A renowned American woman artist, Georgia O'Keeffe was among the first generation of modernists in this country. She translated a love of nature and a feeling for form into some of the most advanced paintings and drawings of the twentieth century.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Born outside of Madison, Wisconsin, into a family of farmers, O'Keeffe decided to be an artist at the age of ten. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905-1906 and, after her move to New York the following year, at the Art Students League under William Merritt Chase and Kenyon Cox. Chase was an important American Impressionist who encouraged O'Keeffe's love of landscape. She was more stylistically influenced, however, by Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University. Dow had studied with the post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin and greatly admired Japanese art. O'Keeffe was moved by Dow's orientalizing...