Georgia O’Keeffe

As the second child of seven children, Georgia was not the favorite and did not absorb much of her parents’ attention. However, her mother supervised her education and sent her to art lessons. She also spent a lot of time on the farm observing and interacting with nature. She liked to play independently, and developed with an acute sense of herself and her non-conventionality.

First, O’Keeffe faced a major obstacle in art school, where most students assumed that women could only become art teachers, not artists themselves. Furthermore, because of her position as an important female artist at a time when there were not many female artists, the differences between her work and the work of male artists was attributed to her gender.

Both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz shared a passion for art, and they realized and respected this passion. Moreover, Georgia was not interested in elite society, as Emmeline Stieglitz was. She did not have the same social presumptions, but lived to produce art, something Stieglitz recognized and identified with.