Georgia O’Keeffe Ignored Advice to Mimic Great European Masters. Her Goal Instead Was to Be a Great American Painter

Opposite, a 1918 photo portrait by future husband Alfred Stieglitz. Jen Judge; Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images 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.”

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.