Lynes, Barbara Buhler

PERSONAL:

Education: University of California, Riverside, B.A., 1964, M.A., 1967, Ph.D. (French literature), 1977; Indiana University, Ph.D., 1979 (art history).

ADDRESSES:

Office—Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St., Santa Fe, NM 87501.

CAREER:

Art historian, curator, educator, writer, and editor. Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, Mellon assistant professor of art history, 1978-1980; Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, assistant professor of art history, 1980-86; Montgomery College, Rockville, MD, associate professor of art history, 1986-89; Maryland Institute, Baltimore, professor of art history, 1989-1997, chair, 1989-1992; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, Abiquiu, NM, independent contractor, 1992-98; Emily Fisher Landau director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center and curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM. Member of the Art of the Americas advisory council for the College of Santa Fe; former member of the acquisitions committee for the Baltimore Museum of Art. Also curator of numerous exhibitions.

MEMBER:

Association of Research Institutes in Art History (treasurer), Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association (former vice-president), College Art Association.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Samuel H. Kress Foundation fellowship, 1976-77; Chester Dale fellow, National Gallery Art, Washington, DC, 1977-78; Dartmouth College faculty fellowship, 1984; National Endowment for the Humanities traveling fellow, 1992. Frances Smyth-Ravenel Prize for Excellence in Publications Design, for Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné; Independent Press Publication of the Year for Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place; U.S. News Best Book of 2007 for General Art Books, for Georgia O'Keeffe: Museum Collections. Ambassador List, the Masterworks Foundation.

WRITINGS:

O'Keeffe, Stieglitz, and the Critics, 1916-1929, UMI Research Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1989.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Rizzoli Publications (New York, NY), 1993.

Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, two volumes, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1999.

(With Elizabeth Glassman, Judith C. Walsh, and Ruth Fine) O'Keeffe on Paper, National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), 2000.

(With Russell Bowman) O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes: The Artist's Collection, Thames & Hudson (New York, NY), 2001.

(Author of introduction) Georgia O'Keeffe and the Calla Lily in American Art, 1860-1940, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2002.

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum: Highlights of the Collection, Harry N. Abrams (New York, NY), 2003.

(Author of introduction and editor, with Ann Paden) Maria Chabot—Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941-1949, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 2003.

(With Lesley Poling-Kempes and Frederick W. Turner) Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2004.

(With Heather Hole, Neil Printz, and John Smith) Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol: Flowers of Distinction, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (Santa Fe, NM), 2005.

(With Jonathan Stuhlman) Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling around Abstraction, Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, FL), 2007.

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections: Celebrating Ten Years, Abrams (New York, NY), 2007.

(With Sandra S. Phillips and Richard B. Woodward) Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities, Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2008.

Contributor to books and exhibition catalogues, including Georgia O'Keeffe: From the Faraway, Nearby, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1992; The Expanding Discourse, Feminism and Art History, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1992; Georgia O'Keeffe in Williamsburg, Muscarelle Art Museum (Williamsburg, VA), 2001; Postmodernism: A Virtual Discussion, edited by Maurice Berger, University of Maryland (College Park, MD), 2002; Museums of Tomorrow: A Virtual Discussion, edited by Maurice Berger, University of Maryland (College Park, MD), 2004; Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism, edited by Heather Hole and Barbara Buhler Lynes, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2007; Georgia O'Keeffe and the Camera: The Art of Identity, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2008.

Also contributor to periodicals, including Art Bulletin, Gazette des Beaux Arts, Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, American Art, and Women's Art Magazine.

SIDELIGHTS:

Barbara Buhler Lynes is an art historian and an expert on the art of noted American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. She has written numerous books, book chapters, essays, and exhibition catalogues focusing on O'Keeffe. The artist and her work have long been associated with American Southwest, especially after O'Keeffe settled in the area later in her career. Among O'Keeffe's most famous paintings are her depictions of flowers, animal bones, and landscapes of the American Southwest. These paintings typically incorporate both elements of realism and abstraction.

Lynes first book about O'Keeffe is O'Keeffe, Stieglitz, and the Critics, 1916-1929, which was followed by the 1993 book titled simply Georgia O'Keeffe. Another of Lynes's books focusing on the works of O'Keeffe is the two volume Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné. This book documents and authenticates the artist's extensive oeuvre and includes 2,000 reproductions of O'Keeffe's works. Referring to the book as "an elegant treasure," Kathryn Wekselman, writing in the Library Journal, went on in the same review to note that the author "provides a wealth of information" about the artist and her work.

O'Keeffe on Paper is an exhibition catalogue of the artist's work on paper with essays by the author, Elizabeth Glassman, and Judith C. Walsh. In these essays, the authors place the work in context with other artists. They also write about the technical aspects of O'Keeffe's use of paper. The book includes fifty plates. Library Journal contributor Jack Perry Brown noted that "the essays, particularly that by Barbara Lynes …, are first-rate."

O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes: The Artist's Collection is a book to accompany a traveling exhibition of O'Keeffe's works. Including essays by Lynes and Russell Bowman, the book features the artist's own collection of her works, which included more than half of all of her paintings. In her essay, Lynes examines the reasons why O'Keeffe kept so many of her works and points to lessons learned from Alfred Stieglitz, her husband and mentor, concerning marketing her works and looking to secure her financial future. In addition, the artist in some cases might have felt that some of the works were not representative of the Southwestern United States motifs that she had become famous for while believing that others were very important representations of her famous style and wanted to keep for posterity. "Illustrated with beautiful color plates, this book is recommended for all libraries with art collections," wrote Sandra Rothenberg in Library Journal.

In Georgia O'Keeffe and the Calla Lily in American Art, 1860-1940, the author presents fifty-four paintings, photographs, and drawings of the calla lily dating from the 1860s to 1940, including nine of O'Keeffe's most renowned paintings of the flower. The book also includes works for comparison by Imogen Cunningham, Marsden Hartley, Man Ray, Edward Weston, Joseph Stella, and Charles Demuth. Lynes is author of the introduction and the book includes essays on the calla lily, an exotic flower from South Africa, by Charles C. Eldredge and James Moore.

Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place contains seventy-six color and black-and-white illustrations and essays by Lynes and coauthors Lesley Poling-Kempes and Frederick W. Turner. The book was written for a traveling show of the same name and "explores the artistic and emotional connections between some of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings and the specific sites in the New Mexico landscape that inspired them," according to a contributor to the American Artist. In her essay Lynes recalls how she located the sites of various O'Keeffe paintings and discusses the artist's move from strictly abstract painting to more realistic paintings with an abstract element. The book includes photos of the traveling sites beside the paintings depicting them. "This book … is illuminating in its depth of coverage," wrote the American Artist contributor.

Lynes is the author, with Jonathan Stuhlman, of the text for Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling around Abstraction. The book features approximately fifty of the artist's early abstract paintings. In the book's two essays by the authors, they discuss the origins of these lesser-known works by the artist and the author's irritation at critics interpreting them in a feminine light while other similar works by male artists received no such gender identification.

In Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections: Celebrating Ten Years, published in 2007, Lynes presents many of the paintings housed in the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, including less familiar works, drawings, and watercolors from nearly every period of the artist's career. Lynes also include selected works by O'Keeffe's contemporaries for comparison. "Essential for fans, the book also makes for a handsome introduction to the artist's brilliance," wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. Amy K. Weiss, writing in the Library Journal, noted that the book "would be an outstanding purchase for public and academic libraries looking for a comprehensive retrospective of O'Keeffe's art."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Artist, August, 2004, review of Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place, p. 75.

Art Journal, spring, 1992, Naomi Rosenblum, review of O'Keeffe, Stieglitz, and the Critics, 1916-1929, p. 105.

Booklist, March 15, 2007, Donna Seaman, review of Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections: Celebrating Ten Years, p. 12.

Bookwatch, June, 2001, review of O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes: The Artist's Collection, p. 4.

Book World, December 5, 1999, review of Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, p. 10; February 25, 2001, review of O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes, p. 6.

Choice, June, 2000, M. Kren, review of Georgia O'Keeffe, p. 1805; January, 2001, E.H. Teague, review of O'Keeffe on Paper, p. 892; November, 2001, Sandra Rothenberg, review of O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes, p. 499; March, 2003, J.A. Day, review of Georgia O'Keeffe and the Calla Lily in American Art, 1860-1940, p, 1172; August, 2007, M.M. Hamel-Schwulst, review of Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections, p. 2093.

Entertainment Weekly, December 17, 1999, review of Georgia O'Keeffe, p. 78.

Library Journal, December, 1999, Kathryn Wekselman, review of Georgia O'Keeffe, p. 124; November 1, 2000, Jack Perry Brown, review of O'Keeffe on Paper, p. 76; September 15, 2001, Sandra Rothenberg, review of O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes, p. 76; November 1, 2000, Jack Perry Brown, review of O'Keeffe on Paper, p. 76; May 1, 2007, Amy K. Weiss, review of Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections and Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling around Abstraction, p. 80.

Publishers Weekly, April 30, 2007, review of Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections, p. 152.

Reference & Research Book News, February, 2004, review of Maria Chabot—Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941-1949, p. 206.

Spectator, February 26, 2000, review of Georgia O'Keeffe, p. 36.

Times Literary Supplement, April 14, 2000, review of Georgia O'Keeffe, p. 24; August 13, 2004, Dore Ashton, review of Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico, pp. 28-29.

ONLINE

TFAO: Traditional Fine Arts Organization,http://www.tfaoi.com/ (February 5, 2008), profile of author.

Vassar College Office of College Relations Web site,http://collegerelations.vassar.edu/ (February 5, 2008), brief profile of author.

Yale University Press,http://yalepress.yale.edu/ (February 5, 2008), description of Georgia O'Keeffe and the Calla Lily in American Art, 1860-1940.