Georgia O Keeffe

Edward J. Sozanski apparently knows very little about the life of Georgia O'Keeffe and even less about her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. He wrote in a March 7 obituary: "Miss O'Keeffe became a celebrity both because of her art, . . . and because she was the wife of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. . . . " And later: "Her visibility as an artist rather than as a personality waned after Stieglitz died in 1946. " Then, after disclaiming Miss O'Keeffe's strong individuality, he finally robs her of her talent when he writes: "She owed her success to Stieglitz.

The legend of Georgia O'Keeffe is only partly based on what she achieved as an artist. She became a folkloric figure because of her fierce independence in the way she lived as well as painted, and because she served as an inspirational role model to several generations of American women. O'Keeffe's association with the equally legendary Alfred Stieglitz - as protege, lover and wife - in itself made her an important art-historical figure. Her solitary, ascetic life in New Mexico after Stieglitz died in 1946 added a romantic dimension to her composite public portrait.

One of the most celebrated careers in American art ended yesterday when Georgia O'Keeffe died in Santa Fe., N.M., at 98. According to the Associated Press, O'Keeffe was taken to St. Vincent Hospital there yesterday morning and died just after noon. Details on the cause of death were not immediately available. For a time it seemed that the country's most famous female artist might be immortal. Living since 1949 in Abiquiu, a village in northern New Mexico, Miss O'Keeffe continued to paint through her 80s and well into her 90s. She moved from the village to Santa Fe last summer.

My heart is racing and breath short. I've just been looking over some of Alfred Stieglitz's photos of Georgia O'Keeffe. During their life together, he took more than 300 of them: Her face, her paintings, her body, her car, her hands. This remarkable artistic monument tells a story with the century stamped all over it. You know O'Keeffe: she of the flowers, the steer-skull-in-the-desert paintings. And Stieglitz: the photographer who helped invent modern photography and modern American art. He also started "291," a New York art house at which the finest in contemporary art could be seen and purchased.

By now, we expect the seasonal flood of art books that washes over the bookstores every fall to include at least one new volume on Georgia O'Keeffe and more startling revelations about the impressionists. This season delivers that and more - insightful biographies of two important American painters, an informative and thoroughly readable look at the history of art dealing and collecting, and the most unusual and imaginative art book I have ever seen. The last would be The Art Pack by Christopher and Helen Frayling and Ron van der Meer (Alfred A. Knopf, $40)

Lumina: Reports on the Arts (Ch. 12, 10 p.m.) is an hour-long presentation that hops back and forth around the country to present profiles of artists and issues in the arts. Tonight's subjects range from a story about Louisiana singer-accordionist Buckwheat Zydeco to an examination of the architectural issues surrounding Philadelphia's own One Liberty Place. Lumina strives mightily for diversity; tonight's profile of the late painter Georgia O'Keeffe, for example, is preceded by a look at circuses around the country.

Theater at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts? Why not? Twice this weekend, at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, museumgoers at Broad and Cherry streets may attend a 25-minute drama adapted from the letters of artist Georgia O'Keeffe and a friend, featuring two actresses from the Novel Stages company. "From the Faraway Nearby" is an adjunct event to the exhibition "Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream 1970-85," which explores a period that saw more women artists than ever before enter the mainstream of contemporary art. Actress-writer-adapter Clista Townsend, who plays O'Keeffe in the one-act play (her colleague Leigh Smiley takes the role of Anita Pollitzer, the art student friend who corresponded with her)

PORN ELDER statesman Bill Margold once told us a story about finding new talent for the sex biz. Whenever a young woman arrived at his office wanting to be a star, he would ask her to give the job choice serious thought. He'd tell the girls: "Ten years from now you may have a son and the boy will come home from school one day and ask you if it was your birthday. And you'd ask 'My birthday'? 'Yeah,' he'd reply. Johnny showed me a picture of you in a magazine and you had a candle in your a--. " We remembered that story yesterday when word crossed our desk that Cameron Diaz is seeking an injunction barring the release of reportedly nude photos taken at a private modeling session over a decade ago - before she was, you know, Cameron Diaz.

Arnold Newman began his career as a portrait photographer in Philadelphia in 1939. From a humble beginning working for a commercial chain that specialized in cheap photo portraits, he developed his own distinctive approach to the genre that made him internationally famous. Newman called his style "environmental portraiture," meaning that he posed his subjects in surroundings, and with objects, that symbolized their vocations. For example, one of his most familiar images depicts composer Igor Stravinsky seated at a grand piano, his head supported by a bent arm that counterpoints the prop holding up the piano top. To inaugurate its new gallery for special exhibitions, in the lower level of the recently opened Mari Sabasuwa Michener wing, the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown has chosen a traveling show of more than 100 such portraits.

Georgia O'Keeffe bequeathed four of her oil paintings to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, making it one of eight institutions to share 52 works from the estate of the artist, who died on March 6 at age 98. The bequest will bring to eight the number of O'Keeffe works at the museum. The value of the paintings was not stated in the will, filed last week with the district court clerk in Santa Fe, N.M., where she died. "We're absolutely thrilled," said the museum's director, Anne d'Harnoncourt, who added that officials had been told that they would get four paintings, but that they did not know any details.

For the public, the new galleries and expanded library are the heart of the Art Museum's Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building. Now visitors can at last appreciate the depth and range of several specialized collections, including photography, design, sculpture, and costume and textiles. They can do this through five inaugural exhibitions, which begin just inside the building's main entrance in the Exhibition Gallery, a large space ideally suited to displaying sculpture. For the opening, the museum has stocked this window-lined room with about a dozen modern and contemporary pieces, from Pablo Picasso's bronze Man With a Lamb to Sol LeWitt's multicolored Splotch, in which the rigorous minimalist and conceptualist becomes uncharacteristically playful.

PORN ELDER statesman Bill Margold once told us a story about finding new talent for the sex biz. Whenever a young woman arrived at his office wanting to be a star, he would ask her to give the job choice serious thought. He'd tell the girls: "Ten years from now you may have a son and the boy will come home from school one day and ask you if it was your birthday. And you'd ask 'My birthday'? 'Yeah,' he'd reply. Johnny showed me a picture of you in a magazine and you had a candle in your a--. " We remembered that story yesterday when word crossed our desk that Cameron Diaz is seeking an injunction barring the release of reportedly nude photos taken at a private modeling session over a decade ago - before she was, you know, Cameron Diaz.

My heart is racing and breath short. I've just been looking over some of Alfred Stieglitz's photos of Georgia O'Keeffe. During their life together, he took more than 300 of them: Her face, her paintings, her body, her car, her hands. This remarkable artistic monument tells a story with the century stamped all over it. You know O'Keeffe: she of the flowers, the steer-skull-in-the-desert paintings. And Stieglitz: the photographer who helped invent modern photography and modern American art. He also started "291," a New York art house at which the finest in contemporary art could be seen and purchased.

Their mission was simple: Decorate the blank walls of a Cheltenham apartment. But how to do it without going broke or being embarrassed by their lack of art smarts? Rosemarie Gontz and Paul Costa found the answer at the Adam's Mark Hotel yesterday, in a crowded ballroom dripping with oil paintings. There, the Collectors Art company dangled $49 price tags and a liberal exchange policy to the nervous and curious. The Cheltenham couple, among hundreds, bit and bought hard. "At a gallery, I'd have to get advice and get dressed up," said Gontz, a 30-year-old nanny, as she clutched a textured sunflower canvas to her denim overalls.

Arnold Newman began his career as a portrait photographer in Philadelphia in 1939. From a humble beginning working for a commercial chain that specialized in cheap photo portraits, he developed his own distinctive approach to the genre that made him internationally famous. Newman called his style "environmental portraiture," meaning that he posed his subjects in surroundings, and with objects, that symbolized their vocations. For example, one of his most familiar images depicts composer Igor Stravinsky seated at a grand piano, his head supported by a bent arm that counterpoints the prop holding up the piano top. To inaugurate its new gallery for special exhibitions, in the lower level of the recently opened Mari Sabasuwa Michener wing, the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown has chosen a traveling show of more than 100 such portraits.

Johanna Goodman stands in her Grays Ferry studio surrounded by notable women. On a chair to her right is Georgia O'Keeffe. First ladies Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jackie Kennedy Onassis sit to her left. The artist Frida Kahlo and Queen Elizabeth II are seated as well. Goodman, bespectacled, boisterous and rarely at a loss for words, is chattering away. Often, when making what she thinks is a particularly pertinent point, she gently flips her right hand out, palm up, as if to ask, "Don't you see?"

Every fall, art-book publishers usually can be counted on to deliver some standard goods for Christmas giving, such as books on impressionism or impressionist painters. Georgia O'Keeffe has been another staple in recent years. Well, this year tradition doesn't count for much. There's only one major impressionist book in the stores, but it's an important one. Joachim Pissarro has produced a strong, lively monograph on his great-grandfather, Camille Pissarro, whom Cezanne once described as "the father" of the impressionists.

Gertrude Kasebier (1852-1934) was a remarkable woman as well as a first- rate photographer. Reading Barbara L. Michaels' account of her life and career, published last year by Harry N. Abrams, you realize that she was every bit as exemplary a role model for women artists as was Georgia O'Keeffe, except that she didn't become nearly as famous. Yet in one sense, Kasebier, whose work is now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, developed the model of the independent woman beyond what O'Keeffe represented to a later generation.

When two artists marry, it's never a foregone conclusion that they will influence each other's work, particularly if the talents are roughly equivalent. Yet it's natural to look for consonances simply because it's difficult to believe that they wouldn't exist. This was demonstrated recently in an exhibition at the Helen Drutt Gallery in Philadelphia devoted to the careers of ceramic artists Paula and Robert Winokur. Early in their careers, there was some evidence of one partner's trying his or her own variation of a line of inquiry initiated by the other.

By now, we expect the seasonal flood of art books that washes over the bookstores every fall to include at least one new volume on Georgia O'Keeffe and more startling revelations about the impressionists. This season delivers that and more - insightful biographies of two important American painters, an informative and thoroughly readable look at the history of art dealing and collecting, and the most unusual and imaginative art book I have ever seen. The last would be The Art Pack by Christopher and Helen Frayling and Ron van der Meer (Alfred A. Knopf, $40)