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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * In a dazzling work of historical fiction in the vein of Nancy Horan's Loving Frank, Dawn Tripp brings to life Georgia O'Keeffe, her love affair with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and her quest to become an independent artist.
This is not a love story. If it were, we would have the same story. But he has his, and I have mine.
In 1916, Georgia O'Keeffe is a young, unknown art teacher when she travels to New York to meet Stieglitz, the famed photographer and art dealer, who has discovered O'Keeffe's work and exhibits it in his gallery. Their connection is instantaneous. O'Keeffe is quickly drawn into Stieglitz's sophisticated world, becoming his mistress, protégé, and muse, as their attraction deepens into an intense and tempestuous relationship and his photographs of her, both clothed and nude, create a sensation.
Yet as her own creative force develops, Georgia begins to push back against what critics and others are saying about her and her art. And soon she must make difficult choices to live a life she believes in.
A breathtaking work of the imagination, Georgia is the story of a passionate young woman, her search for love and artistic freedom, the sacrifices she will face, and the bold vision that will make her a legend.
Praise for Georgia
"Complex and original . . . Georgia conveys O'Keeffe's joys and disappointments, rendering both the woman and the artist with keenness and consideration." -- The New York Times Book Review
"As magical and provocative as O'Keeffe's lush paintings of flowers that upended the art world in the 1920s . . . Tripp inhabits Georgia's psyche so deeply that the reader can practically feel the paintbrush in hand as she creates her abstract paintings and New Mexico landscapes. . . . Evocative from the first page to the last, Tripp's Georgia is a romantic yet realistic exploration of the sacrifices one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century made for love." -- USA Today
"Sexually charged . . . insightful . . . Dawn Tripp humanizes an artist who is seen in biographies as more icon than woman. Her sensuous novel is as finely rendered as an O'Keeffe painting." -- The Denver Post
"Masterful . . . The book is a lovely portrayal of an iconic artist who is independent and multidimensional. Tripp's O'Keeffe is a woman hoping to break free of conventional definitions of art, life and gender, as well as a woman of deep passion and love." -- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"O'Keeffe blazes across the pages in Tripp's tour de force about this indomitable woman. . . . Tripp has hit her stride here, bringing to life one of the most remarkable artists of the twentieth century with veracity, heart, and panache." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A dazzling exploration of Georgia O'Keeffe's artistic career and the deeply human woman behind the cultural icon . . . Tripp's writing is the linguistic equivalent of O'Keeffe's art: bold, luminous, full of unusual juxtapositions." -- Shelf Awareness
"I devoured this dazzling novel about an American icon. Dawn Tripp brings Georgia O'Keeffe so fully to life on every page and, with great wisdom, examines the very nature of love, longing, femininity, and art." --J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of Maine and The Engagements
Author Notes
Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for fiction, Dawn Tripp is the author of the novels Moon Tide, The Season of Open Water, and Game of Secrets, a Boston Globe bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, The Rumpus, Psychology Today, and NPR. She graduated from Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
American artist Georgia O'Keeffe blazes across the pages in Tripp's tour de force about this indomitable woman, whose life was both supported and stymied by the love of her life, photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz. The author manages to get inside O'Keeffe's mind to such an extent that readers experience her transformation from a somewhat shy Texan art teacher who decided to throw away the rules to create her own art to the accomplished, strong-willed woman who held to her artistic vision; they will feel the passion that infused her work and love life that emboldened her canvases. Especially eye-opening is the way Stieglitz's nude photographs of O'Keeffe not only amazed and scandalized the art world, but shadowed the perception of her paintings and her identity, a consequence that haunted her most of her life until she made New Mexico her permanent home and reinvented herself as a solitary artist of the Western landscape. The relationship between Stieglitz and O'Keeffe, and her metamorphosis from lover to wife to jilted partner, is poignantly drawn. Tripp has hit her stride here, bringing to life one of the most remarkable artists of the 20th century with veracity, heart, and panache. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
This fictionalized biography of one of the best-known artists of the last century begins with Georgia O'Keeffe as a young woman teaching in Texas. When her sketches make their way to Alfred Stieglitz, photographer and gallery owner in New York, the two meet, and their passion is undeniable. They become lovers, and Stieglitz encourages O'Keeffe to develop her artistry, but she also becomes the inspiration for his work. When Stieglitz shows his nude portraits of her, Georgia is launched into the spotlight overnight. It is a defining moment for them both, one that Georgia repeatedly reevaluates as she fights to distance herself from the woman in the photographs and have her painting recognized for its artistry, not its femininity. Details from letters and other writings are the backbone of this powerful interpretation of the artist's personal growth throughout her relationship with Stieglitz. As vibrant and colorful as one would hope for a story about this beloved artist, Tripp's novel clearly takes liberties, but the relative truth painted with them is well worth the straying.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A middle-aged star spots an up-and-comer, falls in love, launches her career and dies in eclipse. Sound familiar? In "Georgia," Tripp does well to avoid the cliché. Her Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and gallerist whose relationship with Georgia O'Keeffe defined his later years, is neither an imperious Pygmalion nor an angst-ridden Norman Maine, the fading idol of "A Star Is Born." More to the point, Tripp's O'Keeffe is complex and original, little resembling Galatea or Vicki Lester, Maine's dutiful wife. The novel spans O'Keeffe's adult life: her early correspondence and encounters with Stieglitz; her triumphs; her marital ups and downs; her rejuvenation in New Mexico ; the commission for the Rockefeller Center mural that was never realized; Stieglitz's death in 1946 (she would outlive him by 40 years) and beyond. Tripp writes gracefully - on the whole. For O'Keeffe's sake, I hope Stieglitz's pickup chat sounded better than it reads here: "He quotes from the critics, some of the reviews I notice the words live on his tongue: exile, privation, flowing, rise, mystical, in a sensitized line. I am aware of him standing near me - so near, it feels almost unsafe." "Privation"? "Mystical"? "Sensitized line"? Evidently you had to be there. And we could do without the Gertrude Stein-speak: "He loves them. He loves them"; "It was good. It was good, the painting." Strange to say, Tripp is considerably better on the couple's late-in-life lovemaking - "It is slow and sad, like a leave-taking" - than their youthful passion, which consists largely of chills, shivers, aches, "electric" touches, breathlessness. Sex and Stein notwithstanding, "Georgia" conveys O'Keeffe's joys and disappointments, rendering both the woman and the artist with keenness and consideration. In the novel's final chapter, O'Keeffe reflects on her younger sister's warmth and compassion: "Sometimes that kind of goodness lends a quality of greatness to a life. I never had that kind of life." She didn't need goodness to achieve greatness.
Kirkus Review
A much-celebratedand misunderstoodpainter peers across decades to ask: what would I have become without the lover who first promoted my work? "This is not a love story," she promises, before Tripp (Game of Secrets, 2011, etc.) re-creates O'Keeffe's unannounced visit to Alfred Stieglitz's New York gallery, just missing a show of abstract drawings she's been sending him from Texastruly, one of the sexiest "meets" of all time. In short order, he rehangs all of the work so he can photograph her with it and within a year, has thrown over his dismal-but-financially-advantageous 25 years of marriage to nest with his young sibyl and capture every inch of her with his camera. The nudes revive his career, but what's in it for O'Keeffe, who hasn't sold a painting? Tripp soon locates the wrinkle in this storybook relationship: "You will be a legend," Stieglitz tells O'Keeffe, if she sticks with her more representational (and sexually provocative) studies of oversize flowerswhich will more easily win over critics and attract customers who tend to shy away from purely abstract work. She takes the advice and is crowned best woman painter of the modernist generation. Over time, O'Keeffe gets pulled back to the Southwestern landscape, the one place she can free her mind of her lover's unquenchable thirst for young female adoration andmost bitter to herhis refusal to father a child (he has his reasons). Artful dialogue and snappy segues whiz a reader through 30 years of professional and domestic Sturm und Drang plus cameo appearances by members of the era's avant-garde art scene (including one or two who tempt O'Keeffe to turn tables on Stieglitz). In the end, it's not fidelity she craves but space to make art as she did when she was "nobody": "This is, after all, what I learned from [Stieglitz]: to keep what I want to myself. To reveal only what I want to be seen." A year before the centennial of that first one-woman show, Tripp's portrait makes a compelling primer to O'Keeffe's early careerand, yes, more than a love story. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In 1916, when Georgia O'Keeffe was 30 years old, she made the connection that would forever alter her life: Alfred Stieglitz. From their first meeting, she became the married photographer's muse and mistress, while he in turn supported and encouraged her art. Their volatile affair gave birth to the career of one of America's greatest female artists, but not without cost. Throughout her life, O'Keeffe struggled with the impact her relationship with Stieglitz had on her art, its perception in the marketplace, and her own sense of self-worth. Tripp's (Game of Secrets) writing is romantic, poetic, and flows as smoothly as her artist subject's brushstrokes in her famous floral studies. However, the trouble with biographical novels is where the author's vision and history collide. Tripp's language and the dreamy feeling it evokes at times feels at odds with a relationship so tempestuous and flawed from its start. VERDICT Recommended for those who enjoy the genre.-Leigh Wright, Bridgewater, NJ © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.