#000093
Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters
Jack Cowart & Juan Hamilton
Produced for the 1987 National Gallery of Art retrospective, this catalogue does something most art books don't: it lets Georgia O'Keeffe speak. Alongside color plates of some 120 works, editors Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton, and Sarah Greenough thread in roughly 125 of O'Keeffe's own letters, grouped across the four great stretches of her life—the teaching years, the New York decade with Alfred Stieglitz, the pull of the Southwest, and her long residence in New Mexico. The effect is a portrait in two voices, the paintings and the plainspoken, often startlingly funny prose of the woman who made them. For readers who know the flowers and bleached skulls but not the person, this is the book that closes the gap—handsome, intimate, and unusually revealing.
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The artist
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) became the rare American modernist to achieve genuine popular fame, known for magnified flowers, New York skyscrapers, and the bones and mesas of New Mexico. Her long partnership with the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz shaped her early career; her decades at Ghost Ranch defined its second half.
The book
This is the catalogue for the National Gallery of Art's 1987 exhibition, which traveled on to Chicago, Dallas, and the Metropolitan Museum. It combines full-color reproductions with a generous selection of O'Keeffe's letters and essays by Cowart, Hamilton, and Sarah Greenough, organizing the correspondence by the phases of her life.
How it reads
The pairing of image and letter is what gives the book its staying power. O'Keeffe's prose is direct, wry, and unsentimental, and it steadily corrects the myths that gathered around her. It remains a primary source scholars still cite.
For more context
Juan Hamilton was O'Keeffe's companion and assistant in her final years; the letters here draw on the archive she left, later central to holdings at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.
Sources
- Type
- Exhibition catalog
- Author / Maker
- Jack Cowart & Juan Hamilton
- Publisher
- National Gallery of Art / New York Graphic Society (Little, Brown)
- Place of publication
- Washington, D.C.
- Year
- 1987
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine