The untold story of an icon of twentieth-century art.

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was one of the most successful American artists of the twentieth century: her arresting paintings of enormous, intimately rendered flowers, desert landscapes, and stark white cow skulls are seminal works of modern art. But behind O'Keeffe's bold work and celebrity was a woman misunderstood by even her most ardent admirers. This large, finely balanced biography offers an astonishingly honest portrayal of a life shrouded in myth.

When she was still unknown as an artist, O'Keeffe married Alfred Stieglitz, twenty-three years her senior and well established as a pioneer in art photography. The relationship was physically and intellectually passionate, but Stieglitz was a man of the world. Through the author's access to previously unavailable materials—including interviews with Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz's longtime paramour—we are offered new knowledge about O'Keeffe's defining relationships and the effect of her husband's infidelity. Driven to a nervous breakdown by the Norman affair, O'Keeffe relocated and redefined herself in New Mexico, where she created her unforgettable signature paintings. 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations, 32 color plates.