared, demonstrating how creativity, experimentation
and revolutionary vision flourished during great times of uncertainty. This spirit was exemplified
by Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper, two artists who emerged as uniquely American painters. Hopper's
work took a more realistic and theatrical tone, while O'Keeffe's was more abstract - and infused
with magic surrealism. While Hopper was seen as a conformist, O'Keeffe was a rebel and a Trailblazer,
who looked at the world around her in an open, fearless way. She was an uncompromising artist
whose work was Inseparable from the way she lived her life - simple - clear - and yet poetic.
Interviewer: "Where do you suppose you got the idea of being an artist?" O'Keeffe: "I haven't the faintest idea. I often think about it, and wonder.
But I had it in my head when I was - well I couldn't have been 12 before - I had that idea".
It is said that even as a child O'Keeffe was a non-conformist - and had
an acute awareness of her image and style. While other girls in this school photograph
wear bouffant hairdos and floppy bows, her hair is austere and tightly pulled back.
She was born in 1887, on a dairy farm in Wisconsin to Second-Generation Americans.
The endless horizons of the Prairies fired her visual imagination and gave her a sense that
wide open spaces were HER territory. From a young age she wanted to be a painter, but her family were
not wealthy, and in late Victorian times, women had little to no access to an Arts education.
But she was determined and ambitious and won a place at the Art Institute of Chicago, and then the
Art Students League in New York where she learned the techniques of traditional painting. From 1911
to 1918 she was a high school art teacher, but at the age of 28 her life changed when
a friend sent some of her extraordinary charcoal abstractions to Alfred Stieglitz - a visionary who
helped establish Modern Art in America, and who would play a huge part in O'Keeffe's early success.
When they met in 1916, he was 52 and a famous internationally acclaimed photographer, with an
avant-garde Gallery in Manhattan - that showcased artists like Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso.
She on the other hand was 28, a school teacher and unknown. The most important person in the New York art world
was interested in the work of a high school teacher. He had already put her charcoal drawings on the wall
of his New York gallery. And gave O'Keeffe a solo show the following year.
They became romantically involved in 1918 and so started one of the great love affairs of the
early 20th century. Stieglitz was married with a child when he met O'Keeffe and their affair
caused huge turmoil in all of their lives. After his divorce they were married in 1924.
Stieglitz HAD plucked O'Keeffe from obscurity, but their entire marriage would be strained
by his infidelity and controlling behaviour,, and the reading of her work would be affected by
his insistence on promoting it as "erotically charged". She was no compliant artist though, and had a
clear and innate understanding of what she wanted her place in American art to be.
Stieglitz more than anyone had made photography a legitimate art form - and it was photography more
than anything else that inspired O'Keeffe. Her art changed significantly in the first few years the
two met, in part due to Stieglitz's photographs and her growing appreciation of the art of photography.
It is interesting to look at O'Keeffe's work through photography.
As a young artist she was fascinated by the way the photographers in Stieglitz's circle were
beginning to see the world in new radical ways, and she drew on photography's capacity for minimalism.
Her work uses the same formal techniques of modernist photography: Close-ups, cropping and
the distilling of visual Essence to a form or a shape, was at the centre of her painterly vision.
She knew of Steiglitz's experiments with snow and smoke, to form large fields of white. And the direct
influence can be seen when you compare O'Keefe's 1916 watercolour to Stieglitz's much earlier image.
The photographers Edward Weston and Paul Strand were huge influences. They honed in on objects,
getting so close that their details turned into abstract compositions. These photographs showed
O'Keeffe how the camera could portray the natural world, while simultaneously compressing, flattening,
and layering space - and in the process transforming objects into abstract forms.
When she came to paint her famous flowers in the early 1920s, O'Keeffe chose to zoom in and crop her
frame quite dramatically - and then she subverted scale by making them huge.
O'Keeffe: "The size it is, nobody would ever look at it. But if I enjoy the flower, I'm going to paint it big so they will HAVE to look at it!"
She took a stereotypically feminine subject matter but painted them in a way nobody
had painted them before, creating a decidedly new vocabulary. As far as she was concerned
the flower works were exploring the realm of abstraction, like so many male artists at the time.
But many saw her works as something else entirely - something sexual - which she denied.
O'Keeffe: "Well they were talking about themselves - not about me".
Starting early on in their relationship Stieglitz took over 300 nude photos of O'Keeffe, using
close-ups and Abstract compositions, which would help shape O'Keefe's own work, but also have the
detrimental effect of creating a sexualised public image of her, when what she desperately
wanted was to be known as a serious painter. When Stieglitz showed the nudes to the public
in a 1931 exhibition, he controversially showed them alongside her paintings. The juxtaposition
of her work, and these intimate portraits would lead critics to interpret her work as an "exposé
of female sexuality". It was a part of Stieglitz's marketing strategy and would lead to a sexual
interpretation of her work she would spend her entire career fighting - while at the same time Stieglitz promoted the idea.
O'Keeffe: "Listen - you try arguing with him and see where you get"
Wanting to distance herself from these interpretations, the painter decided to return to recognizable forms.
A 1929 visit to the New Mexico desert had proved a turning point for her.
It was in that otherworldly landscape that she formed a deep spiritual connection.
The New Mexico desert was where Georgia O'Keeffe's public Persona was created, which persists to this
day. She would be portrayed as a loner, a Hermit, and an artistic Puritan hiding out in the New
Mexico Badlands - except she wasn't. She had friends staying often, and she had a team of
servants. It was all a myth created by Stieglitz , a myth as essential to her Mystique as it is untrue.
Their relationship however was never a 'Svengali' one. It was a marriage of equals. But at the start
of her career, O'Keeffe was happy to defer to her more experienced husband, who manipulated the Press.
And for the time being at least, O'Keeffe went along with it. Then in 1929 shortly after her husband
openly began an affair, and she had been hospitalized for psychoneurosis, O'Keeffe broke away
from Stieglitz and took her first extended trip to New Mexico - an area that would be her salvation.
Things had been falling apart in her marriage for a while, so she was free in a certain way to think
of alternatives for herself, and one alternative was to carve out a new landscape to paint.
We can also see the change in style towards more figuration and Landscape - perhaps as a response
to the sexualisation of her more abstract work? O'Keeffe was tired of Stieglitz and his cronies and longed for her independence.
O'Keeffe: "He had to have an audience. He was that way - and they all
thought he was wonderful for a while - then after a while they got mad at him like children do you know?
Get mad at their father and leave". The West offered her much needed autonomy. She would spend more
and more time in New Mexico away from Stieglitz's Power base. While he pined for her, and wrote daily,
he had an aversion to the desert and remained in New York - with his mistress. Although he would
still be O'Keeffe's dealer and promoter, and they would be intellectually entwined, they became both
physically and romantically distant as a couple, but would remain married until his death in 1946.
"Ram's Head, White hollyhock - Hills" was completed in 1935. it is an oil painting on canvas. The
frame is original and was designed by O'Keefe. The change of scene in New Mexico provided a
break from her marriage, but also opened up new artistic opportunities to explore,
to depict American culture through the beauty and spirituality of its landscapes.
O'Keeffe was 47 at the time she painted it, and at a turning point in her life and her art.
She was also at the height of her creative powers. Soon after her arrival in New Mexico, she began
collecting animal skulls and bones - motifs to which she returned repeatedly throughout her career.
This painting marked a new direction for O'Keeffe's evolving modernist style when it was exhibited in
1936. The elements of landscape, flora and fauna, she had always used - now appear in a
composition that does away with Earthly logic. In something close to surrealism. The skulls became
a signature style for her, something no other artist was doing, and it shocked and Confused
the New York critics, who didn't know what to do with these skull paintings when she began
to show them - who thought maybe she was having some kind of religious experience. O'Keeffe's use
of animal bones is so familiar now, but there was an element of chance. As they are very
much connected to the severe drought in the 1930s when the Midwest was littered with animal skulls.
In Western Art, skulls had long been used as a symbol of mortality and the fragility of life, but for O'Keeffe it was simply about Aesthetics.
O'Keeffe: "It never occurred to me that they have anything to do with death. They were very lively".
She collected this cow's skull in New Mexico during the summer of 1930.
And created this painting using the skull, and then she painted the same skull against a background
of red, white, and blue. The question of whether there could even be such a thing as an "American
work of art" was a driving force for O'Keeffe and other artists of her generation, and painting the
red, white, and blue skull was a move calculated to establish herself as a uniquely "American Artist".
O'Keeffe: "So I thought I'll make my picture a red white and blue. I'll make it an American painting".
Despite O'Keeffe's rejection of a suggested meaning, the bleach skulls ARE evocative of a wider
American identity, and were seen at the time as a powerful allegory of nationhood and character,
when the depression, economic stability, and severe drought were threatening to undermine the nation.
New Deal financial help was just beginning to be passed by the government, aimed at promoting
economic recovery and there was hope on the horizon for the American people. This is reflected
in the painting. As dark heavy rain clouds suggest it is finally about to rain after a long drought.
Another element of Hope is the Hollyhock, known as a symbol of rebirth, because each bud produces
hundreds of seeds to spread its growth. This painting is both realistic and abstract, with
its focus on the shapes and forms of the ram skull and the hollyhocks, but also on the way
these elements are set against the backdrop of the hills, creating a sense of harmony and
balance. Like so much of her work in New Mexico this is a painting that is characterised by
simplified forms, bold colours, and a focus on nature. A work that is both intimate and Monumental.
Once again, O'Keeffe's use of close-up views, dramatic lighting, and bold graphic shapes - which create
a sense of depth and texture - are reminiscent of a photographic image. Ram's Head, white hollyhock -
Hills, marked a new and risky direction for O'Keeffe at the time, but is now rightly considered one of
her most iconic works and celebrated as an important work of American art.
At the age of 84, O'Keeffe started to go blind. At first, she painted from memory and Her Imagination,
then she hired assistants, and then she took up an entirely new medium - Ceramics. With the help of
Juan Hamilton, an artist who was 60 years younger than her, and with whom she formed an intimate
and controversial relationship. O'Keeffe was an ambitious artist who created a unique visual
language, that speaks to the beauty and complexity of the natural world. Nobody else was using colour
with such bravado. She forged her own path. And while other artists were looking to Europe for
influence, O'Keeffe focused on creating images that have become synonymous with the Great American
frontier. Her ability to distil the essence of natural forms into powerful abstractions
made her a pioneer of modernism, and her work has influenced generations of artists since.
She lived on until the age of 98, still creating and still learning right up until the very end.
O'Keeffe was an innovator, a rebel, and an icon.
O'Keeffe" "I can't say it any other way - I get this shape in my head. And sometimes I know what it comes from - and sometimes I don't"
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