50 Fun Facts About Georgia O'Keeffe

Which white flower fills the Georgia O'Keeffe painting that sold for a record $44.4 million in 2014?

Jimson weed, a toxic desert bloom she let flourish around her New Mexico patio, fills the 1932 canvas. Its sale more than tripled the auction record for a woman artist.

Which photographer and gallery owner exhibited Georgia O'Keeffe's drawings in 1916 and married her eight years later?

Alfred Stieglitz went on to make more than 300 portraits of her before he retired from photography in 1937. He was 23 years her senior.

In which New Mexico city did the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum open in 1997, eleven years after the painter's death?

Santa Fe was her home for the last two years of her life. The museum there now also looks after her preserved house and studio, 53 miles to the north.

Which former dude resort in New Mexico became Georgia O'Keeffe's summer home and the subject of many paintings?

Ghost Ranch took its name from local legends of evil spirits. Its red cliffs fill her landscapes, and one quarry there holds nearly a thousand Coelophysis dinosaur skeletons.

Which animal's skull hangs before stripes of red, white and blue in a famous 1931 Georgia O'Keeffe painting?

Cow skulls and other bones she gathered from the New Mexico desert became her signature subjects. The three colours stand for the American flag, and the canvas belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Which eye condition cost Georgia O'Keeffe much of her sight by 1972, ending her oil painting without assistance?

Macular degeneration left her with only peripheral vision. She kept on drawing in pencil until 1984, two years before her death at the age of 98.

Which fruit company's forerunner commissioned Georgia O'Keeffe to visit Hawaii in 1939 and paint for its advertisements?

Dole, then called the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, got 20 lush paintings from her nine weeks in the islands, though the pineapple it wanted came only after a plant was shipped to her New York studio.

Which studio smell did Georgia O'Keeffe say made her ill during four years when she gave up painting?

Turpentine turned her stomach after her father's bankruptcy ended her studies in 1908. She worked as a commercial artist in Chicago, then taught, until a 1912 summer class drew her back to art.

What kind of creature is Effigia okeeffeae, named in 2006 to honor Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico landscapes?

A fossil crocodile relative that walked on two legs, it sat unopened in a museum's plaster jacket for almost 60 years after being dug up in 1947 near her summer home.

Which car did Georgia O'Keeffe buy and learn to drive in 1929, then use to explore the New Mexico desert?

A Ford Model A carried the artist, known as a loner, across the land she loved. She bought it at 41, in the first summer she spent painting in New Mexico.

Georgia O'Keeffe spent decades rejecting critics' claims that her magnified flower paintings were really about what?

Female sexuality was read into the flowers from the 1920s on. She answered that people who found erotic symbols in her pictures were really talking about their own affairs.

In which state was Georgia O'Keeffe running a college art department when she left for New York in 1918?

Texas gave her the wide Panhandle skies and the cliffs of Palo Duro Canyon, which she painted in vivid watercolours on her long walks.

In which Midwestern state was Georgia O'Keeffe born in 1887, the second of seven children in a farming family?

Wisconsin's Sun Prairie was her birthplace, and by the age of ten she had decided to become an artist. A middle school in Madison now carries her name.

In 1946 Georgia O'Keeffe became the first woman given a solo retrospective at which New York institution?

The Museum of Modern Art show came in the year her husband died. Three years later she left New York for good to live in New Mexico.

Juan Hamilton, hired by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1973 as her sight failed, taught her to work in which material?

Clay was Hamilton's own medium, since he was a potter. He also coaxed her back to painting and helped her write her bestselling 1976 autobiography.

Which painter befriended Georgia O'Keeffe in New York in 1931 and kept in touch during her 1933 hospital stay?

Frida Kahlo met her at the opening of Diego Rivera's New York exhibition, and kept in touch while her new friend recovered from a breakdown in hospital.

A pine tree Georgia O'Keeffe painted from below in 1929 stood at the New Mexico home of which English novelist?

D. H. Lawrence wrote at a table under the big ponderosa. She lay on his bench and looked up through the branches at the night sky, so the picture can be hung more than one way up.

Which traditional material forms the thick walls of Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico home, a National Historic Landmark?

Adobe walls surround a central patio in the house, parts of which date to the 1700s. She added skylights to flood it with daylight, saying she wanted not a Spanish or an Indian house but her own.

Georgia O'Keeffe was named after her maternal grandfather, a count who emigrated to America in 1848 from which country?

Hungary was the homeland of her mother's father, whose surname Totto became her middle name. Her father's side of the family was of Irish descent.

Georgia O'Keeffe, whose career spanned seven decades, is often called the "Mother" of which art movement?

American modernism owes her some of its best-known images, yet her work stayed largely independent of the major art movements of her day.

Which animal lies beside a copper pot in the still life that won Georgia O'Keeffe a student prize in 1908?

Rabbit and pot earned her the William Merritt Chase still-life prize at the Art Students League, and with it a scholarship to an outdoor summer school.

Shortly before a breakdown put Georgia O'Keeffe in hospital, she lost a mural project for which New York venue?

Radio City Music Hall would have carried her mural, but the project was lost. She spent two months in hospital in 1933 and did not paint again until January 1934.

The gallery that first showed Georgia O'Keeffe in 1916 was called 291 after its address on which New York street?

Fifth Avenue's number 291 gave the gallery its name, though its room, only fifteen feet square, was actually next door at 293. It closed in 1917.

In which medium did Georgia O'Keeffe make the 1915 abstract drawings that a friend carried to a New York gallery?

Charcoal abstractions made while she was teaching in South Carolina so impressed the gallery's owner that he hung ten of them without asking her permission.

Which actress played the painter in the 2009 television film Georgia O'Keeffe, opposite Jeremy Irons as her husband?

Joan Allen took painting lessons for the role, and the crew became the first film company allowed to shoot at the artist's own New Mexico home.

Which Judy Chicago artwork of 1979 honors Georgia O'Keeffe alongside 38 other women from history and myth?

The Dinner Party lays a triangular table with 39 place settings, and hers is among the final ones, standing for the twentieth century. It lives at the Brooklyn Museum.

Which garden flower was the subject of Georgia O'Keeffe's first large-scale flower painting, made in 1924?

Petunia, No. 2 was first shown in 1925. She went on to make about 200 flower paintings, many of them enlarged as if seen through a magnifying lens.

Which illness forced Georgia O'Keeffe to take a year off after she ranked top of her class at art school?

Typhoid fever interrupted her studies in 1906. The next year she enrolled in New York instead, where one of her teachers was the painter William Merritt Chase.

What kind of farm did Georgia O'Keeffe's parents run when she was born in the American Midwest in 1887?

Dairy farming was the family business until 1902, when the O'Keeffes moved south and her father started making concrete building blocks that never found a market.

Where in upstate New York did Georgia O'Keeffe spend summers at her husband's family estate and later bury his ashes?

Lake George was the site of Oaklawn, his father's estate. Years earlier, as a student, she had won a scholarship to a summer school at the same lake.

In which New Mexico village did Georgia O'Keeffe restore an abandoned hacienda as her permanent home and studio?

Abiquiú gave her a favourite subject close at hand. From 1946 she painted the patio wall and door of her own house again and again.

Which president awarded Georgia O'Keeffe the National Medal of Arts the year before she died?

Ronald Reagan honoured her in 1985, when she was 97. Eight years earlier Gerald Ford had given her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award given to American civilians.

Georgia O'Keeffe's 24-foot-wide Sky Above Clouds IV, her largest painting, was inspired by the view from where?

An airplane window showed her the scene on the long flights she took in her sixties and seventies, despite a fear of flying. The size was prompted by an enormous blank wall at the John Deere headquarters.

Which Manhattan skyscraper did Georgia O'Keeffe paint by night in 1927, with her husband's name glowing in red neon?

The Radiator Building stood a few blocks from her high-rise hotel apartment. The red sign has been read as a jab at her husband, who despised commercial advertising.

The buyer who paid a record price for a Georgia O'Keeffe flower painting in 2014 was an heiress to which retailer?

Walmart heiress Alice Walton was the buyer, and the picture went to Crystal Bridges, the museum of American art she founded in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Which landscape photographer joined Georgia O'Keeffe and friends on a month-long camping trip through Arizona in 1937?

Ansel Adams made a candid portrait of her on the rim of Canyon de Chelly during the trip, which was guided by the head wrangler from her New Mexico summer home.

In Mary Beth Edelson's 1972 collage based on Leonardo's The Last Supper, Georgia O'Keeffe's face replaces which figure?

Jesus Christ's head gives way to hers at the centre of the table, while other living women artists stand in for the apostles. It became an icon of the feminist art movement.

Where did Georgia O'Keeffe take the 1912 summer art class that started her experiments with abstraction?

The University of Virginia class was taught by Alon Bement, and she came back for two more summers. A 2016 museum exhibition was devoted to the pictures she made there.

Which cosmetics magnate commissioned Georgia O'Keeffe's largest flower painting for her New York salon's exercise room?

Elizabeth Arden paid $10,000 for the 1936 canvas of four huge blossoms, hoping the unfurling petals would encourage her clients in their stretches.

On which Atlantic island did Georgia O'Keeffe recuperate in 1933 and 1934 after two months in hospital?

Bermuda helped her recover from a nervous breakdown. She went back to New Mexico in 1934, and that August first stayed at the desert retreat she would paint for decades.

Which art teacher's ideas, shaped by Japanese design, steered Georgia O'Keeffe toward abstraction from 1912 onward?

Arthur Wesley Dow taught that artists should compose with line, mass and colour instead of copying nature. She met his ideas through a colleague of his, then took his class in 1914.

Which college friend and future suffrage leader took Georgia O'Keeffe's drawings to a New York gallery in 1916?

Anita Pollitzer went on to chair the National Woman's Party in the 1940s, and wrote a memoir of the friendship called A Woman on Paper.

Georgia O'Keeffe's sharp-edged 1920s paintings of Manhattan skyscrapers are linked with which American art style?

Precisionism favoured flat, simplified shapes with little detail. Her husband's circle disapproved of the city as a subject for her, but she went on painting it until 1929.

Which arts patron hosted Georgia O'Keeffe in Taos during her first painting summer in New Mexico in 1929?

Mabel Dodge Luhan gave her and a travelling companion studios of their own. The hostess ran a famous salon for artists and writers with her husband Tony, a member of Taos Pueblo.

Which Nashville institution received a share of her late husband's art collection from Georgia O'Keeffe?

Fisk University received works including her own night view of a Manhattan skyscraper. Since 2012 it has shared the collection with a museum in Arkansas.

Which Hawaiian island gave Georgia O'Keeffe the most productive stretch of her nine-week painting trip in 1939?

Maui gave her complete freedom to explore and paint. All the photographs she took in Hawaii come from the same island, and they are said to be her first major works with a camera.

Which name is given to the dark New Mexico hills Georgia O'Keeffe painted in an extensive series during the 1940s?

The Black Place lay about 150 miles west of her summer home, and she often camped there. It had a pale twin: a white rock formation near her village house, the White Place.

What kind of building at Ranchos de Taos did Georgia O'Keeffe paint several times, as many artists had before her?

A mission church dedicated to San Francisco de Asís, it was a favourite of painters. Her best-known version shows only a fragment of it silhouetted against the sky.

Which narrow New Mexico mesa did Georgia O'Keeffe paint many times and claim as her own mountain?

Cerro Pedernal, Spanish for flint hill, appears in many of her canvases, among them a 1936 picture that pairs it with a deer's skull. Its Tewa name means obsidian mountain.

Which singer-songwriter was among the visitors to Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico home, as was aviator Charles Lindbergh?

Joni Mitchell was one of a string of famous callers at the remote desert home of a painter known as a loner with a prickly personality.