O'KEEFE GEORGIA (1887-1986)
Nationality : American
Activity: Painter
Price range: Between $ 100,000 and 2 million
Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Georgia 0'Keefe studied painting with William Chase, Vanderpoel and Arthur W. Dow before meeting in 1916 Alfred Stieglitz, a famous photographer and collector. At that time her work was based on a kind of analysis of natural rendering with the ambition of only keeping an emotional essence in it.
O'Keefe always flirted with abstraction and was surely a pioneer of what was called Minimal art, which blossomed during the 1960s, especially when she painted her “Blue lines” as soon as the year 1916, two years before Malevich produced his daring “White over white”.
Clinging to austerity and essential spiritualism, she tackled during the 1920s the flower theme in accepting the fact that the flat surface of the canvas, which in her view had as much importance as the subject represented, was considered primarily as a pretext as in her “Mountains” or “Bones” or her famous “Window on the Lake George” of 1929, a work exhaling purity.
Her role as a precursor of Minimal art was obvious but her work, notably the representation of gigantic flowers, also had some parenthood with a kind of instinctive Surrealism somewhat naive in style, felt in the landscapes and vegetation she painted in the region of New-Mexico.
O'Keefe took part in many exhibitions in the U.S and abroad and had some retrospective shows in Chicago in 1943 and in Fort Worth in 1966. Not much known in Europe, she was considered from the late 1950s in the U.S as one of the main founders of the modern American school of painting.
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