Georgia O'Keeffe (Critical Lives) - Softcover

Scott, Nancy J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780234287 ISBN 13: 9781780234281

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2015

Synopsis

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), the most famous woman artist of American modernism in the twentieth century and a pioneer in shaping abstract art, created an unprecedented, fiercely independent and intense world, focused as much on the grandeur of the high desert mesas and cliffs as on the smallest flower. A world has formed around O'Keeffe as well, incorporating the photographic nude studies of her by Alfred Stieglitz, a gallery impresario and leading advocate of photography as a fine art as well as O'Keeffe's mentor and later husband, and the photographs of O'Keeffe in her later years. Nancy J. Scott examines O'Keeffe's work, its evolution and the conflicts between the artist's inner self and public personality, using a broad range of sources including many of O'Keeffe's letters. Her letters exchanged with Stieglitz, long restricted by the terms of O'Keeffe's 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. O'Keeffe's 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 flowers, bones, shells, rocks and the landscape, her art is structured with abstract design. She identified the power of landscape, discovered first in Texas and later in the desert of New Mexico, as a primary inspiration. Nancy J. Scott's succinct yet comprehensive account of O'Keeffe's long life and prolific body of work, and her presence at the forefront of American abstract art over eight decades, will both inform and fascinate.

About this title

Review:

Scott s thoroughly researched book on Georgia O Keeffe reads like a novel. Using the artist s own words to bring her alive, Scott offers a fresh perspective on the painter s life and work within the context of world events. This introduction to one of the twentieth century s most influential American artists should appeal to novice and scholar alike. --Lisa Mintz Messinger, former curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and author of Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O Keeffe"

About the Author:

Nancy J. Scott is Associate Professor of Art History at Brandeis University, Massachusetts. She has taught and published on twentieth-century American modernism with a focus on O'Keeffe, Stieglitz and the artists of his circle.

About this edition

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1780234287
• ISBN 13: 9781780234281
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272