#000202
Georgia O'Keeffe: 1887-1986 (Taschen)
Britta Benke
This is Taschen's compact monograph on Georgia O'Keeffe, written by the art historian Britta Benke - one of the affordable, well-illustrated introductions that made the publisher's name. In a slim, richly reproduced volume it traces O'Keeffe's long career: the pioneering abstractions, the magnified flowers that made her famous (and that she resisted seeing reduced to Freudian symbols), the New York cityscapes, and the sun-bleached bones and desert forms of her New Mexico years. Benke sets the work against O'Keeffe's life and her marriage to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz without letting biography swamp the pictures. It doesn't pretend to be the last word - it is a primer - but as a portable, good-looking survey of one of America's greatest modern painters, it does its job with clarity and care.
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The subject
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was a central figure of American modernism, celebrated for her large-scale flowers, her New York scenes, and the landscapes and bleached bones of New Mexico, where she settled. Fiercely independent, she shaped her own myth as much as her critics did.
The book
Britta Benke's volume is part of Taschen's line of accessible artist monographs: a concise biographical and critical survey generously illustrated with color plates, tracking O'Keeffe from early abstraction through her signature flowers to her desert work.
How to read it
Take it as an introduction rather than a scholarly monograph - strong on reproductions and orientation, ideal for a first serious encounter with the work before turning to fuller biographies.
For more context
Follow it with Roxana Robinson's biography Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, or the catalogues of major O'Keeffe retrospectives.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Britta Benke
- Publisher
- Taschen
- Place of publication
- Cologne
- ISBN
- 978-3-8365-4231-9
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine
Taschen edition; distinct from #102