Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things

The Poetry of Things makes the case that Georgia O'Keeffe's real subject was the object, and that her apples, shells, bones and doors amount to a reinvention of still life rather than a sideline to the flowers and the landscapes.

Published in 1999 by The Phillips Collection with Yale University Press, the 160-page volume carries 80 colour and 69 black-and-white illustrations. Elizabeth Hutton Turner's essay traces the formative influence of Arthur Wesley Dow and the meeting of Eastern and Western thought in O'Keeffe's handling of things; Marjorie P. Balge-Crozier sets her inventions against the academic and traditional models of Western still life; Elsa Smithgall supplies an illustrated chronology. Full-page plates are interleaved with photographs of the artist's studios and collections, so the objects she kept can be read against the objects she painted. The exhibition opened at the Phillips in April 1999 and travelled to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

The Phillips has a particular claim on this material: in 1926 it became the first museum to buy a work by O'Keeffe, and had been showing her since 1927. The book took the Border Regional Library Association's Southwest Book Award.