8 The New York Review
Al & Georgia & Beck & Paul
Regina Marler
Foursome :
Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe,
Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury
by Carolyn Burke.
Knopf, 419 pp., $30.
Alfred Stieglitz:
Taking Pictures, Making Painters
by Phyllis Rose.
Yale University Press, 259 pp., $26.
In 1973 Georgia O’Keeffe accepted a
young poet’s help organizing her library
at her house in Abiquiu, New Mexico.
For seven years, C. S. Merrill spent her
weekends with the great painter, who
was in her eighties, cranky, and nearly
blind, but still a formidable figure, at-
tracting acolytes and interviewers and
painting with help from assistants. The
younger woman rarely asked ques-
tions—“if I wanted to last there,” she
was advised, “I must consider it like a
medieval court and keep a very formal
relationship with Miss O’Keeffe”—but
sometimes O’Keeffe would reminisce
about her artistic beginnings in New
York. She confided that the years be-
fore her success “were the best of her
career because she was surrounded by
people who didn’t care. She was free.”
One day, O’Keeffe surprised Merrill
by opening a desk drawer to show her
a photograph—one of the famous early
nude portraits of her by Alfred Stieg-
litz, when she was “young and in love,”
Merrill comments. They were the start
of an unparalleled serial portrait of
more than three hundred images, made
over two decades.
Two recent books examine the lives
of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe and their
astonishingly productive marriage.
Carolyn Burke’s group biography,
Foursome, explores the friendship and
mutual influence between two creative
couples: Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, and
the photographer Paul Strand and his
first wife, the painter Rebecca Sals-
bury. At its most intense, in the 1920s,
their friendship was charged with ex-
citement and aesthetic inspiration.
But it degenerated into a Pinteresque
drama of complications, betrayals, and
rebuffs, with some surprising third- act
reversals. While Burke has four nar-
rative threads to weave—and does so
with dexterity—Phyllis Rose, in Al-
fred Stieglitz: Ta king Pictures, Making
Painters, has only one, to which she
brings her characteristic wit and vivac-
ity, offering a fascinating counterpoint
to Foursome.
Stieglitz has no real heir in contem-
porary American culture. No single
figure leads the avant-garde—what-
ever that is now—with his fervor and
authority. A dynamo who energized
two generations of art and photogra-
phy enthusiasts, he brought legitimacy
and prestige to American art in its own
country, and gave many of the giants
of European modernism—including
Picasso, Brancusi, and Matisse—their
first exhibitions in the US. One art-
ist described Stieglitz’s gallery as “an
oasis in the desert of American ideas.”
The novelty in Foursome is seeing
Stieglitz always in relationship, rather
than embattled and alone, as he has
sometimes been depicted, thrashing
through a thicket of mostly forgotten
conservatives and philistines in the New
York art world. He gathered follow-
ers—most notably, in the early years,
the photographer Edward Steichen,
whom he heavily promoted—but often
drove them away. Steichen and Stieg-
litz clashed during World War I, when
Steichen argued that Stieglitz’s gallery
must take a stand politically against
Germany, while Stieglitz (emotionally
connected to Germany) insisted on the
universality of art. Although they rec-
onciled in old age, Steichen later wrote,
“Stieglitz only tolerated people close to
him when they completely agreed with
him and were of service.”
Of the four artists in Foursome,
Stieglitz had the most artistically en-
riched upbringing. He was born in
Hoboken in 1864, the eldest child in
what would be a large family. His fa-
ther, a German- Jewish wool broker and
weekend painter, uprooted the whole
family in 1881 and moved them back
to Germany so the children could com-
plete their educations. Alfred stayed
nine years—a Jamesian immersion in
European art and manners. Although
he had been studying mechanical en-
gineering (his father’s idea) at the
Technische Hochschule in Berlin, he
eventually switched to chemistry so that
he could work with Professor Hermann
Wilhelm Vogel, the pioneer of photo-
chemistry. Stieglitz had bought his first
camera at nineteen and was obsessed.
With Vogel, he mastered his craft and
returned to New York in 1890 as per-
haps the most technically advanced
photographer in the country. After afailed early business venture in photo-
mechanical color printing and a season
of moping over his lost European idyll,
Stieglitz took on coeditorship of The
American Amateur Photographer and
launched his career.
For rank-and-file members of the
two photographic clubs in New York,
as well as for the few art connois-
seurs then interested in photography,
Alfred Stieglitz swept in like a hur-
ricane. He wrote most of the articles
in The American Amateur Photogra-
pher, whether technical or critical, and
snatched prizes at photography exhibi-
tions. He roamed Manhattan with his
first hand-held camera, a Folmer and
Schwing 4x5 plate, and took some of
his best-known images, including Win-
ter—Fifth Avenue (1893) and The Ter-
minal (1892), which Burke describes
as “both a tour de force and a spiritual
statement.” Until about World War I,
every image Stieglitz created was also
an argument for photography as a fine
art, rather than a purely mechanical
and chemical process or, God forbid,
a hobby. At first, this meant promoting
the gum and glycerin processes—dark-
room brushwork, essentially—that al-
lied photographers with painters. As
Rose points out, however, Stieglitz was
too attracted to detail to fully embrace
the dark, dreamy pictorialist aesthetic
of Gertrude Käsebier or early Steichen.
After his marriage in 1893 (again, his
father’s idea), he used his long Euro-
pean honeymoon as a photographic
odyssey—a frustration to his wife, Em-
meline, who preferred an elegant shop
to a picturesque ruin. Three years later,Stieglitz was asked to lead the Camera
Club of New York and its beautiful, far-
reaching new journal, Camera Notes.
“I had a mad idea that the Club could
become the world center of photogra-
phy,” he recalled.
After Camera Notes came the even
more lush and influential Camera Work
(1903–1917). Of these years the pho-
tography critic Sadakichi Hartmann
wrote, “It seemed to me that artistic
photography, the Camera Club and
Alfred Stieglitz were only three names
for one and the same thing.” In 1902,
fed up with opposition to his autocratic
rule of the Camera Club, he declared
the Photo-Secession, a group of art-
ists—Clarence White and Käsebier
were early favorites—he handpicked
to represent the new direction in pho-
tography. Steichen was vacating his stu-
dio and suggested Stieglitz show some
photographs there. The Little Galleries
of the Photo-Secession, the first of his
three galleries, was born in 1905. (This
venture is better known as “291,” for its
address on Fifth Avenue, even though
the gallery moved next door to 293 in
1908.) No plush, no gilt: the starkness
of the gallery walls was as arrestingly
modern as the art he showed. (Even
the famous Armory Show of 1913 was
decorated with great leafy garlands and
bunting.)Stieglitz was “always there, talking,
talking, talking, talking in parables,
arguing, explaining,” as Steichen re-
membered. He cared little about sales,
except insofar as they helped his art-
ists. O’Keeffe recalled her first visit
to the gallery in 1908 with classmates
from the Art Students League to see
a controversial exhibition of Rodin’s
sketches of the nude—“Rodin’s draw-
ings struck her as so many scribbles,”
according to Burke—but years passed
before she returned. Eventually, in
1916, she went alone to see a Marsden
Hartley show and found Stieglitz kind
and sympathetic. He let her take a
drawing home for free.
He had long hoped for a female pro-
tégé, a lover, or even, having envied his
twin brothers’ closeness, a kind of twin.
The birth of his daughter, Katherine, in
1898 had not saved his unhappy mar-
riage; Emmeline helped support the
galleries financially but had little else
in common with her husband. For a
couple of years, Stieglitz had been try-
ing to seduce the painter Katharine
Rhoades. Rose observes that Rhoades
“was his first try at creating a woman
artist.”^1 Not only was Stieglitz sexually
frustrated—his marriage was almost
celibate—but he longed to seize every-
thing that was modern: in this case, the
sexual freedom beginning to emerge in
Europe and in artistic bohemian circles
in New York.
Fittingly, given the geographic dis-
tance O’Keeffe put between them for
much of their marriage, the big mo-
ment for Stieglitz and her arrived whenAlfred Stieglitz: Georgia O’Keeffe and Rebecca Strand, 1922–Alfred Stieglitz Collection/National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.(^1) His last attempt was his lover Dorothy
Norman, whom he taught photography,
and who turned out to be a sensitive
and intelligent portraitist. Her archive
is housed at the Center for Creative
Photography in Tucson.