O'Keeffe, Georgia

US painter. One of the best known US painters of the 20th century, O'Keefe is known chiefly for her large, semi-abstract studies of flowers, bones, and other imagery, such as Black Iris (1926; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Although painting representational subjects, her strong lines, geometric forms, and flat planes sometimes verge on abstraction, as in Jack-in-the-Pulpit (1930; collection of Georgia O'Keeffe).

O'Keeffe worked frequently in series or multiples such as the Pelvis Series of the 1940s, stretching the objects across the canvas and depicting them as if viewed from a close-up camera lens. O'Keefe was considered a Precisionist or cubist-realist (an art movement derived from cubism, where the underlying structures of objects were depicted in straight lines and flat colours). However, her work is now seen to be far more personal and natural than that of others in the group. She was married 1924–46 to photographer and art exhibitor Alfred Stieglitz, in whose gallery her work was first shown.