The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

O'Keeffe's enthronement as the most revered and mythologized American woman artist is due as much to the uncompromising nature of her life as to the startling originality, lyric beauty, sensual abstraction, and organic spirituality of her paintings. No matter how familiar viewers believe themselves to be with her work, a fresh look proves that there is always more to see and to absorb. There is no greater testimony to the lasting power of an artist's work than to have a museum built in her honor, and, with the opening of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, O'Keeffe's stature is affirmed. This exquisitely produced volume presents the museum's inaugural collection, a group of more than 80 magnificent drawings and paintings produced throughout O'Keeffe's life, all lusciously reproduced (many published for the first time), and accompanied by outstanding essays by Lisa Mintz Messinger, Barbara Novak, and Barbara Rose. --Donna Seaman