Art · 20th century
1887–1986 · American
American Modernism — the 'Mother of American Modernism'
Georgia O'Keeffe magnified flowers until they filled the canvas, and reduced the New Mexico desert to bones, adobe walls and clean bands of colour. Independent of every movement, she worked for seven decades, was promoted (and photographed) by Alfred Stieglitz, and spent her last forty years in New Mexico.
A giant white trumpet-shaped flower from a poisonous weed; in 2014 it set a record price for a work by a woman (1932)
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, sold for $44.4 million in 2014
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A bleached skull hung against a vertical black stripe between two blue bands, painted as an answer to the search for the Great American Novel (1931)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Her deliberately 'American' picture, made to tease the novelists of the day
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A dark purple flower opened to fill the canvas, the painting whose sexual readings the artist always denied (1926)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Black Iris III
Image: Georgia O'Keeffe · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Blazing scarlet blooms cropped so hard that the petals become pure abstract field (1927)
Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota
Oriental Poppies
Image: Georgia O’Keeffe · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
A horned skull with a white flower, hovering above red hills in the New Mexico desert (1935)
Brooklyn Museum, New York
One of the emblematic images of her Ghost Ranch years
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A twenty-four-foot canvas of flat white clouds stretching to the horizon, painted from an aeroplane window at 77 (1965)
Art Institute of Chicago
Too large to travel to many exhibitions; painted in her garage at Abiquiú
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia