O'Keeffe, Georgia

O'Keeffe, Georgia (b Sun Prairie, Wis., 15 Nov. 1887; d Santa Fe, N. Mex., 6 Mar. 1986).
American painter. One of the pioneers of modernism in America, she was a member of the circle of Stieglitz, whom she met in 1916 and married in 1924. She is best known for her near-abstract paintings based on enlargements of flower and plant forms, works of great elegance and rhythmic vitality, whose sensuous forms are often sexually suggestive (Black Iris, 1926, Met. Mus., New York). In the 1920s she also painted townscapes of New York in a manner close to that of the Precisionists and landscapes done in broad, simple forms. From the 1930s she spent each winter in New Mexico and she settled there after Stieglitz's death in 1946, the desert landscape appearing frequently in her paintings (bleached animal bones were a favourite subject). She began to travel widely in the 1950s and many of her later paintings were inspired by views of the earth, sky, and clouds seen from an aeroplane. She became partially blind in 1971 and did little work thereafter. A museum dedicated to her opened in Santa Fe in 1997.