Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300148178 ISBN 13: 9780300148176

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Although Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) has long been regarded as a central figure in 20th-century art, the abstract works she created throughout her career have remained critically and popularly overlooked in favor of her representational subjects. Beginning with charcoal drawings made in 1915, which were among the most radical creations produced in the United States at that time, O’Keeffe sought to transcribe pure emotion in her work. While her output of abstract work declined after 1930, she returned to abstraction in the 1950s with a new vocabulary that provided a precedent for a younger generation of abstractionists. By devoting itself to this largely unexplored area of her work, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction is an overdue acknowledgment of her place as one of America’s first abstractionists.

In addition to rethinking O’Keeffe’s role in the development of a uniquely American abstract style, this book chronicles the shifts and changes in subject matter and style over the span of her long career. It adds significant new insight into her life, reproducing excerpts of previously sealed letters written by O’Keeffe to photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, whom she married in 1924. These previously unpublished letters, along with other primary documents referenced by the authors, offer an intimate glimpse into her creative method and intentions as an artist.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Haskell is Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Barbara Buhler Lynes is Curator at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe. Bruce Robertson is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Elizabeth Hutton Turner is Professor and Vice Provost for the Arts at the University of Virginia and Guest Curator at the Phillips Collection.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0300148178
• ISBN 13: 9780300148176
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Haskell Barbara