from the Art Institute Chicago - Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” runs June 2 and runs through September 22
https://www.artic.edu/articles/1135/12-things-to-know-about-georgia-o-keeffe
#1
Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, to a family of dairy farmers, and by the age of 12 had decided to become an artist.
#2
She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906 but had to pause her education for a year to recuperate from typhoid fever.
#3
In 1907, she studied painting with William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in New York and eventually saw works by Rodin and Matisse at 291, the avant-garde gallery owned by photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
#4
In 1908, driven by financial necessity, she stopped painting and went to work as a commercial artist back in Chicago, designing lace and embroidery. Over the next decade she traveled and worked as an art teacher in Virginia, South Carolina, and Texas.
#5
In 1912, she studied drawing at the University of Virginia, which offered a nontraditional and more experimental approach to art developed in part by Arthur Wesley Dow, who had been influenced by Japanese prints.
#6
She returned to New York City in 1914 to study with Dow at Columbia University and became more and more familiar with European modernism and abstraction, seeing works by Picasso and Braque at Stieglitz’s 291.
#7
She moved back to New York in 1918 after Stieglitz created a solo show of some of her abstract charcoal drawings and watercolor landscapes at his gallery.
#8
Between 1918 and 1949, she lived primarily in Manhattan. She married Stieglitz in 1924, and they moved into the Shelton Hotel, then the world’s tallest residential building, which inspired her with new views of the cityscape.
#9
Around 1927, O’Keeffe began earning enough money from the sale of her paintings, including her New Yorks, to support herself as an artist. Stieglitz showed O’Keeffe’s work in his gallery every year until his death in 1946.
#10
Although she had spent most summers in Lake George in upstate New York, she traveled to New Mexico for the first time in 1929 and started to spend summers there, captivated by the landscape.
#11
In 1945, O’Keeffe set up a home and studio in Abiquiu near Santa Fe in New Mexico, and after settling Stieglitz’s estate in New York, she returned to New Mexico in 1949 and lived there until her death in 1986 at the age of 98.
#12
The Art Institute, which gave O’Keeffe her first museum retrospective in 1943 (purchasing Black Cross, New Mexico out of the show), received a major gift from the artist in 1949: the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, which included paintings, sculptures, drawings, watercolors, and photographs by artists other than O’Keeffe. Between 1949 and her death, she gifted her own works, followed by a bequest of five works.