s been hidden behind a series of popular images which have been propounded to explain her. In her younger days, she was known as Stieglitz's wife and model, and his composite portrait of her--some five hundred candid shots--influenced the art of photography to a great extent. Journalists with a Freudian mind pictured her as the woman who painted sexy pictures of flowers, but they were writers with little knowledge of art. The moved to New Mexico in the Thirties, and since that time her pictures of deserts and bones have been coupled in the public mind with legends of her ability at killing the local rattlesnakes (Vogue).
Robert Hughes has described her paintings as being like the desert itself, which he sees as a place with no middle ground-everything is either far or near, held in hallucinatory clarity. There is a concentration of desert images in her work that has led some to compare them to Surrealism. However, Hughes says that surrealism is almost by definition fantastic whereas the works of O'Keeffe insist that they are not dreams. The commonest object unfolds itself. Hughes also notes that though there is never a figure in her work--she has only painted one work with a human figure in it--but that her images are a ric
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