Becoming O'Keeffe: The Early Years

By examining the period 1915 to 1930, with flashbacks to O'Keeffe’s little-known studies in Chicago and New York, Becoming O'Keeffe casts a clear new light on how a fiercely independent art student became the artist Georgia O'Keeffe. The careful scholarship and persuasive arguments of Dr. Peters’s text-supported with forceful clarity by her choice and juxtapositions of images-reveal not only unexpected complexity in O'Keeffe’s own work but also previously unexplored connections with work by her colleagues, particularly her dealer and husband, Alfred Stieglitz, and the photographers Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, and Edward Steichen. Dr. Peter’s interpretations of the aesthetic and personal interaction between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz show for the first time how strongly the painter’s work influenced Stieglitz’s own, and she suggests new ways of understanding their art and their relationship. That she does all this in exhilaratingly good prose makes this book a rare pleasure to read. Now revised to take into account the latest scholarship, Becoming O'Keeffe also provides an updated and expanded bibliography, as well as six new illustrations.