The 50-year friendship between Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams began when they met in Taos, New Mexico, in 1929. It’s no surprise that O’Keeffe, who loved to trek across big country in Texas and New Mexico, took to him. He was an intrepid photographer, clambering over dangerous terrain to make his iconic photographs. (In late […]
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Georgia O’Keeffe: what I meant, what you saw
The young Georgia O’Keeffe, working relentlessly to find her voice as an artist, was ambivalent about viewer reception. She longed for people to understand her art, but she resisted that desire at the same time. Modern art was for art’s sake, and the meaning was hers to know and not necessarily for her viewer to […]
But is it art?
After a break, I went back to reading My Faraway One. In my June 20 post about the first two hundred pages of correspondence between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, I asked myself: At this point, does O’Keeffe think of herself as an artist? Lo and behold, within another hundred pages, O’Keeffe addresses this very […]
Reading “My Faraway One”
Nearly two hundred pages into the correspondence* between Georgia O’Keeffe (in Canyon, Texas) and Alfred Stieglitz (in New York City), I’m feeling claustrophobic. On every page, another angst-filled stream-of-consciousness. Both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz feel like misfits — lonely, and needy. She is the aspiring artist needing affirmation. He is the aging man needing a shot […]
Photographing O’Keeffe being photographed
In her old age, Georgia O’Keeffe described photography sessions with Alfred Stieglitz as work. This rare photo of such a session in progress, one of several that sculptor Arnold H. Rönnebeck took in 1924 at Lake George, pulls back the curtain on the romance with which the world views Stieglitz’s portrait project of O’Keeffe. What […]
Georgia O’Keeffe: changing the narrative
“Finally, a woman on paper!” That’s the legendary — and likely apocryphal — exclamation attributed to photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz when he first laid eyes on drawings by Georgia O’Keeffe. As the standard story unfolds (he exhibits her, photographs her, promotes her, marries her), this “aha” moment of recognition becomes a claim of […]
O’Keeffe photo by Stieglitz on auction
I love this Alfred Stieglitz portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe (1918), because it’s a rare image of her at work. I like the way she’s seated, slightly elevated, on a sturdy cushion, her legs drawn up in front of her. With a brush in her right hand, those long tapered fingers of her left hand are […]