New York (1918 – 1929)

O’Keeffe moved to New York in June 1918 at the invitation of Alfred Stieglitz, and they were married in 1924. From mid-1918 until the summer of 1929, when O’Keeffe first traveled to New Mexico to paint, she and Stieglitz were nearly inseparable, living and working together either in the city (winter and spring) or at the Stieglitz family estate at Lake George (summer and fall).

Soon after her arrival in New York, O’Keeffe began working primarily in oil. Between 1918 and 1923, she produced in this medium some of the most remarkable abstractions of her entire career. But as early as 1919, a new degree of precision and specificity began to characterize her representational images, suggesting an active response to the concerns of Modernist photography.

And so it was in the 1920s that O’Keeffe established herself principally as a painter of recognizable forms, for which she remains best, known today. She developed approaches to representation during this decade that reveal her ongoing fascination with Modernist photography. Her large – scale painting of flowers, leaves, and trees frequently present close-up views of these natural forms, and many of her paints of New York buildings use optical distortions that are equally derivative of photographic manipulations.

New York (1918 – 1929)