American artist Georgia O'Keefe developed an intensely personal and abstract style of painting. Born in Wisconsin, O'Keeffe was encouraged in art by her mother, who saw that she had art lessons along with a well-rounded education. O'Keeffe became famous with the help and patronage of world-renowned photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, whom she eventually married in 1924. Although her early works depict scenes of New York City, O'Keefe lived in the Southwest for most of her life, and it was to that region that she looked for the themes and motifs of her later work. In that work, she painted huge canvases---their spaces beautifully filled with bleached bones, barren rolling hills, desert blooms, adobe churches, and brightly colored close-ups of simple flowers. Her work occupied a middle ground between abstraction and realism. O'Keefe's paintings are in many museums and private collections. Two of her well-known works, Cow's Skull, Red, White, and Blue (1931) and Sunflower, New Mexico No. 2 (1934), can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Throughout her life, O'Keefe insisted that her paintings needed no analysis or interpretation to be understood and appreciated. When she died at the age of 98, she was already a legend in the art world.
