Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Collections by Barbara Buhler Lynes (book review)

Heather Kline, Reviewer

Book Review – Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Collections by Barbara Buhler Lynes. New York: Abrams, In Association with Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2007.

In commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, curator Barbara Buhler Lynes compiled the comprehensive publication Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Collections.

The book highlights the museum’s large collection of works created throughout O’Keefe’s through a wide variety of illustrated plates and text narrative. It includes biographical details, quotes, and explication by the author and O’Keeffe scholars, artists, and acquaintances on the themes and styles of O’Keeffe’s work. It also includes a listing of the works of other Modernists in the O’Keeffe Museum collection (including luminaries Marsden Hartley, Thomas Hart Benton, Robert Henri, and Edward Hopper), and a chronology of O’Keeffe’s career.

Specific themes analyzed through images and text include cityscapes, portraits, series, views from airplanes, bones & other objects, and depictions of both rural and urban architecture in New York and New Mexico. The book shows a chronological progression in the sense that O’Keeffe’s years in New York and New Mexico greatly expanded her subject matter and influenced her style.

Along with such geographical and chronological development, one of the more intriguing assertions is that O’Keeffe’s artistic development was greatly influenced by photography, particularly the work of husband Alfred Stieglitz. Photographs gave her a new way of viewing and depicting light and dark and perhaps influenced the colors and shapes of some of her best known work. Buhler Lynes contends that photography created in her art a style based on “composition-based thinking”.

The book also calls into question common interpretations of O’Keeffe’s subject matter. The depiction of skulls as symbols of death and dark landscapes as desolate recesses of the psyche may have been compositional tools used by O’Keeffe as a new way to approach color, light, and shape relationships.

Undoubtedly this is a definitive study of O’Keeffe’s work in this collection, and it is compelling to consider her alternative interpretations of O’Keeffe’s most common subjects. The book is accessible to most audiences for the quality of the illustrations and the plethora of interesting and unique narrative and biographical detail. It is highly recommended as a starting point for O’Keeffe researchers attempting to get a visual “feel” for the artist, as well as others interested in introducing themselves to her immense contribution to American art in general and Modernism in particular.

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Heather Kline is a librarian, art historian, writer, and book reviewer.

An archive of Heather's's articles is located here.

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