Georgia O'Keeffe : And the Eros of Place

Dijkstra, Bram

ISBN 10: 0691015627 / ISBN 13: 9780691015620

Published by Princeton University Press, 1998

Former library copy. Pages intact with possible writing/highlighting. Binding strong with minor wear. Dust jackets/supplements may not be included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. Seller Inventory # GRP63469470

Synopsis:

Georgia O'Keeffe has been recognized as one of America's most adventurous early modernist artists. But critics often suggest that she became a revolutionary despite her American background, not because of it. This work challenges this point of view. Dijkstra shows that O'Keeffe's work was decisively shaped by the America in which she grew up, illuminating the facts of O'Keeffe's life and offering different readings of some of her most important paintings. Art historians have largely accepted the view that O'Keeffe's art was shaped by Alfred Stieglitz and the work of European modernists she encountered under his tutelage. Dijkstra counters this idea describing the cultural environment of O'Keeffe's childhood and revealing the details of her early education in art. He shows that O'Keeffe's mature style found its origin in such sources as Edgar Allan Poe's speculations about the androgynous nature of the soul before industrialism, and in what Dijkstra calls the "transcendental materialism" of the tonalist movement in turn-of-the-century American art. The book also explores O'Keeffe's identification with the feminist aims and artistic concerns of the radical periodical "The Masses". It shows that the illustrations featured there and in other magazines of the period, significantly influenced her development of a personal style. The book argues that O'Keeffe's very American search for an organic abstraction of form that would celebrate nature, allowed her to develop a humanist style that challenged the early European modernists' emphasis on mechanistic constructions of form against nature.

About the Author: Bram Dijkstra is Professor of American and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of numerous books, including Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Sitcle Culture, and Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Georgia O'Keeffe : And the Eros of Place
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: 1998
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good