Georgia O'Keeffe & New Mexico: A Sense of Place

What sets this book apart from other small exhibition catalogues of O'Keeffe's work is the set of side-by-side comparisons of 20 paintings with recent, commissioned, full-color photos of their actual sites, which pinpoint the exact perspective of the paintings. Lynes (Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonne) is curator of Santa Fe's Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and director of the research center there. In walking around""O'Keeffe country,"" reading the letters and studying the sites, Lynes discovered that such photos would be possible to make. She presents photos and paintings beautifully here in the essay that begins the book, and that leads to two sections of paintings that use figuration and abstraction to give (famously)""A Sense of Place."" A second essay, by scholar Leslie Poling-Kempes, breaks O'Keeffe's cliff and rock faces into their geological strata, showing where Triassic gives way to Jurassic, and Jurrassic to Cretaceous. There are 66 lush color plates in all, and 11 b&w reproductions, mostly of work from the 1930s.