O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: Intimacy at a Distance

By DEBORAH SOLOMON, New York Times

Published: August 12, 2011

MY FARAWAY ONE

Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume I, 1915-1933

Edited by Sarah Greenough

Illustrated. 814 pp. Yale University Press. US$39.95.

Georgia O’Keeffe never seemed to mind having wrinkles. When we think of her, we are most likely to think of her later years, when she owned a ranch in Abiquiu, N.M., and roamed the red hills. She lived to be 98, and even after her hair went white, she was not shy about posing for photographs. As if to play up the pantheistic spirit of her art, she presented herself as an American natural, an exemplar of unbuttoned, un-­Botoxed ­authenticity.

"You see I cared for you as an artist," Alfred Stieglitz wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe. "No one else does."Bettmann/Corbis. (pic right)

Courtesy of the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Excerpt of a letter by Alfred Stieglitz, dated Nov. 4, 1916.

But free spirits cultivate their ­images, too. O’Keeffe owed much to the curatorial ministrations of Alfred Stieglitz, the pioneering photographer and art dealer. His gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue was one of those now-hallowed New York spaces where modernism took root in this country. O’Keeffe married him in 1924, by which time he had already exhibited her work and enshrined her as his model and muse. He took hundreds of photographs of her, sensuously infatuated images of her splayed fingers and her white neck and her handsome, wicked-witch-like face.  
The first thing one notices about “My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume I, 1915-1933” is its elephantine bulk. Running to more than 800 extra-large, text-crammed pages, it inherently raises the question of whether O’Keeffe is a sturdy enough talent to support such heavy, reverential treatment. She was, to this viewer, an original painter, but the distilled lushness of her early scenes of flowers and skies eventually ossified, and her work became formulaic, one of the first brands in American art. She claimed to have found her inspiration in nature, but her paintings — with their radical simplification of form and near abstractness — perhaps owe more to the early experiments in close-up photography of Paul Strand, who was part of the Stieglitz circle and a close friend of hers.
Full review at New York Times.