Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe was an American painter who lived from 1887 to 1986. She is one of the most famous artists in United States history. She is best known for her huge close-up paintings of flowers and her quiet desert pictures of New Mexico. Many people call her the "Mother of American Modernism," meaning she helped start a fresh, modern style of American art.

O'Keeffe grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. She decided she wanted to be an artist when she was about ten years old. She studied art in Chicago and New York, but she did not want to copy older European painters. She wanted to make something new. As a young teacher in Texas, she began drawing simple, flowing shapes in charcoal. A photographer named Alfred Stieglitz saw her drawings, showed them in his New York gallery, and later married her.

Starting in the 1920s, O'Keeffe began painting flowers up close and very large. A single poppy or iris might fill a canvas four feet wide. She wanted people to slow down and really look. "Nobody sees a flower, really," she once said, because flowers are usually so small and people are always in a hurry. By making them giant, she forced viewers to notice every curve and color.

Some critics tried to read hidden meanings into her flowers. O'Keeffe disagreed with them for the rest of her life. She said a flower was just a flower, painted the way she saw it. Art historians still debate what her paintings really mean.

In 1929, O'Keeffe took a trip to New Mexico and fell in love with the desert. The wide skies, red cliffs, and bleached animal bones became her favorite subjects. She drove out into the desert alone and painted for hours. She often picked up cow and sheep skulls she found in the sand and brought them home. In her paintings, a white skull floats against a blue sky like a strange, beautiful planet.

O'Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, after Stieglitz died. She lived in a small adobe house at a place called Ghost Ranch and painted the same hills over and over. She kept working into her 90s.

Today her paintings hang in museums around the world. There is a whole museum dedicated to her in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She showed American artists that they could find beauty in their own country, in a single flower or a sunbleached bone.