Georgia O'Keeffe Books

Few couples in 20th-century American art and culture are as significant as Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. From 1915 to 1946, they exchanged over 5,000 letters (more than 25,000 pages) detailing their lives. This volume presents around 650 carefully selected and annotated letters by photography scholar Sarah Greenough. The correspondence captures their initial romance in the 1910s, their life together in the 1920s, the strain on their relationship during the early Depression years, and its revival in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Their distinct writing styles—O'Keeffe's sparse vibrancy and Stieglitz's fervent lyricism—offer insights into their creative evolution and friendships with influential figures in early American modernism, such as Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, and Paul Strand. The letters also highlight their interactions with key personalities in American and European art and culture, including Duncan Phillips, Diego Rivera, and Marcel Duchamp. Additionally, their poignant prose reflects the broader cultural influences of World Wars I and II, the 1920s economic boom, and the 1930s Depression on their lives as articulate, creative individuals.

One of the greatest American painters of the 20th century, Georgia O'Keeffe is beloved by a broad audience that ranges from the most erudite art historian to the twelve-year-old girl next door. Her monumentally sensuous oil paintings of flowers hang in the best museum collections but are known as well via mass-produced posters, greeting cards and calendars; her weathered, elegant, fierce self has long been mythicized through Alfred Stieglitz's classic black-and-white photographs of his wife. This large-format monograph on O'Keefe renews her place in the modern canon and encourages an intensive encounter with her work. Her radical departures from imitative realism, the style that was prevalent when she began to study art making, eventually led to an idiosyncratic painting style characterized by a state of suspension. Over the course of her lengthy career--she worked up until two years before her death at age 98--she discovered and developed a personal language through which to express her own feelings and ideas, creating bold picture conceptions and spatial designs that hover somewhere between the real and the abstract, the close-up and the monumental, natural representation and artificiality.

A full-color, lavishly illustrated volume presents postcard-sized reproductions of the noted American artist's thirty-two most popular works.

About the idiosyncratic of O’Keeffe’s careerThe art of American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is splendid with color and laden with hidden sensuality. O’Keeffe’s name rests mainly on the large-format flower pictures that have assured her an unusual place in the annals of art, between realist and abstract.>Our Basic Art Series study traces the idiosyncratic of O’Keeffe’s career, and numerous illustrations document the most important periods in her lengthy life in art.About the Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series

O'Keeffe's 1927 painting expresses her defiant commitment to abstraction and the influences of Kandinsky, Dove and others During the 1920s, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) became widely known for her paintings of enlarged flowers. But she regularly returned to abstraction, and indeed found it "surprising how many people separate the objective from the abstract." Executed in 1927, Abstraction Blueillustrates that belief, retaining the glowing color, careful modulation and zoomed-in view of the artist's contemporaneous blooms, while forgoing any obligation toward representation. In this latest volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Samantha Friedman considers how these and other factors converged in the creation of this composition.