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Georgia O'Keeffe: Inevitable Icon Linda M. Grasso, Equal under the Sky: Georgia O'Keeffe and Twentieth-Century Feminism. University of New Mexico Press, 2017 (hardcover), 2019 (paper). 336 pp. notes, bibl. index, pap., $34.95, ISBN 978-0826360731.
Artist Georgia O'Keeffe has, for decades, enjoyed privileged status as a woman of mystery and speculation. Famously grumpy, stubborn, and independent, she has been admired as a feminist icon, though she herself never mentioned feminism as a source of power or inspiration. Author Linda M. Grasso points out, "Feminism is the greatest unacknowledged factor in O'Keeffe's success story and it is O'Keeffe herself who is partly responsible for this historical erasure" (p. 73).
Equal under the Sky examines O'Keeffe through twin lenses of feminism and modernism. The world O'Keeffe navigated is of utmost significance in this book; in fact, 20th-century America is almost as big a character in this narrative as O' Keeff e hers elf is.
O'Keeffe's life is conveniently long, bookended by two major American movements in women's rights: the fight for suffrage in her early years at the beginning of the 20th century and the women's liberation movement near the end of her life (she died in 1986). These years coincide with major changes in the art world...