Review by Choice Review
Many volumes have been written about Georgia O'Keeffe's art and life in the past twenty years since she has attained the status of an artistic legend. Despite the plethora of material available on the artist, a sense of mystery persists about her which intrigues authors and the public alike. Robinson's book displays a number of advantages over earlier biographies. Most significantly, this biography is the first to have the active cooperation of the O'Keeffe family, and Robinson utilizes many sources not available to earlier authors. This access to the family and to new materials is evident in the scope and detail of the text, which tracks O'Keeffe's life from birth to death and into the controversies that followed. Written in a generous but factual style, the text is occasionally embellished with romantic touches revealing Robinson's background as a novelist. The quality of the research, evident in the bibliography and the notes, reflects Robinson's experiences as an art historian who has written previously about the Stieglitz circle. The book includes more than 90 small, black-and-white illustrations of good quality, limited largely to the places and people important in O'Keeffe's life. For now, Robinson's work is the best source available although Laurie Lisle's Portrait of an Artist (CH, Apr'87) still has much to recommend it. Robinson's book will appeal to readers in both public and undergraduate libraries. -J. A. Day, University of South Dakota
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This biography, the first to draw on sources unavailable during O'Keeffe's lifetime--and the first to be granted her family's cooperation--offers a persuasive feminist analysis of the life and work of an iconic figure in American art. ``A resourceful, imaginatively rendered portrait of a dauntingly difficult subject,'' remarked PW. Photos. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The painter Georgia O'Keeffe lived a long and complicated life, and her work has become a cultural icon, so demand for this title should be great. It is by no means a definitive biography, however. Novelist Robinson has clearly done her homework, but the uses to which she puts it are sometimes curious. After quoting a passage from O'Keeffe's correspondence, she cannot resist reiterating what she thinks the painter felt, even though O'Keeffe has just told us. Elsewhere, the description of an early romantic relationship of O'Keeffe's is vividly delineated, but we learn only in a footnote that the letters on which the description is based are only conjecturally from the man in question. While Robinson at times veers toward sentimentality in writing about the artist's life, she never does so about the work, and she treats the emotional complexity of O'Keeffe's marriage to Alfred Stieglitz and relationship with her companion Juan Hamilton with intelligence and care. Still, she wears the reader out (it takes 200 pages to get to Stieglitz's first showing of her work). This might have been a happier book as a novelization. --GraceAnne A. DeCandido, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A thorough, full-blown biography that celebrates Georgia O'Keeffe as a social and artistic pioneer who masters, not without cost, the struggle to put work at the center of her life. Novelist Robinson (Summer Light, 1988) begins her sweeping, sometimes flowery chronicle with O'Keeffe's ancestors settling the ""rounded swells of mahogany earth"" of Sun Prairie, Wisc., in the 1850's. It is from the Midwest and its tradition of self-reliant farm women (her mother included), Robinson argues, that O'Keeffe got her ""kind of nerve"" to break convention. Into the moving detail-packed account of O'Keeffe's life, Robinson weaves her art and her spirited voice: ""I've been working like mad all day--had a great time--Anita, it seems I never had such a good time--I was just trying to say what I wanted to say. . ."" But O'Keeffe must fight to sustain this ""nerve"" even in her legendary relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, where she played the often conflicting roles of wife, artist, and model. Already well-known when they met, Stieglitz championed O'Keeffe, exhibiting her work at his gallery, ""291,"" and drawing her into his circle of early modernists (Marsden Hartley, John Marin). He also brought her instant and problematic fame with his brilliant series of photographs that documented her every mood, her every inch. In part to escape his demanding presence, she began annual sojourns to the stark landscape of the Southwest in 1929. Revealing America's most celebrated woman painter as a complex and contradictory woman, Robinson holds her accountable for her far-from-flawless life. During her sad, last years in New Mexico, O'Keeffe was blind, cut off from friends and family, and increasingly dominated by her young companion, Juan Hamilton. In 1986, she died alone at 98. The almost-500-page, relentlessly balanced tale ends with the battle between Hamilton and her family over her $90-million estate. The most comprehensive O'Keeffe biography to date, this essentially feminist reading convincingly builds its case from a wealth of sources (some unavailable before her death) to explain less the woman-behind-the-myth than how and why the woman herself became myth-maker. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
