Georgia O'Keeffe Notecard Folio

Georgia O’Keeffe was the quintessential American artist—bold, passionate, unmistakable, incapable of compromise. She came from a farm in Wisconsin, found inspiration among the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and headed west to the New Mexico desert, where her paintings took on a new life. Nature, land, the garden: it was her habit to go out in search of things of beauty, which she brought back to her home and studio.

Flowers came early to O’Keeffe, whose childhood art teacher wore a hat made of artificial violets and brought a jack-in-the-pulpit to class for students to sketch. A year later, at a new school, it was purple lilacs. When O’Keeffe got to Manhattan and saw huge billboards and met photographers whose lenses rendered the small monumental, she painted cannas and petunias the likes of which had never been seen.

At a time when European modernism swept into the galleries and living rooms of American connoisseurs, the young and immensely self-possessed artist preferred to follow her instincts. Flowers, her principal subject during the mid-1920s, continued to appear in her art into the 1950s and 1960s.

Contains 5 each of the following images:
Petunia No. 2, 1924
Bella Donna, 1939