November 7, 2019 9
they were far apart. From Columbia
College in Charleston, where she was
teaching art, O’Keeffe had sent some
abstract charcoal drawings she called
“Specials” to a close friend in New
York, Anita Pollitzer. She asked Anita
to keep them private. “At certain mo-
ments in our lives we know what we
must do, and when I saw Georgia’s
drawings, it was such a moment,” Pol-
litzer recalled.^2 She rolled the drawings
back up and took them to 291, where
Stieglitz exclaimed, “Finally a woman
on paper!” “Her line embodied the tac-
tility he revered,” writes Burke; “her
swirls gave off a sense of movement.”
It was January 1, 1916, his fifty-
second birthday. Without asking
O’Keeffe, Stieglitz exhibited ten of the
drawings in May, and began a cautious
but steady courtship, much of it episto-
lary, since she had several other suitors
and soon left Charleston to chair the
art department at West Texas State
Normal College.
O’Keeffe was twenty-three years
younger than Stieglitz. “She was com-
pletely Other” to him, Rose remarks:
Her style was midwestern, her
clothes austere and androgy-
nous. Self-reliant, strong-minded,
tart and snappy, she was the free
American Girl who had never
been to Europe and had no inter-
est in going there.Her parents were Wisconsin dairy
farmers who had relocated their large
family to Virginia when Georgia was in
her teens. Always encouraged by them
to pursue art, O’Keeffe studied at the
Art Institute of Chicago and then at
the Art Students League, winning the
William Merritt Chase prize in 1908
for a brownish, Dutch-inspired still life
of a dead rabbit and a copper pot—her
last imitative work. Owing to a case
of measles and her father’s financial
misfortunes, O’Keeffe stopped paint-
ing for a few years, then enrolled in art
classes at the University of Virginia in
1912, where she was introduced to the
composition theories of Arthur Wesley
Dow and began moving toward what
we would now call abstraction.At almost the same time that Stieg-
litz lost Steichen’s allegiance, he gained
a new adherent in Paul Strand. Burke
does her best with Strand, but he was
elusive, often withdrawn into his work,
and his side of his long correspon-
dences with Rebecca Salsbury and
with O’Keeffe has been lost. Strand
had first visited 291 on a field trip with
Lewis Hine’s class at the Ethical Cul-
ture School and became a habitué.
Around late 1914 he brought
his portfolio to Stieglitz, who
disparaged Strand’s then
fashionable use of a soft-
focus lens: “You’ve lost all
the elements that distinguish
one form... from another,”
he said. When Strand re-
turned the next summer with
a new portfolio of formally
innovative urban images, the
most “modern” pictures yet
to appear among American
photographers, Stieglitz an-
nounced that he had done
something new for photog-
raphy, and that he should
consider 291 his home.
The timing seemed magi-
cal. Stieglitz saw Strand
as the child of 291, his eye
trained by the work and val-
ues Stieglitz had presented.
But his experiments also
spurred Stieglitz’s competi-
tive instincts. Impressed by
Strand’s sharp-focus city
studies—Strand had rigged
his camera so that people on
the street would not realize
they were being photographed—Stieg-
litz brought similarly crisp detail to por-
traits of his entourage and, in the waning
days of 291 (the gallery closed in 1917, a
cultural casualty of the war), the build-
ing’s elevator operator. Hodge Kirnon
(1917) demonstrates Stieglitz’s love of
creamy midtones and his subtle but ar-
resting geometric forms, in this case the
window that frames his subject’s head
from behind, a glowing trapezoid.
It is hard to look away from a Stieg-
litz print. Harder still to imagine that
he and Strand were, in these years,
reluctantly adapting to a new process,
palladium, since platinum—the highly
customizable “prince of all processes,”
as Stieglitz called it—had military ap-
plications and became unobtainable for
photographers during the war. (Hodge
Kirnon is a palladium print, as are most
of Stieglitz’s nudes of O’Keeffe.) Burke
notes that Stieglitz describes his new
ideas as “just the straight goods,” nearly
the same terms he applied to young
Strand’s: “The work is brutally direct.
Devoid of all flim-flam; devoid of trick-
ery and of any ‘ism.’” No more apolo-
gies for the mechanical aspects of the
art. The machine aesthetic lay ahead.
Strand’s prints had also stirred
O’Keeffe, who was soon conducting
an intimate correspondence with both
men. It must have taken all Stieglitz’s
self-control to allow this infatuation
to burn itself out. But by the time
O’Keeffe returned to New York inGeorgia O’Keeffe: No. 7 Special, 1915. This is one of the
charcoal drawings that O’Keeffe sent to her friend Anita
Pollitzer, who then showed them to Alfred Stieglitz.Alfred Stieglitz Collection/National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.(^2) O’Keeffe knew that her friend was col-
lecting materials for a biography of her,
but withdrew approval after reading
Pollitzer’s completed manuscript. Per-
haps her own early letters, from which
Pollitzer included long extracts, embar-
rassed her. A Woman on Paper: Geor-
gia O’Keeffe was published in 1988,
after both women’s deaths.
Lorenz Helmschmid, Field Armor of Maximilian I (detail), 1480. Sallet: Private Collection,
New York; all other armor elements: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Imperial Armoury.
The Last Knight
THE ART, ARMOR, AND
AMBITION OF MAXIMILIAN I
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The exhibition is made possible by Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder.
Additional support is provided by Alice Cary Brown and W.L. Lyons Brown,
the Estate of Ralph L. Riehle, the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund, Kathleen and
Laird Landmann, Marica and Jan Vilcek, and Christian and Florence Levett.
The exhibition is supported by an Indemnity from the Federal Council
on the Arts and the Humanities.
The catalogue is made possible by the Grancsay Fund, The Carl Otto von
Kienbusch Memorial Fund, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Through January 5 metmuseum.org Catalogue available