Georgia O'Keeffe by Lisa Mintz Messinger

“Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986) was an American artist. She was best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been recognized as the "Mother of American modernism". She studied art during the summers between 1912 and 1914 and was introduced to the principles and philosophies of Arthur Wesley Dow, who espoused created works of art based upon personal style, design, and interpretation of subjects, rather than trying to copy or represent them. This caused a major change in the way O'Keeffe felt about and approached art, as seen in the beginning stages of her watercolors from her studies at the University of Virginia and more dramatically in the charcoal drawings that she produced in 1915 that led to total abstraction. This book is a collection and analysis of O'Keeffe's early charcoal and watercolours of 1915-16 in a collection belonging to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”