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Visions is a collection of poems inspired by twentieth-century paintings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Unique and lovely poetry
A friend gave me two of Hofstadter's books. I'm not a great reader of poetry, but "Visions" was truely a unique and lovely collection of poems on paintings that I admire. I've never read anything quite like it. I then read Hofstadter's "House of Peace" very different but wonderful as well.

Poetry? No.
Marc Elihu Hofstadter, Visions: Paintings Seen Through the Optic of Poetry (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2001)

After I'd read a few pages of this, I was relatively sure I'd read it before; however, I couldn't find a review of it, so I figured I was just caught in a case of deja vu. Turns out that, no, I did read it back in 2004. But my review seems to have slipped through the cracks, so here I am again, having wasted another four hours of my existence on this godawful mess. You can be sure that this time it's headed off to Half-Price Books so I don't make the same mistake again.

There are a great many aspiring poets who don't understand that poetry is not just prose chopped up into little lines. Thankfully, you see this trend a great deal less among the published set, but there are still times when it rears its ugly head:

"I'm an artist trying to make a work
I've learned to draw well
so I put this white line here,
shade this yellow rectangle just so
and make the orange glow
But it's not quite right
It expresses my soul
but not all of it"
("No. 19, 1949")

I'm not even sure where to start with all that's wrong with that poem. However, it's pretty easy to illustrate what I'm talking about: write it out yourself, taking out all the line breaks, as a paragraph, inserting the necessary punctuation. Do you find it notably changed when you read it that way? If not, then what's the justification for making it poetry and not prose?

An awful book from front to back. I guess the reason I read it again is because I'd blocked it out of my head the first time; I shall endeavor to do so again immediately. *
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Customer Reviews (1)

Building a Successful Image Through Photography
Georgia O'Keeffe's persisting fame as one of America's best known artists is due, in no small part, to her success at creating an image for herself by working with some of America's best know photographers. Starting with her mentor -- dealer and eventually husband Alfred Stieglitz -- she learned about projecting an image of herself. It was knowledge that she went on to use with Life photographer John Loengard and a host of other famous photographers including Irving Penn, Ansel Adams, Arnold Newman, Karsh,Philippe Halsman, Eliot Porter and, improbably enough, Andy Warhol.
"Georgia O'Keeffe and the Camera - the Art of Identity," explore this topic in a fascinating, albeit occasionally frustrating, account. Susan Danly, curator of graphics, photography and contemporary art at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine organized the show, which appeared in Portland and at the O'Keeffee Museum in Santa Fe, and wrote the catalog.
Perhaps the many books about O'Keeffe and Stieglitz cover their complex relationship in so much detail that Danly felt it unnecessary to probe more deeply, but this account sleights the importance of O'Keeffe's age, experience and success in dealing with Stieglitz. It suggests that Stieglitz took advantage of her youth and inexperience which may shortchange the power of her own personality.
At the core of this is the unexamined issue of O'Keeffe's posing nude for Stieglitz.Was she a naïve young woman, or someone relaxed about posing for the famous photographer and gallery owner?The text seems to be uncomfortable with the real world in its disinclination to grapple with issues of age, experience, sophistication, and the passage of time.In 1917, at the time Stieglitz arranged her first solo show in New York, she was 30. Danly says she had studied art in New York during the 1910s before moving to Texas and teaching at West Texas State Normal College. It was at this time that Stieglitz began his series of pictures of her, including the nudes. Intriguingly, although the nudes form a key part of the story, none is included in the book.O'Keefe's friend Rebecca Strand, wife of the photographer Paul Strand, also posed nude for Stieglitz - something the Danly doesn't mention but which suggests that nudes were less of a problem for artists and photographers then than they apparently are for curators now. (This reminds me of the scandalized tone in wall labels at the Thomas Eakins exhibition at the Met a couple of years ago when they described his practices in teaching life drawing in Philadelphia.)
O'Keefe was 30 at the time of her first show and the beginning of her series of Stieglitz photographs, she lived in New York as an art student for at least a few years, she was a Texas teacher when she received a one-woman show at a leading gallery in New York - is there a problem? Okay, perhaps I need to go to the biographies for answers. Stieglitz didn't show the nudes after 1921, but apparently the photos and his commentary on sexual suggestion in her flower paintings incited critics to Freudian commentary, often a favored recourse of the partially educated.In any event, O'Keeffe apparently disliked the commentary and was spurred to take control of her professional image; in her campaign she enlisted her knowledge of photography to create her own myth in the high desert of New Mexico.

Her first trip to New Mexico in 1929 was with Rebecca Strand at the invitation of the famed salon hostess, Mabel Dodge, who provided a studio for three months at her home in Taos.Danly notes that Stieglitz's photograph of O'Keeffe in 1929 was captioned "After Return from New Mexico" and show O'Keeffe as a commanding, perhaps condescending, presence posed against an automobile, presumably the one she bought in New Mexico.
This "differs significantly from his earlier images of O'Keeffe posed with her work. Gone are the allusions to sensuality, either personal or aesthetic, and instead we see the artist as a saintly desert ascetic."
Of course, this image was 12 years later than the 1917 photos, so she had gone from 30 to 42 and Stieglitz from 53 to 62. Is a change in their relationship and the way she and he present her image so remarkable?
The book presents a remarkable story of an artist attuned to the growing American interest in art and celebrity, stoked by magazines like Life and Vogue.
The photographic styles are interesting - Ansel Adams, who became a close friend of O'Keeffe's in New Mexico and New York, has the friendliest photos of her - painting in the back of her car, and glancing coyly at a cowboy.She, in turn, drew from his architectural photographs a deeper interest in local buildings as a subject for her own work.
Each photographer brought his own style for depicting her - from Life's John Loengard's journalism - so popular it has been turned into a book and was reissued in several languages in 2006, to Irving Penn's New York studio portrait, Arnold Newman's signature style of her in front of an easel withskull and horns and Philippe Halsman's stark profile. Throughout the articles, portrait sessions and extended visits by photographers who shot her home, studio and brushes, she was apparently an avid collaborator in the creation of her own image.
One benefit of this carefully managed celebrity was that through knowing her life and her face people who might normally ignore abstract art or even western landscapes were attracted to her work. Sanford Schwartz, the author of several books about art, objected to some of the stagy photographs in an essay in the New Yorker, but added:"O'Keeffe was a figure with a national renown that cut through art circles and reached the widest public - a public that often had little or no interest in the art world. O'Keeffe's fame was special in that it was based equally on what people knew of her work and of her life."
Barbara Rose, another expert in art history, said that O'Keeffe's success in making her own myth was one of her greatest creations. "Her painting and her personal together provide a lasting drama of artistic and human interest."
As Danly concludes, "O'Keeffe's astute understanding of the power of the photographic image became a critical tool in fashioning her popular identity and a key to her abiding fame."

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Product Description
One of the greatest American painters of the 20th century, Georgia O'Keeffe is beloved by a broad audience that ranges from the most erudite art historian to the twelve-year-old girl next door. Her monumentally sensuous oil paintings of flowers hang in the best museum collections but are known as well via mass-produced posters, greeting cards and calendars; her weathered, elegant, fierce self has long been mythicized through Alfred Stieglitz's classic black-and-white photographs of his wife. This large-format monograph on O'Keefe renews her place in the modern canon and encourages an intensive encounter with her work. Her radical departures from imitative realism, the style that was prevalent when she began to study art making, eventually led to an idiosyncratic painting style characterized by a state of suspension. Over the course of her lengthy career--she worked up until two years before her death at age 98--she discovered and developed a personal language through which to express her own feelings and ideas, creating bold picture conceptions and spatial designs that hover somewhere between the real and the abstract, the close-up and the monumental, natural representation and artificiality.When I was still a little girl, I used to think that since I couldn't do what I wanted to...at least I could paint as I wanted to, and say what I wanted to when I painted.~~The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters. --Georga O'KeeffeEdited by Bice Curiger.~Essays byBice Curiger, Carter Ratcliff, Peter J. Schneimann and Robert Storr.Clothbound, 9.75 x 12.5 in./220 pgs / 70 color 30 BW0 duotone 0 ~ Item D20407 ... Read more

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Arguably America's best-known architect, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is famed for his sleek, rational designs of houses and buildings nestled in natural surroundings. Across the United States, Wright's works embody the precept of Organic Architecture, that a project must be constructed in response to the site's landscape, with respect for the client's needs, and with awareness of local materials. Throughout her career, painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) created breathtaking works of intimacy, simplicity, and precision, inspired by observations both of the urban environment of New York City and the stark landscapes of the American Southwest. Both Wright and O'Keeffe applied a respect and understanding of nature to their work. Studied together, these creators' works bring new insight into how the organic influences the artistic.

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Pomegranate's "Georgia O'Keeffe Deluxe Engagement Book" is the ultimate in high-quality calendar elegance. Beautifully designed and carefully crafted, this hardcover, quarterbound book is printed in color throughout with 20 plates, and includes a ribbon marker. Holidays and moon phases are noted. ... Read more

Product Description
A survey of the art of Georgia O'Keeffe, one of this century's most influential American painters, which traces the genesis and growth of her artistic imagination. This book is organized around the various themes that she explored in her art. ... Read more

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Encompassing the artist's entire oeurve
In his opening chapter, Charles C Eldredge, professor of art at the University of Kansas, writes at length about the indomitable Georgia O'Keeffe and in the succeeding chapters to as he looks at various aspects of her work under the headings: Abstraction, Lake Georgia, Fruit and Leaf, Flower, City, Desert, Bone and Sky. In doing so he encompasses O'Keeffe's complete oeuvre. He concludes his study with a chronology and a selected bibliography.

The book is illustrated throughout with around 55 colour plates and over 5o black and white illustrations, including some pictures published here for the first time. The majority of the colour plates and a few of the monochromes are full page.

This is a well produced large format book printed on heavy stock, the text is interesting and accessible; and it is enlightening to see the wide range of the artist's output, and the familiar alongside to unfamiliar.

12.25" x 9.25" (31.1 cm x 23.5 cm) 160 pages. Published 1991. ISBN 0810936577. Hardback.
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Between her birth and her death, Georgia O’Keeffe’s life became as emblematic of modern American history as a Hollywood movie. Born in a small town, it was in New York that Georgia O’Keeffe created a name for herself at a period in the middle of the 20th century when the city took over from Paris as the heart of the modern art world.Born in 1887, Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the great figures in the history of the emancipation of modern art from its American essence. At a time when women were primarily wives and mothers, Georgia defied convention when she became first the companion, then the wife of the famous photographer and father of American modern art: Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe is known above all for her complex visual descriptions of nature: the delicacy of an autumn leaf, the subtle nuances of a flower petal, or the symmetry of an animal’s head. Today we associate the name of Georgia O’Keeffe with bright colours and the austere beauty of the New Mexican desert, where she lived until her death at the age of 98.This work explores the personal journey of Georgia O’Keeffe, her creative process and the legacy that she left to the art world. It not only explores the experiences that shaped Georgia O’Keeffe at the beginning of her life, but it also informs the reader about her later years, when she was just as vibrant and prolific an artist as in her youth.

About the authors: Janet SouterJanet Souter studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has written a number of works on art history as well as several biographies. She also writes for the Daily Herald, Illinois’ thirdlargest newspaper. ... Read more

Product Description
Essays, photos of some of the art on display, chronology. ... Read more