Brief introduction of O'Keefe

Georgia O'Keefe is one of the most legendary American artists in the 20th century. She is famous for her close-up paintings of flowers that give people sensual enjoyment.

Chinese name: Georgia O'Keefe.

George keefe

Nationality: USA

Date of birth: 1887

Date of death: 1986

Occupation: artist

Masterpieces: Black Rock, Blue Sky and White Clouds, Sky on Clouds.

brief introduction

George O'Keefe (1887- 1986) is the greatest American female artist in the 20th century. It rose in new york in the 1920s, and 1986 died in New Mexico. He painted for more than eighty years. Since I went to live in the wilderness of New Mexico alone, I have not cared about the changes in the world, but only focused on painting and experiencing life. Although she is out of fashion, her cottage in Santa Fe has become a pilgrimage site for countless O'Keefe worshippers.

The life of the character

/kloc-when she was 0/2 years old, O'Keefe was sent to Sacred Heart School in Dominica, where the studio and the nearby Woods and lakes were her frequent places. The female teacher who taught the painting class asked her to observe the details of the Indian star orchid, which aroused her lasting interest in the details of flowers. Ten years later, O'Keefe created a series of oil paintings showing the parts of flowers, which went beyond the surface truth and went deep into the essence of flowers. This observation and appreciation of natural details that people turn a blind eye to began when she first became an artist.

1905, O'Keefe came to art institute of chicago for further study, but the rigidity and dullness of university teaching depressed her, and she left soon. 1907, she came to new york for the first time and joined the Art Students' Union of new york. At the turn of the century, new york is a bustling metropolis, where courses, city life and students' travel have brought her an unprecedented artistic atmosphere. The courses she studied in the Art League were much more radical than what she had accepted before. Chase, an American impressionist painter, taught here, which enabled O'Keefe to receive Sargent-style technical training.

At that time, there was a famous 29 1 gallery in new york, which often held exhibitions of modern European painters and introduced avant-garde painters such as Picasso to American audiences. Its owner is Stiglitz, a separatist photographer, surrounded by a large number of modern American painters such as Marin, Dewey and haviland. 1908, when Rodin's sketch exhibition was held in 29 1 gallery, O'Keefe was deeply moved by his abstract and simple techniques.

1in the autumn of 908, O'Keefe dropped out of school due to financial difficulties and went to Chicago to engage in commercial painting for two years. After that, she attended the summer art class of Professor Allen Bementer. Under the influence of Bementer, O'Keefe accepted escher's artistic thought. Dolph's composition summarizes the decorative factors of post-impressionism and oriental art, emphasizes the combination of design and human instinct, and reveals an American way of color and picture composition. This book aroused O'Keefe's interest in oriental art, especially the method of plane composition, simplification of form, symbolic and religious application of color and modeling, which had a far-reaching impact on O'Keefe's life.

The second important influence on O'Keefe is Kandinsky. In On Artistic Spirit, he proposed that emotion is an extension of the artist's spirit and soul, and color is a metaphor of emotion.

During the period of 19 13- 18, O'Keefe directly practiced the theories of doffer and kandinsky. Her watercolor painting Tent Door at Night, written in 19 13, consists of several divided triangles, emphasizing the application of natural geometry in painting, with simple and strong colors.

19 12, O'Keefe came to Luo Ranch Central School in ammari, Texas as an art teacher. Here, the grandeur and mystery of the great plains and canyons make her art closer to nature. Later, she got a position at the Wasteland School in South Conerida, and she went to Texas and South Conerida to teach and paint. She walks a long way along the wasteland every day and picks flowers in the wild. She expressed her natural form and introverted feelings from the plain starry sky with simple and frank lines and rhythms. She sent her work to a friend in new york. These works were sent to the gallery of Stie Gerriets. Stie Gerriets was moved by O'Keefe's artistic talent and held an exhibition for her in 29 1 gallery in the spring of17. From then on, O'Keefe was known to the public.

O'Keefe's artistic inspiration in this period mainly comes from the natural scenery of the West Texas Grand Canyon. Everything in the Grand Canyon, especially the night sky and plains, is intoxicating. She often walks along the cliff for a long time, watching the dim light on the land reflect the vast desert and sky like the ocean. She captures the changing colors of the sky, and she uses red, orange and blue ribbons to represent the light waves in the universe. These lights from the plains and the sky have become a theme that she will never get tired of in the future.

O'Keefe's subsequent art and life are also closely related to Stie Gerriets: since her first solo exhibition was held in 29 1 year, they have established correspondence. 19 18 summer, Stie Gerriets invited O'Keefe to new york and provided her with a studio. O'Keefe paints, and Stie Gerriets takes pictures of her. Their relationship became closer and closer, and finally, his wife kicked her husband out of the house. This change turned them from friends to lovers. 1924, Stie Gerriets officially divorced and married O'Keefe. Stie Gerriets's love quickly changed O'Keefe's life. He aroused O'Keefe's love and spiritual awakening, and made her more confident and elegant. At the same time, Stie Gerriets introduced her to modernist painters and other avant-garde figures in literary and art circles.

19 19- 1929 is the most productive and abundant period in O'Keefe's life. Since the 1920s, she has been holding solo exhibitions, and Stie Gerriets has been taking portraits of her. Under his lens, O'Keefe's simple, rebellious appearance and eccentric personality made her the first female painter to attract public attention with her appearance, life and art. She appeared on the cover of Life magazine twice, which caused numerous critics to comment on her.

This decade is also a turning point of O'Keefe's art. On the basis of early sketch and watercolor abstract exploration, she combined the figurative feeling, and the picture became gentle and restrained. She kept the method of getting patterns and inspiration from nature. One of her main goals is Lake George. Stie Gerriets's family has a holiday apartment on Lake George. After Stie Gerriets left home, O'Keefe spent many happy hours with him by the lake. She painted many works with the theme of Lake George in her life, and Lake George in 1923 is her masterpiece in this period. The water, earth and sky in the picture are represented concisely, the colors are restored to blue and brown, the shape of the ground is sharp and dignified with an abstract triangle, and only the sky is changeable and full of vitality.

During this period, the theme of flowers also became a microcosm of O'Keefe's artistic growth. Her favorite theme is canna. Her flower works do not show details according to the tradition of realistic still life, and there is no normal shadow, but give the paintings their own life. This kind of life performance is constantly changing from 19 18 to 1938: the Canna series gradually expands to the central Canna image, occupying the edge of the picture. 1923' s red canna is an extreme: poetic, dancing petals are abstract, and purple petals are located in the center of the light in the center of the picture, showing the loneliness and mystery of flowers.

Flowers in O'Keefe often emphasize a certain form and color. In "The Red Poppy" from 65438 to 0927, the intense China red petals flew out of the picture and pounced on the audience, bursting into powerful energy in the tiny picture. In Black Iris, which brought her great reputation, the most attractive thing is the solemnity of the upward bending flower: the audience follows the painter's eyes into the center of the flower, a tightly curled inner petal, and the flowing diagonal structure seems to emanate from the center of the diamond, showing a fragile beauty compared with the bright and strong canna.

The evaluation of O'Keefe's works has been an endless debate, firstly because O'Keefe is a female painter, and secondly, more importantly, because her shining, dedicated, wonderful and fragile flower details have aroused many audiences' fantasies about sex. Some people think that her flowers suggest human genitals, and one critic even thinks that the prominent pistil on the flowers is a description of the clitoris. O'Keefe himself denied the metaphor. Of course, in the 1920s, American sexual behavior remained secret, not public. In any case, O'Keefe's flowers inevitably give people sexual associations in visual effects, and many younger painters claim that their descriptions of sex, genitals and sexual feelings are inspired by O'Keefe's works.

O'Keefe's fame in the 1920s was of course related to Stiglitz's planning arrangement. Since 1923, The New York Times, The new york People and other important magazines have frequently commented on her. The price of her works has increased countless times between 19 18- 1937: at 19 18, her sketches sold for less than $ 100, and at 1927. O'Keefe's artistic career also reached its peak.

1929 Summer is another turning point in O'Keefe's artistic career. She left new york for Taos, New Mexico. O'Keefe left because of her emotional crisis with Stiglitz: because of her withdrawn personality and her escape from the public, she had a conflict with Stiglitz who lived in a public center. Just then, another woman came into Stie Gerriets's life. O'Keefe came to Taos with a broken heart.

Taos used to be the home of Indians. The vast and magnificent natural scenery and gorgeous colors here made O'Keefe forget his emotional pain for the time being. Here, she drove in the endless desert and bathed in the afterglow of the sunset. The plateau here is 8000 feet above sea level. Dry, clean air and strong colors make O'Keefe get rid of the gray-green of Lake George and the noise of new york. The earth and the night sky aroused her inner wildness and unruly when she was in the Grand Canyon of Texas. In this magical land, O'Keefe set up his own studio. It is located in a place called Ghost Ranch, which is more like her home than any other place, isolated from the world, surrounded by cacti, Rosa roxburghii and sagebrush. Spacious studio with huge windows facing the desert and steep crimson cliffs. After 1930s, O'Keefe spent more time in the desert. She is lonely, but calm and happy. She relaxed her work, made her own decisions and acted spontaneously.

In the desert, she chose shells, bones, hills, crosses and ancient masonry churches to express her thoughts on death and to find new images to express her desire to gradually become independent from Stie Gerriets. This colorful wilderness environment just suits her mood and artistic needs. Here, O'Keefe painted almost every corner she could see and wrote down her life in lonely time.

In the next ten years, her painting reached a new stage: the color became strong and exaggerated. Her imagination of color is combined with nature. She completed paintings of Taos Church, desert hills and flowers. To 193 1, she mainly painted cow's head bones. The contrast effect in the series Skeleton expresses a kind of meditation between two opposing concepts: life and death, reality and illusion, and male and female. These dream-like disassembled skulls are also symbols of the painter's mental and physical pain.

O'Keefe's flower-centered painting began to change from 1930s to 1940s, showing more artistic conception and attitude: big and plump, small and exquisite. 1936' s sunflower series is as clear and powerful as Van Gogh, and has more vitality than previous flowers. Datura stramonium, two poisonous desert plants, is an enlarged object that opens at night. They are bold and full of fantasy: the petals are swollen like white clouds, and the dark green center and seeds are both strange and full of death. Compared with the early flowers, these giant flowers have more energy, but not so subtle and precise details.

1936 The exhibition of O'Keefe's works in new york caused another sensation. Mountford, a critic, commented: "Every work is a chapter in her autobiography, but this correspondence is very cleverly hidden. This exhibition brings the awakening of life and the echo of spring to the admirers in O'Keefe. It is not only technically perfect, but also has mysterious power and hidden soul, which is invisible to ordinary people. "

The natural environment in New Mexico has a great influence on O'Keefe's paintings, and critics have summarized her paintings at this stage as "light, vast land and color". These works are characterized by panoramic composition, monumental solemnity, static ribbon composition, strong colors, plane depiction, tight but not hard edges, and the communication between natural form and human form, which forms her quality of combining realism with abstraction, tranquility, no passion and eternity.

1945, O'Keefe bought an abandoned church building in a desolate village in Abikel, New Mexico, and converted it into her long-term seclusion. Spanish speakers live there, and O'Keefe is completely isolated here. She built a wall to protect her residence and her closed Persian garden, where she painted and lived alone. Just like her works, her later life was simple, quiet and poetic. The Sky above the Clouds, which was completed in 1960s, became a symbol of her later artistic status with its huge and inscrutable style.

artistic attainments

O'Keefe's art in his later years pays more attention to meditation on nature, and every meditation contains a concise and high-pitched feeling. 1972, in her 85-year-old work Black Rock, Blue Sky and White Clouds, the quality of meditation in her art reached its peak. She searched for new images in the colorful wilderness environment to express her desire for spiritual independence from Stiglitz, and her painting style also changed greatly. Her works are characterized by "light, wide area and color", with commemorative solemnity and plane depiction, forming a quiet and eternal quality. She chose bones, white clouds, distant mountains, crosses and churches to express her thoughts of death and loneliness. For example, the sunflower series is clear, powerful and more vital, but the details are less subtle and meticulous. The symbol of sex is no longer emphasized, which shows her more metaphysical and non-physical feelings about sexy knowledge after choosing celibacy. Skeleton series expresses a meditation between life and death, lyricism and rationality, abstraction and concreteness, yin and yang, reality and illusion, and a symbol of spiritual loneliness.

Social assessment

O'Keefe is a painter who successfully integrated himself into nature and painting. All her life's works are her "self-definition":1sexy flowers immersed in secular love in the 1920s,1desert life in the 1930s, sand dunes, churches and poisonous Datura, and she chose Blackstone as the theme when she lived in seclusion in her later years. All the natural themes in her works are completely deified by the American imagination. In a deeper sense, O'Keefe's art expresses the struggle against lost time, the extreme of nature and the relationship between man and nature.

Other information

The O'Keefe Museum in Georgia is also named after this artist, and the movie of the same name features her and her biographer.