1. Portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe.

2. Blue Lines, No10, 1916.

Watercolor, 63.5 x 48.3 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

New York, NY.

Georgia O’Keeffe, in her ability to see and marvel at the tiniest detail of a flower or the vastness of the southwestern landscape, drew us in as well. The more she cultivated her isolation, the more she attracted the rest of the world. What is it that makes her legacy so powerful, even today? People recognize flowers, bones, buildings. But something in her paintings also shows us how to see. We stroll on the beach or hike a footpath and barely notice a delicate seashell or the subtle shades of a pebble; we kick aside a worn shingle. Driving through the desert we shade our eyes from the sun, blink, and miss the lone skull, signifying a life long since gone. Georgia embraced all these things and more, brought them into focus and forced us to make their acquaintance. Then she placed them in a context that stimulated our imagination. The remains of an elk’s skull hovering over the desert’s horizon, or the moon looking down on the hard line of a New York skyscraper briefly guide us into another world.

In her own life she showed women that it was possible to search out and find the best in themselves; easier today, not so easy when Georgia was young. Her later years serve as a role model for those of us who feel life is a downhill slide after the age of sixty. Well into her nineties, her eyesight failing, she still found ways to express what she saw and how it excited her.

To this day, her work is as bright, fresh and moving as it was nearly 100 years ago. Why? Because the paintings, although simple in their execution, hold a feeling of order, of being well thought out, a steadiness, yet also serve as a vehicle to help all of us see and examine the sensual delicacy of a flower, the starkness of a bleached skull and the electricity of a Western sunset.

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887 on a farm near the village of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the first daughter and second child of Francis and Ida Totto O’Keeffe. Georgia’s childhood was singularly uneventful. She spent her early and middle years in the large family home near Sun Prairie, an area of rolling hills and farmland.

In the evenings and on rainy days, her mother Ida O’Keeffe, believing in the importance of education, read to her children from books such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales or stories of the west. Ida had spent much of her childhood on a farm next to the O’Keeffe property. When her father, George, left the family to return to his native Hungary, Ida’s mother Isabel moved the children to Madison, Wisconsin where her children might have the opportunity for a formal education.

3. Special No32, 1914.

Pastel on paper, 35.5 x 49.5 cm. Private collection.

Ida enjoyed pursuing her intellectual interests, and as a young girl thought of becoming a doctor. But when she reached her late teens, Francis O’Keeffe, who remembered her as the attractive girl from the nearby farm, visited her regularly in Madison and eventually proposed marriage. For the next several years there was hardly a time when Ida was not pregnant or nursing. She was a farmer’s wife whose education had been cut short. She wanted more for her offspring and over the next several years clung to the belief that if her children had the advantage of an exposure to culture, and a well-rounded education, it might keep them from falling further down the social ladder. She also felt it was important for her daughters to have the skills needed to earn their own living should the need arise.

For nine years, Georgia walked to the one-room Town Hall schoolhouse, a short distance from her home. Perhaps because of the importance her mother had placed on learning, the thin, dark-haired Georgia with the alert brown eyes was known to her neighbors and teachers as a bright, inquisitive little girl.

4. Abstraction, 1916, 1979-1980.

White lacquered bronze, 25.7 x 12.7 x 12 cm.

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM.

5. Abstraction IX, 1916.

Charcoal on paper, 61.5 x 47.5 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

6. Nude Series XII, 1917.

Watercolor on paper, 30.5 x 45.7 cm.

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM.

Consistent with her desire for her children to have as many educational advantages as possible, Ida enrolled her daughters in drawing and painting classes in Sun Prairie during their elementary school years. The following year they took painting classes on Saturdays and were allowed to choose a picture to copy. Georgia remembers just two – one of Paharoah’s horses and another of large red roses. “It was the beginning with watercolor,” she later wrote.

Georgia attended the one-room school up until eighth grade. Georgia remembers saying, “I’m going to be an artist.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century few options were open to the woman seeking a career. She knew she could find work as a teacher, nurse, garment worker, governess, cook or housemaid. If she were ambitious or from an upper class family and could afford the education, the law and medical professions might let her in. As technology gained a foothold, she could be trained as a typist or telephone operator. In the world of art, a woman who attended a public art school went on to designing wallpaper, teaching, or commercial illustration. For most women, studying art was a stopgap pursuit to the ultimate goal – marriage.