Georgia O’Keefe was born on November 15th in 1887.
[O’Keefe] was an unknown 29-year-old art teacher when a series of her charcoal drawings wound up in the hands of the photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz, and he put the drawings in his art gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York City without even asking her. At first, she was angry that her work had been exhibited without her permission, but the drawings made her famous, the first American woman to be taken seriously by the art world.
She eventually met Stieglitz; they hit it off and got married. O’Keeffe eventually became even more famous for her paintings of flowers, but when asked why she chose flowers as her subject, she said, “Because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.”
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is in Santa Fe. American Masters has a brief biography.
Judge Wapner is 91 today. Raymond Babbitt sends his greetings.
Ed Asner, who will always be Lou Grant to me, is 81. We saw Asner in a one-man performance as FDR earlier this year.
Petula Clark will be headed downtown to celebrate her 78th birthday.
When you’re alone
And life is making you lonely
You can always go
Downtown
Sam Waterston is 70.
Our guv for a few more weeks, Bill Richardson, is 63 today.
Justice Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965), Field Marshal Edwin Rommel (1891-1944), Governor (of New York) Averell Harriman (1891-1986), and U.S. Air Force General (and George Wallace running-mate) Curtis LeMay (1906-1990) were all born on this date.