Read a biography before you read O'Keeffe on herself. She spent sixty years correcting the public account of her work, most of all the sexualised reading of the flower paintings that her husband Alfred Stieglitz's promotion had helped install. Her own books are therefore arguments, and very good ones — but they are easier to read as arguments once you know what she was arguing against.
That is the organising principle of this path. Independent biography first, then her own words, then the Stieglitz material, then the specialist catalogues. Several of these books were written by participants, and this article flags each one, because in this subject the distinction genuinely changes how you read a sentence.
The biographies
Roxana Robinson's Georgia O'Keeffe is the standard scholarly life: thorough, restrained, strong on the Wisconsin and Texas years that the legend skips. Start here. Laurie Lisle's Portrait of an artist was the first full biography, written while O'Keeffe was alive and without her cooperation, which makes it both less complete and unusually free of her editorial hand. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp's Full Bloom is the most recent of the three and the best on the New York art world and the machinery of her early reputation.
O'Keeffe in her own voice
The book catalogued simply as Georgia O'Keeffe under her own name is her 1976 volume: full-page plates with her own text facing them, published when she was eighty-eight. It is the definitive statement of how she wanted the paintings seen and a direct rebuttal of the Freudian readings, and it is beautifully made. Some memories of drawings is the companion in miniature, her commentary on individual early works.
Georgia O'Keeffe Art and Letters is a National Gallery exhibition catalogue pairing paintings with a large selection of her correspondence. It is co-credited to Juan Hamilton, who became her assistant and companion in her final years and inherited a large part of the estate; her will was challenged by her family after her death and settled out of court. Nothing in the catalogue is thereby unreliable, but it was assembled by someone with an interest in the record.
Stieglitz, and the two of them
My Faraway One is Sarah Greenough's edited volume of the O'Keeffe and Stieglitz correspondence covering their first years together — thousands of letters, meticulously annotated, and the primary source everything else draws on. It is a scholarly edition and reads like one; use it selectively. Benita Eisler's O'Keeffe and Stieglitz is the interpretive dual biography, more psychological in method and, in the view of a number of reviewers, more speculative than the evidence supports.
Georgia O'Keeffe, a portrait is Stieglitz's own photographic series of her, made over roughly two decades. He was her dealer, her promoter and her husband; the photographs made her famous and simultaneously created the erotic frame she spent the rest of her career resisting. Two lives is the exhibition catalogue that hangs her paintings and his photographs against each other, which is the clearest way to see the negotiation happening.
New Mexico and the specialist volumes
Barbara Buhler Lynes, who compiled the catalogue raisonne, is behind Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico — the authoritative treatment of the landscape work and Abiquiu. One Hundred Flowers is a plates volume of the flower paintings, useful precisely because they are the most misread part of the output. Ruth Fine's O'Keeffe On Paper covers the drawings and watercolours, including the 1915 charcoals that were the first work Stieglitz showed. Wanda Corn's Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern accompanied the exhibition of her clothing and possessions and makes a serious argument about self-presentation as part of the practice — an ideal last book, because by then you have watched her do it.
Follow the whole path and you get both the painter and the persona, in the order that lets you tell them apart.
Follow the full ordered path here: Georgia O'Keeffe: The Best Books to Read, in Order.
