This large, finely balanced biography offers an astonishingly honest portrayal of one of the most successful American artists of the 20th century--known for her arresting paintings of enormous, intimately rendered flowers, desert landscapes, and stark white cow skulls.
Offers a portrait of the twentieth-century woman artist through discussions of her marriage to art photography pioneer Alfred Stieglitz, the impact of his infidelity on her psyche, and her relocation to New Mexico, where she created her signature works.
Equal under the Sky is the first historical study of Georgia O’Keeffe’s complex involvement with, and influence on, US feminism from the 1910s to the 1970s. Utilizing understudied sources such as fan letters, archives of women’s organizations, transcripts of women’s radio shows, and programs from women’s colleges, Linda M. Grasso shows how and why feminism and O’Keeffe are inextricably connected in popular culture and scholarship. The women’s movements that impacted the creation and reception of O’Keeffe’s art, Grasso argues, explain why she is a national icon who is valued for more than her artistic practice.
Collects the private correspondence between Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, revealing the ups and downs of their marriage, their thoughts on their work, and their friendships with other artists.
Art historian Wagner looks at the imagery and careers of three important figures in the history of twentieth-century art: Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, and Georgia O'Keeffe, relating their work to three decisive moments in the history of American modernism: the avant-garde of the 1920s, the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, and the modernist redefinition undertaken in the 1960s. Their artistic contributions were invaluable, Wagner demonstrates, as well as hard-won. She also shows that the fact that these artists were women--the main element linking the three--is as much the index of difference among their art and experience as it is a passkey to what they share.--From publisher description.
This volume presents a portrait of the friendship between Maria Chabot (1913-2001) and American artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) seen through the lens of their personal correspondence to each other. For four summers beginning in 1941, when O'Keeffe was in New Mexico, Chabot lived with the artist at Ghost Ranch, managing her house and guests, and organizing the famed camping-painting trips from which came some of O'Keeffe's most distinguished works of the period. In 1946, Chabot agreed to conceive and oversee the reconstruction of a ruined adobe house in New Mexico that would become O'Keeffe's permanent home in 1949. During the periods when O'Keeffe was in New York where she lived with her husband, famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the two women wrote each other with remarkable frequency. Their letters describe their love for northern New Mexico, the hardships of life there during World War II, and their interactions with the diverse cultural groups of the region. The letters also offer insights into the women's very different ways of dealing with the world and their differing perceptions of a complex and sometimes tempestuous friendship.
The extraordinary story of the artists who propelled themselves to international fame in 1960s Los Angeles Los Angeles, 1960: There was no modern art museum and there were few galleries, which is exactly what a number of daring young artists liked about it, among them Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman, Judy Chicago and John Baldessari. Freedom from an established way of seeing, making, and marketing art fueled their creativity, which in turn inspired the city. Today Los Angeles has four museums dedicated to contemporary art, around one hundred galleries, and thousands of artists. Here, at last, is the book that tells the saga of how the scene came into being, why a prevailing Los Angeles permissiveness, 1960s-style, spawned countless innovations, including Andy Warhol's first exhibition, Marcel Duchamp's first retrospective, Frank Gehry's mind-bending architecture, Rudi Gernreich's topless bathing suit, Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, even the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Doors, and other purveyors of a California style. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the epicenter of cool.
Between the two world wars, middle-class America experienced a "marriage crisis" that filled the pages of the popular press. Divorce rates were rising, birthrates falling, and women were entering the increasingly industrialized and urbanized workforce in larger numbers than ever before, while Victorian morals and manners began to break down in the wake of the first sexual revolution. Vivien Green Fryd argues that this crisis played a crucial role in the lives and works of two of America's most familiar and beloved artists, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Combining biographical study of their marriages with formal and iconographical analysis of their works, Fryd shows how both artists expressed the pleasures and perils of their relationships in their paintings. Hopper's many representations of Victorian homes in sunny, tranquil landscapes, for instance, take on new meanings when viewed in the context of the artist's own tumultuous marriage with Jo and the widespread middle-class fears that the new urban, multidwelling homes would contribute to the breakdown of the family. Fryd also persuasively interprets the many paintings of skulls and crosses that O'Keeffe produced in New Mexico as embodying themes of death and rebirth in response to her husband Alfred Stieglitz's long-term affair with Dorothy Norman. Art and the Crisis of Marriage provides both a penetrating reappraisal of the interconnections between Georgia O'Keeffe's and Edward Hopper's lives and works, as well as a vivid portrait of how new understandings of family, gender, and sexuality transformed American society between the wars in ways that continue to shape it today.
New York Times Notable Book Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist Wall Street Journal—one of five best artist biographies Edward Hopper's canvasses are filled with stripped-down spaces and unrelenting light, evocative landscapes, and the lonely aspects of men and women seemingly isolated in their surroundings. What kind of man had this haunting vision, and what kind of life engendered this art? No one is better qualified to answer these questions than art historian Gail Levin, author and curator of the major studies and exhibitions of Hopper's work. In this intimate biography she reveals the true nature and personality of the man himself—and of the woman who shared his life, the artist Josephine Nivison.
A wildly entertaining and surprisingly educational dive into art history as you've never seen it before, from the host of the beloved ArtCurious podcast We're all familiar with the works of Claude Monet, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous reproductions of his water lilies on umbrellas, handbags, scarves, and dorm-room posters. But did you also know that Monet and his cohort were trailblazing rebels whose works were originally deemed unbelievably ugly and vulgar? And while you probably know the tale of Vincent van Gogh's suicide, you may not be aware that there's pretty compelling evidence that the artist didn't die by his own hand but was accidentally killed--or even murdered. Or how about the fact that one of Andy Warhol's most enduring legacies involves Caroline Kennedy's moldy birthday cake and a collection of toenail clippings? ArtCurious is a colorful look at the world of art history, revealing some of the strangest, funniest, and most fascinating stories behind the world's great artists and masterpieces. Through these and other incredible, weird, and wonderful tales, ArtCurious presents an engaging look at why art history is, and continues to be, a riveting and relevant world to explore.