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.
This biography draws on many sources closed to writers during O'Keeffe's lifetime and has the co-operation of the O'Keeffe family. Her life spanned nearly a century of ferment and change in America and although part of the modernist movement she established her own unique vision. She was deeply influenced by feminist thought, having experience the early suffrage movement before World War I. During the next wave of feminist thought in the seventies, she was hailed as a heroine.