How Georgia Became O'Keeffe: Lessons On The Art Of Living

by Karen Karbo award-winning author of the New York Times Notable Book THE DIAMOND LANE

Overview

A fresh, revealing look at the artist who continues to inspire new generations of women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780762771318
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	11/15/2011
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.84(w) x 9.94(h) x 0.96(d)

About the Author

Karen Karbo is a novelist, journalist, and witty, no-nonsense social commentator, and is the author of The Gospel According to Coco Chanel and How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great, a biography-cum-guidebook the Philadelphia Inquirer called “an exuberant celebration of a great original.” Karbo is also the author of Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost, the third installment in a trilogy about a seventh-grade girl detective who has a peculiar gift: self-confidence. Karbo’s debut novel, Trespassers Welcome Here, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and all three of her novels have been named New York Times notable books. The Stuff of Life, her memoir about her father, was a People Magazine Critic’s Pick and winner of the Oregon Book Award. Her work essays, reviews, and articles can be found in Outside, Elle, Vogue, Esquire, Redbook, More,Self, Entertainment Weekly, the New Republic, the Oregonian, and the New York Times. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Read an Excerpt

How O’Keeffe Became Herself

In the art world, critics remain divided over whether O’Keeffe was a genius or merely an energetic fetishist who pressed upon us, year after year, her sexy yin and yang paintings of calla lilies, sweet peas, the various chalk white bones of horses and cows, mysterious doorways, and adobe walls. What remains indisputable, however, is her genius for navigating the waters of her own vision, for discovering it, nurturing it, and never abandoning it. At a time when women still didn’t have the right to vote, when their life goal was marriage to pretty much anyone who would have them, O’Keeffe was having none of it. She had better fish to fry. How, we may ask, did she catch these all-important fish?

 

She wrote letters

I realize I may as well be suggesting that you take up whittling, but the fact remains that one of the best ways to figure out what you’re all about is to write letters.. . .

She found a devotee

One of the reasons O’Keeffe was able to flaunt the conventions of Canyon with such confidence and ease is because she had Stieglitz rooting her on from New York.. .. .

She defied all accepted conventions of feminine beauty

With her fabulous raw-boned frame, snaggly brows, and schoolmarm’s bun, her black vestments, man’s shoes, and odd assortment of hats and turbans, O’Keeffe was out there. There was no like her, then or ever.. . .

Editorial Reviews

As readers of her How to Hepburn and The Gospel According to Coco Chanel know, Karen Karbo does not write traditional biographies. In fact, her reassessments are, as the subtitle of this book notes, lessons on the art of living. Thus, in covering the long (1887-1986) life of painter Georgia O'Keeffe, she teaches us more about how the Wisconsin-born artist found her path and defined her style than about how she mixed her paints or arranged her itineraries. How Georgia Became O'Keeffe describes how this passionately independent woman was able to maintain a successful relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, a masterful photographer with a strong personality. Unconventional both as a biography and a self-help tome; equally useful as both.

Choosing to examine and extract lessons from famed artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s personal life rather than dissect her oeuvre, the author of The Gospel According to Coco Chanel ponders what it is about O’Keeffe that speaks to us so deeply and what went on inside the artist to allow her to defy society’s conventions and be so “resolutely herself” in the service of an abiding passion.” Growing up on a Wisconsin farm and left to her own devices by a withholding mother gave O’Keeffe the freedom to create her own vision. In her 20s, measles derailed an early career in commercial art, and a short stint teaching art in a remote Texas public school turned her on to the beauty of extreme landscape and how isolation could spark inspiration. O’Keeffe’s marriage to the much older legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz was bumpy; he was overbearing and unfaithful, but he believed in her vision and genius. This intimate, quirky, and sassy essay makes its iconic subject into an accessible, relevant figure with whom readers, particularly women, can identify. But Karbo’s constant wisecracking and self-referencing grow tiresome, and her adoration of O’Keeffe lacks intellectually rigorous discussion of the art itself. Illus. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Karen Karbo's fresh and revealing take on the epic life of Georgia O'Keeffe is both effortlessly entertaining and profoundly inspirational. As vivid and original as an O'Keeffe flower, How Georgia Became O'Keeffe offers a quirky, modern view of one of America's most iconic women.”

—Sheila Weller, author of Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—And the Journey of a Generation.

“In this intimate, joyful, and absolutely fun biography, Karen Karbo shows us why artist Georgia O’Keeffe remains an inspiration for women in search of a self-determined life. I will immediately pass this book on to my fifteen-year old daughter so that she can learn from this unforgettable original: gifted, independent, daring, her beauty and creativity raw and unadorned, from youth into her old age.”

—Julie Metz, author of the New York Times bestseller Perfection

"Karen Karbo has done what no biographer, social critic, or fan has yet been able to do. She's burrowed past the genius and the legend and the clichés and arrived at the heart of Georgia-philia. The lessons she imparts remind us that true independence, like true eccentricity, true beauty and, of course, true love, cannot be faked. They remind us that owning your life requires owning your soul and, beyond that, you don't really need much else. I want to give this book to every young woman I know who's setting out on her own in the world—not to mention the rest of us, who could always use a refresher course on this stuff." —Meghan Daum, author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House

"How perfect that a writer as thoughtful, original, and hilarious as Karen Karbo takes on as a subject the talented, passionate, and fearless Georgia O'Keeffe. The result is a fresh, funny, highly personalized take on ‘the nation's greatest woman artist,’ a meticulously researched, page-turning romp through the life of a painter whose days were as bold and unique as her art." —Cathi Hanauer, author of Sweet Ruin and editor of The Bitch in the House

“Karbo writes like nobody else. She gives you O’Keeffe, but she also serves herself up in relation to O’Keeffe, woman to woman, as it were. Others do this, and the charm is so obviously fake. .. that millions fall for it. Karbo serves up more rueful memories: the dateless high school years, thyroid surgery, going on the O’Keefe trail in an RV.. .. Yes, there’s the standard stuff you want and need to know: the paintings, the photographs, her love of the Southwest. All presented lightly, effortlessly, casually, colloquially. ‘For O'Keeffe, forty was the new sixty,’ Karbo writes. That’s not being cool. That’s just style.” —Jesse Kornbluth, Head Butler

From the Publisher