Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) Original Color Lithograph. Red Poppy No. VI, 1928. Poster for 1989 Exhibition at Reed College. Written on back: "08.23.08, broke glass. 01/03/10, replaced with plexiglass." 

Overall: 36 1/2 X 24 1/2 in. 

Sight: 35 3/4 X 23 3/4 in. 

#3823 . 

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born on November 15th, 1887 in a farmhouse in the town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents were dairy farmers, and by the age of 10 she had decided to become an artist. With her sisters Ida and Anita she received art instruction from local watercolorist Sara Mann. O’Keeffe attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin until 1902, when her family moved to the close-knit neighborhood of Peacock Hill in Williamsburg, Virginia. From 1905, when O’Keeffe began her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, until about 1920, she studied art or earned money as a commercial illustrator or a teacher to pay for further education. After a bout of typhoid fever she traveled to New York to study at the Art Students League under William Merritt Chase. Influenced by Arthur Wesley Dow, O’Keeffe began to develop her unique style beginning with her watercolors from her studies at the University of Virginia and more dramatically in charcoal drawings that led to total abstraction. Her education and career were regularly delayed and derailed by disease, both her own encounters with measles and the 1918 flu and her mother’s struggle with tuberculosis. In 1916 O’Keeffe taught and headed the art department at West Texas State Normal College, watching over her youngest sibling, Claudia, at her mother’s request. Alfred Stieglitz, a New York art dealer and photographer, held an exhibit of her works in 1917. She moved to the city in 1918 at his request and began working seriously as an artist. Over the next couple of years she taught and continued her studies at the Teachers College, Columbia University. She and Stieglitz developed a professional and personal relationship that led to their marriage on December 11th, 1924 after he was finally divorced from his first wife. O’Keeffe began to create many forms of abstract art in oils, including close-ups of flowers, such as the Red Canna paintings, that many found to represent vulvas, though she consistently denied that intention. The imputation of the depiction of women’s sexuality was also fueled by explicit and sensual photographs of O’Keeffe that Stieglitz had taken and exhibited. By the end of World War I she was already established as an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose work remained largely independent of major art movements, a trend that continued over her seventy-year career. Called the “Mother of American Modernism,” she gained international recognition for her meticulous paintings, which were often inspired by and related to places and environments in which she lived. She and Stieglitz lived together in New York until 1929 while O’Keeffe painted multiple cityscapes, until she began spending part of each year in the Southwest to overcome depression caused by his numerous affairs with other women. The New Mexico landscapes and images of animal skulls immediately began to dominate her work. In 1938 O’Keeffe received an honorary Doctorate from the College of William & Mary. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among her many awards were another honorary degree from Harvard University, the 1977 Presidential Medal of Freedom given by Gerald Ford, and the 1985 National Medal of Arts given by Ronald Reagan. In 1993 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, but spent much of her life disavowing the “foundational feminist” moniker that many bestowed upon her. After Stieglitz’s death in 1946 she lived in New Mexico for the rest of her life, mainly at her home studio Ghost Ranch, where she played host to countless celebrities, fellow artists, and politicians. By 1972 O’Keeffe had lost much of her eyesight due to macular degeneration, and in 1973 she hired a potter named John Bruce “Juan” Hamilton as a live-in assistant and caretaker. Hamilton taught O’Keeffe to work with clay, encouraged her to resume painting despite her deteriorating eyesight, and helped her write her autobiography in 1976, working with her for 13 years. She moved to Santa Fe for health reasons in 1984, where she died on March 6, 1986. Her family contested her will because codicils added to it in the 1980s had left most of her $65 million estate to Hamilton, and the case became a famous precedent in estate planning. A living legend since her 30s, a substantial part of her estate’s assets were transferred to the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, resulting in a museum opening in Santa Fe in 1997. Widely considered one of the best known female artists in history, her painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1 (1932) sold for $44,405,000 in 2014 at auction to Walmart heiress Alice Walton, the largest price paid for any painting by a female artist up to that time.