Georgia O'Keeffe : Catalogue Raisonne - Hardcover

Lynes, Barbara Buhler

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9780300081763: Georgia O'Keeffe : Catalogue Raisonne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300081766 ISBN 13: 9780300081763

Publisher: National Gallery Washington, 1999

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Georgia O’Keeffe’s magnificent landscape paintings, flower studies, abstract art, and other works are greatly admired, yet the full range of her subjects, her working methods, and her stylistic development have never been accurately explored. This beautiful two-volume catalogue raisonn�―which presents more than 2000 works by O’Keeffe in a variety of media―displays her innovative use of color and form and in the process sheds light on her distinctive contribution to American modernism.

A key figure in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe was at the center of the ferment taking place in American art in the early twentieth century. Aware of all the intellectual and aesthetic currents of the period, her own work―beginning with her distinctive drawings and watercolors of 1915 to 1917―nevertheless developed in highly personal ways. This catalogue includes O’Keeffe’s paintings, drawings, watercolors, and sculpture, many of which have never been reproduced, along with entries that provide all pertinent factual information. The works are arranged chronologically and are enhanced with a full bibliography, exhibitions listing, and chronology of the artist’s life.

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Review:

Georgia O'Keeffe, who was born in 1887 and lived nearly 99 years, was a prolific, successful artist whose work was exhibited continually throughout her adult life. To give an impression of the scope of this two-volume boxed set, here is a sentence from the preface by Barbara Buhler Lynes: "The catalogue reproduces and describes 2,045 objects, made by O'Keeffe between 1901 [when she was 14] and 1984." And for an idea of the care Lynes brought to her task, here is the next: "Of these, 2,029 were located and examined between June 1992 and December 1998: 821 on canvas or board; 1,137 on paper...."

Obviously, this catalog will be indispensable to many libraries and museums, but it is also a work that any lover of O'Keeffe's art will pore over for years. From the first pages of volume 1, a reader is struck by the early appearance of motifs that remained essential to O'Keeffe throughout her life: architectural forms; flowers; vases and vessels with monumental, simplified shapes. (After the early years, however, she deals with the human metaphorically, in phallic sculptures or nipple-like seed pods, or the swollen bellies of clay pots.) For those readers who may have fallen out of love a bit during the 1970s--when O'Keeffe's least works seemed to be included in every gathering of second-rate, so-called women's art--these two volumes will renew their passion. Her astonishing talent, which she never betrayed, pulses through these color-saturated pages. While most works are necessarily reproduced smaller than the originals, the book's designers have dealt thoughtfully with issues of scale by increasing the size of the reproductions as O'Keeffe's paintings became larger and printing her vast, late cloudscapes and other large works at full- or double-page size. This is typical of the sensitivity with which this catalog was conceived. --Peggy Moorman

About the Author:

Barbara Buhler Lynes is the Emily Fisher Landau director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Study Center and curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

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