Ida Ten Eyck O'Keeffe (1889-1961)

Trained as a teacher and nurse, Ida O'Keeffe attempted to launch her art career at the height of the Great Depression. Although she exhibited frequently and remained aware of current art trends, she was unable to establish long-term gallery representation and repeatedly relocated for temporary jobs. Ida's artistic ambitions never earned the support or encouragement of Georgia O'Keeffe. Nor did they benefit from Georgia's marriage to Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), one of the leading gallerists in the country.

Early Works

As children in Wisconsin and later Virginia, Ida and Georgia O'Keeffe received art instruction from the same sources. Ida then taught drawing and "domestic arts" for six years (1911-1917) before studying and working as a nurse (1918-1925). In 1925, during a private assignment as a nurse in Connecticut, she wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz with the news that she had taken up oil painting and confided that she had never taken lessons in the medium. This admission underscores how middle-class women during the 19th and early 20th centuries were trained only in drawing and watercolors, instruction in oil painting was generally reserved for male students.

Her progress over the next two years impressed Stieglitz, her brother-in-law and a leading purveyor of modern American art. Georgia O'Keeffe included her sister's work in a show she guest curated in late 1927. Two of the works from that show appear in this gallery. Not wanted to be perceived as riding her sister's coattails, Ida O'Keeffe dropped her last name and exhibited as "Ida Ten Eyck."

1933: Exhibition and Estrangement

In 1933, Ida O'Keeffe had her first major solo show at the Delphic Studios, a contemporary art gallery in New York City. The exhibition presented paintings, prints, and drawings on a variety of subjects, including three paintings hanging nearby, as well as the series of lighthouses on view in the next gallery. Her younger sister Catherine O'Keeffe Klenert had also been featured in a solo exhibition at the same gallery two months earlier. Critics noticed the proliferation of O'Keeffes and declared them a "Family of Artists." Georgia O'Keeffe, the eldest sister, responded to the the heightened familial associations with anger. She demanded that her sisters cease to exhibit. Klenert obliged; Ida O'Keeffe did not. The once affectionate relationship between Georgia and Ida O'Keeffe was permanently altered into one of estrangement.

Late Works

Beginning in 1934, Ida O'Keeffe assumed the first in a string of teaching and fellowship positions that took her to North Carolina, Alabama, New England, New York, New Jersey, Missouri, Texas, Oregon, and, finally, to Whittier, California, where she settled and spent the last nineteen years of her life. While she continued to create and exhibit her work, these serial dislocations were disruptive and stressful, sapping both the energy and time necessary for the thoughtful development and maturation of her art.

In the latter part of her career, Ida continued to explore several styles and genres simultaneously (realism and abstraction, still life and landscapes). This lack of singular focus frustrated critics, who were accustomed to artists with a cohesive style. Her experiments with abstraction ranged from vibrant non-objective paintings to the subdued nocturnal landscapes of 1938, the latter of which were particularly admired by critics.  

DMA exhibition text Ida O'Keeffe: Escaping Georgia's Shadow, 2018.

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