One of the most significant artists of the 20th century, Georgia O'Keeffe was born on a farm in Wisconsin in 1887 as the second of seven children. She received art lessons at home as a child, and her teachers recognized and encouraged her talent.
She went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where she learned traditional painting techniques. Everything changed for O'Keeffe when she was exposed to the works of Arthur Wesley Dow, a contemporary abstract painter, during a summer course at the University of Virginia.
Her own work took on a bolder, more abstracted form from this point forward, as she was
inspired by Dow's imaginative approach of making art that was grounded in personal expression and an interpretation of the natural world, rather than a direct representation of it. ▶ This watercolor (courtesy of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum) is one of the early examples of her experimenting with this approach in 1912.
She went on to create abstracted drawings in charcoal, and mailed several to a friend in New York City. Her friend showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, the art dealer and renowned photographer, who would eventually become O’Keeffe’s husband. He became the first to exhibit her work, in 1916.
◀ Early Abstraction, 1915, Charcoal on paper, 24 x 18 5/8 in., Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, M1997.189, (CR 50), Photography by Malcolm Varon
During her time in New York City in the 1920s, she became known as one of the most important and successful artists of her time, in large part for her renowned paintings of New York skyscrapers. During her time in New York, she made frequent summer trips to New Mexico, and eventually settled there permanently in 1949 after her husband's death.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Radiator Building—Night, New York, 1927, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas ▶
The period that O'Keeffe is perhaps most known for is her time in New Mexico, where her works were inspired by the stark landscape, local culture and adobe architecture, which converged with a growing public interest in seeing different sides of America outside of the New York-centric perspective. Using the area’s distinctive natural and architectural forms as subjects, she was further able to develop the abstracted modernist style she is renowned for.
▲ Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico/Out Back of Marie’s II, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alcalde, New Mexico, 1930, Credit: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, gift of The Burnett Foundation
Our limited collection of CHOKOLATINE is inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe's life and works. We created 4 varieties of hand-painted chocolates to correspond with 4 of her paintings in flavors cultivated from the artists' own New Mexico garden.
Sources: Britannica, The Georgia O'Keefe Museum