9781422276471

INTRODUCTION

E arly in 1915, when she was twenty-eight and teaching art in South Carolina, Georgia O’Keeffe decided to take stock of her career. According to her friend Anita Pollitzer, the artist hung all of her paint- ings around her room and proceeded to go through a monumental self-evaluation of her work. O’Keeffe by then had studied at several schools around the coun- try under notable teachers of the time. She concluded that each one of her paintings was derivative of these influences and so destroyed every piece. The destruction of O’Keeffe’s early work leaves a tantalizing mystery in her oeuvre, particularly since she explored in depth certain subjects and themes, returning to them again and again during her long and prolific career. Her early visits to Lake George, New York, in 1907, and to Amarillo, Texas, in 1912, were the genesis of long-standing obsessions with both the Lake George region and the Southwest, yet none of these early works survived. O’Keeffe’s love of nature was surely inspired by her childhood in Wisconsin. She was born on Novem- ber 15, 1887, in Sun Prairie, and grew up among the hundreds of acres of her family’s large dairy farm. As O’Keeffe said near the end of her career, “What’s important about painters is what part of the country they grow up in.” She called her homeland in the Midwest “. . . the normal, healthy part of America” and credits it as the foundation for the development of her art. O’Keeffe’s mother encouraged early art instruction for all of five of her daughters—just as she herself, and O’Keeffe’s grandmother before her, had received art training when they were young girls. In the nineteenth century, farm women in the area were expected to decorate their own furniture and walls with colorful, floral patterns. Yet, early on, O’Keeffe knew that she would devote her life to art, believing at first that she would be a “portraitist.” Most of the works that remain from her childhood and teens are portraits of family

O’Keeffe with Skull Painting U nknown photographer , 1931. The Bettmann Archive, New York.

In an effort to bring the New Mexico desert to the city, O’Keeffe sent barrels full of bones back to New York. She spoke of them as her treasures and created many of her bone paint- ings during the winter months in New York.

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