Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern, Wanda M. Corn

This book threads an elegant narrative that treats O’Keeffe’s wardrobe, her domestic spaces, and her photographic self-presentation as integral motifs in the modernist project. This volume reads almost as a textile diary, weaving together rare images of the artist’s garments and accessories (many unpublished until now), reproductions of her paintings, and architectural interiors of her New Mexico homes — all framed through the lens of minimalism lived. O’Keeffe’s disciplined aesthetic—her pared-back forms, her exacting cultivation of a public persona—comes alive as a continuous act of design, a seamless interface between dress, body, and space. Photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh, Cecil Beaton and others help sharpen the visual strategies she employed to assert a modern identity.

Corn’s book is more than a catalogue or fashion study; it is an interpretive gesture that situates an artist’s daily life within her oeuvre. The “everyday” in O’Keeffe’s case becomes an aesthetic programme: the manner of dressing, the layout of interior rooms, the way light falls on a fabric or an enamel, all are part of the same modern vision. In Selvedge parlance, it privileges texture, tactility, and the subtle interplay of material presence. As a companion to a traveling exhibition, it invites readers to slow-look at nuance — not only at the surface of a skirt or the geometry of a chair, but at the mindset of an artist who lived her modernism.

About the Author
Wanda M. Corn is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita of Art History at Stanford University, and one of the most influential scholars in American modernism. Her scholarly work spans photography, visual culture, and the recalibration of notions of domesticity, identity, and modernism.

Publication date: 2017
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9783791356013