Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia OKeeffe (1887-1986), the most famous woman artist of American modernism in the twentieth century and a pioneer in shaping abstract art, created an unprecedented, ercely independent and intense world, focused as much on the grandeur of the high desert mesas and cliffs as on the smallest ower. A world has formed around OKeeffe as well, incorporating the photographic nude studies of her by Alfred Stieglitz, a gallery impresario and leading advocate of photography as a ne art as well as OKeeffes mentor and later husband, and the photographs of OKeeffe in her later years.
Nancy J. Scott examines OKeeffes work, its evolution and the conicts between the artists inner self and public personality, using a broad range of sources including many of OKeeffes letters. Her letters exchanged with Stieglitz, long restricted by the terms of OKeeffes will, show that her words could be as revelatory as her painting, as they intimately show her growing love for Stieglitz, and the tumult of their long union as artists.
OKeeffes reputation as a sexually inspired, Freudian-minded artist preceded the reception of her art in the gallery. Neither wholly abstract nor realist, but a melding of realist interpretations of owers, bones, shells, rocks and the landscape, her art is structured with abstract design. She identied the power of landscape, discovered rst in Texas and later in the desert of New Mexico, as a primary inspiration.
Nancy J. Scotts succinct yet comprehensive account of OKeeffes long life and prolic body of work, and her presence at the forefront of American abstract art over eight decades, will both inform and fascinate.