Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright never collaborated nor did they compete. Yet these romantic heroes of twentieth-century art and architecture largely operated in parallel. In this ground-breaking book, Rovang weaves together their compelling life stories, examining their intermittent but nonetheless poignant friendship and its direct relationship to their work. 

Beginning in 1933, O’Keeffe and Wright exchanged roughly two dozen letters in which they expressed admiration for one another and their passion for the places that informed them. Many of these places they shared: both were born in southern Wisconsin, where they spent much of their young lives outside on their family’s farms and immersed in Nature. And both were drawn to the deserts of the Southwest in their later years, with Wright in Arizona and O’Keeffe in New Mexico. Along the way, they navigated the commercial and cultural labyrinths of Chicago and New York, and found spiritual respite in the landscapes of Japan. Though separated in age by twenty years and rarely in the same place at the same time, they forged the same trail in uncanny ways.

Juxtaposing almost 200 images highlighting common aspects of their individual biographies and creative outputs, this unique meditation on American artistic expression explores the nature not only of intellectual kinship but also of home, place, and material. Rovang’s text gives rich context to the allure of her visual subject, offering new ways to appreciate O’Keeffe’s and Wright’s monumental contributions to American culture. 

Rovang’s title, Through the Long Desert, comes from the twentieth-century critic and curator E. C. Goossen who, in a 1967 profile for Vogue, wrote that “only O’Keeffe and Wright . . . were prepared for the trip through the long desert awaiting American art between the wars.” His metaphor operates on multiple levels throughout this pioneering book, evoking the literal journey that led O’Keeffe and Wright to the Southwest as much as the poetic journey at the heart of the American spirit.