Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters

Art and Letters is the book that let Georgia O'Keeffe speak for herself at scale, setting a full colour survey of the paintings beside 125 of her letters and, in doing so, replacing a good deal of the mythology that had accumulated around her.

Published by the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1987 with the New York Graphic Society and Little, Brown, the 306-page volume was the catalogue of the artist's centennial exhibition, which travelled to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1987 and 1989. It reproduces the 120 works shown, from early charcoals and pencil drawings through watercolours, pastels and the oils on canvas that make up the bulk of the selection. The letters were chosen and annotated by Sarah Greenough, then curator of photographs at the Gallery, and are grouped into four periods: the teaching years in Virginia, South Carolina and Texas; the New York years with Alfred Stieglitz; the turn toward the Southwest; and the New Mexico decades after his death. Jack Cowart and Juan Hamilton edited the volume, with a foreword by J. Carter Brown.

O'Keeffe (1887-1986) had died the year before the show opened, and this remains one of the primary published sources for her correspondence.