Georgia O'Keeffe

By the age of twelve Georgia O'Keeffe was determined to become an artist. Beginning in 1907 she studied at the Art Students League in New York City under the Impressionist William Merritt Chase, and then later at Columbia University's Teachers College with the painter, printmaker, photographer, and art theoretician Arthur Wesley Dow. It was while taking classes with Dow in the mid-1910s that she began to experiment with abstraction, creating her first series of non-representational works that she called "Specials." O'Keeffe then applied her new approach to landscapes and figural studies and, by the end of the decade, to fruit and floral still lifes. At this time, her work came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz (whom she would marry in 1924); he displayed a series of her abstract drawings for the first time in an exhibition at his gallery 291 in 1916.

This text was adapted from Davis, et al., MFA Highlights: American Painting (Boston, 2003).