O’KEEFFE PASSAGE
Now it’s time to practice some Reading passages and questions. Make sure you mark up the passage and note the Big
Idea and the Paragraph topics. Research the details and predict your answers. Most important, remember that it’s about
the questions.
The painter Georgia O’Keeffe was born in
Wisconsin in 1887 and grew up on her family’s farm.
At seventeen she decided she wanted to be an artist
and left the farm for schools in Chicago and New York,
( 5 ) but she never lost her bond with the land. Like most
painters, O’Keeffe painted the things that were most
important to her, and nearly all her works are simplified
portrayals of nature.
O’Keeffe became famous when her paintings
( 10 )were discovered and exhibited in New York by the
photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whom she married in
- During a visit to New Mexico in 1929, O’Keeffe
was so moved by the bleak landscape and broad skies
of the western desert that she began to paint its images.
( 15 )Cows’ skulls and other bleached bones found in the
desert figured prominently in her paintings. When
her husband died in 1946, she moved to New Mexico
permanently and used the horizon lines of the desert,
colorful flowers, rocks, barren hills, and the sky as
( 20 )subjects for her paintings. Although O’Keeffe painted
her best-known works in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, she
continued to produce tributes to the western desert until
her death in 1986.
O’Keeffe is widely considered to have been
( 25 )a pioneering American modernist painter. While
most early modern American artists were strongly
influenced by European art, O’Keeffe’s position was
more independent. She established her own vision and
preferred to view her painting as a private endeavor.
( 30 )Almost from the beginning, her work was more
identifiably American than that of her contemporaries
in its simplified and idealized treatment of color, light,
space, and natural forms. Her paintings are generally
