10/28/2025
Always be you.
New York City.
Alfred Stieglitz, the most powerful art dealer in America, discovered charcoal drawings by an unknown woman teaching art in Texas. The drawings were unlike anything he'd seen—abstract, powerful, unapologetically sensual without being sexual.
He hung them in his gallery without asking permission.
When Georgia O'Keeffe found out, she stormed into his gallery and demanded he take them down. He refused. They argued. And then, somehow, they began one of the most complicated creative partnerships in art history.
But this isn't a love story. This is a story about a woman who refused to be anyone's muse.
Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin—stubborn, quiet, and certain from childhood that she was going to be an artist. Not an artist's wife. Not an artist's model. An artist.
She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, learning traditional techniques from men who painted women as objects to be looked at, never as artists doing the looking.
Georgia learned their techniques. Then she left to find her own.
In 1912, she took a teaching job in Amarillo, Texas. Then Canyon. The desert changed her. The vast sky, the emptiness, the way light hit red rocks and turned them into something almost holy. She started painting what she felt, not what she saw.
Abstract forms. Colors that pulsed. Shapes that suggested flowers, bones, landscapes, but weren't quite any of those things.
That's when Stieglitz discovered her work.
They married in 1924. He was 60. She was 37. He photographed her obsessively—over 300 portraits over two decades. Some n**e. Some in profile. Some capturing her hands, her face, her body in ways that made her both subject and collaborator.
The art world decided Georgia O'Keeffe was Stieglitz's muse. His creation. His beautiful discovery.
Georgia had other ideas.
In 1924, she began painting flowers. Not delicate botanical studies. Massive, monumental flowers that filled entire canvases. A calla lily as tall as a person. An iris that opened like a cathedral. Petals rendered in such intimate detail you could see the veins, the folds, the architecture of growth.
"Nobody sees a flower really," she said. "It is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time."
So she made them impossible to ignore. Six feet tall. So large you had to stand back to see the whole thing. So close and detailed you felt like you were inside the flower, not just looking at it.
Male critics immediately interpreted them as sexual. Freudian. Vaginal. Female sexuality rendered in paint.
Georgia's response? "Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don't."
Translation: That's your hang-up, not mine.
She kept painting flowers. Huge, unapologetic, impossible to dismiss as "pretty" or "delicate" or any of the words men used to diminish women's work. Her flowers were powerful. Architectural. Demanding.
And she kept painting them her way, regardless of what anyone said.
But New York was suffocating. Stieglitz's world was galleries, critics, cocktail parties, endless talk about art instead of making it. Georgia needed space. Silence. A place where the light was clean and the sky went on forever.
In 1929, she visited New Mexico for the first time. It was like coming home to a place she'd never been.
She started spending summers there. Then longer. Then most of the year. Stieglitz stayed in New York. Their marriage became a long-distance arrangement where they lived separate lives connected by letters and the occasional visit.
When Stieglitz died in 1946, Georgia didn't perform public grief. She settled his estate, handled his gallery, and within three years, she'd moved permanently to New Mexico—first to a house in Abiquiu, then to an even more remote property at Ghost Ranch.
She was 62 years old. And she was just getting started on the work that would define her.
For the next four decades, Georgia O'Keeffe painted the desert. Bleached animal skulls against blue sky. Adobe walls. Red and orange cliffs. The geometry of landscape reduced to its essential forms. She painted what tourists ignored—the bones, the rocks, the way light changed color on sand.
She traveled—to Peru, to Japan, to anywhere the landscape interested her. She flew in small planes to see rivers from above. She painted clouds from airplane windows because she liked the perspective.
As she aged, Georgia didn't soften. She got sharper. More particular. More protective of her time and space. She wore black. She kept her hair pulled back. She looked at the world with eyes that had spent decades learning to really see.
In her 70s, macular degeneration began stealing her central vision. Most artists would have stopped. Georgia switched to pottery. When pottery became difficult, she switched to watercolors with assistance. When that became impossible, she supervised younger artists creating work from her vision.
She painted—in whatever form she could manage—into her 90s.
Georgia O'Keeffe died on March 6, 1986, at age 98, in Santa Fe. She'd outlived Stieglitz by 40 years. She'd created over 2,000 works of art. She'd shown the world that flowers could be powerful, that deserts could be sacred, that a woman could be an artist without being anyone's muse.
She never explained her work. Never apologized for it. Never softened it to make critics comfortable.
"I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life," she once said, "and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do."
Georgia O'Keeffe didn't paint flowers to be pretty. She painted them to demand attention. She didn't move to the desert to escape—she moved there to see more clearly. She didn't reject the art world's rules—she simply walked so far past them that the rules couldn't reach her anymore.
Every woman who creates without asking permission. Every artist who paints what they see instead of what they're told to see. Every person who chooses solitude over compromise.
They're walking a path Georgia O'Keeffe cleared by refusing to be anything other than exactly herself.
She painted flowers six feet tall. She lived to 98. And she never, ever explained herself to anyone.
That's not rebellion. That's freedom.
In honor of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), who painted what she saw, lived how she wanted, and proved that the biggest art comes from refusing to make yourself smaller.
