Exhibition itenerary: Hayward Gallery, London, April 8, 1993-June 27, 1993; El Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, July 15, 1993-October 1, 1993; Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, October 30, 1993-January 16, 1994.

"In association with InterCultura, Fort Worth, the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, Abiquiu."

Includes bibliographical references (p. 221).

Georgia O'Keeffe has become a legend in modern western culture. As an artist, she was able to garner and sustain the attention of the public and critics alike for well over six decades. Though O'Keeffe is particularly known for her canvases of large flowers and of bones and skulls, her oeuvre is far more extensive. Georgia O'Keeffe: American and Modern accompanies the first international retrospective of one of the most loved American artists. Charles C. Eldredge explores two qualities of the artist's work - the American and the modern - suggesting that they were the leading impulses for her extraordinary vision. Beginning with a discussion of O'Keeffe as an American artist, Eldredge describes the openly nationalistic billing that the photographer and art impresario Alfred Stieglitz, who later became her husband, gave to her one-woman exhibition in New York in 1923. Even in O'Keeffe's earliest works, her penchant for abstraction is evident. Eldredge also examines the artist's later preoccupation with common subjects such as barns, which reflected her desire to paint "something I know." He highlights these subjects as a mark of her modernism - her ability to borrow from the pedestrian world as a vehicle for transcendence. For the first half of the twentieth century, O'Keeffe was the preeminent woman artist of the United States. Eldredge explores this circumstance as well, discussing the psychoanalytic speculation surrounding the element of sexuality in the artist's drawings and paintings. In particular, her flower paintings grabbed the attention of the critics, who were quick to interpret them with the help of the increasingly popular Freudian theory. Despite the inclination to discuss O'Keeffe's art as feminine self-revelation, critics discovered that it transcended easy categorization. As Eldredge points out, her style and choice of subjects evolved from a variety of influences, not the least of which were the photographic techniques she adopted from Stieglitz. Other influences include the immensity of the American West, a profound commitment to nativism and modernism, and a true respect for American culture. As O'Keeffe's work suggests, her life was infused with a spirit reflecting a new outlook, a new approach that was wholly modern - and distinctly American. Eldredge further illuminates the artist's career with a chronology of her life, which is illustrated with photographs - portraits and snapshots - many of them unpublished, and drawn from O'Keeffe's personal archive and from those of renowned photographers. The chronology creates a historical and biographical context for O'Keeffe's career, emphasizing the maturity and talent of the artist, as well as the scope of her acquaintances and travels. This book, which reproduces more than eighty of O'Keeffe's paintings and drawings, and includes extended discussion of many of them, serves as the catalogue for the exhibition "Georgia O'Keeffe: American and Modern," shown at the Hayward Gallery, London; El Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; and the Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama in 1993 and 1994