cover image O'Keefe and Me: A Treasured Friendship

O'Keefe and Me: A Treasured Friendship

Ralph Looney. University Press of Colorado, $27.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-87081-406-8

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) projected in her later years a flint-hard toughness, yet the artist's pose as aloof recluse, according to Looney, was a carefully crafted image that concealed her warm personality and quick, well-honed sense of humor. This ingratiating memoir, decked out with scores of photographs, records Looney's friendship with the fiercely independent painter beginning in 1962, when he first interviewed her in New Mexico for a magazine piece, through the early 1970s. We meet a woman with complete, steely confidence in herself, a skeptical observer of people, a stalwart liberal who championed Kennedy and hated Nixon, a radiant survivor who braved the tragic, gradual loss of sight that hindered her artistic output from 1971 onward. Retired chief editor of the Rocky Mountain News, Looney includes his relaxed photographs of O'Keeffe, of her house interiors and of the wild, rugged, colorful landscape that she transmuted into the lyric poetry of her paintings. (Oct.)