Georgia O'Keeffe Biography
Emily Hilyard
Intro 6th hr
Frakes
12/16/11
Georgia O’Keeffe Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most influential and beautiful artists in history. During the 1920s and beyond, she made her ground as a great modernist painter, gaining the attention of many artists and critics, even as a woman. In her time she established a new type of art with her style of colorful canvases filled with flowers and landscapes and skulls, and she has painted over 1,000 works dating from 1901 to 1984. But it isn’t just her art that is fascinating and inspiring, but the woman behind the paintbrush. Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887 in Sun Pirie, Wisconsin. She was born on a dairy farm and she was the second of seven. She decided she would become an artist at the young age of only ten, and her and her sister studied under Sara Mann, a local watercolorist. She even stayed with her aunt in Wisconsin to study with Mann while her parents and siblings moved to Virginia until 1903 when she joined them and completed High School at Chatham Episcopal Institute, a protestant school. She then studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906, continuing her art education at the Art Students League in New York. Many talented artists have attended the Art Students League, including Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, and William Merritt Chase – who O’Keeffe studied under while she was there. Chase was a flamboyant artist, who loved to teach his lessons outside, and he and Georgia got along and he taught her well. So well, that in 1908 she won the Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting, Mona Shehab. From the prize she won a scholarship to attend the League’s outdoor summer school in Lake George, NY. She had only begun and was already living a promising young artist’s life, going to parties and exhibitions, even attending a particular one of Rodin’s watercolors at the 291, a studio owned by her future husband, Afred Stieglitz. Although she had a
Intro 6th hr
Frakes
12/16/11
Georgia O’Keeffe Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most influential and beautiful artists in history. During the 1920s and beyond, she made her ground as a great modernist painter, gaining the attention of many artists and critics, even as a woman. In her time she established a new type of art with her style of colorful canvases filled with flowers and landscapes and skulls, and she has painted over 1,000 works dating from 1901 to 1984. But it isn’t just her art that is fascinating and inspiring, but the woman behind the paintbrush. Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887 in Sun Pirie, Wisconsin. She was born on a dairy farm and she was the second of seven. She decided she would become an artist at the young age of only ten, and her and her sister studied under Sara Mann, a local watercolorist. She even stayed with her aunt in Wisconsin to study with Mann while her parents and siblings moved to Virginia until 1903 when she joined them and completed High School at Chatham Episcopal Institute, a protestant school. She then studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906, continuing her art education at the Art Students League in New York. Many talented artists have attended the Art Students League, including Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, and William Merritt Chase – who O’Keeffe studied under while she was there. Chase was a flamboyant artist, who loved to teach his lessons outside, and he and Georgia got along and he taught her well. So well, that in 1908 she won the Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting, Mona Shehab. From the prize she won a scholarship to attend the League’s outdoor summer school in Lake George, NY. She had only begun and was already living a promising young artist’s life, going to parties and exhibitions, even attending a particular one of Rodin’s watercolors at the 291, a studio owned by her future husband, Afred Stieglitz. Although she had a