Norton £25 pp630

Much can be learnt about an artist from her or his palette. Georgia O’Keeffe’s was made of glass. The colours on it were clearly separated from each other, and, if a tone had to be mixed, it was wiped off the palette as soon as it had been used. In both her life and her art, this artist favoured a clean, precise manner.

In her person, she adopted a severe style. She achieved elegance by ignoring fashion, making her own dresses (which were usually black), wearing flat shoes and scorning make-up. One of the ironies of her career is that this woman, who looked like a prim schoolteacher, first gained widespread public attention through her body and the sensuality it expressed.

“When I make a photograph, I make love.” Alfred Stieglitz’s famous dictum informs the images of O’Keeffe, nude or partially clothed, which he took during the first two years of their relationship. In one, her upper lip is dotted with sweat. When 46 of these photographs were exhibited in 1921, as part of a retrospective of his work, they caused a sensation. As one critic observed, these images, many of which are taken close-up, achieve “the exact visual equivalent to the report of hand or eye as it travels over the body of the beloved”.

Stieglitz revelled in the publicity. When it began to wane, he announced that one nude photograph of O’Keeffe would be sold for $5,000, as the plate from which it had been made had been destroyed. The strategy worked, and viewers returned. O’Keeffe, meanwhile, was distraught at the way that her private sexuality had been made public. Everyone now knew that she was the mistress of a married man.

“I thought that I could never face the world again.” These words sit oddly with her other pronouncements. More typical was her serene conviction. “I had a sense of power,” she insisted. “I always had.” Even as a schoolgirl, she had begun to take control, and was criticised for doing so. “When so few people ever think at all,” she replied, “isn’t it all right for me to think for them, and get them to do what I want?” To others, she seemed direct as an arrow. It was the image she continued to project, fashioning her life accordingly.

This new biography of O’Keeffe cuts the pack afresh. It turns up cards that O’Keeffe would have ignored or concealed. The story of her life becomes messier, yet, for that very reason, more impressive and more intriguing. O’Keeffe became America’s most highly paid woman artist, and remains its most famous. In 2001, one of her paintings fetched $6.2m. A museum in her name has been established in Santa Fe, and her house in Abiquiu, now open to the public, has a one-year waiting list for reservations. This same woman spent much of her early life in poverty; she eked a living for seven years as an art teacher, alienated amid small-town society; she suffered intermittent illness, including a nervous breakdown; and the central relationship in her life, though fashioned into art by Stieglitz’s camera, became the source of conflict and pain.

Born in 1887, on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, she grew up surrounded by unbroken horizons. O’Keeffe always acknowledged the influence this spatial grandeur had on her development as an artist. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, then at the Art Students League of New York. There, she learnt to prime her canvases a brilliant white. One day, while visiting a neighbour across the street, she looked out of the window and saw, in the opposite building, her newly primed canvas standing on the easel. “It looked so fresh and clean compared to the dingy things we usually did at the League,” she recalled. One of these “dingy” things — an exquisite, Chardinesque study of a dead rabbit and copper pot — is reproduced here. It makes clear how far O’Keeffe travelled in her paintings: in many later works, an incandescent white becomes the predominant colour.

One of the first Americans to pioneer abstract art, she did so initially in watercolour. Her friend Anita Pollitzer decided to show a roll of these to Stieglitz, then running a gallery, where he promoted photography and modern art, at 291 Fifth Avenue. He declared these abstracts “the purest, finest, sincerest things” he had seen at 291 for a very long time. (His much-quoted remark — “Finally a woman on paper” — is, we learn, a compression of what he actually said, invented, probably by Pollitzer, to make this episode more pungent.)

Drohojowska-Philp is an expert guide to O’Keeffe’s world. She catches the gang of photographers and artists attracted to Stieglitz, as impresario of modern American art, a role he fulfilled with club-like affability. He gained a divorce from his first wife, after which he and O’Keeffe married, despite a growing tension between his need for a crowd and her recurrent desire for solitude. But even before Dorothy Norman infiltrated herself into his life, as lover and business partner, O’Keeffe had begun to spend long periods in deserted places. “I am moving it seems,” she reflected, “more and more towards a kind of aloneness, not because I wish it but because there seems no other way.”

Part of O’Keeffe’s appeal to city-dwellers is the romance associated with her desire for the purity and silence of the desert. At Abiquiu in New Mexico, where she rose at dawn and took early-morning walks, she remained aloof, sharp, demanding, confident that she was “one of the few who gives our country any voice of its own”. When a prominent Catholic priest tried to convert her, she was amazed that “he could only make the Catholic church seem like a mound of jelly” in comparison with her rocklike world.

This biography, balanced and, in places, effectively understated, chronicles O’Keeffe’s pursuit of clarity and decisiveness. Telling anecdotes stud the tale throughout. When O’Keeffe donated some of her late husband’s photographs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the curator informed her that Stieglitz’s mounts would have to be cut down, to fit the solander boxes used for storage. O’Keeffe objected. The supercilious curator explained that this was how they handled their Rembrandt prints. “Well,” O’Keeffe tartly replied, “Mrs Rembrandt isn’t around.”

IN THE SHADOW

Stieglitz’s early portraits of O’Keeffe troubled her in more ways than one. In 1938, Life magazine claimed it was he who had “helped this one-time schoolteacher to become one of the country’s most...talked-of painters”.

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