Exhibition of new photography acquisitions opens at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

Alfred Stieglitz, the avant-garde photographer and gallerist who later became her husband, created a series of more than 300 photographs of O’Keeffe during the course of his life.

Via ArtDaily.com

SANTA FE, NM.- “New Photography Acquisitions” opened at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum March 27, 2015. This exhibition presents a selection of the newest additions to the Museum’s photography collection, many of which have never been published or exhibited at the Museum.

“We are especially proud to offer the first look at these recent acquisitions, including photographs that span O’Keeffe’s life from New York to New Mexico,” says Robert A. Kret, director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. ”New Photography Acquisitions" includes many rarely seen images of O’Keeffe, one of the most photographed women of the 20th century, by some of the most well-known photographers of her day.”

“It is wonderful to see these insightful images,” says Carolyn Kastner, curator of the exhibition, “which include beautiful gelatin silver prints from Alfred Stieglitz, Philippe Halsman, and Ansel Adams, whose mastery of their media is a great complement to O’Keeffe’s paintings.”

Alfred Stieglitz, the avant-garde photographer and gallerist who later became her husband, created a series of more than 300 photographs of O’Keeffe during the course of his life, beginning in 1917. Several images from 1918, are included in the exhibition. One is famous for picturing O’Keeffe in the act of painting (one of only two known to do so), while others, which have not previously been published, frame intimate moments at Lake George, where the couple spent the summer and fall at the Stieglitz family home.

After Stieglitz’s death and O’Keeffe’s move to the remote village of Abiquiu in New Mexico, the artist continued to be a subject of interest to important photographers of the day, who journeyed to New Mexico and captured the artist in her environment, at home and in the landscape. Important portrait photographers such as Philippe Halsman, Yousuf Karsh, John Loengard, Arnold Newman and Tony Vaccaro followed her west. O’Keeffe friends Ansel Adams and Todd Webb, famous for their landscape photography, composed portraits of the artist–working the stark New Mexico scenery into the frame. Later pictures by Doris Bry, George Daniell, and Arnold Newman portray O’Keeffe in her New Mexico homes and in the surrounding landscape.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s photographic archive numbers more than 2,000 images. It forms a valuable record of the many ways that O’Keeffe presented herself to the camera in formal portraits as well as in candid snapshots with friends and family. Since the Museum was founded in 1997, its collection of photographs has grown steadily, primarily through gifts. The largest gift of more than 1000 photographs was presented to the Museum in 2006 by the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. That collection, assembled by the artist during her long life, became part of her estate after her death in 1986.

Similarly, the new acquisitions included in this exhibition, part of a collection purchased by the Museum in 2014, are unique because O’Keeffe selected the photographs for James Johnson Sweeney, the curator of her 1946 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The acquisitions include a wide range of materials such as fine art prints, copy prints, negatives, contact sheets, and documentary photographs.

The Museum’s photographic archive also constitutes a collection of work by contemporaries of O’Keeffe who were recognized photographers in their own right as well as friends and visitors to New Mexico. The creative practice of O’Keeffe, her husband Alfred Stieglitz, and the photographers in the Museum’s collection span the 20th century and the rise of American Modernism. “New Photography Acquisitions” will be on view March 27 – September 26, 2015

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“My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz"

Credit: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Alfred Stieglitz attached this photograph to a letter for Georgia O'Keeffe, dated July 10, 1929. Below the photograph he wrote, "I have destroyed 300 prints to-day. And much more literature. I haven't the heart to destroy this..."


 Kathaleen Roberts / Journal Staff Writer
Wednesday, Aug 3, 2011

It was a relationship built on white-hot passion, nearly shattered on a fault line of freedom and creativity.

National Gallery of Art photography curator Sarah Greenough leafed through 25,000 pieces of paper exchanged by Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz to produce “My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume I, 1915-1933,” (Yale University Press, 2011) an 800-page tome as big as the Chicago phone book. Despite its girth, the book represents just one-tenth of their correspondence during this period.

Greenough will be at the New Mexico Museum of Art today to talk about the book.

When Stieglitz and O’Keeffe met in 1916, he was 52 and already considered the nucleus of the New York art world. She was an unknown 28-year-old Texas art teacher.
The book traces the pair’s correspondence –– hers in squiggles and curlicues, his in thick black lines –– across their relationship. Stieglitz became entranced by her work when introduced to it by O’Keeffe’s friend Anita Pollitzer. The couple frequently exchanged three to four letters a day. They were sealed, at O’Keeffe’s request, for 20 years after her death.
At first, O’Keeffe comes across as a smitten schoolgirl turned giddy by the attentions of a powerful man. Stieglitz, alternately charismatic, egotistical and narcissistic, yearned for a woman artist after spending years in a miserable first marriage.
“You can see them really starting to fall in love,” Greenough said.
Stieglitz, the man who had introduced Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to the U.S., had long been searching for a great woman artist. He was convinced he had found one in O’Keeffe.
“In the early letters, you see him just getting to know her,” Greenough said. “I think he strongly wanted to encourage her art. Yet, eventually in the correspondence, his fascination with her as a woman artist gets transferred into his fascination of her as a woman.”
By 1916, Stieglitz was writing letters that were 20 to 30 pages long.
As O’Keeffe was about to return to Texas in 1917, he wrote to her: “How I wanted to photograph you –– the hands –– the mouth –– & eyes –– & the enveloped in black body –– the touch of white –– & the throat –– but I didn’t want to break into your time.”
Before O’Keeffe moved to New York in 1918, he wrote, “What do I want from you? –– Sometimes I feel I’m going stark mad –– That I ought to say.”
“They pretty much fell in love through their correspondence,” Greenough said.
Stieglitz found and cleaned a small studio for O’Keeffe. They began living together almost immediately and married in 1924.
By the mid-’20s, cracks start to snake through their bond. O’Keeffe desperately wanted a child; Stieglitz –– already the father of a daughter –– did not. She wanted to travel; he was a dedicated New Yorker. At first, the couple lived with Stieglitz’s brother and his wife. O’Keeffe later wrote that “living with the brother and the wife had all the emotional warmth of a cold, damp cellar.”
The family also intruded on her time to paint.
“And she wanted to live a more independent life than Stieglitz wanted her to,” Greenough said.
Thanks in no small part to Stieglitz’s promotion, O’Keeffe became a famous artist. Restless, she made the trip that would transform both their lives.
In 1929, O’Keeffe traveled to New Mexico to visit Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos. She discovered a vast expanse of land and light that would flood her canvas. She was surrounded by a circle of artists and intellectuals, including Tony Lujan, D.H. Lawrence and Dorothy Brett.
“This really isn’t like anything you ever saw,” she wrote to Stieglitz from Taos in 1929. “Mabel’s place beats anything you can imagine about it –– it is simply astonishing.”
The letters offer glimpses of O’Keeffe’s take on her own paintings:
“I hate the back of my Ranchos church –– Tomorrow I must get out at it again –– It is heavy –– I want it to be light and lovely and singing.”
The cascading letters reveal the couple’s contrasting writing styles. Stieglitz’s is flowing and poetic, teeming with imagery. O’Keeffe paired phrases with squiggles and loops. “It’s almost as if she was … sketching out an idea.” Greenough said. “O’Keeffe is very lucid and very sharply rendered, like her paintings are distilled down to their essence.”
“Neither one of them cared about sending carefully crafted letters,” she added. “They’re very immediate and free-flowing.”
Greenough first met O’Keeffe through photographs –– the sparsely iconic black-and-white images by Stieglitz, the subject of the curator’s dissertation. Greenough organized one-man exhibitions of the acclaimed photographer at the National Gallery of Art. O’Keeffe asked Greenough to edit their correspondence. She annotated each letter with a “yes” or a “no” for publication.
“When I met her, it was an extremely different person than the one in the photographs,” Greenough said. “She had a very dry wit and a real twinkle in her eyes. She was definitely a strong-willed person.”
Greenough is at work on Volume II, which runs from 1934 to Stieglitz’s 1946 death.
“I think it probably won’t be nearly as long,” she said.

If you go WHAT: Sarah Greenough, author of “My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume I, 1915-1933″
WHEN: 6 p.m. today
WHERE: St. Francis Auditorium, New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Ave.
COST: Free
CONTACT: 476-5088

Via The Albuquerque Journal

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Lecture: My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz

New Mexico Museum of Art


WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3
 1915 - 1933
6:00 pm

In her long-awaited book, My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume 1, 1915-1933 (Yale University Press, 2011), Sarah Greenough applies her formidable scholarship and insights to the engaging epistolary tale of one of the twentieth-century art world’s most famous couples. In more than 650 letters, selected and annotated by Greenough from thousands of pages, the two artists write candidly about topics including art, music, travels, friendships, and their powerful attraction to one another. This volume begins with the letters O’Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged before they met, details through their passionate affair and marriage, and closes in the wee hours of New Year’s Day 1934, when Stieglitz was seventy years of age. In her lecture, Greenough will talk about tackling the voluminous correspondence of these two creative powerhouses and how their writings illuminate their works of art. Copies of the book are available for purchase in the museum shop. Sarah Greenough is the Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art. For a short biography about her career: http://www.nga.gov/press/bios/greenough.shtm For publishing information about the book: Yale Univeristy Press - http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300166309

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