Georgia O'Keeffe valuation
Enlarged flowers to fill the canvas, then spent forty years painting the hills and bones of New Mexico.
Georgia O'Keeffe was born at Sun Prairie in Wisconsin in 1887 and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York.
What a work by Georgia O'Keeffe is worth
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Bio
Georgia O'Keeffe was born at Sun Prairie in Wisconsin in 1887 and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York. Alfred Stieglitz showed her charcoal drawings at his gallery 291 in 1916, and they married in 1924; he photographed her for two decades. Through the 1920s she painted the large close-up flowers and the New York skyscrapers that made her famous. From 1929 she spent summers in New Mexico, and after Stieglitz's death in 1946 she settled there for good, at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú, painting the red hills, adobe walls and bleached bones of the desert. She died in Santa Fe in 1986, aged 98.
Paintings are scarce on the market, since a large part of the output belongs to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and to other museums, and the flowers and New Mexico landscapes of the 1920s to the 1940s lead. Works on paper, the charcoals and watercolours, form a second group. The catalogue raisonné by Barbara Buhler Lynes, published in 1999, is the reference, and a work that is not in it needs careful examination. Posters and prints of the flowers are produced in enormous numbers and are reproductions.
At a glance
- Born
- 15 November 1887, Sun Prairie
- Died
- 6 March 1986, Santa Fe
- Movement
- American Modernism
More on Wikipedia.
Texas, the Museum of Modern Art and Abiquiú
Before 1918, when Stieglitz persuaded her to move to New York, O'Keeffe taught art in Texas, at Amarillo and at the West Texas State Normal College in Canyon. The Brooklyn Museum gave her a retrospective in 1927, and in 1946 she became the first woman to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
She bought the house at Ghost Ranch in 1940 and the house at Abiquiú in 1945, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe in 1997. Its research centre holds her archive.
Chase, the Shelton and Hawaii
At the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905 and 1906 O'Keeffe studied with John Vanderpoel, and at the Art Students League in 1908 she won William Merritt Chase's still-life prize for Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot. Unable to pay for further study, she worked as a commercial artist in Chicago until 1910 and did not paint for four years. A summer class with Alon Bement at the University of Virginia in 1912 introduced her to the ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow, and the charcoal drawings of 1915 were her move into abstraction.
She made about 200 flower paintings, and the first large one, Petunia No. 2, dates from 1924. From a 30th-floor apartment in the Shelton Hotel, where she moved in 1925, she painted the skyscraper series, including Radiator Building, Night, New York. In 1939 the Hawaiian Pineapple Company sent her to Hawaii for nine weeks, and the trip produced a series of 20 paintings. Macular degeneration ended her unassisted oil painting in 1972; with the potter Juan Hamilton as her assistant she took up clay, and she worked in pencil and charcoal until 1984.
Best auction results
- Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 $44.4m
- Oil on canvas, 1932 · New York · 20 November 2014
- Publicly reported
- Bought by Alice Walton. More than three times the previous auction record for a woman artist.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
