"""Music that makes holes in the sky"": Georgia O'Keefe's visionary romanticism"
"At the time of Georgia O'Keeffe's death in 1986, she was stereotyped as provincial American who was untouched by literary or intellectual stimuli, a ""frontier"" woman attached to nature by gender rather than philosophy. O'Keeffe's extraordinary abstractions and their sources remained largely unexplored in favor of of her more popular depictions of flowers, desert landscapes, and bones, and even these were not examined in the depth they deserved with respect to their content and sources. O'Keeffe herself attempted to direct attention from the depth of her interest in literature. Yet in her reading and in her friendships with writers, a multifaceted spirituality emerges as a recurring theme. It also seems to have provided a key stimulus for her revolutionary abstractions of the teens. Georgia O'Keeffe was a modern romantic, emphasizing individual experience, intensified emotional responses, an interest in the sublime, music, synaesthesia, and the irrational forces of nature, including human nature, much as nineteenth-century Romantic artists did."
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign