ABSTRACT
Few individuals' influence have been as pervasive in the history of American art as Georgia O’Keeffe. The images she painted, from sensuously detailed and richly col ored billowy flowers to stark and structural bleached bones, have become icons. Her aesthetic independence as she gained acceptance as a female American artist has become legendary. Together, her unique deportment and her provocative style, which explored an undefined territory bridging the abstract and the representational, filled a void in twentieth-century American art. It is difficult to isolate a singular aspect of O’Keeffe’s oeuvre, but it is her instinctive appreciation of the larger American land scape that is a key to understanding the spirit and significance of her work. This special sensitivity to the land, and the architecture and plant and animal life that punctuate it, is manifested in her long-lived passion for the Southwest, especially the New Mexico countryside.
