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Georgia O’Keeffe Ignored Advice to Mimic Great European Masters. Her Goal Instead Was to Be a Great American Painter
The genius of her work was in painting things as she saw them through her own eyes. So when she surrounded herself with beauty, her work reflected it
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When Georgia O’Keeffe was an art student in New York City, during the 1907-8 school year, she showed one of her paintings to a male classmate. It featured two poplar trees with the sky shining between their clearly defined branches. Her classmate informed O’Keeffe that she should paint less crisply, using dots of red, blue and green. He took the canvas and painted right over her trees, demonstrating how it should be done. “He tried to explain to me about the Impressionists,” O’Keeffe later recalled. “I hadn’t heard of anything like that before—I didn’t understand it and I thought he had spoiled my painting.”
From then on, O’Keeffe didn’t let other people spoil her paintings. By the time she died, in 1986, she had a dazzlingly original legacy that spanned eight decades and an estate worth $90 million. She had her first exhibition of charcoals in 1916, and soon began a series of oil paintings that focused on the fine details of flowers. As she explained in an exhibition catalog, her goal was to make busy New Yorkers pay attention to the flowers by enlarging them on four-foot canvases. Her plan worked, though many viewers projected sexual meanings onto the alluring, inward-curving petals. O’Keeffe found this as irritating as the boy who had painted over her poplar trees: “When you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don’t.”
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O’Keeffe was born in Wisconsin in 1887 and moved to Virginia as a teenager. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, then at the Art Students League in New York. She taught at a school in South Carolina and a university in Texas, and in 1929, she took her first trip to the New Mexico desert. “This really isn’t like anything you ever saw—and no one who tells about it gives any idea of it,” she wrote that May to her husband, the influential photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. The skies were impossibly blue, the hills were red and the ground was covered with scrubby plants and primordial bones. She brought a barrel of those bones back to the house she and Stieglitz shared in Lake George, New York, and sat down to paint them.
As she worked, O’Keeffe thought about all the American places she knew. “I had driven across the country many times. I was quite excited over our country,” she later wrote. Yet all the male artists she knew wanted to live in Europe. “They talked so often of writing the Great American Novel—the Great American Play—the Great American Poetry. I am not sure that they aspired to the Great American Painting.”
Did you know? O’Keeffe was meticulous about her living environment.
- After moving into her adobe home in New Mexico, she gave away treasured seashells because they didn’t fit the aesthetic.
- As she wrote in her memoir, "Years later when I was living in Abiquiu, I built a large table top covered with glass for my shells. I got them out of the boxes into the daylight under the piece of glass. Each shell was a beautiful world in itself, but I was surprised to find that the shells did not fit in with the adobe house."
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The men in O’Keeffe’s circles were emulating French painters like Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet. Like the Impressionists, they strove to evoke the feeling of a scene by using loose brushstrokes, blurred edges and dabs of color. O’Keeffe did the opposite: She painted exactly what she saw in front of her, focusing so keenly on shape and color that real objects turned into abstractions. When she painted a cow skull, it became a winged white shape floating in a field of blue. “I thought to myself, ‘I’ll make it an American painting,’” she later wrote. To drive the point home, she added red stripes to the sides of the white-and-blue painting. “They will not think it great,” she wrote, anticipating the critics’ reaction, “but they will notice it.”
O’Keeffe had an important ally in her well-connected husband. Stieglitz had been the first to exhibit her work, and he shared her desire for a truly American approach to art. In 1929, when he opened a new gallery in Midtown Manhattan called An American Place, O’Keeffe’s paintings were among the first he displayed. Stieglitz also added to O’Keeffe’s allure by taking a series of dramatic black-and-white photo portraits of her. But it was New Mexico that established her as a true visionary.
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For more than 15 years, O’Keeffe divided her time between her East Coast life with her husband and an independent existence in the desert near Santa Fe. She lived at a property called Ghost Ranch, then bought a single-story adobe house in nearby Abiquiú. After Stieglitz died in 1946, she moved to New Mexico full time. With no one to answer to, she could sleep on her rooftop and play with perspective. She painted the nearby Pedernal mesa over and over, in its green and brown seasons and through the circular opening of a bone. In her 70s, she traveled through Italy, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia, and when she came home, she wanted to capture the vastness of the view from the airplane. She spent a summer working on a massive 8-by-24-foot painting called Sky Above Clouds IV, laboring in her garage from dawn till dusk while keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes.
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By the time Calvin Tomkins profiled O’Keeffe for the New Yorker in 1974, he was able to characterize her as “an important precursor of much contemporary American art.” She’d had a recent retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum, and galleries all over the world were interested in her work. But O’Keeffe’s life remained quiet and intimate. She helped the local Native American and Spanish-speaking community by building a gymnasium and improving the water system. During Tomkins’ visit, O’Keeffe asked her closest companion, a handsome 28-year-old potter named Juan Hamilton, to drive them to see some wild asters.
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O’Keeffe earned acclaim right up to the very end. In her 80s, she accepted honorary degrees from Harvard, Columbia and Mount Holyoke. The year she turned 90, she won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At 97, she was part of the first group to receive the National Medal of Arts. When she died in 1986, at the age of 98, her New York Times obituary praised her as an icon of late-in-life beauty: “weather-beaten, leathery skin wrinkled over high cheekbones and around a firm mouth that spoke fearlessly and tolerated no bores.” Her ashes were said to have been scattered on the Pedernal mesa.
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To O’Keeffe, being an American artist meant seeing the world through her own eyes. It meant setting aside labels and genres so she could simply capture what she saw—the lines, shapes and color fields that made up the inside of a flower, the hollow of a bone or the skyscape above the clouds. As she wrote, “I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.”
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This article is a selection from the Summer 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine