Georgia O’Keeffe: The Pioneer Spirit

It took real nerve – along with unwavering confidence in her art – for a woman aligned with the avant-garde of the 1920s to dare to paint flowers. In doing so, she risked inviting every cliché of a deeply ingrained misogyny that relegated women to art seen as trivial, charming, and merely decorative. Georgia O’Keeffe refused to be constrained by such misreadings. In 1924, she launched a series of flower paintings that would become inseparable from her name. By then, she had already become what the American critic Henry McBride called “a newspaper personality” – what we would now describe as a media figure.

This fame had little to do with her art. It stemmed instead from an exhibition that, a few years earlier, had introduced New York audiences to Georgia’s unabashed nudity. The images were taken by the city’s most celebrated photographer: Alfred Stieglitz.

In 1917, Stieglitz – founder of the 291 gallery and the man who, as early as 1905, had brought the European avant-garde (Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi…) to New York – was captivated by a series of drawings sent to him by a friend of an unknown young artist: Georgia O’Keeffe. His enthusiasm was such that he immediately displayed them on the walls of his gallery.

A year later, he orchestrated Georgia’s move to New York, providing her with both a place to live and the means to devote herself entirely to her work. What followed was a passionate love affair – and the photographic series that would first bring her into the public eye.