By Veronica Kavass
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ARTISTS IN LOVE FROM PICASSO & GILOT TO CHRISTO & JEANNE- CLAUDE A CENTURY OF CRE ATIVE AND ROMANTIC PARTNERSHIPS BY VERONICA KAVASS ARTISTS IN LOVE FROM PICASSO & GILOT TO CHRISTO & JEANNE- CLAUDE A CENTURY OF CR E ATI V E AND ROMANTIC PARTNERSHIPS BY VERONICA KAVASS For centuries, great artists have been drawn together in friendship and in love. In Artists in Love, curator and writer Veronica Kavass delves into the passionate and creative underpinnings of the art world’s most provocative romances. From Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschen- berg, Kavass’ intimate and daring text provides a generous glimpse into the inspiring and sometimes tempestuous relationships between celebrated artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. From poetic beginnings to shocking endings (and vice-versa), the various dimen- sions of the artist couple archetypes are ceaselessly explored. Some yield astonish- ing parallel bodies of work, as with Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, others are enduring and collaborative, like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, yet others are ador- ing but explosive, such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and Lee Miller and Man Ray. Essays revealing what compelled these dynamic artists to partner, how their pairing influenced their work, and why their love may have faltered or endured, are accompanied by lush illustrations of their art and documentary photographs of the couple. The first major visual book to explore this subject in such epic scope,Artists in Love is a revelatory and riveting journey into the hearts and minds of our great- est artist couples. Includes more than 150 full-color illustrations Stieglitz put O’Keeffe on display the way a scientist “reveals an exotic creature in a pen for other experts to stare at while scratching their chins.” ALFRED STIEGLITZ GEORGIA & O’KEEFFE THE HUNGRY AND THE STARVED In 1915, A BESPECTACLED, DISQUIETED ALFRED STIEGLITZ SAT ALONE in his “291” gallery space and pondered his next step as New York City’s leading intellectual pundit. He had spread himself thin as an artist, a dealer, an editor, and a proselytizer—a combination that resulted in a lack of funds and an irritating buzz in his head. He made audacious decisions, such as turning on his own artistic medium to celebrate the modernist paintings of Picasso and Matisse for being “anti-photography.” Curating painting shows allowed him to tiptoe around the central infuriating concern of his own work. He found that he could ensconce his psychological self-flagellation by “selflessly” promoting the work of others. After visiting his gallery, Georgia O’Keeffe—then a twenty-seven-year-old art teacher—wrote her good friend from South Carolina, “I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something— anything I’ve done—than anyone else I know of.” 1 And it was upon sight of her charcoal drawings, spread out by said friend on the floor before him, that Stieglitz ceased pondering his next step, clasped his hands together in excitement, and uttered the words, “Woman Pictures!” What Stieglitz deduced from O’Keeffe’s drawings that day ushered in the challenge she would face for the rest of her blossoming career. His contrived interpretation of Specials (which was her title for the series) was Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe at his family estate in Lake George, New York, sensationalized amongst intellectuals when he hung the drawings on the 1929. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. gallery walls—without asking her permission. He put her on display the way 30 ARTISTS IN LOVE Alfred Stieglitz photographing Georgia O’Keeffe, 1924. Photograph by Arnold H. Rönnebeck. He—the first photographer in the world to “capture the night—blew the dust off his camera and obsessed over his new subject.” a scientist reveals an exotic creature in a pen for other experts to stare at while scratching their chins. He pointed at the works and claimed, Behold, the woman! The woman feels the world through her womb. The association with anatomical abstraction was undeniable—the “puckers and folds within the shape and its sheer visual weight and centrality invite us to make it over into Alfred Stieglitz 2 Georgia O’Keeffe, 1919 a body part.” But the emphasis on the psychoanalytic approach and the title Palladium print Woman Pictures made her feel pigeonholed. She traveled to New York City 7 1/5" x 9 1/5" to ask in person who gave him authorization to hang her pictures. Stieglitz When Stieglitz and O’Keeffe began slyly replied, “No one.” “Take them down! They are mine!” she demanded. their relationship in 1916, he took daily Upon which he replied, “You have no more right to withhold these pictures photographs of her. The subject, process, 3 and result inspired him to produce over than to withdraw a child from the world, had you given birth to one.” To this, 300 portraits of O’Keeffe over the course she responded by staring at him without flinching, her eyes burning into his of two decades. The first image he shot of being. His mouth formed a smile under his thick mustache. A year later they her showed her hands resting in front of her clothed chest (this was prior to their affair). embarked on a feverish love affair. Once they became romantically involved, The clouds parted for Stieglitz. He—the first photographer in the world he focused mainly on her nude figure, to capture the night—blew the dust off his camera and obsessed over his photographing every part of her body with endless fascination, maintaining a constant new subject. “Stieglitz’s Portrait of O’Keeffe—a series of more than three obsession with her hands. hundred photographs—was made over a period of two decades, but most of STIEGLITZ & O’KEEFFE 33 the individual pictures were made in the first years of their affair, when the besotted, insatiable Stieglitz seemed compelled to photograph his lover inch by inch and moment by moment.” 4 Everything that was supposed to matter at that time lost gravity—their twenty-three-year age difference, Stieglitz’s marriage to another woman, O’Keeffe’s disregard for societal mores, their unabashed sexuality. Many of the nude photographs he took of her during this idyll exposed her as headless—close-ups of her breasts, her hands. Should it come as a surprise that during his worship of her femininity she would want a child? When she brought the subject up early in their affair, he acted shocked. “But your art is your child!” It is hard not to imagine her stretched-out figure recoiling at this remark. Regardless, she was so blissfully in love at that time, the initial rejection of the idea didn’t dissuade her from eventually marrying him in 1924. She traded her charcoals in for watercolors and experimented with moody tones (fuchsia and blue). Music, Pink and Blue No. 2—a reference to her love of music—was a clear prelude to her iconic floral abstractions. For O’Keeffe, like everything in her new “Southwestern landscape, Stieglitz became a hazy form, something she had to squint to see off in the distance.” The lust, of course, faded. Although O’Keeffe was a continuous portrait subject throughout their life together, Stieglitz spent less time looking at her and more time focused on the clouds. He found a new solace in resting Georgia O’Keeffe Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, 1919 supine on the hill at his family’s estate at Lake George, pointing his lens to Oil on canvas the heavens. “These are my spiritual equivalents,” 5 he would tell his audience. 35" x 29 1/8" Eventually a new young thing emerged from his listeners—Dorothy Norman, a Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 is one of twenty-one-year-old, well-to-do bride. O’Keeffe was heartbroken over the affair, O’Keeffe’s early abstract paintings. Her which continued until Stieglitz’s death in 1946. But her grief also presented particular mastery of composing flowing lines took on a new form when she transitioned her with an opportunity to search for a new sacred place—the dry desert of from charcoal to oil. Her intensely physical New Mexico. They wrote one another letters—Stieglitz, sounding like a boy relationship with Alfred Stieglitz at the time without his mother, begged for her to return. In response, she pleaded with certainly influenced the swell of motion and the curving lines. When her work started him to let her stay. As he aged, her absence created a painful void in his life. being exhibited and written about, the voices For O’Keeffe, like everything in her new Southwestern landscape, Stieglitz (all male), exclaimed that her art represented became a hazy form, something she had to squint to see off in the distance. the female mindset and sex. O’Keeffe disliked this interpretation, even though She had always absorbed the space between them, between birth and death, Stieglitz had established it. entrances and exits. 34 ARTISTS IN LOVE Choosing young Kahlo to be his bride was a jackpot move. “ Her maternal, notwithstanding tempestuous, presence in Rivera’s life indubitably advanced him. FRIDA ” KAHLO DIEGO & RIVERA CompAÑERos IN LETTERS TO LOVED ONES IN MEXICO, FRIDA KAHLO RAPIDLY unraveled her impressions of the United States as an indulgent, clueless, and vulgar place—specifically aporquería or a cochinada. 1 She’d include tiny macabre self-portraits under her affectionate sign-off. As an obedient new bride in 1929, she accompanied her gringo-sensationalized husband, Diego Rivera, while he brought his politically revolutionary art to America’s mother cities. Fascinated with aesthetics of American industry—mass production, assembly lines, gargantuan machinery—Rivera, the proud communist, approached the journey as though he were walking into the belly of the beast.