Georgia O’Keeffe

(by Lisa Mintz Messinger)

I read this book because a) I didn’t know a whole lot about Georgia O’Keeffe’s art and b) my husband has been friends with the author’s son since 7th grade, and when we went to the author’s memorial service back in December, someone read a passage from this aloud and it made me want to read the whole thing. If you’re looking for a full biography of O’Keeffe, this is not it: there are biographical details but this book is about the art. If you are looking for brief close readings of many works (with great color reproductions of many of the works being discussed), exposure to selections from O’Keeffe’s output from different periods of her life, and an examination of O’Keeffe’s themes and how she circled back to different aspects of them in different forms over the course of decades, I would definitely recommend this book. For me, it was a pleasure to broaden my awareness of O’Keeffe’s oeuvre beyond the paintings of flowers and skulls that I was familiar with, and to see the way that she, as Messinger puts it, “recorded subtle nuances of color, shape, and light.” I liked seeing early watercolors like Blue Hill No. 1 (from 1916) and Pink and Green Mountains No. I (from 1917). I wasn’t at all familiar with her cityscapes, like East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel, which was painted in 1928, which was the year before her first trip to New Mexico, whose landscape would prove to be a huge inspiration, and it was cool to see pictures like this where if I saw it in a museum from across the room and had to guess the artist, I would definitely not have guessed O’Keeffe. I like the vastness of Wave, Night, and the washes of color in Blue B and the striped rocks of On the River I (and how the way this painting shows solidity and empty air echoes the way O’Keeffe explored form and void in her paintings of pelvis bones and in earlier abstractions). (And oh—of course this excellent song by The Nields was in my head for a lot of the time when I was reading.)