The American painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) created a distinctive iconography that includes startling details of plant forms, bleached bones, and landscapes of the New Mexico desert--all rendered with pristine clarity.

Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Georgia O'Keeffe studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905) and the Art Students League in New York City (1907-1908). She worked briefly as a commercial artist in Chicago, and in 1912 she became interested in the principles of Oriental design. After working as a public school art supervisor in Amarillo, Texas (1912-1914), she attended art classes conducted by Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University. She instituted Dow's system of art education, based on recurring themes in Oriental art, in her teacher-training courses at West Texas State Normal College, where she served as department head (1916-1918).

In 1916 Alfred Stieglitz, the well-known New York photographer and proponent of modernism, exhibited some of Georgia O'Keeffe's abstract drawings...