This book was somewhat interesting and did not portray
stieglitz well. Georgia was a woman in need of control and she was portrayed as more 3-dimensional than Stieglitz. Of course it was upsetting to learn of the abuse she experienced. Many of the details did not add to the story. ( )

NB: The original review included pictures and can be found here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/297302#6607581

“I make forms that echo those early abstract forms I made when I was no one, and it occurs to me that art is a separate country, outside the body, outside time, like death or desire, an element beyond our physical selves we are traveling toward. My hand shakes. Small drops of paint have spilled. So human, so flawed and imprecise, and beautiful for that.”

I don’t know art. I don’t study it. I don’t always (usually?) get it. But I know what I like, and I like Georgia O’Keeffe. When I was a child, my mother received as a gift, a huge coffee table book of fifty O’Keeffe flower paintings, and I loved to page through it. I loved the colors and the shapes and what I now think of as a kind of motion in the paintings. A few years ago, I went to Santa Fe and happily abandoned my not-interested husband to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum – it was amazing to see her work in person, and I spent a long time in that relatively small space. Earlier this week, I took in some of the galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and came across two O’Keeffes. It inspired me to finally pick up this book, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe by Dawn Tripp, and I immediately sank into it.

Tripp focuses on O’Keeffe’s relationship with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who mentored, seduced, loved, and manipulated her. He photographed her early on in their relationship, and his exhibition of her nude portraits was her introduction to the claustrophobic art world of New York.

When her paintings were finally exhibited, her art was often viewed through the lens provided by Stieglitz’s photos, and O’Keeffe resented it. She resented the gendered terms being used, the reduction of much of her work to sexual expressionism: “I feel heat rising into my face, burning. They are writing me down, this thrall of bow-tied men, straining me into awful, frivolous terms. Every observation they make about my art is linked back to the body of the woman in the photographs.”

O’Keeffe and Stieglitz had a complicated relationship – he wanted to marry, she did not. She wanted a child, he did not. They eventually married and had no children because he convinced her it would interfere with her art. Tripp includes a lot of yearning on O’Keeffe’s part to have a child and the sense of loss when she realizes she won’t. I wondered how much of this was based in the available evidence, to be honest. It seems like such a weirdly conventional and overtly feminine trait to attribute to a woman who rejected so many similar stereotypes for herself.

Tripp writes beautifully, of normal everyday things and of art and artistic inclinations, passions, and frustrations.

“Our mother was cool but not unkind. Her eyes luminous, austere, held a sort of distance we did not belong to, like the line at the end of the sky – that silent point of reference that held everything tethered, the line that seemed to meet the land but never did.”

“The shapes of the world out there are shadowy. Lean and contoured strokes, they glow. The moon shines and cuts the night open.”

Her portrait of a stormy relationship is sensitive and nicely-detailed; she includes small moments to illustrate the push and pull between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz and in so doing makes them very real and sympathetic to the reader. One is simultaneously frustrated and moved by them. In the end, O’Keeffe reclaims herself and her art, and the last sections of the book, where she is an old woman, are beautifully done.

“I will go back to New Mexico. I will walk out into the dry nothingness of the country that I love and paint: sharp-edged flowers, desert abstractions, cow skulls – images of Thanatos. I will title my work and that is what they will see: the subject that fills space and the words that define it. They will not notice that what I am really after – all I was ever really after – is that raw desire of the sky pouring through the windowed socket of a bone.”

Despite plenty of flaws, I really loved this book.

4.5 stars

“When I make a picture of a flower, I don’t paint it as I see it, but as its essence moves me. I eliminate every detail that’s extraneous. I paint it as I want it to be felt.”

“Day after day, it is the desolation of this country that enthralls me. How the wind sweeps the light and throws it into vibrant shifting patterns of color and shadow against the cliffs. I breathe. My mind loosens like a fist and empties. I do not think of him. I drive, I walk, I paint, and I am not the woman that he made.”

And this was fun – this is one of the paintings I saw at the Met on Monday.

“This will be my answer to the men who are always setting out to make the Great American Novel or the Great American Photograph. This will be my joke on them. Lines of red, white, and blue, and that mythic, imperfect cow skull – that piece of country – floating there through the center, the stripped cold strength of that bone that lasts and lasts, rising out of the blue like some crazy American dream. It will be unsalable – who would hang a thing like this? I don’t care. They may not like it, but they’ll notice. Whether they get it or not. They don’t make the country like I do. They don’t see that what is most magical and lush exists where you would never think to look. The bones are not what you imagine. I told Beck this once. Not death. But the life that is left over. When I finish the painting, I study it. It isn’t pretty, but it’s what I want it to be.” ( )

Georgia O'Keeffe is my mother's favorite artist so I grew up surrounded by her artwork and always loved it. I went to the same art show at the Whitney that inspired the author to write this novel. I didn't have much knowledge on Georgia O'Keeffe's life and her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz before reading this book, so I don't know how accurate it is, but it is fascinating, sometimes sexy, sometimes sad, but always compelling. ( )

I actually did not finish the book. I tried but I think I am one of the few that was not impressed and was actually bored with the book. I was excited to see Georgia O'Keefe in a fictional setting but I hope she was more passionate in real life. ( )

I read all her books. She knows how to shuck her shadow and then step back into it, as she would say. I enjoyed the take on O'keeffe's persona, but I especially enjoyed the take on Alfred Stieglitz. I also recommend her books, Moon Tide, and Open Water ( )