Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe [Hardcover]

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 2004

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was one of the most successful American artists of the 20th-century: her arresting paintings of enormous, intimately rendered flowers, desert landscapes and stark white cow skulls are seminal works of modern art. But behind O'Keeffe's bold work and celebrity was a woman misunderstood by even her most ardent admirers. When she was still unknown as an artist, O'Keeffe married Alfred Stieglitz, 23 years her senior. The relationship was physically and intellectually passionate, but Atieglitz was a man of the world. Driven to a nervous breakdown by Stieglitz's affair, O'Keefe relocated and redefined herself in New Mexico, where she created her unforgettable signature paintings. Through personal material - including interviews with Dorothy Norman, Stieglitz's longtime paramour - this biography offers an insight into O'Keefe's defining relationships and the effect of her husband's infidelity, and offers an honest portrayal of a life shrouded in myth.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Arguably America's most popular painter, O'Keeffe (1887–1986) receives a full, too full, biography from art critic Drohojowska-Philp in her book debut. The first section reaches back four full decades before the artist's birth to O'Keeffe's immigrant grandparents' Wisconsin farm, and forward through O'Keeffe's studies (Art Institute of Chicago; Art Students League, New York), her jobs (commercial artist, art teacher) and her romances with various artists and others. The midsection, covering 1918–1946, details the New York years, O'Keeffe's relationship with photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz and her blossoming as a painter. The New Mexico decades between Stieglitz's death and O'Keeffe's (1947–1986), years of large canvases, honors and aging, complete the triptych. O'Keeffe was a prolific artist (more than 900 works), and Drohojowska-Philp seems driven to remark on as many as can be squeezed in. Notably greater detail about Dorothy Norman, who became Stieglitz's lover, and John Hamilton, who attended O'Keeffe during the last decade of her life, mark the book, but are all but buried beneath a paralyzing avalanche of tiresome detail and hollow data: "At four-thirty in the morning, [O'Keeffe] watched the sun rise over the glacial lake."
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From The New Yorker

Georgia O'Keeffe's long and prolific life lasted nearly a century, but much of it was comparatively uneventful. Her farmgirl childhood in Wisconsin and the retreat to New Mexico that occupied the second half of her life were separated by a glamorous period—a thirty-year sojourn in bohemian New York, where she was for a time the wife, muse, and protégée of the aging photographer Alfred Stieglitz. It was he who promoted her as an artist, and initially O'Keeffe struggled to assert her autonomy. Drohojowska-Philp's biography painstakingly assembles the details of O'Keeffe's life—love letters, financial problems, a schoolteacher who said that her drawing of a child's hand was too small—but occasionally fails in the attempt to make them seem important in relation to the art. "Where I come from, the earth means everything," O'Keeffe said, and she seems to have lived most of her life in accordance with this principle.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (September 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0641743084
• ISBN-13: 978-0641743085
• ASIN: 0393058530
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,100,787 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Respectable and well-researched, but still imperfect, January 30, 2005

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Professor Goatboy (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe (Hardcover)

There have been a number of biographies of O'Keeffe: this one's strength is its willingness to break through the O'Keeffe myth of the independent, tough, self-sustaining artist. The author examines O'Keeffe's breakdowns, her domination by Stieglitz, and the long affair between Stieglitz and Dorothy Norman. The author is not a natural writer, however, and the prose is often clumsy, with small underdeveloped paragraphs. And she is strangely too easy on Juan Hamilton, the man who took care of -- and advantange of -- O'Keeffe in her old age. The research of this biography is solid, but it really should be read with Roxana Robinson's for a more complete picture.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More than you ever wanted to know about Georgia O'Keeffe, June 5, 2005

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Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe (Hardcover)

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is a sound writer, one who obviously does her research inexhaustibly, and with a background in art criticism she also speaks with authority and an informed eye. But she does go on....

For those who want to know more about the idiosyncrasies of this American idol then this is the resource of choice. We learn more about the frustrations, self doubt, love affairs, and general personality quirks than in all the other biographies combined. We also learn about each painting in depth which I suppose is like a verbal catalogue raissonne and for that we should be thankful.

It is just that with all great artists not everything they make is of show quality and it is this inclusion of all of the odds and major ends of O'Keeffe's work that borders on tiresome. It is with a good degree of relief that the last page of this nearly 500-page opus is reached.

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp obviously holds Georgia O'Keeffe in a realm close to Valhalla and that is all well and good. She writes with vigor and determination and certainly informs us of the 'full bloom' of her title. In the end this is a valuable volume for the archives, but not a book to recommend for the casual reader who has already grown visually fatigued with the Santa Fe posters of poppies, ox skulls, and datura flowers. Grady Harp, June 05

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tremendous and important detail lacking in other biographies, June 19, 2006

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B. Horrigan (MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe (Paperback)

Detailed and thoughtful, and a riveting read if you really want to understand this artist's life. After reading dozens of books and articles about O'Keeffe during the course of my own research on New York-inspired artwork, I didn't think another O'Keeffe biography was necessary. But I'm grateful I found this book. I learned so much more about this artist--about her friendships, her travels beyond New York and the Southwest, and her abstract works.