Georgia O'Keeffe

(United States of America, 15/11/1887 - 06/03/1986)

White Iris (1930)

Nicknamed the ‘Mother of American Modernism’, O’Keeffe was raised on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin, in the United States, and began her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905 before attending the Art Students League and Teacher’s College at Columbia University in New York, where she trained to be an art teacher. Over this time, O’Keeffe developed her style eventually leaning into abstraction with watercolours and charcoal drawings of floral forms and landscapes. The only other artist making such radically abstract works at this time was, of course, Hilma af Klint.

Her break into the New York art world came in 1916 when her abstract charcoal drawings were exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz’s pioneering 291 gallery. By 1918, she had begun to experiment with oil paints but retained the fluid space and curvilinear motifs of her early charcoals through which she recorded her emotional and sensory experiences, especially her responses to the rhythms and forms of the natural world.

Like many of her contemporary women artists, O’Keeffe did not conform to the popular art movements of her day and favoured abstraction over the fractured geometry of cubism, which was dominating American art in the early 20th century, as well as later surrealist and pop-art movements.

O’Keeffe created many forms of abstract art including enlarged and close-up flowers that many believed represented vulvas, though she consistently denied that intention and this was likely fuelled by explicit photographs she and her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, had taken and exhibited.

In 2014, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art purchased O’Keeffe’s 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 for $44,405,000 USD (equivalent to $59,586,124 in 2025) which remains the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a female artist. While this sounds impressive, it pales in comparison to the prices paid for the work of male artists and doesn’t put her even in the top 150 most expensive artworks.

Image: Georgia O'Keeffe, White Iris (1930). Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 76.2 cm. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, U.S.A.