Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life

One of the most well researched books on the life of Georgia O'Keeffe. It was instructive as a text on the people she knew, her interactions with them as well as a well written general biography. The author dealt with conflicts frankly and laid out her cases succinctly. She leaves the reader with the idea that O'Keeffe was a loner who proved that women could be successful in the 20th century, especially as an artist. I think that I'll read another book to get another perspective, though.

Clear, lucid, understanding and thoroughly researched biography. Roxana Robinson sheds full light on the complex nuances of the long life and career of O’Keeffe (1887-1986). A career which intertwined with the history and art of the twentieth century.
O’Keeffe’s life spanned nearly a century of change in America. Although she was part of the modernist movement, she established her own unique vision. She can be called a pioneer who worked in her own style and on her own terms. Perhaps O’Keeffe’s most significant contribution to art history was her unique approach to abstraction and her use of flamboyant color. Photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz whom she married in 1924, was important for her development as an show more artist. She was also deeply influenced by feminist thought, having experienced the early suffrage movement before World War I. And she believed in her own unique sense of her talent which she put down in her paintings.
Robinson structures her research in the following parts:
Part I: 1887-1902. Sun prairie: the wide and generous land.
Part II: 1903-1918. Distant skies: explorations and initiations
Part III: 1919-1928. An ordered life: Manhattan and Lake George
Part IV: 1929-1946. A fair division: New York and New Mexico
Part V: 1947-1972. A peaceful life: the land of shining Stone
Part VI: 1973-1986. The dying of the light show less

a excellent biography of ms o'keeffe

VG copy in VG DJ

Georgia O’Keefle's life spanned nearly a century of ferment and change in America. Her childhood was spent on a midwestem farm in a pioneer community in the 1890s. As a young painter, she lived in New York City at the centre of the avant-garde during a time of turbulence and transformation following World War 1. After her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz began and as her own achievement grew, she divided her time between the city, the countryside at Lake George, New York, and her explorations of the vast spaces of the West. After Stieglitz’s death she returned to a settled rural existence in New Mexico where she spent the rest of her life.
As an artist, she came of age with American modernism. Though part of that movement, she show more established her own vision and remained in the forefront of American art through much of her life. She was the first artist to record the female sensibility without apology in a style both strong and candid. She was deeply influenced by feminist thought, having experienced the early suffrage movement before World War 1. During the next wave of feminism in the 1970s, she was hailed as a heroine.
Her life was rich in intense relationships—With family and friends; Stieglitz with whom she had a long, intimate and difficult marriage; and, later, a much younger companion, ]uan Hamilton.
Georgia O’Keeffe lived with courage, passion and integrity. Her life was governed by the rigorous demands of love and work, and the struggle between them resulted in extraordinary accomplishment.
(front jacket)
This richly detailed and moving biography is the first to draw upon the many sources closed to writers during O’Keeffe’s lifetime, and the first to have the cooperation of the O’Keeffe family. To her wonderful portrait of this remarkable woman, Roxana Robinson has also brought her talents as a novelist and art historian.
Roxana Barry Robinson is a scholar of American painting and has written about Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and other members of the Stieglitz circle. She is the author of Summer Light, a novel, as well as short fiction that has appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines.
(back jacket) show less