Carr, a Canadian, O'Keeffe, an American, and Kahlo, a Mexican, were not close during their lives, but Udall (an independent art historian in Santa Fe, New Mexico), in this carefully reasoned and illuminating study, effectively brings many aspects of the artists' works together to demonstrate a kind of zeitgeist they shared as women developing often surprisingly similar, non-traditional themes in the 1920s. Links between their works are developed in the areas of nationalism, identity, gender, nature, and self through discussion of their paintings, psychology, and artistic influences. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Offers a portrait of the twentieth-century woman artist through discussions of her marriage to art photography pioneer Alfred Stieglitz, the impact of his infidelity on her psyche, and her relocation to New Mexico, where she created her signature works.

Engendering an avant-garde is the first book to comprehensively examine the origins of Vancouver photo-conceptualism in its regional context between 1968 and 1990. Employing discourse analysis of texts written by and about artists, feminist critique and settler-colonial theory, the book discusses the historical transition from artists’ creation of ‘defeatured landscapes’ between 1968–71 to their cinematographic photographs of the late 1970s and the backlash against such work by other artists in the late 1980s. It is the first study to provide a structural account for why the group remains all-male. It accomplishes this by demonstrating that the importation of a European discourse of avant-garde activity, which assumed masculine social privilege and public activity, effectively excluded women artists from membership.

They all came to Taos: Georgia O'Keefe, D. H. Lawrence, Carl Van Vechten, and other expatriates of New York City. Fleeing urban ugliness, they moved west between 1917 and 1929 to join the community that art patron Mabel Dodge created in her Taos salon and to draw inspiration from New Mexico's mountain desert and "primitive" peoples. As they settled, their quest for the primitive forged a link between "authentic" places and those who called them home. In this first book to consider Dodge and her visitors from a New Mexican perspective, Flannery Burke shows how these cultural mavens drew on modernist concepts of primitivism to construct their personal visions and cultural agendas. In each chapter she presents a place as it took shape for a different individual within Dodge's orbit. From this kaleidoscope of places emerges a vision of what place meant to modernist artists-as well as a narrative of what happened in the real place of New Mexico when visitors decided it was where they belonged. Expanding the picture of early American modernism beyond New York's dominance, she shows that these newcomers believed Taos was the place they had set out to find-and that when Taos failed to meet their expectations, they changed Taos. Throughout, Burke examines the ways notions of primitivism unfolded as Dodge's salon attracted artists of varying ethnicities and the ways that patronage was perceived-by African American writers seeking publication, Anglos seeking "authentic" material, Native American artists seeking patronage, or Nuevomexicanos simply seeking respect. She considers the notion of "competitive primitivism," especially regarding Carl Van Vechten, and offers nuanced analyses of divisions within northern New Mexico's arts communities over land issues and of the ways in which Pueblo Indians spoke on their own behalf. Burke's book offers a portrait of a place as it took shape both aesthetically in the imaginations of Dodge's visitors and materially in the lives of everyday New Mexicans. It clearly shows that no people or places stand outside the modern world-and that when we pretend otherwise, those people and places inevitably suffer.

This book explores the meaning and symbolism of the flower motif in the art of women artists, from the nineteenth century to the present day. It begins with a discussion of the symbolic significance of the flower in canonical texts such as the Song of Songs, in which the female lover is likened to a “lily among the thorns,” and to an “enclosed garden.” These allegorical images permeated into Christian iconography, attaining various expressions in the plastic arts from the twelfth through nineteenth centuries. The heart of the book is a discussion of the meaning of the change in representations of the flower, and at the same time the appearance of amazing images of “masculine” skyscrapers, in the works of avant-garde American women artists during the 1920s and 30s, in three hubs of Modernist art: New York, California, and Mexico. Tessler explains how modernist artists of various fields of art – such as Glaspell, Stettheimer, O’Keeffe, Pelton, Cunningham, Mather, Modotti and Kahlo – were aware of the religious symbolism of the flower in Judaism and Christianity, and turned it into an emblem of the new modern woman with her own views of the world. Flowers and Towers concludes by presenting the works of contemporary feminist American artists such as Chicago and Schapiro, who pay tribute to those same Modernist artists by creating a new and daring image of the flower and using “feminine” materials and techniques that link them, as it were, to their spiritual mothers.

Between the two world wars, middle-class America experienced a "marriage crisis" that filled the pages of the popular press. Divorce rates were rising, birthrates falling, and women were entering the increasingly industrialized and urbanized workforce in larger numbers than ever before, while Victorian morals and manners began to break down in the wake of the first sexual revolution. Vivien Green Fryd argues that this crisis played a crucial role in the lives and works of two of America's most familiar and beloved artists, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Combining biographical study of their marriages with formal and iconographical analysis of their works, Fryd shows how both artists expressed the pleasures and perils of their relationships in their paintings. Hopper's many representations of Victorian homes in sunny, tranquil landscapes, for instance, take on new meanings when viewed in the context of the artist's own tumultuous marriage with Jo and the widespread middle-class fears that the new urban, multidwelling homes would contribute to the breakdown of the family. Fryd also persuasively interprets the many paintings of skulls and crosses that O'Keeffe produced in New Mexico as embodying themes of death and rebirth in response to her husband Alfred Stieglitz's long-term affair with Dorothy Norman. Art and the Crisis of Marriage provides both a penetrating reappraisal of the interconnections between Georgia O'Keeffe's and Edward Hopper's lives and works, as well as a vivid portrait of how new understandings of family, gender, and sexuality transformed American society between the wars in ways that continue to shape it today.

A revised edition of this classic survey that presents a thorough overview of Georgia O’Keeffe’s life and work. Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) was a major figure in American art for seven decades. Throughout that long and prolific career she remained true to her unique artistic vision, creating a highly individual style that synthesized the formal language of modern European abstraction and the themes of traditional American pictorialism. The main subjects she returned to again and again were the flowers, animal bones, and landscapes around her studios in Lake George, New York, and New Mexico, to which her legacy is tied. This comprehensive and illuminating book by noted O’Keeffe scholar Lisa Mintz Messinger surveys her complete oeuvre—drawings, watercolors, and paintings from all periods—and explains her life in the context of her artistic output. Now revised with an updated bibliography, Georgia O’Keeffe features color reproductions of artworks throughout.