CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF AN ARTIST
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
(1887–1986)
Born in 1887, Georgia O’Keeffe grew up with the world preparing for the turn of the 20th century. With a new century also came monumental changes in society, and O’Keeffe’s art undoubtedly reflects these changes as well. Her art reflects each of the cities that she’s lived in, both physically and based on their circumstances. These cities were primarily located in America and she only traveled abroad in her mid-sixties, after her artistic style had developed.
Having found her affinity for art since her youth, she took on studying art at a young age and by 1905, O’Keeffe had moved from her hometown in Wisconsin to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then, in 1908, O’Keeffe moved to New York City, where she was given the opportunity to study European styles of art, which had been foreign to her until then. During that time, it was common for European artists to look towards Asia and Africa for artistic inspiration and for American artists to look up to Europe for ideas.
This exchange of artistic styles allowed artists from all over the world to play around and merge them together.
Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918
O’Keeffe, using the context of Transcendentalist readings, she studied Oriental thinking and art, primarily Chinese and Japanese styles, under the guidance of Alon Bement at the University of Virginia in 1912, who taught Arthur Wesley Dow’s adaptation of the techniques in Japanese art. From that course, O’Keeffe was particularly interested in Dow's oriental theory of design, from which she derived the techniques of balancing light and dark, as well as how to use shape and color to make a flat pattern on a surface. In terms of branching out to European art, when she saw the work of Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse, both of whom are French, she was exposed to art with many different techniques than the traditional American ones she learned in art school. Eventually, she started to incorporate these European styles into her work, though that only started to become evident in the mid-1910s.
O’Keeffe’s first stay in New York was short, having left for the South two years later, but she returned to the city in May of 1916, where her work was exhibited for the first time by Alfred Stieglitz, who eventually became her husband. Stieglitz, a photographer, was O’Keeffe’s mentor and often encouraged her to pursue her artistic interests outside of traditional teaching. In 1917, O’Keeffe started to explore different interests in art and even branched into pieces with nudity, portraying the female body with gentle sensuality using blended watercolor that was not often seen in the era.
During this period, World War I was raging in Europe and the Progressive Era was coming to an end in America. While the war did not appear to influence her work directly, though she did use much darker tones in a lot of her art during the time, what came out of the end of the war did. In the 1920s, O’Keeffe became increasingly interested in portraying cityscapes and skyscrapers, which had started being popularized in metropolises in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The increase in skyscrapers was particularly seen in cities such as New York and Chicago. After the end of the First World War, technology boomed and the economy flourished from it. This prosperity of the 1920s became known as the “Roaring Twenties” and it bled into artistic movements as well.
The White Calico Flower, 1931
Like many other artists of the time, it was evident how much O’Keeffe’s artistry was influenced by the advancement of the camera, especially since her partner was a photographer. By the 1920s, cameras were designed to be more compact and portable, at least compared to their predecessors in the 1800s, so photography became much more accessible and influential. In the 1920s, O’Keeffe’s interests shifted to botanical subjects, and her style in painting these magnified, cut-off images of plants reflected the work of photographers Paul Strand and Edward Steichen. This fascination with botanical subjects allowed her to produce Black Iris III and the accompanying pieces in the series. While these paintings reflected a real subject, O’Keeffe added her own abstraction and style of coloring to make the lines appear feathery.
O’Keeffe’s paintings of cityscapes and skyscrapers drew inspiration from Precisionism, which is a movement developed in America from Cubism, as well as the works of Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. Those who participated in this movement recognized post-war industrialization and the wonders of technology. Precisionists tended to focus on the hard edges and smooth surfaces of their subjects, creating clean geometric shapes to accentuate the sleekness of modern technology. Many of these Precisionsists, O’Keeffe included, used photographers of the time as examples for their work. These photographers portrayed their subjects with an emphasis on their abstract shape by using lighting and sharp focus. These elements can be seen in many of the paintings in O’Keeffe’s New York series, such as in The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. (1926), in which she portrays Shelton Hotel with the Sun shining from behind it. In this painting, O’Keeffe does not focus on the details of the hotel, but rather its general shape and uses atmospheric perspective to create depth in the painting. The painting almost feels like it is mimicking a scene through a camera lens. O’Keeffe continues to use this style of painting throughout the rest of the 1920s and 1930s.
The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., 1926
© 2018 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Despite being a piece developed with oil on canvas, Black Iris III actually resembles styles of watercolor instead. This style of focused botanical subjects became popularized by other photographers after O’Keeffe’s creations were made.
By 1926, O’Keeffe had returned to her early styles of oil painting, which were primarily abstraction-based. Her earlier paintings did not specifically have a subject, but in the 1920s and 1930s, she started using tangible subjects in her art, while putting personal twists on them. Besides plants, O’Keeffe used architecture as her subject while maintaining her abstract style. Her pieces of barns, like much of her previous work, could be seen reflected in preceding photography of a similar style. During this time, O’Keeffe primarily lived in New Mexico and used subjects like New Mexican churches as her subjects, like Ranchos Church (1930). She also started to use animal skeletons and landscapes as her subjects. Much of her regional paintings also happened to coincide with how many American Modernists artists hoped to draw a unique view of America.
Having stayed in America for the entirety of her life, she finally took to traveling internationally in the 1950s. As she visited places like
Summer Days, 1936
Peru and Japan, she also drew inspiration from them and detailed them in her work. O’Keeffe eventually resettled in New Mexico and continued to paint, despite her deteriorating eyesight, until her death at the age of 98 in 1986.
Ultimately, Georgia O’Keeffe is an artist that draws from the world around her, using the changing times to move forward with her work. As the world changed, art movements and styles changed, and O’Keeffe’s work undoubtedly reflects them. Her artistic relationship with photography, especially as cameras advanced technologically, also demonstrates her changing with the times.
Citations:
“About Georgia O'Keeffe.” The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, 31 May 2022, https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/about-georgia-okeeffe/.
Chave, Anna C. “‘Who Will Paint New York?’: ‘The World’s New Art Center’ and the Skyscraper Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe.” American Art, vol. 5, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 87–107. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3109032. Accessed 10 Oct. 2022.
Donagh, Rita. “Georgia O’Keeffe in Context.” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 3, no. 1, 1980, pp. 44–50. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360178. Accessed 9 Oct. 2022.
“Georgia O'Keeffe.” Georgia O'Keeffe | Whitney Museum of American Art, https://whitney.org/artists/962.
“Georgia O’Keeffe.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 42, no. 2, 1984, pp. 3–64. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3258762. Accessed 9 Oct. 2022.
Lisle, Laurie. “Viewing O’Keeffe.” Journal of the Southwest, vol. 30, no. 2, 1988, pp. 254–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40169606. Accessed 10 Oct. 2022.
Murphy, Jessica. “Precisionism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/prec/hd_prec.htm (June 2007)
“The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.” The Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas, 1 Jan. 1970, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/104031/the-shelton-with-sunspots-n-y.
GALLERY OF GEORGIA O'KEEFFE ART AT THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
