Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life

A New York Times Notable Book: Roxana Robinson’s definitive biography of Georgia O’Keeffe is a rich and revealing portrait of the iconic American artist.
 
Artist Georgia O’Keeffe was born into a family of strong Midwestern farmwomen and taught self-reliance at an early age. Coming of age in the modern era, she went on to defy the social conventions of her time and lead a successful and emancipated life full of creativity, feminism, and austerity that has taken on mythic proportion. Roxana Robinson’s multilayered book explores O’Keeffe’s journey to personal and professional independence, the evolution of her art, and her most influential relationships. Written with the cooperation of O’Keeffe’s family, and using sources unavailable during her lifetime, this biography presents the artist’s own voice through her letters to family and friends.
 
Robinson follows O’Keeffe from her childhood on a Wisconsin farm to the center of the New York art scene where she met her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz championed O’Keeffe, exhibiting her work at his gallery and drawing her into his inner circle of early modernists. But O’Keeffe, ever caught between the demands of love and art, left New York to find inspiration in the New Mexico desert where she created some of her most renowned work.
 
This vividly rendered, beautifully written account succeeds in capturing the passions, controversies, and contradictions in the life of an extraordinary woman.