"She followed her own rules, and got away with it," Karen Karbo says of Georgia O'Keeffe, referring to the artist as "the poster child for doing exactly what you want, in the service of an abiding passion." Karbo's innovative How Georgia Became O'Keeffe, told with great wit and hilarity, delves beyond the facts of its subject's "art star" status in order to better understand her choices: why she lived and painted the way she did; why she endured a tumultuous, codependent artistic and romantic relationship with the father of modern photography, Alfred Stieglitz; and how she maintained her sense of self and authenticity throughout.
Karbo's personal admiration for the bold, fearless O'Keeffe leaps off the page. A single verb introduces the theme of each chapter, comparing the artist's challenges with those that plague creative women today. Karbo explores O'Keeffe's artistic influences while reinforcing that, although she came from a sensible, hardworking, middle-class family, she continually took risks and defied the expected conventions of womanhood in order to nurture and preserve her ideals of self-expression.
This is the final installment of Karbo's "kick ass women" trilogy, following biographies of Katharine Hepburn and Coco Chanel, two other strong, independent women who forged their own paths by living true to themselves. While O'Keeffe is already revered by millions of women and aspiring artists everywhere, Karbo's original, wry analysis is bound to enrich her status even further. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines