Georgia O'Keeffe and Her Houses: Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu

Painter Georgia O'Keeffe's (1887%E2%80%931986) dominant themes%E2%80%94vast, open spaces and washes of color, skulls, flowers, mountains, sky, "all the earth colors of the painter's palette"%E2%80%94were inspired by the landscape surrounding her two custom-designed houses in New Mexico (Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu), traditional buildings that were carefully tweaked to bring desert light into spaces for eating, reading, cooking, and painting. O'Keeffe scholar-curators Lynes (Georgia O'Keeffe Museum) and Lopez collect correspondence, architectural plans, photographs, present-day images, portraits of the artist, and reproductions of paintings to illustrate how O'Keeffe's living spaces influenced her creative life. A mention of O'Keeffe's love of sunbathing is accompanied by a photograph of her climbing a ladder to the roof, which brings a stirring emotional dimension to Ladder to the Moon, a surreal turquoise canvas that features a wooden ladder suspended in space between the black silhouette of desert mountains and a pearlescent half-moon. This beautifully designed and fascinating book shows how O'Keeffe's houses combined native adobe architecture, a modernist aesthetic, and her love of the natural world, revealing how the properties "fulfilled two different aspects of O'Keeffe's independent nature"%E2%80%94her competing desires for both rugged solitude and domestic comfort in "our most beautiful country." Color and b&w illus. (Sept.)