Full Bloom
The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe
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- £14.99
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- £14.99
Publisher Description
"The definitive life of O'Keeffe." —Hilton Kramer, Los Angeles Times
Georgia O'Keefe (1887?-1986) was one of the most successful American artists of the twentieth century: her arresting paintings of enormous, intimately rendered flowers, desert landscapes, and stark white cow skulls are seminal works of modern art. But behind O'Keeffe's bold work and celebrity was a woman misunderstood by even her most ardent admirers. This large, finely balanced biography offers an astonishingly honest portrayal of a life shrouded in myth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arguably America's most popular painter, O'Keeffe (1887 1986) receives a full, too full, biography from art critic Drohojowska-Philp in her book debut. The first section reaches back four full decades before the artist's birth to O'Keeffe's immigrant grandparents' Wisconsin farm, and forward through O'Keeffe's studies (Art Institute of Chicago; Art Students League, New York), her jobs (commercial artist, art teacher) and her romances with various artists and others. The midsection, covering 1918 1946, details the New York years, O'Keeffe's relationship with photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz and her blossoming as a painter. The New Mexico decades between Stieglitz's death and O'Keeffe's (1947 1986), years of large canvases, honors and aging, complete the triptych. O'Keeffe was a prolific artist (more than 900 works), and Drohojowska-Philp seems driven to remark on as many as can be squeezed in. Notably greater detail about Dorothy Norman, who became Stieglitz's lover, and John Hamilton, who attended O'Keeffe during the last decade of her life, mark the book, but are all but buried beneath a paralyzing avalanche of tiresome detail and hollow data: "At four-thirty in the morning, watched the sun rise over the glacial lake."
