Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
Georgia O'Keeffe is one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. Coming of age during the rise of American modernism, O'Keeffe led a life rich in intense relationships – with the great ferment of ideas in modern art, with family, friends and especially noted photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who became her husband. In her work she drew on abstraction, modernism, photography and Asian sources, producing a body of work both powerful and unique. The images she created – the red hills, the magnified flowers, the great crosses and white bones – are irrevocably hers and known throughout the world. She was a natural feminist, and hailed as a heroine by the wave of Feminism of the 1970s.
This biography, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, draws on many sources closed to writers during O'Keeffe's lifetime and the author was given the co-operation of the O'Keeffe family and access to the letters between the artist and her circle.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This biography, the first to draw on sources unavailable during O'Keeffe's lifetime--and the first to be granted her family's cooperation--offers a persuasive feminist analysis of the life and work of an iconic figure in American art. Inspired by strong women in a Midwestern family that stressed a sturdy sense of self-reliance, O'Keeffe bucked oppressive social conventions to become one of the first female American artists to lead a professionally successful and emancipated life. But along the way lay struggle: O'Keeffe had to fight for emotional and artistic independence in her public and private lives, experiencing particular difficulties in her relationships with men, most notably her benefactor and husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Novelist Robinson's ( Summer Light ) detailed, sensitive critique of O'Keeffe's work, tracing the development of the artist's esthetic, alternates with an absorbing, intimate narrative of O'Keeffe's personal life (including her notorious relationship with Juan Hamilton, six decades her junior, and the public battle over her estate) to provide a resourceful, imaginatively rendered portrait of a dauntingly difficult subject. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC alternate.
