Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico with one of her landscape paintings
As a new solo show of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work opens in Madrid, artnet?s Vice President and LUX columnist Sophie Neuendorf reflects on how the American painter’s visionary work and mainstream success paved the way for many of today’s women artists
Sophie Neuendorf
American artist Georgia O?Keeffe burst onto the New York gallery scene in 1917 at the age of twenty. At the time, the American art world was under the influence of French Cubism, but O?Keeffe?s abstract charcoal drawings presented a version of modernism that was so radically individual, she quickly became a favourite among collectors – a nearly unthinkable achievement for a young women from the midwest. Follow LUX on Instagram: luxthemagazine
The artist began making her famous large-scale flower paintings in the 1920s. A new show at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid includes O?Keeffe?s spectacular Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932), which sold for over $44 million at auction in 2014, more than tripling the previous auction record for a female artist. Since then, the market for her work has been steadily growing, with her top 10 most expensive works finding buyers over the past 10 years (source: artnet price database).
Georgia O’Keeffe, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932)
A recurring subject for O?Keeffe, the flower was a tool through which she could explore varying languages of abstracti...