Introduction

Greenough, Sarah

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Introduction

Sarah Greenough (Editor)

Description: My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz...

My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz (Volume 1, 1915–1933)

~PASSIONATE AND POETIC, vivid and compelling, the letters between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz are a profoundly moving account of the lives of two of this country’s most celebrated artists and an exceptionally important source of information on twentieth-century American art and culture. Between 1915, when they first began to write to...

Author

Sarah Greenough (Editor)

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00086.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-17982

Introduction

PASSIONATE AND POETIC, vivid and compelling, the letters between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz are a profoundly moving account of the lives of two of this country’s most celebrated artists and an exceptionally important source of information on twentieth-century American art and culture. Between 1915, when they first began to write to each other, and 1946, when Stieglitz died, they exchanged more than 25,000 pages of letters that describe in unimaginably rich detail their daily lives in New York, Texas, and New Mexico during the many months they were apart. In language that is sparse and vibrant (O’Keeffe), fervent and lyrical (Stieglitz), immediate and unfiltered (both), the letters reveal the development of their art and ideas and their friendships with many of the most influential figures in early American modernism, while offering often poignant insights into the impact of larger events — two world wars, the booming economy of the 1920s, and the Depression of the 1930s — on two intensely engaged individuals. But above all else, as these letters trace the blossoming of their love during the 1910s, its rich maturation in the 1920s, its near-collapse during the early years of the Depression, and its renewed tenderness in the later 1930s and early 1940s, their correspondence is a deeply compelling account of the evolution of a relationship between two focused, willful, and independent but passionately committed individuals.

When O’Keeffe and Stieglitz first met in the spring of 1916, they were at very different points in their lives. Stieglitz, fifty-two years old, was already a major force in the American art world. Long a proponent of the artistic merit of photography and an internationally acclaimed photographer himself, in 1905 he had founded the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, known as 291 from its address on Fifth Avenue in New York. There he constructed a radically innovative dialogue among all the arts, exhibiting not only the finest examples of the art of photography but also the most advanced European painting, sculpture, and drawing. A leader in the introduction of modern European art to America, Stieglitz gave Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso their first exhibitions in the United States, and he also championed the work of American modernist painters and photographers, presenting John Marin and Paul Strand, among others. While Stieglitz was at the pinnacle of his fame in 1916, O’Keeffe was a twenty-eight-year-old art student. Although she had taught sporadically, her work had never been exhibited and was unknown to all but a few friends, family, and colleagues.

In addition to these disparities in age and reputation, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz also had very different personalities and backgrounds. Exceptionally articulate and opinionated; intellectually voracious and widely read; egotistical but charismatic and endowed with a remarkable ability to establish a deep communion with those around him, Stieglitz was an inveterate New Yorker from a large, close-knit, prosperous, and secular German-Jewish family. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, and schooled at the College of the City University of New York and the Königliche Technische Hochschule in Berlin, he had traveled extensively in Europe, but rarely west of the Alleghenies. With his thick mane of gray hair, his intense gaze, and signature cape, he cut a dashing figure in the New York art world. Married for more than two decades to Emmeline (Emmy) Obermeyer, a brewery heiress whose inheritance helped finance his activities, he shared little in common with her, except love for their only child, a daughter, Katherine (Kitty). With his passionate nature, Stieglitz was drawn to attractive women, especially younger ones, and in the last dozen years had been infatuated with at least two — Sophie Raab and Katharine N. Rhoades — but both seem to have been wary of entering into a relationship with a married man.

Where Stieglitz’s life had been formed by the cultured affluence and supportive milieu created by his parents and siblings, O’Keeffe’s background had been more modest and her family more fractured. Born on a dairy farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, she was one of seven children of second-generation Irish and Hungarian immigrants who were far from prosperous. When she was in her teens, her parents moved to Virginia, hoping to find better opportunities, leaving Georgia and her brother Francis behind to live with relatives and attend school in Madison, Wisconsin. Guided by her growing passion for art, she had studied at a number of art schools, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906 and the Art Students League in New York from 1907 to 1908. More apt to present herself as intuitive rather than intellectual, more prone to keen observation than flowery discourse, O’Keeffe had come to rely on her clear understanding of herself and her innate independence. With a sharp wit, feisty sense of humor, and occasionally imperious nature, she was also an astute judge of people and had little tolerance for those who did not engage her quick, lively imagination. When faced with the prospect of dull companions, she opted instead for her own company, work, and long walks in the outdoors. Unlike many other aspiring American artists of the time, she had never traveled to Europe, but by 1916 she knew the Midwest and the South, especially Texas, far better than most of her big-city colleagues. With her lithe figure, handsome beauty, and striking appearance, O’Keeffe was as drawn to creative, energetic individuals — especially good-looking men — as they were to her. Flirtatious, occasionally coy, and disarmingly frank, she confounded most men with her maverick behavior and her refusal to conform to conventional notions of beauty and dress. At a time when many women still wore elaborate Edwardian dresses and hairstyles, O’Keeffe’s frocks were simple, and she usually pulled her hair back, with only a modest sweep of bangs covering her forehead. By 1916 she had been involved with two men: George Dannenberg, with whom she carried on an extensive correspondence from 1908 to 1912, and Arthur Macmahon, a political science professor at Columbia University whom she met at the University of Virginia in the summer of 1914. But as soon as both men became serious about her, she pulled away, perhaps instinctively sensing that they would curtail her freedom.

Despite their differences, when O’Keeffe and Stieglitz met in 1915, both were at turning points in their lives. Following the groundbreaking exhibitions Stieglitz had mounted at his gallery and the sensational 1913 Armory Show of modern art, organized by others, numerous other galleries had opened in New York to exhibit the most advanced European and American painting and sculpture, providing competition for 291. New periodicals addressed many of the radical ideas previously encountered in Stieglitz’s publication Camera Work, while patrons such as Walter Arensberg, Mabel Dodge, and Gertrude Whitney began to court and support contemporary artists, offering the welcoming shelter and intellectual stimulation once found primarily at 291. Moreover, while Stieglitz was still hailed as one of the most important photographers of the time, by 1916 his own art had languished for several years, taking a back seat to his other activities. Unwilling to be one among many, Stieglitz mounted a series of “demonstrations” — small, focused exhibitions at his gallery — of children’s and African tribal art in order to reclaim his position as New York’s preeminent iconoclast. Perceived to be less corrupted by the materialism of Western society, these kinds of art were also thought to be more immediate and inventive, less intellectualized or analytical and therefore more expressive of subjective states, and deeply authentic. From 1912 through 1916, Stieglitz mounted four exhibitions of children’s art at 291, and his 1914 exhibition of African sculpture was the first ever held in an art gallery in the United States. He was also intrigued with what he regarded as another facet of primitivism — women’s art. His readings of Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Sigmund Freud had convinced him that if, as these authors argued, women were fundamentally different from Western men — less objective or cerebral, more emotional, sensual, and capable of divining higher powers — their art should also be different from that by men. A woman artist, Stieglitz had come to believe, could be one of those intuitive “geniuses [who] have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.”1 As quoted in “Some Remarkable Work by Very Young Artists,” 1912, repr. in Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York, 1973), 115. To test his belief, in January 1915 he presented a joint exhibition of paintings by Rhoades and Marion H. Beckett.

O’Keeffe, too, was about to embark on a new path. For the last few years she had had a series of dead-end jobs, punctuated by stimulating but too brief periods of study. From 1908 to 1910 she had been employed as a commercial artist in Chicago, but the work repelled her. She all but abandoned painting for two years and returned to it only in 1912, when, visiting her family in Charlottesville, she met Alon Bement, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who was working at the University of Virginia’s summer school. He introduced her to the work and ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow, a highly influential teacher who believed that art need not strive for accurate representation but could instead simply be a beautiful depiction of harmoniously arranged forms. Armed with these new insights, O’Keeffe had pieced together a series of jobs teaching art — first in the Amarillo, Texas, public schools from 1912 to 1914 and in the summer school in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she taught from 1913 to 1916. But only her position at the University of Virginia, where she assisted Bement, offered her any modicum of stimulation; her years in Amarillo forced her to confront the limited, prescribed methods of teaching art so commonly practiced at the time. With Bement’s encouragement, O’Keeffe studied with Dow at Teachers College in 1914 and 1915. There she made close friends, such as fellow art student Anita Pollitzer, and visited New York’s museums and galleries, including 291, where she saw an exhibition of Marin’s work.2 An Exhibition of Water-Colors, Oils, Etchings, Drawings, Recent and Old, by John Marin, of New York, on view at 291, Feb. 23–Mar. 26, 1915. Fascinated by 291, she confided to Pollitzer that she wanted Stieglitz, more “than anyone else I know,” to “like something — anything I had done.”3 GOK to Pollitzer, Oct. 1915; see Clive Giboire, ed., Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer (New York, 1990), 40. But when O’Keeffe left New York that spring — bound first for Charlottesville to assist Bement with his summer courses and later for Columbia, South Carolina, to teach at Columbia College — she had spoken no more than a few words to the legendary photographer and gallery director.

It was not until the spring of 1916, when O’Keeffe moved back to New York to study once more at Teachers College and again went to 291, that she and Stieglitz began to get to know each other. Those brief encounters prompted the exchange of a few letters, even while O’Keeffe was still in New York. After she returned to Charlottesville in mid-June to teach summer school, they began to correspond more often. At first they wrote each other weekly, but as a sign of their growing closeness, they quickly abandoned salutations and signatures. In late August when Stieglitz was at his family’s summer home in Lake George, New York, their correspondence became more frequent as O’Keeffe, her summer job over, traveled throughout the South. By late September, after O’Keeffe had moved to Texas, they were exchanging ever more lengthy and often daily letters, and by late 1916 Stieglitz was sending her letters that were twenty to thirty pages long. They soon discovered their differences — Stieglitz revealed himself to be intense and passionate; O’Keeffe, high-spirited and spontaneous — but they also recognized their shared exuberance for life, their willingness to bare their emotions to each other, and their deep commitment to their work. Just as quickly, they realized they were intensely attracted to each other — intellectually, emotionally, and physically. Each adopted a tone that was direct and candid: they did not expound on current theoretical ideas, religion, or philosophy (as Stieglitz might do in his correspondence with others), nor did they extensively discuss the intellectual motivations behind their own art. Instead, they wrote about their struggles to make their art, their daily lives — the people, books, art, concerts, and the natural environment that moved them — and most especially what they saw and felt. Their letters were, as O’Keeffe perceptively noted, “intensely alive,” filled with both a great “humanness” and an expansive, generous spirit that made her feel as if “all the world greets you.”4 GOK to AS, July 11, 1916; GOK to AS, Feb. 10, 1917. Unless otherwise noted, all of O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s letters to each other, as well as their letters to others and manuscript materials, are in Stieglitz / O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

From 1916 through 1918 O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s lives changed markedly, in large part because of their deepening relationship. As O’Keeffe became more familiar with the painters Stieglitz exhibited, as well as with his and his protégé Strand’s photographs, her art became more sophisticated and sure. Discarding earlier influences, she synthesized her own, often highly abstract pictorial language. As she sent Stieglitz each new batch of work, he grew increasingly enamored of her. Extolling O’Keeffe as both the “Great Child” and the “Great Woman,” he saw her as one of the “geniuses” of the modern age, the confirmation of his belief that women could be important creative artists. Yet despite their increasingly intense focus on each other, both were also affected by the mounting war hysteria. From his family and his years studying in Berlin in the 1880s, Stieglitz had a strong affection for Germany, but by late 1916 and early 1917 both he and O’Keeffe accepted the United States’ involvement in the war as inevitable. However, neither condoned anti-German propaganda nor agreed with the popular sentiment that linked Germany’s past triumphs in art, literature, and music with its current political aspirations. Whereas O’Keeffe’s attitude toward the war and her focus on Stieglitz distanced her from her friends and neighbors in Texas, the war had direct consequences for Stieglitz. When the United States joined the Allies against Germany in the spring of 1917 and the government ruled that food products could not be used for the manufacture of alcoholic beverages, Emmy Stieglitz’s income was significantly curtailed. Unable to afford 291 on his own, more modest inheritance, he closed the gallery at the end of June, after a final exhibition of O’Keeffe’s work. In the fall and winter of 1917 and 1918 he kept a room at the same address, as an office and storage space, but with no exhibitions to attract visitors, he became increasingly isolated. As both O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s loneliness intensified, they drew even closer together and their mutual attraction became ever more powerful and palpable.

During these years their correspondence significantly escalated and the letters that follow represent only approximately one-tenth of their copious output.5 O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s letters in the Yale Collection of American Literature are available online. This volume, which is divided into three sections (1915–1918; 1919–1928; and 1929–1933), traces the arc of their love from O’Keeffe’s first letter to Stieglitz in 1915 through their marriage in 1924 to the near demise of their relationship in 1933. Volume two (forthcoming) will reveal how, beginning in 1934, they used their new, hard-won understanding of themselves and each other to forge a less romantic and passionate but no less vital union that lasted until Stieglitz’s death. In both volumes, I have chosen letters that most forcefully speak to several issues: the evolution of their art and ideas; their relationships with many of the most influential cultural figures of their time, as well as their friendships with less celebrated individuals who nurtured each of them; the impact of larger social, cultural, and historic events on their daily lives; and the character of both the vibrant New York world of art and culture that was critical to Stieglitz and the rural life in Texas and New Mexico that enriched O’Keeffe. But above all, I have selected the most compelling letters, ones that chart both the growth and depth of their relationship and their struggles to create a truly modern marriage that gave each of them complete freedom yet preserved their commitment to each other. I have constructed the selection to establish a dialogue between them and to show the qualities that attracted each to the other, the changes that transpired as they matured, the difficulties they encountered, and the new paths they charted to resolve these issues. I did not avoid letters that address their sexual relationship, for to do so would minimize the important physical nature of their love, nor did I omit ones that reveal their attractions to others, for this too would not give a clear picture of the hurdles they faced as they worked to sustain their union over more than thirty years. Readers will also encounter occasional gratuitous racist remarks uttered by both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz — these too have been neither avoided nor highlighted, for to do so would not accurately reveal the tenor of the time. Both artists, of course, exchanged many letters with friends and colleagues, which they sometimes referred to in their correspondence with each other. I have attempted to locate all of these letters to other individuals and when they elucidate the character and evolution of O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s relationship, I have added pertinent information in footnotes or introductory texts.

In addition to correcting numerous biographical facts and clarifying their relationships with a wide range of individuals (from Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley to Marcel Duchamp and D. H. Lawrence, for example), O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s letters reveal a wealth of new insights into both artists that will fascinate readers for years to come. These include — but are by no means limited to — the changing personas each presented to the other; Stieglitz’s tendency in the first decade of their relationship to treat O’Keeffe like a brilliantly gifted child, but also her willingness to reinforce this sense of immaturity; the struggles that resulted from their different ages, backgrounds, and temperaments, which gradually became apparent in the 1920s and erupted in the early 1930s; the nature of Stieglitz’s affair with the much younger Dorothy Norman from the late 1920s until his death and its often devastating, always gnawing effect on O’Keeffe, as well as the duplicity Stieglitz assumed to perpetuate it; Stieglitz’s hypochondria and his tendency to project onto others his own perceived frailties; his intense egotism, self-absorption, and devotion to ideas, especially the concept of whiteness or purity, often at the expense of his personal relationships; the shrewdness with which O’Keeffe managed her later career, her resilient independence, but also her occasionally aloof manner toward Stieglitz and others; and the extent to which both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were able to infuse their deepest experiences into their art. Yet the letters also show the remarkable depth of their commitment to each other and their willingness to withstand “a good deal of contradictory nonsense,” as O’Keeffe wrote toward the end of her life, “because of what seemed clear and bright and wonderful.”6 Georgia O’Keeffe, “Introduction,” Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (New York, 1978, 1997), unpaginated. Many of these issues are briefly noted in the texts scattered throughout this volume and the subsequent one, but they are not explored in depth, for it is the purpose of this publication to put forth the primary documents that detail their relationship in all its complexity.

As the letters do not always present both authors in the best light, they raise a number of other questions. First, did Stieglitz or O’Keeffe destroy any of their own or the other’s letters that they deemed unimportant, inappropriate, or even incriminating, thus modifying the collection of their correspondence now housed in the Stieglitz-O’Keeffe Archive in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University? Nothing in their letters to friends or colleagues or the memoirs of others suggests that they did, nor are there unexplained gaps in their own correspondence. While many of their telegrams and the one- or two-line notes that O’Keeffe left for Stieglitz — in the sleeves of his clothes or on his pillow — when she departed probably have not survived, the collection of their letters at the Beinecke Library appears remarkably complete. The only exceptions are approximately 230 letters from O’Keeffe to Stieglitz written mainly from April through July 1943 and April through October 1944, which are now housed at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center and which O’Keeffe most likely intended to be part of the Stieglitz-O’Keeffe Archive at the Beinecke Library.7 In the years immediately after Stieglitz’s death in 1946, O’Keeffe had many of her letters to him transcribed. The handwritten letters from 1943 and 1944 and their typed transcriptions that are now at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, were, most likely, inadvertently never returned to her.

Second, did O’Keeffe and Stieglitz write each other with the expectation that their letters would be read by others, and did they want their correspondence published? The sheer volume of letters; their immediate, unfiltered voice; the fact that neither O’Keeffe nor Stieglitz edited them after they were written (passages, phrases, even individual words are almost never crossed out); and, most important, the critical role their correspondence played in the development and perpetuation of their relationship indicates that these are very private, not public documents. Yet from the very beginning of their relationship, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were a private couple operating on a public stage. Stieglitz ensured that their relationship became another one of his “demonstrations” through his display of his intimate photographs of O’Keeffe, his promotion of her art as an expression of her sexuality (and also, to some extent, his virility), and his promulgation of the idea that their marriage represented the perfect union of both a man and a woman and two intensely creative individuals. He also carefully saved all of O’Keeffe’s letters to him, along with thousands of other letters received from family, friends, and associates, knowing that these documents would help to confirm his preeminent position in twentieth-century American art and culture. In addition to publishing Marin’s letters, he also reprinted several of O’Keeffe’s letters to him in an exhibition brochure.8 John Marin, Letters of John Marin, ed. and with an intro. by Herbert J. Seligmann (New York, 1931); Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue of the 14th Annual Exhibition of Paintings with Some Recent O’Keeffe Letters, exh. cat., An American Place, New York, 1937. Noting that he felt “a book of your letters should be printed,” Stieglitz wrote O’Keeffe late in his life, “Yes I have so often wanted to print letters of yours. Letters you wrote before we were together. Letters to me.”9 AS to GOK, Aug. 23, 1943.

For her part, O’Keeffe was not always comfortable with the public limelight Stieglitz forced on her and their relationship, and, as is evident in their correspondence, she came to resent his use of intimate details from their private lives as fodder for the stories and parables he recounted to rapt audiences at his galleries. Later in life, she was also notoriously careful about protecting her privacy and projecting a carefully modulated image to the public. She too saved all of his letters to her, but when she deposited their correspondence in the Beinecke Library, she sealed it, stipulating — with only a few exceptions — that their letters could not be read until twenty years after her death. Yet the evidence clearly indicates that O’Keeffe also wanted their correspondence published. After Stieglitz’s death, she went through their correspondence and had hundreds of her letters to him transcribed. When she was in her mid-eighties and early nineties, she asked a few people, including me, to compile a selection for publication. She gave me few explicit instructions on the content and character of the book of their letters, except to “make it beautiful and make it honest.”10 GOK in conversation with the author, 1981. I have been guided by these wishes and by her belief that others would benefit, as she wrote Stieglitz in 1937, from “peeping over the rim into our world.”11 GOK to AS, Oct. 3[?], 1937. I have also been inspired by the knowledge that just as O’Keeffe and Stieglitz sought to “touch the center”12 See GOK to AS, May 7, July 9, and July 24, 1929. of each other — emotionally and physically, intellectually and artistically, and even spiritually — so too would readers be moved by the story of their lives and love.

1 As quoted in “Some Remarkable Work by Very Young Artists,” 1912, repr. in Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York, 1973), 115. »

2 An Exhibition of Water-Colors, Oils, Etchings, Drawings, Recent and Old, by John Marin, of New York, on view at 291, Feb. 23–Mar. 26, 1915. »

3 GOK to Pollitzer, Oct. 1915; see Clive Giboire, ed., Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer (New York, 1990), 40. »

4 GOK to AS, July 11, 1916; GOK to AS, Feb. 10, 1917. Unless otherwise noted, all of O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s letters to each other, as well as their letters to others and manuscript materials, are in Stieglitz / O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. »

5 O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s letters in the Yale Collection of American Literature are available online. »

6 Georgia O’Keeffe, “Introduction,” Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (New York, 1978, 1997), unpaginated. »

7 In the years immediately after Stieglitz’s death in 1946, O’Keeffe had many of her letters to him transcribed. The handwritten letters from 1943 and 1944 and their typed transcriptions that are now at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, were, most likely, inadvertently never returned to her. »

8 John Marin, Letters of John Marin, ed. and with an intro. by Herbert J. Seligmann (New York, 1931); Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue of the 14th Annual Exhibition of Paintings with Some Recent O’Keeffe Letters, exh. cat., An American Place, New York, 1937. »

9 AS to GOK, Aug. 23, 1943. »

10 GOK in conversation with the author, 1981. »

11 GOK to AS, Oct. 3[?], 1937. »

12 See GOK to AS, May 7, July 9, and July 24, 1929. »

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