Woman from Sun Prairie

Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the great modern U.S. artists, is having her first retrospective museum show--not at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, but at Chicago's Art Institute.

The Institute's 61 paintings covering the 28 years of Georgia O'Keeffe's painting life, are a superb catalogue. They include the abstractions, the giant flowers, trees, shells, bones, skulls and landscapes which once caused the New York Sun's Critic Henry McBride to remark that only Georgia O'Keeffe could "so hush up a bunch of lady art connoisseurs and make them go whispering on tiptoes about a gallery." O'Keeffe's huge flowers include jack-in-the-pulpits, hollyhocks, larkspur, the 3-by-2 1/2-ft. Black Iris, which the Institute's Art Director Daniel Catton Rich described as an example of the Artist's means of "conveying her own distinguished emotions."

Says Georgia O'Keeffe of her flower paintings: "I am attempting to express what I saw in a flower which apparently others failed to see." For years people have been seeing all kinds pf things in O'Keeffe's flowers. Critic Lewis Mumford has seen a celebration of "almost every phase of the erotic experience." Said he: "Socrates learned about love from the priestess Diotima; but if he were alive today, he would probably go to O'Keeffe." Painter Oscar Bluemner has written: ". . . O'Keeffe steps forth as [an] . . . imaginative biologist of all creation . . . extending perhaps beyond the confines of the human body." While O'Keeffe admits there is reason for her flowers and landscapes to be considered as symbols of the unconscious, her gigantic Black Cross, New Mexico] might suggest extreme asceticism. All of O'Keeffe's work, utterly original, has graphic cleanliness, economy, purity, a lyric quality suggesting that of Poetess Emily Dickinson.

Jet-haired, olive-skinned, hazel-eyed Georgia O'Keeffe was born 55 years ago in Sun Prairie, Wis. Her father was an Irish farmer, her mother was Hungarian. After the family moved to Williamsburg, Va., in 1901, Georgia decided to become a painter, studied at the Chicago Art Institute and at Manhattan's Art Students League, where she was known as "Patsy." A winter of painting as her teachers taught it convinced her that she could not paint at all. She worked as a commercial artist in Chicago, a public-school art supervisor in Amarillo, Tex. She calls Texas "the only place I ever felt really at home."

In 1916 O'Keeffe decided she was "a very stupid fool" not to paint just as she wished, sent a roll of sketches to a friend in Manhattan on the "express condition that they were not to be shown to anyone." The friend promptly showed them to Dealer Alfred Stieglitz (TIME, Jan. 11). He gave an exhibition of O'Keeffe in his "291" gallery, persuaded her to devote all her time to painting, married her eight years later. Her first sale brought $400. In 1928 she got $25,000 for five paintings of lilies. She once sold a single picture for $10,000, but does not know how much money she has taken in altogether.

Georgia O'Keeffe spends half the year in Manhattan, the other half in her adobe house in Abiquiu, N. Mex., where she walks, rides and paints. Says she: "I can't imagine why people want to write about me--I'm really awfully dull."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.