Customer Reviews

O'Keeffe At Abiquiu

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If you love New Mexico, O'Keeffe or just fine photography this is a book for you. This intimate look at O'Keeffe through text and photos gives us a better look at this complicated artist. The photos by M. Wood are outstanding, as he takes you through how he contacted Ms. O'Keeffe, through the subtle games she and her gardener played. It was easy to see the love of the land that not only Ms. O'Keeffe had, but the same feeling seems to to just pop out of each photogrpah that Mr. Woods shows us.

At last count there were, oh, 2,324 books on Georgia O'Keeffe. 82% of them focus on the last part of her career -- the approximately 40 years she spent in New Mexico living a singular life and painting increasingly numinous images.

This is one of those late career books. It is to my mind, one of the best books on O'Keeffe and, indeed, one of the best portraits of any 20th century artist.

The adobe house that O'Keeffee inhabited was in the town of Abiquiu and, about ten years before her death, O'Keeffe allowed Myron Wood to photograph her home and studio. This book contains these images. There's hardly a human being to be seen here, but the photographs of the landscape, the interiors and exteriors of the house, and the oddly beautiful things which O'Keeffe surrounded herself with, speak to her artistic process with clarity and depth. Particulary insightful is the essay by O'Keeffe's "nurse companion" C.T. Patten.

The blurb explains things fairly well...

"Anyone who knows New Mexico with its fierce light, pungent aroma of sage, and big open skies will understand its fascination for O'Keeffe. The landscape is direct and elemental, like her paintings; it is tough and unyielding like her character."

and

The essay "provides considerable information, but also attempts to evoke the high desert atmosphere as O'Keeffe herself experienced it."

Book details: tidy oblong hardback in dustjacket: 120 pp, a bit under 2 pounds. In a heavy-weight dustjacket; sewn binding; cloth over boards; b&w illustrations throughout.