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O'Keeffe's Centenary Celebration: The National Gallery Honors America's Most Famous Woman Artist
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13067 |
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THE ARTS
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11 / 1987 |
2,833 Words |
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Laura Coyle
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The name Georgia O'Keeffe conjures up various stock images: the young beauty who posed for the sensual photographs made by her lover and, later, husband, Alfred Stieglitz; the feisty woman in black who aged so magnificently on the desolate plains of New Mexico; the talented painter who created evocative canvases of enormous flowers and Southwestern landscapes. Her reputation is staked on her colorful biography and a few frequently reproduced masterpieces. However, O'Keeffe most likely thought the large body of her very personal and extraordinarily diverse works were her true legacy. Her public, too, should consider more carefully the subtle charcoals, brilliant watercolors, luscious pastels, and superb paintings she left us that are testaments to a life devoted to the creation of art.
With the exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986 opening this month, the National Gallery of Art is granting O'Keeffe's wish to present a great range of her best work--much of it rarely seen--in the East Building of the Gallery. Commemorating the hundredth birthday she nearly lived to see, this exhibition will allow visitors to share O'Keeffe's innovative, unique vision of the world and to begin to assess the extent and importance of her achievement.
Artistic Decision
Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the second of seven children. She attended the local school, then a convent school near Madison, and took painting lessons with her sisters. Later in her life, O'Keeffe recollected her decision to become an artist:
The year I was finishing eighth grade, I asked our washwoman's daughter what she was going to do when she grew up. She said she didn't know. I said very definitely--as if I had thought it all out and my mind was made up--"I am going to be an artist."
I don't really know where I got my artist idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by that time it was definitely settled in my mind.
O'Keeffe moved with her family to Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1903. She graduated from Chatham Episcopal Institute, where she received top honors in art. The principal of the school encouraged her to continue her art studies, and over the next few years she attended the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students' League in New York. By 1908, she was working in Chicago drawing advertisements for embroidery and lace. Frustrated with her conservative instructor and with her own lack of progress, she gave up the idea of becoming an artist.
At her sister's insistence, she resumed art classes in the summer of 1912 at the University of Virginia with Alon Bement, himself a student of the eminent artist and theorist Arthur Wesley Dow--a champion of modern art who based many of his teachings on Oriental aesthetics and methods. O'Keeffe was intrigued with what Bement taught. She wrote:
He had an idea that interested me. An idea that seemed to me to be of use to everyone--whether you think about it consciously or not--the idea of filling a space in a beautiful way. Where you have the windows and door in a house. How you address a letter and put on a stamp.
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