Georgia O'Keeffe and her houses Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu

In flight from her hectic New York life with her avidly sociable husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and in pursuit of quiet and isolation, O'Keeffe found the perfect refuge in New Mexico. Her passion for the land and sky and her profound attachment to her homes at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu shape and vitalize all of her best-known paintings, yet the full story of how she acquired and lived and worked in these sanctuaries has never been told before. Lynes (Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections, 2007), curator of the Georgia O'Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, and Lopez, director of Abiquiu Historic Properties, thoroughly and thoughtfully chronicle the ways the artist turned her cherished homes and studios into veritable works of art. With information on adobe construction and the Pueblo Revival style, striking black-and-white photographs of the artist in her homes by such famous photographers as Ansel Adams, O'Keeffe's paintings of Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, and new color photographs that capture the enduring beauty and serenity of O'Keeffe's gracefully pristine sanctuaries, this is a gorgeous and enriching addition to the O'Keeffe collection.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Painter Georgia O'Keeffe's (1887-1986) dominant themes--vast, open spaces and washes of color, skulls, flowers, mountains, sky, "all the earth colors of the painter's palette"--were inspired by the landscape surrounding her two custom-designed houses in New Mexico (Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu), traditional buildings that were carefully tweaked to bring desert light into spaces for eating, reading, cooking, and painting. O'Keeffe scholar-curators Lynes (Georgia O'Keeffe Museum) and Lopez collect correspondence, architectural plans, photographs, present-day images, portraits of the artist, and reproductions of paintings to illustrate how O'Keeffe's living spaces influenced her creative life. A mention of O'Keeffe's love of sunbathing is accompanied by a photograph of her climbing a ladder to the roof, which brings a stirring emotional dimension to Ladder to the Moon, a surreal turquoise canvas that features a wooden ladder suspended in space between the black silhouette of desert mountains and a pearlescent half-moon. This beautifully designed and fascinating book shows how O'Keeffe's houses combined native adobe architecture, a modernist aesthetic, and her love of the natural world, revealing how the properties "fulfilled two different aspects of O'Keeffe's independent nature"--her competing desires for both rugged solitude and domestic comfort in "our most beautiful country." Color and b&w illus. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.