page_808 < previous page page_808 next page > Page 808 exhibited her charcoal drawings and watercolors at his small avant-garde gallery in New York in 1916 and 1917. He was a strong advocate of the first generation of American modern artists, including John Marin, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley, and he brought O'Keeffe into this circle, convinced that she expressed a female sensibility in a new, original, and bold manner. In 1923, the year before their marriage, he sponsored her first one-artist exhibit, followed by others virtually every year. O'Keeffe won early acceptance: the Brooklyn Museum exhibited her work in 1927 and the Museum of Modern Art in 1929; the Whitney Museum of American Art first purchased her work in 1932 as did the Metropolitan Museum of Art two years later. Her first retrospective was at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943. During the late teens and early twenties, O'Keeffe painted pure abstractions derived from imagined forms and intense feelings, many of which pivot on a central vertical axis and consist of sensuous colors; they are characterized by highly controlled and almost invisible brush-work. Along with a brief period of portraying New York skyscrapers, she also painted over-sized views of natural objects  flower blossoms, leaves, rocks, shells, feathers, animal bones  in which she frequently integrated abstract and objective imagery. Many of these paintings were influenced by photographic techniques, especially close-ups and cropping. She tended to exaggerate sizes, simplify forms, eliminate middle distances, and employ surrealistic techniques, such as a floating animal skull against a distant mountain range. Profoundly inspired by nature, O'Keeffe was an aesthetic descendant of the nineteenth-century Hudson River school, expressing her ecstatic feelings for nature in vibrant colors, organic forms, and uninhabited, dramatic vistas. After a visit to northern New Mexico in the summer of 1929, her work reflected its mesas, mountains, arroyos, and badlands and was invested with as much feeling as another artist might portray in the human body. She returned to the state almost every summer and moved permanently to the village of Abiquiu after Stieglitz's death in 1946. After her first trip to Europe in 1953, the aerial views she had seen inspired her to paint the large-scale, ethereal Sky above the Clouds series. She, in turn, influenced the work of the minimalists and color field abstract expressionists of the 1950s and 1960s. O'Keeffe was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1949 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1962. Laurie Lisle, Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe (1986); Roxana Robinson, Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life (1989). LAURIE LISLE See also Painting and Sculpture. O'Neill, Eugene (18881953), dramatist. In 1920, O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon was acclaimed as America's first native stage tragedy. Thirty-six years later audiences were stunned by the Greek-sized passions of his posthumously produced master-piece, Long Day's Journey into Night. Almost literally autobiographical (unlike his earlier works, in which he disguised the members of his family), it was written, he said, ''in tears and blood." It revealed his father to have been a miser, his mother a morphine addict, and his brother an alcoholic. O'Neill's mother, Ella Quinlan  beautiful, shy, convent-educated  fell in love with James O'Neill, a popular touring actor, who was haunted by his impoverished youth. Eugene was born in a Broadway hotel room, and his difficult birth, coupled with the rigors of accompanying James on his cross-country theatrical one-night stands, drove Ella to morphine addiction. Eugene's brother, Jamie, older by ten years  clever, cynical, an unsuccessful actor  combined all the weaknesses and none of the strengths of his parents. O'Neill's art was influenced by what he proudly called his "life experience." He briefly attended Princeton, failed as an actor, fathered a child out of wedlock, shipped out to sea, lived as a derelict on the New York waterfront  where he drank himself senseless and attempted suicide  worked as a reporter in New London, Connecticut, recovered from tuberculosis, and  < previous page page_808 next page >