Artist's Chronology
1887
November 15, 1887: Georgia Totto O'Keeffe is born to Francis Calyxtus
O'Keeffe and Ida (Totto) O'Keeffe near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She is the
second of seven children.
1898
At the age of eleven, O'Keeffe begins private drawing lessons with her two
younger sisters under the instruction of their primary school teacher, Sarah
Mann. Later that year, she begins watercolor lessons.
1899
O'Keeffe announces to a childhood friend, “I am going to be a painter.” She
later recalls: “I don't really know where I got my artist idea . . . I only
know that by that time it was definitely settled in my mind.”
1901
O'Keeffe begins receiving a formal art education at Sacred Heart Academy
boarding school in Madison, Wisconsin, approximately twenty miles from Sun
Prairie. Following a criticism of scale in one of her drawings, O'Keeffe
decides, “I would never have that happen again. I would never, never, draw
anything too small.”
1902
Every member in O'Keefe's family moves to Williamsburg, Virginia except
herself. She stays with her aunt in Madison, Wisconsin.
O'Keeffe's second year of high school proves to be momentous. She recalls it as "the first time my attention was called to the outline and color of any growing thing with the idea of drawing or painting it.”
1903
O'Keeffe joins her family in Williamsburg and enrolls as a boarding student
at Chatham Episcopal Institute in Chatham, Virginia. She majors in art.
1905
O'Keeffe graduates from high school with the intent of becoming an artist.
In the fall, O'Keeffe starts attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
1907
O'Keeffe attends the Art Students League in New York City and studies under
William Merritt Chase.
1908
O'Keeffe visits “291” to see the drawings of French artist, Auguste Rodin,
the first exhibition of Avant-garde European art in the United States.
After receiving the esteemed Chase Award, O'Keeffe attends Amitola, the Art Students League's outdoor school in Lake George, New York for the summer.
In the fall, she works as a freelance commercial artist for Little Dutch Girl Cleaner in Chicago.
1910
O'Keeffe moves to Charlottesville, Virginia to join her mother and
siblings, after contracting the measles.
1911
O'Keeffe takes her first teaching position at Chatham Episcopal Institute.
1912
During the summer, O'Keeffe attends a class for art teachers at the
University of Virginia taught by Professor Alon Bement from Teachers College,
Columbia University in New York City. He introduces her to the revolutionary
ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow, who also teaches at Columbia University. O'Keeffe
adapts her drawing practice to Dow's ideas of abstract and harmonious
compositions.
O'Keeffe accepts a position as the head of the art department in the Amarillo, Texas public school district (1912-1914).
1913
O'Keeffe begins a three year stint working summers as the teaching
assistant for Bement at the University of Virginia.
1914
O'Keeffe begins attending the classes of Dow at Teachers College, Columbia
University.
“This man had one dominating idea: to fill a space in a beautiful way— and that interested me.”
O'Keeffe teaches at Columbia College, South Carolina.
O'Keeffe joins the National Women's Party on behalf of women's suffrage and maintains her membership for many decades.
1915
February 4-25, 1915: O'Keeffe has
the first public showing of her artwork. Her painting Scarlet Sage is
included in the annual exhibition of the American Water Color Society at the
National Arts Club in New York City.
O'Keeffe acquires Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art (the first English translation was released in 1914).
O'Keeffe teaches art at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina.
1916
January 1, 1916: Anita Pollitzer, a friend of the artist, shows Stieglitz
O'Keeffe's abstract drawings. He exhibits ten charcoal drawings on May 23 at "291."
“Mr. Stieglitz: If you remember for a week—why you liked my charcoals that Anita Pollitzer showed you—and what they said to you—I would like to know if you want to tell me…. I ask because I wonder if I got over to anyone what I want to say.”
August: O'Keeffe moves to Canyon, Texas to become head of the art department at West Texas State Normal College. She and Stieglitz begin a personal correspondence.
No. 9 Special, 1915, exhibited at gallery “291” in 1916.
1917
April 3, 1917: O'Keeffe has her first one-woman show at “291”; she travels
to New York to see it. Her first sale is Train at Night in the Desert from
1916 ($400). Stieglitz begins his photographic portraiture of O'Keeffe.
O'Keeffe to Stieglitz, April 14, 1917: “I really never had a nicer surprise in my life than the [installation] photographs [that arrived] this morning….It was almost like going to 291— ”
May 25-June 1: O'Keeffe travels to New York City and meets Paul Strand and the Stieglitz circle.
August: O'Keeffe and her sister Claudia stop briefly in Santa Fe, New Mexico en route to Colorado. This is her first trip to the area.
1918
February: O'Keeffe moves to San Antonio, Texas to recover from a
respiratory illness.
June: O'Keeffe accepts Stieglitz's invitation to paint in New York City with his financial support for one year.
August: O'Keeffe makes her first visit to Stieglitz's family home in Lake George, a site that inspires many paintings and a meeting place for artists, writers, and friends of the Stieglitz family.
November 6, 1918: Upon her father's death, O'Keeffe laments: “Everything is very uncertain today. Papa is dead - . . . and as if to make things more queer - . . .the town is yelling and screaming and ringing and whistling over the Peace news – Ive [sic] just wondered if a day could be much worse.”
1919
At Lake George, O'Keeffe begins painting small-scale cannas with cropped
and magnified compositions.
1920
August 1920: O'Keeffe refurbishes a shed at Lake George to use as a studio.
1921
February 1921: The Anderson Galleries presents its first exhibition of
Stieglitz's intimate photographs of O'Keeffe.
1922
October 1922: Paul Rosenfeld publishes an article on O'Keeffe's upcoming
exhibition at Anderson Galleries in Vanity Fair.
1923
January 29, 1923: Stieglitz organizes the first annual solo exhibition of
O'Keeffe's artwork, and O'Keeffe's second solo exhibition ever, at Anderson
Galleries; this continues yearly until his death in 1946. The show includes
over one hundred artworks.
1924
March 1924: O'Keeffe and Stieglitz exhibit their work together at Anderson
Galleries (O'Keeffe's exhibition comprises fifty-one paintings; Stieglitz's
exhibition comprises sixty-one photographs).
November 1924: O'Keeffe and Stieglitz move into their first home, 35 East Fifty-eighth Street in New York City.
December 11, 1924: Stieglitz and O'Keeffe are married by a justice of the peace in Cliffside Park, New Jersey.
O'Keeffe begins to create large-scale flower paintings, a technique that would become her signature.
1925
March 9, 1925: Stieglitz's exhibition Seven Americans opens at
Anderson Galleries, including works of his own and those by Arthur Dove,
Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand and Georgia O'Keeffe.
November 1925: O'Keeffe and Stieglitz move into the Shelton Hotel, the first skyscraper residence in New York City. From her window perspective, she begins to paint images of New York cityscape. Her first is New York Street with Moon.
December 1925: Stieglitz opens the Intimate Gallery, a space dedicated to American Modernism. O'Keeffe exhibits her works in annual shows. She also supervises all gallery installations.
1926
February 1926: O'Keeffe addresses the National Women's Party convention in
Washington, DC. March 4, 1926: Constantin Brancusi praises O'Keeffe's
paintings, observing: “There is no imitation of Europe here; it is a force, a
liberating free force.”
1927
June 1 – September 1: The Brooklyn Museum of Art hosts its first exhibition
of O'Keeffe's art, Paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe.
July 1927: O'Keeffe undergoes surgery for breast cancer, inspiring a unique composition titled, Black Abstraction.
“I was on a stretcher in a large room, two nurses hovering over me, a very large bright skylight above me…. As the skylight became a small white dot in a black room, I lifted my left arm over my head…. A few weeks later all this became the Black Abstraction.”
1929
April-August 1929: O'Keeffe travels
to New Mexico with Rebecca Salsbury Strand (James), spending her first summer
in Taos, New Mexico at the home of Mabel Dodge Luhan, instead of Lake George.
This opens a new direction in her art and personal life.
December 13, 1929: Five of O'Keeffe's paintings are included in Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans, the second exhibition ever to be held at the recently-opened Museum of Modern Art.
1930
February-March: Paintings from New
Mexico are exhibited for the first time at An American Place gallery along with
O'Keeffe's urban and floral imagery.
June-September: O'Keeffe returns to Taos for a second summer as a guest of Dodge Luhan.
1931
April: O'Keeffe visits New Mexico for the third time and rents a cottage in
Alcalde at the H&M Ranch owned by Marie Tudor Garland; she begins to paint
skulls and bones as isolated objects in the tradition of still-life painting.
1932
Summer: O'Keeffe stays at Lake George with Stieglitz instead of going to
New Mexico.
August 1932: O'Keeffe travels in the Gaspé area of Canada (eastern Quebec) and is inspired to paint landscapes, barns and crosses.
1933
O'Keeffe is diagnosed with psychoneurosis and spends two months at Doctor's
Hospital in New York. She recuperates with friends in Bermuda and spends the
summer at Lake George.
1934
June: O'Keeffe returns to New Mexico for the first time since 1931 and
visits Ghost Ranch where she paints high desert land formations. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art purchases its first O'Keeffe painting,
1935
The Whitney Museum of American Art opens the exhibition Abstract
Painting in America, which includes five paintings by O'Keeffe.
O'Keeffe paints her first image combining bones, flowers, and the identifiable landscape of Ghost Ranch.
1936
April: O'Keeffe and Stieglitz move into an apartment on 405 East
Fifty-fourth Street in New York City.
O'Keeffe begins painting 150 miles west of the Ghost Ranch at a site she calls the “Black Place,” otherwise known as the Bisti Badlands in the Navajo Nation. She later recalled, “It became one of my favorite places to work.”
1937
O'Keeffe stays for the first time in an adobe house at Ghost Ranch owned by
Arthur Pack.
1938
February: Life magazine publishes a four-page spread, with
photographs by Ansel Adams, proclaiming, O'Keeffe as the “country's most
prosperous and talked-of painters.”
O'Keeffe receives an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, the first of many similar awards.
O'Keeffe travels to Yosemite National Park in California with Ansel Adams, David McAlpin, and Godfrey and Helen Rockefeller.
1939
February: The Dole Pineapple Company commissions O'Keeffe to travel to
Hawaii and produce pictures of pineapples. She later travels on her own to Maui
to paint landscapes.
April: O'Keeffe is honored as one of the twelve most accomplished women of the last fifty years in the New York World's Fair, Building the World of Tomorrow.
1940
October: O'Keeffe purchases her first property: Rancho de los Burros at
Ghost Ranch, a home and seven acres where she had stayed every summer since
1936.
1941
O'Keeffe takes the first of her many trips by air. “I am afraid to fly – but
after the plane takes off I enjoy what I see from the air and forget the
hazards.”
1943
The first retrospective of O'Keeffe's art, Georgia O'Keeffe's Paintings:
1915-1941, is held at The Art Institute of Chicago.
1944
O'Keeffe happens on another compositional technique that draws from her
previous use of bones. “I had a whole pile of bones in the patio waiting to be
painted, and then one day I just happened to hold one up— and there was the sky
through the hole. That was enough to start me.”
1945
After many years of negotiating, O'Keeffe purchases an abandoned hacienda
on three acres of land in Abiquiú, New Mexico from the Archdiocese of Santa
Fe. “When I first saw the Abiquiú house it was a ruin with an adobe wall
around the garden a good-sized patio with a long wall with a door on one side.
It took me ten years to get it-three more years to fix the house so I could
live in it-and after that the wall with a door was painted many times.” She
tasks Maria Chabot with the home's reconstruction.
1946
May 14, 1946: The Museum of Modern Art holds a retrospective of O'Keeffe's
paintings. It is the first solo show to honor a woman.
July 13: Alfred Stieglitz dies. O'Keeffe spends the majority of next two years in New York settling his estate.
1947
O'Keeffe helps organize a special exhibition of Stieglitz's collection at
the Museum of Modern Art traveling to the Art Institute of Chicago.
O'Keeffe visits Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school, in Scottsdale, Arizona.
1948
From the patio of her Abiquiú home, O'Keeffe paints the first abstractions
centered on the salita (little room) door.
1949
After leaving New York, O'Keeffe makes New Mexico her permanent home,
dividing her time between Abiquiú (winter and spring) and Ghost Ranch (summer
and fall).
O'Keeffe is elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
1951
O'Keeffe begins to travel internationally, first embarking to Mexico with
writer Spud Johnson. In Mexico City, she meets famed muralist Diego Rivera and
his wife and painter, Frida Kahlo, later traveling to the Yucatán with Rosa and
Miguel Covarrubias.
1952
Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery hosts O'Keeffe's first solo exhibition in
the space.
1953
O'Keeffe visits Europe for the first time, spends time in France, Germany,
and Spain.
February: A retrospective exhibition of O'Keeffe's art, Georgia O'Keeffe: Paintings, opens at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
1954
O'Keeffe returns to Spain for three months.
In the catalogue for Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Masters of Modern Art, at exhibition catalogue the MoMA. Alfred Barr, Jr. pronounces: “Georgia O'Keeffe has produced few abstract paintings but they are among the most memorable in American art…she has the gift of isolating and intensifying the thing seen, or destroys its scale, until it loses its identity in an ambiguous but always precise beauty.”
1956
O'Keeffe travels to Peru for three months where she is inspired to paint
landscapes and closely cropped paintings of the wall of in the city of Cusco.
1959
O'Keeffe makes the first of several trips around the world, visiting Japan,
Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Southeast Asia, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Israel, and
Rome. Of her trip, she observes: “By the time I get home I should have seen
enough to satisfy me for the rest of my life.” Afterward, she begins a series
of paintings based on her view from airplanes of the earth and sky.
1960
O'Keeffe embarks on another long term trip, traveling for six-weeks to
Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other destinations in Asia and the Pacific
Islands.
1961
At age 73, O'Keeffe rafts the Colorado River on a ten-day trip through Glen
Canyon with Todd Webb, Eliot Porter, and other friends from New Mexico.
1962
American Academy of Arts and Letters elects O'Keeffe as a member.
1963
O'Keeffe travels to Greece, Egypt, and the Near East.
1965
O'Keeffe creates the largest painting of her career in her garage at Ghost
Ranch: Sky Above the Clouds IV, 1965, 96 x 288 in.
1966
The Art Museum at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque presents the
first solo exhibition of O'Keeffe's work in her adopted state.
March: The Amon Carter Museum of Western Art in Fort Worth, Texas presents: Georgia O'Keeffe: An Exhibition of the Work of from 1915-1966.
1967
Vogue magazine publishes article about O'Keeffe describing her work as an
antecedent to Color Field Abstraction. Cecil Beaton provides photographs for
the spread, featuring O'Keeffe in a black kimono.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago awards O'Keeffe with an honorary doctorate.
1968
Life magazine features O'Keeffe on the cover, “Georgia O'Keeffe in
New Mexico: Stark Visions of a Pioneer Painter.”
1969
O'Keeffe is named a Benjamin Franklin Fellow by the Royal Society for the
Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, London.
O'Keeffe Travels to Austria.
1970
The National Institute of Arts and Letters awards O'Keeffe with the gold
medal in painting.
October: O'Keeffe installs her retrospective, Georgia O'Keeffe, at The Whitney Museum of American Art.
1971
Macular degeneration begins to affect O'Keeffe's central vision. She can
only see peripherally.
1972
O'Keeffe completes her last unassisted oil painting, The Beyond.
Afterward, she stops painting for four years.
1973
O'Keeffe meets the sculptor Juan Hamilton, who later becomes her friend,
assistant and representative.
1974
The Governor's Gallery at the New Mexico State Capitol exhibits O'Keeffe's
paintings of New Mexico in her second solo exhibition in the state.
O'Keeffe's agent Doris Bry edits Some Memories of Drawings, a book on her drawings from 1915-1963, published with O'Keeffe's words by the University of New Mexico Press.
O'Keeffe travels to Morocco.
1976
O'Keeffe begins painting again with encouragement from a friend.
O'Keeffe's will to create did not diminish with her eyesight, as she opined at ninety: “I can see what I want to paint. The thing that makes you want to create is still there.”
Viking Press publishes a monograph titled, Georgia O'Keeffe, featuring 108 reproductions and an autobiographical text.
O'Keeffe travels to Antigua in the Caribbean.
1977
President Gerald R. Ford presents O'Keeffe with the Medal of Freedom.
Perry Miller Adato's film, Georgia O'Keeffe is shown on National Public Television.
1978
Georgia O'Keeffe: a Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz opens at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. O'Keeffe writes the catalogue that includes images
not previously published.
1979
O'Keeffe travels to Costa Rica and Guatemala.
1980
With encouragement from Juan Hamilton, O'Keeffe begins to create clay pots.
Laurie Lisle publishes Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe.
1982
May: O'Keeffe Returns to Hawaii.
O'Keeffe creates her final abstract sculpture measuring 11-feet high, which is included in a show of American sculptors at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
1983
At age 96, O'Keeffe makes her last international trip to Costa Rica.
1984
O'Keeffe moves from Abiquiú to Santa Fe.
1985
President Ronald Reagan presents O'Keeffe with the National Medal of Arts.
1986
March 6, 1986: Georgia O'Keefe dies at St. Vincent's Hospital in Santa Fe.
Her ashes are scattered over the landscape of northern New Mexico.