Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe painted flowers at a scale that made people see them differently, spent forty years in the New Mexico desert, and objected for most of her life to what critics said her pictures were about. She trained in Chicago and New York, gave up painting for a period believing she could add nothing, and started again in Texas with charcoal abstractions she sent to a friend, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz without asking. He exhibited them in 1916, and she came to New York the following year. He photographed her more than three hundred times, promoted her relentlessly, and married her in 1924; he also framed her work publicly in Freudian terms as the expression of a woman's body, which sold pictures and which she rejected flatly and repeatedly for sixty years. The enlarged flowers of the 1920s were painted, she said, so that busy people would be forced to look. From 1929 she spent summers in New Mexico and moved there permanently after Stieglitz died in 1946 - the bones, the adobe walls, the Pedernal mountain she painted so often she said God had told her it would be hers if she did it enough. She lost her central vision in the 1970s and worked in clay and in watercolour with assistance. She died at ninety-eight in Santa Fe. Sky Above Clouds IV is twenty-four feet wide and too large for most museum doors. The Georgia O Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe in 1997. Her late assistant Juan Hamilton inherited much of the estate and the will was litigated for years.

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