Tag: books

  • Georgia O’Keeffe up-close in new book

    Georgia O’Keeffe up-close in new book

    Just in time for the holidays comes a new Georgia O’Keeffe picture book, this one by Malcom Varon. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life Well-Lived gives us a glimpse into Varon’s experience with O’Keeffe when he was taking photographs of her paintings at her Abiquiu home in late summer/early fall 1977, when she was nearly 90. (Photographic…

  • Was Georgia O’Keeffe an angry woman?

    Was Georgia O’Keeffe an angry woman?

    As an art student in New York, Georgia O’Keeffe realized that any distraction, like dancing late into the night, would impinge upon her prime directive: to paint. For her, anger was just another distraction.

  • Georgia O’Keeffe: feminist forever

    Georgia O’Keeffe: feminist forever

    Right from the get-go, Georgia O’Keeffe resisted patriarchy. “I have always resented being told that there are things I cannot do because I am a woman,” she told a National Woman’s Party audience in 1926. “I remember how I used to argue with my brother about which were best, boys or girls. When I argued…

  • But is it art?

    But is it art?

    After a break, I went back to reading My Faraway One. In my June 20 post about the first two hundred pages of correspondence between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, I asked myself: At this point, does O’Keeffe think of herself as an artist? Lo and behold, within another hundred pages, O’Keeffe addresses this very…

  • Reading “My Faraway One”

    Reading “My Faraway One”

    Nearly two hundred pages into the correspondence* between Georgia O’Keeffe (in Canyon, Texas) and Alfred Stieglitz (in New York City), I’m feeling claustrophobic. On every page, another angst-filled stream-of-consciousness. Both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz feel like misfits — lonely, and needy. She is the aspiring artist needing affirmation. He is the aging man needing a shot…

  • O’Keeffe’s best years

    O’Keeffe’s best years

    Her best years, Georgia O’Keeffe often remarked, were the early years of discovery and anonymity. She hadn’t yet become “our best woman painter,” or Alfred Stieglitz’s wife, or the sage of Abiquiu. She was an earnest young woman pursuing Art and making her living as an art teacher in towns far away from New York…