Full Bloom

"Georgia O'Keeffe was one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century. She made enormous contributions to modern art, and in her seminal paintings of intimately rendered flowers, desert landscapes, and stark white cow skulls, she applied the photographic techniques of cropping and composition usually relegated to the camera lens. But behind O'Keeffe's bold work and celebrity was a woman misunderstood by even her most ardent admirers. This biography offers an honest portrayal of a life shrouded in myth." "When she was still unknown as an artist, O'Keeffe was discovered by Alfred Stieglitz, twenty-three years her senior and well established as a pioneer in art photography. The relationship was physically and intellectually passionate, and Stieglitz soon left his wife to marry O'Keeffe. But as O'Keeffe's career began to eclipse his own, Stieglitz turned his attention to another impressionable young woman, Dorothy Norman." "In Full Bloom, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp uncovers the woman behind the legend, revealing the life of the artist through her work, her letters, and dozens of interviews with those closest to O'Keeffe in her lifetime. As the first biographer to have interviewed Dorothy Norman, Drohojowska-Philp sheds new light on O'Keeffe's motivations to leave New York for New Mexico, where she effectively redefined herself." "Drohojowska-Philp brings us much closer to understanding the genius of one of the greatest American painters. Rather than the bold, audacious woman most of us assume O'Keeffe always to have been, she emerges as a woman whose disappointments drove her to self-discovery - personally and artistically - far from the brilliance of Manhattan."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.