Her formal training
began at a Madison convent school in 1901. In 1905 O' Keefe moved
to Chicago to study anatomical drawing with John Vanderpoel at the
Art Institute of Chicago. She made her first trip to New York in 1907
and attended classes at the Art Students League. She returned to Chicago
and supported herself by working as a commercial artist. In the summer
of 1912 she studied abstract design with Alon Bement, a follower of
the art educator Arthur Wesley Dow. The oriental mysticism of Dow's
theories of composition had a deep influence on O'Keeffe. She developed
a distinctive form of landscape abstraction over the next four years
while teaching in Western Texas. Her work came to the attention of
the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and he featured it at his Gallery
291 in 1916. O'Keeffe, who had not been consulted about this, came
to New York to close the exhibition, but she found in Stieglitz a
sympathetic friend and supporter. He gave her a solo exhibition in
1917 and in the following year granted her financial assistance to
permit her to paint full-time. They were married in 1924. Although
O'Keeffe lived and worked in New York, she felt her true source of
inspiration lay in the landscape of the American West. She began regular
visits to Taos, New Mexico in 1929 and settled near there after Stieglitz
death in 1949. She has become one of America's most respected artists,
and was among the first to exploit the full possibilities of abstraction
allied to nature.
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