work and drew her into his circle of avant-garde painters and photog-
raphers. Stieglitz became one of O’Keeffe’s staunchest supporters and,
eventually, her husband. The interest of Stieglitz and his circle in cap-
turing the sensibility of the machine age intersected with O’Keeffe’s
fascination with the fast pace of city life, and she produced paintings
during this period, such as New York, Night (FIG. 35-38), that depict
the soaring skyscrapers dominating the city. Like other Precisionists,O’Keeffe reduced her images to simple planes, here punctuated by
small rectangular windows that add rhythm and energy to the image,
countering the monolithic darkness of the looming buildings.
Despite O’Keeffe’s affiliation with the Precisionist movement
and New York, she is probably best known for her paintings of cow
skulls and of flowers, for example,Jack in the Pulpit No. 4 (FIG. I-4),
which reveals her interest in stripping subjects to their purest forms
and colors to heighten their expressive power. In this work, O’Keeffe
reduced the incredible details of a flower to a symphony of basic col-
ors, shapes, textures, and vital rhythms. Exhibiting the natural flow
of curved planes and contour, O’Keeffe simplified the form almost
to the point of complete abstraction. The fluid planes unfold like
undulant petals from a subtly placed axis—the white jetlike streak—
in a vision of the slow, controlled motion of growing life. O’Keeffe’s
painting, in its graceful, quiet poetry, reveals the organic reality of
the object by strengthening its characteristic features.Photography
ALFRED STIEGLITZAs an artist,Alfred Stieglitz(1864–
1946) is best known for his photographs. Taking his camera every-
where he went, he photographed whatever he saw around him, from
the bustling streets of New York City to cloudscapes in upstate New
York and the faces of friends and relatives. He believed in making only
“straight, unmanipulated” photographs. Thus, he exposed and printed
them using basic photographic processes, without resorting to tech-
niques such as double-exposure or double-printing that would add in-
formation not present in the subject when he released the shutter.
Stieglitz said he wanted the photographs he made with this direct tech-
nique “to hold a moment, to record something so completely that those
who see it would relive an equivalent of what has been expressed.”^23
Stieglitz began a lifelong campaign to win a place for photogra-
phy among the fine arts while he was a student of photochemistry in
Germany. Returning to New York, he founded the Photo-Secession
group, which mounted traveling exhibitions in the United States and
sent loan collections abroad, and he also published an influential
journal titled Camera Work.In his own works, Stieglitz specialized in
photographs of his environment and saw these subjects in terms of
arrangements of forms and of the “colors” of his black-and-white
materials. His aesthetic approach crystallized during the making of
The Steerage (FIG. 35-39), taken during a voyage to Europe with his
first wife and daughter in 1907. Traveling first class, Stieglitz rapidly
grew bored with the company of the prosperous passengers in that
section of the ship. He walked as far forward on the first-class level as
he could, when the rail around the opening onto the lower deck
brought him up short. This level was for the steerage passengers the
government sent back to Europe after refusing them entrance into
the United States. Later, Stieglitz described what happened next:
The scene fascinated me: A round hat; the funnel leaning left, the
stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railing made of
chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circu-
lar iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a trian-
gle. I stood spellbound. I saw shapes related to one another—a pic-
ture of shapes, and underlying it, a new vision that held me: simple
people; the feeling of ship, ocean, sky; a sense of release that I was
away from the mob called rich. Rembrandt came into my mind and
I wondered would he have felt as I did....I had only one plate
holder with one unexposed plate. Could I catch what I saw and felt?
I released the shutter. If I had captured what I wanted, the photo-
graph would go far beyond any of my previous prints. It would be a
picture based on related shapes and deepest human feeling—a step
in my own evolution, a spontaneous discovery.^24938 Chapter 35 EUROPE AND AMERICA, 1900 TO 194535-38Georgia O’Keeffe,New York, Night,1929. Oil on canvas,
3 4 –^18 1 71 – 8 . Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln (Nebraska Art
Association, Thomas C. Woods Memorial Collection).
O’Keeffe’s Precisionist representation of New York’s soaring skyscrapers
reduces the buildings to large, simple, dark planes punctuated by small
windows that add rhythm and energy to the image.1 ft.
35-39ASTIEGLITZ,
Equivalent,
1923.