Georgia O'Keeffe

One of the greatest American painters of the twentieth century, Georgia O'Keeffe is beloved by a broad audience that ranges from the most erudite art historian to the twelve-year-old girl next door. Her monumentally sensuous oil paintings of flowers hang in the best museum collections but are known as well via mass-produced posters, greeting cards and calendars; her weathered, elegant, fierce self has long been mythicized through Alfred Stieglitz's classic black-and-white photographs of his wife. This large-format monograph on O'Keeffe renews her place in the modern canon and encourages an intensive encounter with her work. Her radical departures from imitative realism, the style that was prevalent when she began to study art making, eventually led to an idiosyncratic painting style characterized by a state of suspension. Over the course of her lengthy career--she worked up until two years before her death at age 98--she discovered and developed a personal language through which to express her own feelings and ideas, creating bold picture conceptions and spatial designs that hover somewhere between the real and the abstract, the close-up and the monumental, natural representation and artificiality.