Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe

This "brimming biography...is fresh and clear, supple and layered, offering much that is new but, most welcome of all, a tone that is wise and large-hearted. By the end of her increasingly engrossing narrative, we feel we truly have been given, finally, the woman on paper."

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 enormous, 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 finely balanced biography offers an astonishingly 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. Their 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, carefully 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 use of the complete catalogue of O'Keeffe's work, and as one of the few biographers 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.

With her careful analysis of the defining moments of O'Keeffe's life, her critical eye, and her fresh perspective, 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. In the same way in which O'Keeffe's art demands, Full Bloom asks that we look deeply, to examine the artist's desire to live and paint according to a willfully independent vision.

Advance praise for Full Bloom:

"Hunter Drohojowska-Philp has packed Full Bloom with an amazing story (Georgia O'Keeffe's life and art), great characters (O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, their friends and colleagues), terrific dialogue (extracts from letters), colorful places (Manhattan, Lake George, New Mexico), and other elements that make it seem as if you are reading a compelling novel. I couldn't put this important new biography down."

"Finally, a biography of Georgia O'Keeffe that goes beyond the popular stereotypes to reveal an aesthetically complex, politically shrewd, sometimes naive and often willful artist, who transformed 'flower painter' from an epithet into an iconic category of one. The depth of her relationship with Paul Strand and his photographs is just one of the eye-opening revelations of this book."

"I can't imagine a biographical sensibility better suited to dealing with the incongruities of Georgia O'Keeffe's life and career than Hunter Drohojowska-Philp's. She has a fine feel for the improvisational trial and error of O'Keeffe's self-invention, for the right decisions made for the wrong reasons, and vice versa. An artist's art and life are never of a piece, but Drohojowska-Philp makes surprising sense out the finely spun truths and fictions through which O'Keeffe created the illusion that her art and life were, in fact, one."