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.
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.
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