Georgia O'Keeffe Abstraction

O'Keeffe's compelling life story and largely accessible art have contributed to her sustained public adulation. She has been the subject of ongoing critical attention for over 80 years with mixed results. At the center of her fame are her flower paintings, with related accolades for her later New Mexico-inspired landscapes and bone-scapes. This exhibition catalogue documents O'Keeffe's more abstract work, largely produced 1915-30 and in the mid-1940s. The project intends to claim a preeminent place for her in the development of American modernism alongside Dove, Marin, and Hartley. The four expert essays are very readable, engaging, and informative. Project director/editor Haskell's essay addresses how O'Keeffe developed an abstract aesthetic that she maintained throughout her career. The essays are interspersed with substantial sections of appropriate full-color plates of exhibition works, and a section with 14 photographs of O'Keeffe taken 1918-22 by Stieglitz. Included is a selection of O'Keeffe's 1916-46 letters to Stieglitz (many were only recently made public). This significant publication offers an enhanced understanding of the role of abstraction in O'Keeffe's production and provides a more balanced narration on her overall career. Included are an excellent contextual chronology, extensive bibliography, and checklist. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All library collections committed to American modern art; lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers, general readers. J. A. Day emeritus, University of South Dakota

This book from Whitney Museum curator Haskell, accompanying the museum's September 2009 exhibit, contains essays by Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Bruce Robertson and Barbara Buhler Lunes, each of whom examine O'Keefe's visual vocabulary in relation to form and line, and the influence of nature, Art Nouveau and decorative art movements, and the scholarly work of Arthur Wesley Dow. O'Keefe herself described her work as an attempt to make visible "intangible feelings that were beyond her conscious grasp." O'Keefe was struck by the possibility of painting music and finding the elemental forms within "seemingly simple things"; one characteristically fascinating series, called Shell and Old Shingle, progresses from fairly accurate representation to curvilinear abstracts. Elsewhere, Robertson calls O'Keefe's Jack-in-the-Pulpit series "[O'Keefe's] most complete statement of the relationship between abstraction and representation." Also fascinating are photographs by O'Keefe's husband, gallery curator Alfred Stieglitz, accompanied by excerpts from their correspondence full of personal passion and tension, but also O'Keefe's motivations, the messages she struggled to communicate, and her sense of forever falling short. Contemporary critics labeled O'Keefe's paintings Freudian expressions of sexuality and unconscious desires, in large part because of Stieglitz's marketing, but these evaluations fall flat when looking deeply at both subject and painting; Haskell and her colleagues do full justice to their subject, with beautiful, luminous reproductions and a revealing collection of work. (Oct.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.