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Georgia O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist, widely regarded as one of the greatest modernist painters of the 20th century. O'Keeffe was a major figure in American art for over 70 years. O'Keeffe is chiefly known for her blend of abstraction and pictorialism which she applied to flowers, animal bones and landscapes. Her stressed contours and subtle tonal transitions, which often transformed the subject into a powerful abstract image. Her large flower paintings are often interpreted as yonic symbols.

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O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents Francis Calyxtus O'Keeffe and Ida Totto O'Keeffe were dairy farmers. She was the first girl and the second of seven O'Keeffe children. She attended Town Hall School in Wisconsin and received art instruction from local watercolorist Sarah Mann. She attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin as a boarder between 1901 and 1902. In fall 1902 the O'Keeffes moved from Wisconsin to Williamsburg, Virginia, Georgia stayed in Wisconsin with her aunt and attended Madison High School, and joined her family in Willamsburg in 1903. She completed high school as a boarder at Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia, graduating in 1905.

In 1905 Georgia traveled to Chicago to study painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1907 she enrolled at the Art Students' League in New York City, where she studied with William Merritt Chase. In 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot). Her prize was a scholarship to attend the Leagues outdoor summer school at Lake George, New York. During her time in New York she became familiar with the gallery 291 owned by her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

In fall 1908 O'Keeffe returned to Chicago, where she worked as an illustrator, and in 1910 she is thought to have fallen ill with measles and moved home to Virginia. She stopped painting for a period but was inspired to paint again after attending the University of Virginia Summer School in 1912 where she was introduced to the cutting edge ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow during a course run by Alon Bement. Dow's teachings emphasised the creation of abstract art based on line, color, mass, repetition, and symmetry and strongly influences O'Keefe's teaching and her own creatitive process. O'Keeffe taught art and penmanship in the public schools in Amarillo, Texas in 1912 until 1914, and she spent her summers in Charlottesville working as Bement's teaching assistant up to 1916 where she also met and studied with Dow. In 1914 and 1915 she studied teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York, and in fall 1915 she started teaching at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina.

"Canyon with Crows, 1917. While living in Texas O'Keeffe painted over 50 watercolors of Palo Duro Canyon" Canyon with Crows, 1917. While living in Texas O'Keeffe painted over 50 watercolors of Palo Duro Canyon

During her time in Columbia O'Keeffe decided to pursue a career as a visual artist. She created series of abstract charcoal drawings and sent some of her drawings to her friend Anita Pollitzer, who passed them on to Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz and O'Keeffe began to correspond in 1916, Stieglitz was impressed by the drawings and began negotiations with O'Keeffe to display her work, she allowed him to exhibit 10 of the drawings, they were shown in a group exhibition that opened on June 23, 1916; more of her work is shown in an informal group show in August 1916. On April 3, 1917 Steiglitz held, Georgia O'Keeffe, her first one-person show at his gallery, exhibiting many of the watercolors she had produced while in Vermont.

While her career as an artist had begun, O'Keeffe continued to pursue her teaching career. She returned to teachers college in March 1916 to attend a course in the teaching methods of Arthur Wesley Dow as a prerequisite to assuming position at West Texas State Normal College, Canyon. In August 1916 she moved to Texas to take up a teaching position. She took leave from her teaching position in February 1918 and remained living in Texas. She received an invitation to move to New York to work from Steiglitz in May 1918, and she did so, arriving on June 10 1918.r clear="left"

When O'Keeffe arrived in New York City in 1918, Stieglitz arranged for O'Keeffe to move into his nieces unoccupied studio apartment. In July of that year Steiglitz left his wife Emmeline Obermeyer Stieglitz to live with O'Keeffe. At that time he also began to photograph O'Keeffe. Forty-five of his photographs, including numerous nudes modeled by O'Keeffe were exhibited in the Stieglitz retrospective exhibition held at The Anderson Galleries in February 1921. The images created a public sensation. In 1924, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz married, following the finalization of his divorce. O'Keeffe and Stieglitz spent their winters in Manhattan and their summers at the Stieglitz family house at Lake George in upstate New York.

During O'Keeffe's early years in New York she associated with many early American modernists including Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Paul Strand and Edward Steichen, their discussion at Steiglitz gallery influenced the direction of her work. Strand's photography was particularly influential, his landscapes and studies of pattern, shape and line geogograhical, abstracted from everyday objects by magnification were tools she adapted from his work for her own. From the time she arrived in New York she moved from charcoal and watercolor and began painting large canvases in oils and by the mid-1920s used large canvases for close-up objects.

During the 1920s O'Keeffe also produced a huge amount of landscapes and botanical studies during the annual trips to Lake George. She painted her first huge flower painting in 1924, . These images focus on the structure and the time of day.

With Stieglitz's connections in the arts community of New York, from 1923 he organized an O'Keeffe exhibition annually, O'Keeffe's work received a great deal of attention and commanded high prices, in 1928 six of her calla lily paintings sold for US$25,000, which was at the time the largest sum ever paid for a group of paintings by a living American artist.r clear="left"

In the summer of 1929 O'Keeffe went to New Mexico with Rebecca Strand. They went to Santa Fe and then on to Taos. Between 1929 and 1949 she traveled to New Mexico almost annually. During her second summer in New Mexico she began collecting and painting bones, and she painted many landscapes in New Mexico. Each year she returned to New York after painting in solitude, and Steiglitz organized exhibitions of her work at his gallery An American Place. In late 1932 O'Keeffe developed increasingly severe psychological symptoms and was hospitalized in early 1933, she did not paint again until January 1934. In August 1934 she first visited Ghost Ranch, near the village of Abiquiu in New Mexico, some of her most famous works are the landscapes she painted of Ghost Ranch.

In the late 1930's and 1940's O'Keeffe's reputation and popularity grew. She was given commissions and exhibitions in major galleries, in 1942 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York established a project to catalog and list her work, in 1943 she was given a one-woman retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago and in 1946 a one-woman exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first ever given by that museum to a woman. She was also awarded honorary degrees by numerous universities, the first by the College of William and Mary in 1938.

In 1946 Stieglitz died, O'Keeffe spent the next three years in New York settling his estate and in 1949 she moved to New Mexico permanently. Her works following Steiglitz death are regarded as majestic, but lacking the emotion that was was present in her earlier works. During the 1950s O'Keeffe produced a series of paintings featuring the wall of her adobe house in Abiquiu. Her 1958 painting about death , and following her first travels outside the United States she produced a large series of paintings of clouds , which were the views from airplane windows.

In 1962 she was elected to the 50 member American Academy of Arts and Letters. Toward the late 1960s, O'Keeffe's eyesight grew poor, such that by 1972 she could hardly see at all. O'Keeffe met potter Juan Hamilton in 1973 when he introduced himself to O'Keeffe and began doing household jobs for the artist. Hamilton eventually became O'Keeffe's very close companion. He assisted her with her final artworks, with the completion a book about her art called completed in 1976. The book and video, along with retrospective exhibitions revitalized interest in her work. She completed her final unassisted work in oil in 1972, and worked unassisted in watercolor and charcoal until 1978 and in graphite until 1984.

In 1984 O'Keeffe moved with Hamilton to his home in Santa Fe to be closer to medical facilities. Hamilton arranged for O'Keeffe to sign a codicil that left him virtually all of her property. She died at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Santa Fe on March 6, 1986. She was cremated and her ashes scattered at Ghost Ranch.

Following O'Keeffe's death her family contested her will and Hamilton was charged in New Mexico with using undue influence over Georgia O'Keeffe. The lawsuit was settled out of court and a not-for-profit foundation was established to oversee the disposition of her works to nonprofit organizations by 2006. As of May 2005 the foundations assets are to be donated to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, a museum established in Santa Fe in 1997 dedicated to perpetuating the artistic legacy of Georgia O'Keeffe.span

O'Keeffe was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, she received 10 honorary doctorates, and several plays and many more books have been written about her life and her work. The United States Postal Service honored O'Keeffe by issuing a stamp of (1927).

Permanent collections of O'Keeffe's work include those at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In 1999 the two volume written by curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe museum Barbara Buhler Lynes was published. The catalogue reproduces and describes 2,045 objects, made by O'Keeffe between 1901 and 1984. In 1993 a series of 28 watercolours said to be painted by O'Keeffe while in 1916 to 1918 while in Texas collectively known as "The Canyon Suite" were bought by Kansas banker and philanthropist R. Crosby Kemper Jr. for US$5.5 million from art dealer Gerald Peters. Kemper gave the works to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. The National Gallery of Art and the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation refused to include the works in a catalogue raisonné of the works of Georgia O'Keeffe, citing doubts about their authenticity. Questions about the authenticity of the suite created a huge scandal, and Peters bought the works back from the museum in 2001, many of the 28 watercolors are thought to be forgeries.

 The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation to Transfer Assets to Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Press Release. May 31, 2005.