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, 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 were discovered and exhibited in New York by the photographer Levered Stieglitz, whom she married in 1924. During a visit to New York in 1929, O’Keeffe was so moved by the bleak（荒凉的） landscape and broad skies of the Western desert that she began to paint its images. Cows’ skulls and other bleached（变白的） bones found in the desert figured prominently（突出的） 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(贫瘠的) hills, and the sky as subjects for her paintings. Although O’Keeffe painted her best known works in the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s, she continued to produce tributes（贡品、颂词） to the Western desert until her death in 1986.
O’Keeffe is widely considered to have been 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. Almost from the beginning, her work was more indentifiably American than that of her contemporaries in its simplified and idealized treatment of color, light, space, and natural forms.
小题1: Which of the following best tells what this passage is about ?
A．O’Keeffe was a distinctive modern American painter.
B．O’Keeffe was the best painter of her generation.
C．O’Keeffe liked to paint only what was familiar to her.
D．O’Keeffe used colors and shapes that are too reduced and simple.小题2:Which of the following is NOT mentioned as an influence on O’Keeffe’s paintings ?
A．Her rural upbringing
B．Her life in the West
C．The works of European artists
D．The appearance of the natural landscape小题3:Which of the following is most similar to O’Keeffe’s relationship with nature?
A．A photoghrapher’s relationship with a model.
B．A writer’s relationship with a publisher.
C．A student’s relationship with a teacher
D．A carpenter’s relationship with a hammer.小题4:Why is O’Keeffe considered an artistic pioneer ?
A．Her work became influential in Europe.
B．She painted the American Southwest.
C．Her paintings had a definite American style.
D．She painted things that were familiar to her.
