Fact Finder - Arts and Literature

Georgia O'Keeffe revolutionized American art with her large-scale, close-up paintings of flowers, which she treated like abstract landscapes. By magnifying the details of petals and stamens, she forced viewers to 'actually see' the beauty and complexity of nature that is often overlooked. O'Keeffe's style was a bridge between European abstraction and American realism. In the 1920s, she also painted iconic New York skyscrapers before moving to New Mexico, where the desert landscape, bleached animal bones, and stark architecture became her lifelong inspiration. She rejected the popular Freudian interpretations of her flower paintings as sexual symbols, insisting they were purely about the visual experience of nature. Today, she holds the record for the highest price ever paid for a painting by a female artist at auction, with 'Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1' selling for over $44 million.