Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her meticulous paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived.
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
291 is the commonly known name for an internationally famous art gallery that was located in Midtown Manhattan at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York City from 1905 to 1917. Originally called the "Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession", the gallery was established and managed by photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter. Dove used a wide range of media, sometimes in unconventional combinations, to produce his abstractions and his abstract landscapes. Me and the Moon from 1937 is a good example of an Arthur Dove abstract landscape and has been referred to as one of the culminating works of his career. Dove made a series of experimental collages in the 1920s. He also experimented with techniques, combining paints like hand mixed oil or tempera over a wax emulsion as exemplified in Dove's 1938 painting Tanks, in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Abraham Walkowitz was a Russian-American painter grouped in with early American Modernists working in the Modernist style. While not having attained the same level of fame as his contemporaries, Walkowitz' close relationship with the 291 Gallery and Alfred Stieglitz placed him at the center of the modernist movement. His early abstract cityscapes and collection of over 5,000 drawings of Isadora Duncan also remain significant art historical records.
Anita Lily Pollitzer was an American photographer and suffragist.
Katharine Nash Rhoades was an American painter, poet and illustrator born in New York City. She was also a feminist.
Marion Hasbrouck Beckett was an American painter.
Rebecca Salsbury James (1891–1968) was a self-taught American painter, born in London, England of American parents who were traveling with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. She settled in New York City, where she married photographer Paul Strand. Following her divorce from Strand, James moved to Taos, New Mexico where she fell in with a group that included Mabel Dodge Luhan, Dorothy Brett, and Frieda Lawrence. In 1937 she married William James, a businessman from Denver, Colorado who was then operating the Kit Carson Trading Company in Taos. She remained in Taos until her death in 1968.
Georgia O'Keeffe made a number of Red Canna paintings of the canna lily plant, first in watercolor, such as a red canna flower bouquet painted in 1915, but primarily abstract paintings of close-up images in oil. O'Keeffe said that she made the paintings to reflect the way she herself saw flowers, although others have called her depictions erotic, and compared them to female genitalia. O'Keeffe said they had misconstrued her intentions for doing her flower paintings: "Well – I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don't."
O’Keeffe at the University of Virginia, 1912–1914 is an exhibition of watercolors that Georgia O'Keeffe created over three summers in the early 20th century at the University of Virginia. Shown at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the exhibit opened November 4, 2016 and ran through September 10, 2017. A year later, on October 19, 2018, the exhibition opened at the Fralin Museum of Art on the grounds of the University of Virginia, where it remained on display until January 27, 2019.
Light Coming on the Plains is the name of three watercolor paintings made by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1917. They were made when O'Keeffe was teaching at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, Texas. They reflect the evolution of her work towards pure abstraction, and an early American modernist landscape. They were unique for their time. Compared to Sunrise that she painted one year earlier, the paintings were simpler and more abstract.
The early works of American artist Georgia O'Keeffe are those made before she was introduced to the principles of Arthur Wesley Dow in 1912.
Black Iris, formerly called Black Iris III, is a 1926 oil painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. Art historian Linda Nochlin interpreted Black Iris as a morphological metaphor for female genitalia. O'Keeffe rejected such interpretations in a 1939 text accompanying an exhibition of her work, in which she wrote: "Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don't." She attempted to do away with sexualized readings of her work by adding a lot of detail.
Blue is the name of four paintings that Georgia O'Keeffe made in 1916. It was one of the sets of watercolors that she made exploring a monochromatic palette with designs that were non-representational of specific objects. The paintings were made on 15+7⁄8-by-11-inch sheets of Japanese tissue of the gampi tree.
Georgia O'Keeffe created a series of paintings of skyscrapers in New York City between 1925 and 1929. They were made after O'Keeffe moved with her new husband into an apartment on the 30th floor of the Shelton Hotel, which gave her expansive views of all but the west side of the city. She expressed her appreciation of the city's early skyscrapers that were built by the end of the 1920s. One of her most notable works, which demonstrates her skill at depicting the buildings in the Precisionist style, is the Radiator Building—Night, New York, of the American Radiator Building.
Georgia O'Keeffe made a set of paintings of Palo Duro Canyon while working as a department head and art instructor at West Texas State Normal College. The vibrant paintings reflect her development as an Abstract Expressionist, influenced by Arthur Wesley Dow.
Georgia E. Engelhard Cromwell was an American mountaineer in the Canadian Rockies and the Selkirk and Purcell ranges. She was the first female climber to ascend many of the peaks in the Rockies and was the leading female amateur climber of her day. She was also an accomplished painter and photographer.
Summer Days is a 1936 oil painting by the American 20th-century artist Georgia O'Keeffe. It depicts a buck deer skull with large antlers juxtaposed with a vibrant assortment of wildflowers hovering below. The skull and flowers are suspended over a mountainous desert landscape occupying the lower part of the composition. Summer Days is among several landscape paintings featuring animal skulls and inspired by New Mexico desert O'Keeffe completed between 1934 and 1936.
Sky Above Clouds (1960–1977) is a series of eleven cloudscape paintings by the American modernist painter Georgia O'Keeffe, produced during her late period. The series of paintings is inspired by O'Keeffe's views from her airplane window during her frequent air travel in the 1950s and early 1960s when she flew around the world. The series begins in 1960 with Sky Above the Flat White Cloud II, the start of a minimalist cycle of six works, with O'Keeffe trying to replicate the view of a solid white cloud she saw while flying back to New Mexico. She would continue to work on this singular motif in Sky with Flat White Cloud, Clouds 5/ Yellow Horizon and Clouds, Sky with Moon, and Sky Above Clouds / Yellow Horizon and Clouds. A darker variation of this motif occurred in 1972, influenced by her battle with macular degeneration, resulting in The Beyond, her last, unassisted painting before losing her eyesight.
