Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe first became famous in New York partly through someone else's pictures of her. The photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, more than 20 years her senior, showed her abstract drawings in 1916, then photographed her for years, often nude, in a celebrated series that made her a public figure before most people had seen a painting of hers. They married in 1924.

She is best known now for flowers blown up to the size of a wall, single blossoms filling a whole canvas, which critics in the 1920s insisted on reading as veiled female anatomy. O'Keeffe rejected that reading her whole life and said she painted the flowers large so that busy New Yorkers would be forced to actually look at one.

In 1929 she started spending summers in New Mexico, and the empty desert reset her art. She painted the red hills, the adobe churches, and the sun-bleached animal skulls and pelvis bones she gathered off the ground, floating them against the sky. After Stieglitz died in 1946 she moved to New Mexico for good, to a house at Ghost Ranch. She kept working into old age as her eyesight failed, and died in 1986 at the age of 98.