O'Keefe

Zusatztext "A frank! compassionate! and memorable study of the woman behind the legend and her ravishing creations." -- Booklist "This engrossing biography of Georgia O'Keeffe sweeps away myths and legends....a remarkable piece of detective work." -- Publishers Weekly "Hogrefe manages to be both fair and compassionate in his treatment of a difficult woman--who also happens to be one of our most dazzling national treasures." --Edmund White "A historic! in-depth study of what it means to risk one's life to be an artist. It is also a depiction of sexual confusions! ironic outrage and rage! and the shedding of society's armor to create a female knight in pursuit of a vision. Georgia O'Keeffe is the one woman who was there first in the world of art." --Sandra Hochman Informationen zum Autor Jeffrey Hogrefe Klappentext One of this century's most beloved and celebrated artists, Georgia O'Keeffe transmitted her most intimate feelings onto her canvases. But the details of her private life were zealously guarded, leaving the world to wonder: What was the inspiration, and the impetus, for her sexually charged flower paintings? What was the nature of her relationship with her much older husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz? Why did she lie about her past and hide herself from her public? Journalist and author Jeffrey Hogrefe discloses the answers to these questions and more in O'Keeffe , a richly detailed biography that illuminates much of the mystery and intrigue that surround Georgia O'Keeffe, and finally reveals the real woman behind the legend. Hogrefe's encounter with the ninety-three-year-old artist and with Juan Hamilton, the young man she loved in her final years, provided him with unique insights into her private world, as well as into Hamilton's own controversial relationship with O'Keeffe during the last fourteen years of her life. Her acerbic personality, her unconventional lifestyle, and her struggles as an artist and a woman are brought to life in this definitive biography. Prologue In the spring of 1973 a hapless young wanderer with hair down his back and only memories in his pockets arrived in a remote outpost on New Mexico's high desert. He told people he had been sent there, clear across the continent, by a spirit. He was not embarrassed to say so. Most of the residents of Abiquiu were not put off by John Bruce Hamilton--better known as Juan--and his other worlds. Isolated by high mountains and wide arid plains, in remote parts of New Mexico--like Abiquiu--natives occupied virtually the same sphere as their eighteenth-century Spanish forebears. It was believed that witches cast spells and snakes flew in the night. Grown men beat themselves with whips made of cactus barbs in the name of religion. Being driven across the continent by a spirit was as commonplace as long sunsets and fantastic landforms in Abiquiu--a small place in a big land, peopled with a few hundred natives of a unique mixture of Arab, Basque, Spanish, and American Indian blood and consisting of a saloon with a swinging door, a one-room general store complete with saddles and tack, a collection of flat-roofed buildings made out of red mud, a large Catholic church--and an old white woman who lived by herself behind a high wall. Though some called her a bruja, or witch, she called herself an artist. Having turned in conventional clothes for patched jeans, faded flannel shirts, a three-day-old beard, a bushy moustache, and a VW van coated with road dust, twenty-six-year-old Juan Hamilton looked like a troubadour or a gypsy or a hippie--depending on your point of view. Sometimes he wore his brown hair braided in a long Chinese-style pigtail. Sometimes his hair cascaded across his shoulders and down his back freely. A tall man, slender and long-waisted, he had a way of walking that suggested there was no rush. He slunk. He...

Product details

• Authors: Jeffrey Hogrefe
• Publisher: Bantam Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.12.1999
• EAN: 9780553380699
• ISBN: 978-0-553-38069-9
• No. of pages: 448
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 216 mm x 26 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies