Unique artist

...It is therefore the more unfortunate that the first one, by Laurie Lisle, a journalist formerly with Newsweek, should be so inadequate, so disappointing...

...Her life thereafter seemed restless until she was able to spend long periods of time in New Mexico and finally settle there permanently...

...Throughout the rest of his life, Stieglitz promoted O'Keeffe's work as tirelessly as he promoted the work of other American artists, first at his 291 gallery, later at An American Place...

...She deserves better, much better...

...But she is admired and appreciated as well by the most sophisticated of art critics...

...Few artists live as long as she has...

...Maybe...

...The reader has no way of knowing other than Lisle's word...

...Lisle says that in 1908 Chicago was "a crowded city of three million...

...O'Keeffe, remote as always, would not cooperate in this enterprise, a decision that proved to be wise, but at the same time she did not interfere...

...She reduced the accoutrements of living to the barest necessities amongst which the beauty of simple, individual objects may be more fully appreciated...

...Although their marriage was to become strained by her long absences in the desert, where Stieglitz refused to go, and by his attentive friendship with a younger woman, they remained loyal to each other, in what for its time was a shockingly nontraditional marriage arrangement, until his death in 1946...

...Except perhaps for a few more details about O'Keeffe's life than were previously known, Lisle's Portrait of an Artist adds nothing to our knowledge and understanding of O'Keeffe as an artist and as a human being...

...She is probably best known for the huge canvases depicting closeups of parts of flowers (labeled phallic by some critics, but she says that's their problem) and for dried skulls and pelvic bones of animals juxtaposed against the desert landscape or counterpointed with flowers...

...Georgia felt reconciled to past disappointments in her life, and even thought that many of them had been alchemized into good luck...

...Her style has been and is her own, and few artists of any renown have used her subjects...

...O'Keeffe's meticulously made canvases are painted in bright, luminous, clear.colors, the paint thinly and carefully applied...

...Now, as in the past, her exhibitions draw huge crowds, and her work commands extraordinarily high prices...

...And it was Stieglitz,/ the eminent photographer, nearly twenty-four years her senior, who was to become first her lover, later her husband...

...Lisle did do an exhaustive amount of research, using available documents in libraries and public files, and interviewed many of O'KeefTe's family, friends, and acquaintances...

...Her costume is starkly simple, most often unadorned black and white...

...In their early years together she also served as his model for some remarkable erotic photographs, many of which only recently have been shown and published...

...She was the second of seven children...

...In 1905, she left her family to live with an uncle and aunt and study at the Art Institute of Chicago for a year...

...It's made of limestone...

...Born in 1887, O'Keeffe long has been an American institution, both as an individual and as an artist...

...This makes it more the pity that Portrait of an Artist is not better, because these sources, like O'Keeffe, are well along in years and many probably will not again be available to cooperate in any future biography...

...It is somewhat surprising that until now there has been no full-length biographical study of O'Keeffe...

...O'Keeffe worked for a while as a commercial artist in Chicago, but first began to realize her creative potential while teaching at Amarillo, Texas, where she experienced the barren loneliness of the landscape and the unobstructed beauty of nature...

...This could hardly be true, unless the farm were about three feet wide, since a section, 640 acres, is a mile square...

...Georgia O'Keeffe was born liberated, not only as a woman but as a human being and artist...

...She has remained fiercely independent, living mostly in her beloved mountainous New Mexico desert country removed from the fads of art movements and fashion, just as she did when she lived in New York, where art fads change with the weather...

...She disdains fashion in dress as she disdains fashion in art...

...The book may be opened at random to find such statements as...

...Fewer remain productive for as many years...

...And she describes the "massive, marble Art Institute" in Chicago...

...For example, Lisle says of the O'Keeffe Wisconsin farm that it "stretched for several miles in one direction and was said to be as large as six hundred acres...

...Her adobe New Mexico house is as simple...

...She does not wear makeup, and her hair is drawn straight back from her patrician face into a bun at the back of her head...

...It was Alfred Stieglitz who first showed her drawings at his 291 Fifth Avenue gallery in New York, an exhibition of which she had no foreknowledge...

...The population was 2,184,283 in 1910 and did not reach three million until 1923...

...Charles-Gene McDaniel (Charles-Gene McDaniel is a freelance writer based in Chicago who is director of the journalism program at Roosevelt University...

...Throughout the book, Lisle ascribes thoughts and feelings to O'Keeffe, who has kept most of her thoughts and feelings to herself, without offering any supporting evidence, an irritating liberty taken by the practitioners of "new journalism...

...There are a number of obvious errors in the book, leaving the reader to wonder about the accuracy of other information which cannot be easily verified...

...The family later moved to Virginia, where she completed high school with indifferent grades...

...Maybe not...

...Americans who never heard of hard-edge painting or minimalism or conceptual-ism or abstract expressionism recognize and admire O'Keeffe's paintings...

...Hardly any can match her achievement...

...Indeed, one of those who knew O'Keeffe best, Dorothy Brett, died shortly after talking with Lisle...

...Characteristically, when they were wed by a New Jersey justice of the peace in 1924, no wedding rings were exchanged, and O'Keeffe did not promise to "love, honor, and obey...

...She later studied at the Art Students League in New York, the University of Virginia, and Columbia University...

...Her feminism had asserted itself when she was just four and decided that God is a woman...

...Until a skilled biographer comes along to do the job, we still have O'Keeffe's magnificent paintings to admire, and they are as mysterious and awe-inspiring as ever...

...O'Keeffe was born on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, to Ida (Totto) O'Keeffe, descended from Hungarian artistocracy, and Francis O'Keeffe, the son of a failed Irish businessman...