Georgia O'Keeffe - by Wanda M Corn (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book explores how Georgia O'Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2018 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award

This book explores how Georgia O'Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle. Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O'Keeffe's clothes. The author has attributed some of the most exquisite of these garments to O'Keeffe, a skilled seamstress who understood fabric and design, and who has become an icon in today's fashion world as much for her personal style as for her art. As one of her friends stated, O'Keeffe "never allowed her life to be one thing and her painting another." This fresh and carefully researched study brings O'Keeffe's style to life, illuminating how this beloved American artist purposefully proclaimed her modernity in the way she dressed and posed for photographers, from Alfred Stieglitz to Bruce Weber. This beautiful book accompanies the first museum exhibition to bring together photographs, clothes, and art to explore O'Keeffe's unified modernist aesthetic.

This book accompanies the show at the Peabody-Essex Museum, Georgia O'Keeffe: Art, Image, Style.

Review Quotes

"Living Modern has been organized by the influential historian of early American modernism, Wanda M. Corn, whose depth of research is reflected in an exceptional catalog." -The New York Times

"Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern is an outstanding addition to the body of knowledge pertaining to O'Keeffe, presenting her in an entirely new and fresh dimension: her realm of fashion and lifestyle."
-New York Journal of Books

"[Corn's] handsomely designed book, whose subtitle "Living Modern"is readable in several important ways, presents much heretofore unknown or under-analyzed detail about how O'Keeffe chose to present herself, and how, in tandem, she constructed her immediate environments during different periods of an unusually lengthy career." -Women's Art Journal

"This is an altogether innovative approach to O'Keeffe's life and her art and a model for other studies about how artists present themselves and their work." -Susan Danly, College Art Association Reviews

About the Author

Wanda M. Corn is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. Her publications include Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision; The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935; and Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories.