The Life and Work of Georgia O'Keeffe

             The twentieth century brought WWI, Hitler, and the Great Depression to the world. It was a time of turmoil and out of turmoil comes change. The art world would also be turned upside down and forever changed. Fauves, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Fantasy, Dada, Surrealism, and early Abstract art were some of the new art forms. One of the most renowned American painters of the twentieth century was a woman named Georgia O'Keeffe, known for her simplified shapes, organic forms, and content that included abstract images, flower paintings, bleached animal bones, landscapes of the desert, and sky cloud paintings.
             Georgia was born to a prosperous farming family in Sun Prairie Wisconsin, 1887. After high school she enrolled in classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, and two years later she attended the Art Students' League in New York City. Georgia studied with the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase. O'Keeffe was however repelled by the rigid academicism of her art instruction, and in 1909 she abandoned her studies to work as a commercial artist in Chicago.
             In 1912, Georgia attended art classes under the direction of Columbia University professor Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow was an admirer of Oriental art and a student of Post-Impressionism. Dow believed in purely decorative art. His only concern was "to fill a space in a beautiful way."
             Dow's teachings convinced Georgia that there were modes of expression more satisfying than academic realism. O'Keeffe's enthusiasm for painting was reawakened, and she moved to Texas to accept a position as an art teacher. It was in Texas, 1912 when Georgia began to create abstract compositions.
             During the first decades of the twentieth century, a number of artists including O'Keeffe moved toward abstraction as a visual language capable of signifying the central issues of the new modern era. Some artists experimented with painting nonrepresentational w...

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