A lover of wide open spaces, Georgia O’Keefe was born on the prairies of Wisconsin in 1887, and found her forever home in the deserts of New Mexico. Her commitment to her vision and her art translated into an oeuvre and lifestyle that have inspired and intrigued for decades. Often misinterpreted and misunderstood, her work, nevertheless, is massively loved. In 2014 her Jimson Weed / White Flower No. 1 sold for $44.4 million dollars, the highest price paid at auction for any female artist’s work at that time (though she rejected being classified as a ‘female’ artist). O’Keefe has reached mythical status. Her homes are sites of pilgrimage, and photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Andy Warhol, Richard Avedon, Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh, Bruce Weber, and Cecil Beaton have all sought to capture her iconic spirit on film.

Independent from a young age, at boarding school O’Keefe was already following her own lead, walking in nearby off-limits woods, and opting out of assignments she couldn’t be bothered to complete.

In 1905 she attended the Art Institute of Chicago, until typhoid forced an early drop out, and later studied at the Art Students League in New York, as well as at their summer program. The more she formally studied art though, the more disillusioned she became. So many others had already done, and were still doing the same thing. It seemed like it had all been done before.

O’Keefe began to work instead, illustrating lace patterns for commercial advertisers in Chicago. Convinced to give art another try, she attended a summer program at the University of Virginia, and it was here that she was brought into the orbit of Arthur Wesley Dow’s teachings. These espoused an individualistic aesthetic that appealed to her. His self-directed approach provided the necessary entry point that she needed to get back into making art. Describing Dow, O’Keefe said, “This man had one dominating idea: to fill a space in a beautiful way.” ( -The New Yorker). O’Keefe went on to study with Dow in New York, and brought his teachings on color and composition to the Texas and South Carolina schools where she ran the art programs, a professional chapter she loved.

In these outposts, O’Keefe’s desire for independence, and appetite for the wilderness grew. She spent time alone outdoors, and continued to explore her art, practicing distilling down emotions into abstract shapes. A friend sent a few of these sketches to the celebrated New York photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, without O’Keefe knowledge, and he proceeded to display them in his gallery, 291, also without her permission. When she found out, she demanded they be taken down, and this is how the two first met.

Stieglitz ended up hosting O’Keefe’s first solo show at 291 a year later, and what began as a kind of art patron relationship became something deeper. Twenty-five years separated them in age, and Stieglitz was already married, but the two melted into a lifelong love affair. Married in 1924, they lived together in New York’s Shelton Hotel, socializing in the heart of New York’s modern art scene. 

Early on in their marriage, O’Keefe established boundaries around her need to work. This meant taking time away from her husband, but it allowed her to prioritize her art, and ultimately this was something that he supported. She continued her explorations, moving into trying to capture the experience and visuals of synesthesia, by translating sounds into images.

Eventually, life in New York City became suffocating, and Stieglitz was having an affair, so she extended the space between them further. O’Keefe began taking solo trips out to New Mexico, where she was smitten with the colors of the ancient geology, the desert plants, and the expansive vistas. The silence, sunlight, and clarity were nourishing. It felt like freedom, and her commitment to herself was cemented. Stieglitz never visited, but they wrote each other every day, and what began as a bicoastal lifestyle, with O’Keefe returning to New York in the winters, became a permanent life in the desert when Stieglitz passed away. From 1949 onwards, O’Keefe’s summers and winters were split instead between Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, her two New Mexico homes.

Her first space in the desert was Rancho de los Burros, a remote pueblo revival style U-shaped adobe house on the property of the 21,000 acre Ghost Ranch in Rio Arriba County. The home was off grid, had no phone, was dependent on generators for electricity, and required long car rides to Santa Fe or Española to buy fresh fruits and vegetables. But it was hers, and she was free to wander the landscape, gathering inspiration for paintings that she worked on either right there in the wilderness, in the back of her car, or at her home studio later. 

Found objects famously decorated her interiors in curated assemblages of elegant stones, bones, and other treasures, each adding a bit of the mystery and beauty of the natural world to her living spaces. Of the bones she said, “[They] seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable...” ( -tate.org.uk)

Desiring a home where she could garden and grow her own food, she purchased the Abiquiú house, on three acres near the Rio Chama river basin in 1945. This was after years of trying to persuade the previous owners of the property, the Catholic Diocese, to sell. With the ability for a more self-sufficient and comfortable lifestyle, it became O’Keefe’s main house, and where she would live for the next forty years, nearly till the end of her life.

The 5,000 sf home was a total wreck when O’Keefe first acquired it, and it took years of renovations to make it habitable (work overseen by friend and assistant Maria Chabot). The result was a traditional hacienda style adobe house, but with modern upgrades. One of these, a huge wraparound panoramic window in the studio, would have been beyond the structural capabilities of the original design, but steel joists were added to support it. Skylights in that room add to the natural light and indoor outdoor feeling. 

The original cedar wood viga and latilla rafters and adobe walls of the house were preserved, while interiors became modern and minimalist. Luxury furnishings from the leading mid-century modern designers (many who were friends and acquaintances) filled the house. Pieces like an Alexander Calder mobile, Isamu Noguchi lamp, Ray and Charles Eames chair, Harry Bertoia Bird Chair, Le Corbusier chaise, Eero Saarinen coffee table, Florence Knoll Womb Chair, and Alexander Girard pillows were set alongside O’Keefe’s own plywood dining table and footstools. It was a blend of rustic countryside, and sleek mid-century modern.

One unrestored part of the house created a roofless patio that filled with the shifting light and shadows of each day.

And in the garden, almost an acre of terraced land grew vegetables and fruits, tended by a gardener, and irrigated by traditional acequia ditches, whose stone lined canals flooded plants with much needed water.  

Most famous for her stylized depictions of flowers, skulls, and bones, O’Keefe’s surreal artworks are both elevated and earthy. Dogged for years by the (largely male) assumption that her flowers represented female sexuality, she repeatedly set the record straight, saying, "When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they’re really thinking about their own affairs.” ( -christies.com). “Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small – we haven’t time – and to see takes time… So I said to myself – I’ll paint what I see – what the flower is to me, but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it – I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers… Well – I made you take time to look … and when you took time … 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.” ( - artblart.com) Stieglitz himself spoke of O’Keefe’s work through this lens, and in the 1970s feminists championed it for these reasons as well, unaware that they were ironically echoing patriarchal ideas. O’Keefe rebuffed it all. She was capturing the beauty of the natural world, and continuing her earlier explorations of distilling down feelings into form, taking what she saw, and turning it into what she felt. As she said, “Making your unknown known is the most important thing…,” ( -theguardian.com).

O’Keefe also captured New York’s high rises, including The Shelton Hotel where she lived with Stieglitz, and in these industrial-type landscapes, life and nature are still present in the light of the sun and the moon, and the breath of the air on the clouds.

Once she began traveling by air, O’Keefe also painted the clouds from above. 

And life around her New Mexico homes repeatedly featured in her artworks, including beloved landscapes like Cerro Pedernal, Plaza Blanca, and a certain door in her Abiquiu home that captured her in such a way, she felt compelled to paint it over and over again. “I’m always trying to paint that door – I never quite get it… It’s a curse the way I feel – I must continually go on with that door.” ( -theguardian.com).

O’Keefe’s work has been displayed in leading museums around the world, from the Museum of Modern Art, in their first retrospective of a female artist in 1946, again gendering her as an artist in a way that she rejected, to the Tate Modern, who conversely, specifically mounted their 2016 retrospective in order to offer O’Keefe and her work the opportunity for “multiple readings”. The director of exhibitions, Achim Borchardt-Hume explained, “O’Keeffe has been very much reduced to one particular body of work, which tends to be read in one particular way. Many of the white male artists across the 20th century have the privilege of being read on multiple levels, while others – be they women or artists from other parts of the world – tend to be reduced to one conservative reading. It’s high time that galleries and museums challenge this.” 

O’Keefe was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, the National Medal of Arts in 1985, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993, and was elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also received an honorary degree from Harvard University. As a cultural icon, she was featured in a 1968 LIFE Magazine cover story, referenced in a Joan Didion essay in 1979, and was commemorated on U.S. stamps in both 1996 and 2013. Her elegant minimalist style of dress has also inspired fashion, including Dior, who’s head designer for their 2017 Cruise Collection, Maria Grazia Chiuri, said of the artist, “I like to think of Georgia O’Keeffe as this shamanistic woman, as she would go around in the desert in a kimono-like coat…” ( -net-a-porter.com). 

O’Keefe’s uncompromising commitment to herself, in both her art and her lifestyle, has made her a lighthouse for many, and though she passed away in 1986, at the age of 98, her legacy and influence continue. Her ashes were scattered around Cerro Pedernal, her beloved New Mexico landscape, allowing the dust of her bones to merge completely with that of the desert.

“I wish you could see what I see out the window – the earth pink and yellow cliffs to the north – the full pale moon about to go down in an early morning lavender sky ... pink and purple hills in front and the scrubby fine dull green cedars – and a feeling of much space – It is a very beautiful world.” ( - The Guardian / theguardian.com).

Photos courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz, Bruce Weber, the Bruce Weber & Nan Bush Collection, Annie Liebovitz, Richard Avedon, Ansel Adams, anseladams.com, Andy Warhol, Mario Testino, Yousuf Karsh, John Loengard, Philippe Halsman, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, okeeffemuseum.org, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org, the Whitney Museum of American Art, whitney.org, Hauser & Wirth, hauserwirth.com, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, museothyssen.org, the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, brooklynmuseum.org, the LIFE Picture Collection, life.com, theguardian.com,  christies.com, Vogue, vogue.com, Elle, elle.com, wmagazine.com, George F. Mobley, Gavin Ashworth, newrepublic.com, brittanica.com, Magnum Photos, magnumphotos.com, Art Resource Scala, Florence, DACS London, Leigh B. Block, Artists Rights Society, New York, National Geographic Creative, pinterest.com, museemagazine.com, blog.artsper.com, holdenluntz.com,  artsy.net, arthur.io, artblart.com, dailyartmagazine.com, Justin Chung, readcereal.com, openhouse-magazine.com, landscapes-revealed.net, archeyes.com, messynessychic.com, recreosanmiguel.com, news.wttw.com, mail.latitude65.ca, and hanneorla.