Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things

Georgia O'Keeffe's extraordinary still-life paintings -- of apples, leaves, flowers, shells, trees, rocks, crosses, bones, and doors -- reinvented the genre through a new language of color and form that synthesized Eastern thought and a Western style of painting. This stunning book is the first in-depth exploration of O'Keeffe's unique contribution to still-life painting. The book presents an essay by Elizabeth Hutton Turner that explores the formative influence of Arthur Wesley Dow and the unique confluence of Eastern and Western thought in O'Keeffe's approach to objects. It is followed by an essay by Marjorie Balge-Crozier that compares O'Keeffe's invention in still life to academic practices and traditional models in Western art. The essays are accompanied by beautiful full-page reproductions of O'Keeffe's paintings as well as contextual photographs of her studios, collections, and exhibition installations and related historical and contemporary works. The book also provides an illustrated chronology of O'Keeffe's life by Elsa Mezvinsky Smithgall.