PLATE Cross with Red Heart— ,oil on canvas, ⁄ x ⁄ in. Collection of Curtis Galleries, Inc., Minneapolis, Minnesota. O’Keeffe
PLATE Blue River (Chama River, Ghost Ranch) ,oil on canvas, ⁄ x ⁄ in. Museum of New Mexico, Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Gift of the estate of Georgia O’Keeffe, . .. O’Keeffe
PLATE Lavender Hill Forms ,oil on canvas, x in. Private collection, courtesy of Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico. O’Keeffe
PLATE Red Hills with the Pedernal ,oil on linen, ⁄ x ⁄ in. Museum of New Mexico, Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bequest of Helen Miller Jones, . .. O’Keeffe
PLATE PLATE Summer Days From the Faraway Nearby ,oil on canvas, x in. ,oil on canvas, x ⁄ in. Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Calvin Klein. . New York. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, .. O’Keeffe . O’Keeffe
PLATE PLATE Gerald’s Tree II Red and Orange Hills ,oil on canvas, x in. ‒,oil on canvas, x in. Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas. Courtesy of Richard York Gallery, .. New York. O’Keeffe O’Keeffe
PLATE Two Jimson Weeds with Green Leaves and Blue Sky ,oil on canvas, x in. Private collection, Switzerland, courtesy of Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico. O’Keeffe
PLATE PLATE Waterfall—End of Road— Waterfall—No. III—’I¯ao ’I¯ao Valley Valley ,oil on canvas, x in. ,oil on canvas, x in. Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu. Purchase Allerton, Honolulu. Gift of Susan Crawford Prisanlee and General Acquisition Tracy, . . Funds, with a gift from the Honolulu O’Keeffe Advertiser, . . O’Keeffe
PLATE PLATE PLATE (this page, bottom) From the White Place Ghost Ranch Cliffs Series: Near Abiquiu, New ,oil on canvas, x in. ‒,oil on canvas, x in. Mexico—Hills to the Left The Phillips Collection, Washington, Private collection, courtesy of Gerald ,oil on canvas, x in. D.C., acquired . Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Private collection, courtesy of O’Keeffe O’Keeffe Spanierman Gallery, New York. O’Keeffe
PLATE Red Hills and Bones ,oil on canvas, x in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Alfred Stieglitz Collection. -- O’Keeffe
PLATE Black Hills with Cedar ‒,oil on canvas, x in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, . O’Keeffe
PLATE Cottonwoods III ,oil on canvas, x in. The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. Museum Purchase . -- O’Keeffe
B ARBARA N OVAK
On Divers Themes from Nature
In nineteenth-century America, dialogues on landscape painting On American Nature NATURE. were conducted with great intensity and passion. They concerned and Culture I wish I could write it larger than Toward the end of the American that. the popular religion of the period: nature as the unfailing repos- nature adventure, D. H. Lawrence’s NATURE. itory of the society’s ideals. This amounted to a secular mode of retrospective eye perceived with Benjamin overlooked NATURE. faith—based on a unique interfusion of optimism, transcenden- pungent irony the myth of the natural But the French Crèvecoeur spotted talism, nationalism, and science. Though this world view was paradise. The earlier writers show it long before Thoreau and Emerson less insight, because they have less worked it up. Absolutely the safest made logically obsolete when Darwin removed the idealism from hindsight. thing to get your emotional reactions nature and science, it has taken a long time to die. The commu- For writers in the nineteenth over is NATURE. nity’s self-image and self-interest were—and are—involved. century, American nature is impli- Crèvecoeur’s Letters are written cated in the virginal dream generated in a spirit of touching simplicity, Nature’s purity could redeem every evil, since nature itself, as the by an entire culture. Its uniqueness almost better than Chateaubriand. reflection and immanence of God, was without evil. Indeed, is constantly underlined by compar- You’d think neither of them would Americans have often had considerable difficulty acknowledging isons with Europe. Ideas of newness, ever know how many beans make the existence of evil. Thus, the dialogues about nature had a of fresh, unsullied wilderness are five. This American Farmer tells of still viable, but there is a wry aware- the joys of creating a home in the certain opacity at their core; one has to listen to the nineteenth- ness of the inescapable dilemma wilderness, and of cultivating the century voices with an acute ear. The spiritual and moral energies of untouched nature counterposed to virgin soil. Poor virgin, prostituted of a Thoreau, for instance, are unmistakable. It is in the popular progress and culture. from the very start. —D. H. LAWRENCE, Studies in interpretations of the natural religion that the doctrinaire and Hazlitt, Godwin, Shelley, Coleridge, Classic American Literature ()1 routine reveal themselves in language and sentiment. the English romantics, were of The age was severely pained by the challenges science offered course thrilled by the Letters from an I will now venture a few remarks to religion and orthodoxy. It was obsessed with respectability American Farmer.A new world, a on what has been considered a grand world of the Noble Savage and Pris- defect in American scenery—the and morality and confused by the idea of progress, which was in tine Nature and Paradisal Simplicity want of associations, such as arise effect canceling nature—the source of its religion. The issue of and all that gorgeousness that flows amid the scenes of the old world. nature as a last emblem of humanism was forced by the Civil War. out of the unsullied fount of the We have many a spot as umbra- ink-bottle. Lucky Coleridge, who got geous as Vallombrosa, and as pictur- Afterward, nature lacked the spiritual vitality that had placed it no farther than Bristol. Some of us esque as the solitudes of Vaucluse; at the center of the country’s mind and conscience for over forty have gone all the way. but Milton and Petrarch have not years. In those years, nature was the common denominator of I think this wild and noble America hallowed them by their footsteps and is the thing that I have pined for most immortal verse. He who stands on the society’s transactions, subsuming art, philosophy, science, ever since I read Fenimore Cooper, Mont Albano and looks down on and religion. This must be one of the most impressive fictions to as a boy. Now I’ve got it. ancient Rome, has his mind peopled which any society ever subscribed. It bears endless study. Franklin is the real practical proto- with the gigantic associations of the We are now conscious of the assumptions of an age—those type of the American. Crèvecoeur storied past; but he who stands on is the emotional. To the European, the the mounds of the West, the most implicit beliefs that are not even perceived, let alone tested. It is American is first and foremost a venerable remains of American antiq- of course a conceit of every age that its predecessor is obtuse in dollar-fiend. We tend to forget the uity, may experience the emotion ways that it is not. This is the burden of D. H. Lawrence’s emotional heritage of Hector St. of the sublime, but it is the sublimity John de Crèvecoeur. We tend to dis- of a shoreless ocean un-islanded by remarks. But the following comments on nature and art contain believe, for example, in Woodrow the recorded deeds of man. hard thinking that set up wide cultural reverberations. The sen- Wilson’s wrung heart and wet hanky. Yet American scenes are not timent and locution of much of this discourse, so antithetical to Yet surely these are real enough. destitute of historical and legendary our current modes, are only a part, and perhaps not the most Aren’t they?... associations—the great struggle for freedom has sanctified many a spot, important part, of their content. and many a mountain, stream, and rock, has its legend, worthy of poet’s Barbara Novak, “On Divers Themes from Nature,” in The Natural Paradise: pen or the painter’s pencil. But Painting in America ‒ (New York:Museum of Modern Art, ). © Barbara Novak. Reprinted by courtesy of Barbara Novak.
N OVAK PLATE
THOMAS COLE (‒) The Falls of Kaaterskill ,oil on canvas, x in. The Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
American associations are not so much of the past as of the present and the future....2 [L]ooking over the yet unculti- vated scene, the mind’s eye may see far into futurity. Where the wolf roams, the plough shall glisten; on the gray crag shall rise temple and tower—mighty deeds shall be done in the now pathless wilderness; and poets yet unborn shall sanctify the soil....3 [T]o this cultivated state our western world is fast approaching; but nature is still predominant, and there are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away: for those scenes of soli- tude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the conse- quent associations are of God the creator—they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things. —THOMAS COLE, “Essay on try? Our scenery is the great object The facts are as certain as if they inevitable change, that gives, we feel, American Scenery” ()4 which attracts foreign tourists to our had already occurred. In but few so peculiar a character and such a shores. No blind adherence to author- years these impenetrable forests will touching beauty to the solitudes of While Claude’s skies, and the dex- ity here checks the hand or chills the have fallen. The noise of civilization America. One sees them with a melan- terous management of Salvator’s heart of the artist. It is only requisite and of industry will break the silence choly pleasure; one is in some sort pictures continue to retain the admi- to possess the technical skill, to be of the Saginaw. Its echo will be silent. of a hurry to admire them. Thoughts ration they have ever excited, numer- versed in the alphabet of painting, Embankments will imprison its of the savage, natural grandeur that ous modern artists are distinguished and then, under the inspiration sides, and its waters, which today is going to come to an end become by a feeling for nature which has of a genuine love of nature “to hold flow unknown and quiet through mingled with splendid anticipations made landscape, instead of a mere communion with her visible forms,” nameless wilds, will be thrown back of the triumphant march of civiliza- imitation, a vehicle of great moral in order to achieve signal triumphs in in their flow by the prows of ships. tion. One feels proud to be a man, impressions. As modern poets have landscape, from the varied material Fifty leagues still separate this soli- and yet at the same time one experi- struck latent chords in the heart from so lavishly displayed in our moun- tude from the great European settle- ences I cannot say what bitter regret a deeper sympathy with humanity, tains, rivers, lakes, and forests— ments, and we are perhaps the last at the power that God has granted recent limners have depicted scenes each possessing characteristic traits travellers who will have been allowed us over nature. of natural beauty, not so much in the of beauty, and all cast in a grander to see it in its primitive splendour, —ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, spirit of copyists as in that of lovers mould, and wearing a fresher aspect so great is the force that drives the Journey to America ()6 and worshippers; and accordingly, than any other civilized land. white race to the complete conquest however unsurpassed the older —HENRY T. TUCKERMAN, Book of the New World. painters are in historical, they are of the Artists ()5 It is this consciousness of destruc- now confessedly outvied in land- tion, this arrière-pensée of quick and scape. And where should this kind of painting advance, if not in this coun-
O N D IVERS T HEMES Another Kind of Knowing: Nature as Vision and the Sublime
intangibles, to create new mental These [abstractions] deal with the forms out of previously standardized idea of things rather than with things elements, is what separates us from themselves. They suggest subcon- all other life and lack-of-life. When scious moods, memories of experi- On Abstraction and imagine creatively, he will stagnate. previous intangibles or earlier infi- ence, half-forgotten dreams, frag- Perception Abstraction allows man to see nities are mastered, they become ments of the mind....They are com- with his mind what he cannot see finite and so new infinities must be posed of nonobjective forms recall- Abstraction is the key factor of the physically with his eyes. Let me give created so that art can progress. ing through suggestion more definite creative imagination of man. It is an an example. A sculptor can look at a Beloveds, abstraction is therefore points of departure. One looks not experimental inspection of the hith- block of wood and if he decides it is the probing vehicle, the progressive physically, but mentally, spiritually, erto unknown which can facilitate an the proper type of wood, he can thrust toward higher civilization, emotionally. Perhaps this might be evaluation of it. Let me explain. The visualize with his mind’s eye the toward higher evaluation of the finite called the far side of painting. universe is infinite, but nature in plow he will carve out of it. Likewise, by tearing the finite apart, exploding —AUGUSTUS V INCENT TACK, which man finds himself is, within as a painter I can have before me an it so as to thereby enter limitless exhibition catalogue ()2 his recognition at least, finite. It does empty canvas, paint tubes, and areas. Mere realistic art is therefore present him with certain limits. brushes. They are finite in the sense finite and limits man only to the per- Since 1956 any work has tended Think of nature as a finite object and that they are exactly defined. But in ception of his physical eyes, namely more and more toward the all of the plants, animals, rocks, my creative imagination I can visual- that which is tangible. Abstract art abstract—a term not to be confused waters, etc., as the cells and skeleton ize the painting, or at least the sub- enables the artist to perceive beyond with the school which has that title. which give it its form and substance. stance of what will eventually the tangible, to extract the infinite The abstractness of my recent work This tangible quality is readily per- become the painting that I will create out of the finite. It is the emancipa- is arrived at through the distillation ceived by the human eye. Once so with them. In other words, I am tor of the mind. It is an exploration of natural formations, or moods, perceived, the human eye is thereby saying that nature is finite and as into unknown areas. into symbols, an idea aimed at in limited by what it can physically see. such can be a form of confinement —ARSHILE G ORKY,letter ()1 and arrived at through a large And so if man is satisfied only with to man. Abstraction enables man to period of conscious experimental what he sees physically and cannot break the finite barrier and enter into attempts at conventionalization. It is the actuality of infinity. Abstraction, as if there is a veil between me and the ability of man’s mind to think of the ultimate in painting and only
G EORGIA O’KEEFFE AND THE S UBLIME PLATE PLATE
ARTHUR B. CARLES,JR. (‒) STUART DAVIS (‒) Silence Ebb Tide, Provincetown c. ,oil on canvas, x in. ,oil on canvas, x in. Private collection, courtesy of Hollis Collection of Curtis Galleries, Taggart Galleries, New York. Minneapolis, Minnesota.
PLATE (facing page, right)
EDWARD J. STEICHEN (‒) Lake George ,oil on canvas, ⁄ x in. Collection of Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis, Minnesota. bit by bit am I allowed to penetrate visual, or mathematical counterpart the mystery beyond that veil.... and they bring out of this chaos of finds me going back more and more emotion images which give these to that rhapsodic visionary year intangibles reality. There is no strug- of for inspiration and subject gle to go to the fantastic through the matter, which in turn, becomes real, or to the abstract through the absorbed into a further probing into real. Instead the struggle is to bring the secrets of life, nature, and the out from the non-real, from the world of the spirit. chaos of ecstasy, something that —CHARLES E. BURCHFIELD, evokes a memory of the emotion of exhibition catalogue ()3 an experienced moment of total real- ity. This of course may be a meta- The world the European artists have physical notion but it is no more created has always been tied to sensa- metaphysical than the idea that the tion in spite of the fact that in recent realization by Cézanne of his com- years their constant struggle has been plete and pure sensation of his to free themselves from the natural apples adds up to more than the world. Brilliant as their successes apples, or that the two-faced heads have been, they have always had their by Picasso are more than the two base in the material world of sensu- heads, or that the strict geometry of ality. They may have transcended it Mondrian is more than the sum of but they have never been able to do its angles. That to me is an equal without it. Can anyone name a single kind of mysticism. European painter who is able to dis- The Americans evoke their world pense completely with nature?... The of emotion and fantasy by a kind of other words, painting is painting, The purpose of art is not to repro- American artists under discussion personal writing without the props sculpture is sculpture, architecture is duce life, but to present an editorial, create a truly abstract world which of any known shape. This is a meta- architecture. All these arts have their a comment on life....The artist does can be discussed only in metaphysi- physical act. With the European own intrinsic qualities. not set out to imitate nature. What cal terms. These artists are at home abstract painters we are into their I worked for a long time directly would be the purpose of that? Let the in the world of pure idea, in the spiritual world through already from nature, never with the in- camera with its clever mechanism meanings of abstract concepts, just known images. This is a transcen- tention of being imitative but of imitate. Art, such as poetry, music, as the European painter is at home in dental act. To put it philosophically, being creative. This consistent effort and painting, is simply a portion of the world of cognitive objects and the European is concerned with the led me to certain discoveries which the experience of the artist. When we materials. And just as the European transcendence of objects while the convinced me that art is sufficient actually see ideals, they become real painter can transcend his objects to American is concerned with the real- unto itself, not on the basis of art to us. Art traces an abstraction and build a spiritual world, so the Ameri- ity of the transcendental experience. for art’s sake, but on the basis of a makes it audible or visual. It symbol- can transcends his abstract world to —BARNETT N EWMAN (c. )4 neoreality which has its foundations izes the whole of life. We believe in make that world real, rendering the in the artist’s direct relationship to something we can see. epistemological implications of There is definitely, however, an his medium.In this way he is not —MARVIN D. CONE, interview abstract concepts with sufficient con- abstract art. Not everything that sails dependent on exterior contacts with ()6 viction and understanding to give under the name “abstract” is actually nature. For as I just said, painting is them body and expression.... abstract. The word’s meaning is too painting, sculpture is sculpture and There is no such thing as abstrac- The American painters under dis- loosely considered these days. What architecture is architecture. tion.It is extraction....If the extract cussion create an entirely different goes on in abstract art is the pro- —HANS H OFMANN, interview be clear enough its value will exist. It reality to arrive at new unsuspected claiming of aesthetic principles.... (‒)5 is nearer to music, not the music of images. They start with the chaos of Art never can be imitation, but let’s the ears, just the music of the eyes. pure fantasy and feeling, with noth- go further. Art is not only the eye; it —ARTHUR G. DOVE,exhibition ing that has any known physical, is not the result of intellectual con- catalogue ()7 siderations. Art is strictly bound to inherent laws dictated by the medium in which it comes to expression. In
A NOTHER K IND OF K NOWING
T HERESE M ULLIGAN,Curator of Photography
Georgia O’Keeffe’s Legacy at George Eastman House: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Her mission was unusual for its day: for the library. In ,Newhall few museums collected or displayed accepted as part gift, part purchase, photographs. As caretaker of her a set of eighty-two photographs and husband’s legacy, O’Keeffe effectively five autochromes that inaugurated continued his campaign for fine art the Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the photography within the then-rarified museum. In O’Keeffe made an realm of museums. It would be part additional gift that included photo- of her own legacy that O’Keeffe’s gravures by Stieglitz and his contem- dissemination of the Stieglitz estate, poraries Frank Eugene and Alvin accompanied by written conditions Langdon Coburn, issues of Camera of care and use, would greatly con- Work that would complete the tribute to the future preservation of library’s two sets, and thirty-two photography and its acknowledgment lantern slides by Stieglitz. That same as a significant visual form of art year, seeking advice, O’Keeffe con- and culture. sulted Newhall about the future dis- In selecting museums to receive position of Stieglitz’s negatives: sets of Stieglitz’s photographs, I still have a few things to settle ff O’Kee e appeared to follow a decla- with the Stieglitz affairs and I would like ration of her husband that “one does to ask you a couple of questions. I have not scatter the works of Shakespeare decided to destroy the negatives but I over the face of the world, page by thought I would ask you if there be any reason that you might wish to have any ‒ . page.”1 Between and , she ALFRED STIEGLITZ ( ), Clouds, Music No. ,Lake George, .Gelatin silver print, for technical or historical interest of any x . cm. George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y. Part purchase and part gift of An American chose collecting institutions according kind....He [Stieglitz] always spoke of Place. Ex-collection Georgia O’Keeffe. ::. to their cultural importance and not wanting any one to print his nega- geographic location: the Art Institute tives. He didn’t destroy them himself so of Chicago, the Library of Congress, I have hesitated....May I hear from you Few figures exerted greater influence century, he championed those pho- the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the soon about this as I intend to destroy them soon.2 on the course of American art and tographers who would play a critical Philadelphia Museum of Art, and photography in the first decades of role in defining photography’s future the National Gallery of Art, which With future preservation and the twentieth century than Alfred as a fine art, among them Paul Strand, received a key set of approximately research in mind, Newhall’s emotional Stieglitz. For over forty years, he Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon sixteen hundred images. In , response was curatorially informed: worked as writer and publisher, gallery Coburn, and Gertrude Käsebier. In O’Keeffe contacted the newly estab- I shudder at the thought of destroy- owner, and photographer, his many both word and image, Stieglitz was lished George Eastman House about ing, or even canceling, the Stieglitz occupations informed by a dual wholly synonymous with his time. placing the remaining sets. negatives. I know how often Stieglitz goal—to realize for photography the His life and work reflected the zealous As the first American museum spoke of destroying them—yet he never status of a fine art and to promote modern drive to cast aside well-worn dedicated solely to photography and did....In the years to come, as study and appreciation of the medium of photog- the unique character and sensibility practices and create a contemporary motion pictures, and their related raphy comes to be known, there will be of American art. Armed with pen vocabulary based on an everyday technologies, George Eastman House work done by students comparable to and camera, and possessing a single- realism and accompanied by innova- was well situated to benefit from what is now being done in the fields ness of mind, Stieglitz sought to tion in subject matter and technical O’Keeffe’s largess, especially as the of the other arts. The negatives, to the advance an avant-garde program in approach. museum’s curator and photography trained observer, teach much, and I American photography and art and With Stieglitz’s death in , the historian at the time was Beaumont believe should be preserved. It is for this purpose the George Eastman House simultaneously to awaken in the future of his photographic estate was Newhall, a friend and devoted sup- exists....I urge you,therefore,to turn American public an appreciation for taken up by his second wife, Georgia porter of Stieglitz. Over the course of the negatives over to us.3 modernist work. To these ends, in O’Keeffe, who had inspired Stieglitz his twenty-one-year tenure at the galleries, such as , he introduced since their first meeting in .Ever Eastman House, Newhall, in partner- O’Keeffe did turn over the nega- forward-thinking European and mindful of his lifelong ambitions, ship with O’Keeffe, gathered impor- tives to the Eastman House, although American artists, and in the publica- O’Keeffe created sets of Stieglitz’s tant acquisitions from the Stieglitz for only a short time. Reconsidering tion Camera Work, one of the most photographs and began to place them estate for the museum’s collections her decision, she asked for their influential art quarterlies of the past with important American museums. of photography and technology, and return, taking them back in .4
G EORGIA O’KEEFFE AND THE S UBLIME For the twelve years the negatives ence, O’Keeffe proved to have a liber- were housed at the Eastman House, ating effect on the photographer and they were the subject of inquiry his work. In the words of their cook, and conservation by Newhall, the Margaret Prosser, “He did wonderful museum staff, and researchers. Their street scenes, portraits, railroad tracks, inclusion also spoke to Newhall’s and all that before Georgia came. But vision for the photography collection, after Georgia came, he made clouds, and its relationship to other museum the moon, he even made lightening holdings of Stieglitz’s library and [sic]. He never photographed things technology. Newhall believed that the like that before.”5 For Stieglitz, fresh collections should be considered a artistic direction was matched with mutual whole, not disparate parts. advances in technological apparatus, Indeed, his acquisition of Stieglitz both falling sway to the newfound material was not focused on the freedom and sensations now shaping prized photographic print alone, but his personal life. Integral was his use on the accumulation of interrelated of a Graflex camera. Relatively light- objects little appreciated at the time, weight for the time and handheld, including lantern slides and auto- the Graflex supported the intimacy chromes, and books, periodicals, and and spontaneity the photographer correspondence. As evidence of this had long sought with his subjects. ALFRED STIEGLITZ (‒), Lake George, .Gelatin silver print, . x . cm. approach to acquisition, Newhall With Graflex in hand, Stieglitz’s George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y. Part purchase and part gift of An American Place. accepted O’Keeffe’s donation during achievements as a visionary modern- Ex-collection Georgia O’Keeffe. :. the s of Stieglitz’s cameras and ist photographer reached its height accompanying apparatus, which were in the Equivalents, as the subjects of immediately placed on display with his photographs—clouds—escaped several images. Newhall found these the gravity of the earth’s horizon line the legacy of O’Keeffe as benefactor Notes objects, like the negatives, important and found liberty in the boundless and the Eastman House as a collect- This essay is drawn from the Eastman elements to understanding the pho- breadth of the sky. The Equivalents ing institution, with shared beliefs House’s exhibition The Photography of tographer’s working habits and the series constitute a large portion of in the plurality of the photographic Alfred Stieglitz: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Enduring Legacy and publication of the types of subjects he sought to por- the Stieglitz collection at the Eastman medium, both popular and rare, same title (Rochester: George Eastman tray,a case in point being the inno- House, as do the photographs on as an art worthy of study and preser- House, International Museum of Pho- vative imagery made by Stieglitz at display in the exhibition that accom- vation. tography and Film, ). Oaklawn, his family’s retreat on Lake panies this publication. .Richard Whelen, Alfred Stieglitz George in New York. From about With additional gifts and pur- (New York: Little, Brown, ), . into the s, he created extended chases, the Stieglitz collection has .O’Keeffe to Newhall, November bodies of work with powerful, uni- grown to photographic and ,Archives of the Richard and Ronay versal themes, including the cloud photomechanical works, four cam- Menschel Library, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. studies, Equivalents, and a portrait eras, and a cache of correspondence, series of O’Keeffe. These series strike manuscripts, and books by, related .Newhall to O’Keeffe, November ,Archives of the Richard and Ronay an avant-garde chord in their use to,or about Stieglitz. Most recently, Menschel Library, George Eastman of abstraction. Focusing on a bodily the establishment of the George House, Rochester, New York. detail or a slice of the sky, Stieglitz Eastman Archive and Study Center .Documentation at the Eastman House looked to draw connections between has contributed to the holdings with does not contain any information on the natural world and the personal letters from Stieglitz to Eastman, the fate of the negatives once they were returned to O’Keeffe; it is believed that world of thoughts and emotions. and the industrialist’s own references they were subsequently destroyed. Most of the photographs given to the photographer in his daybooks ff .Prosser, interview, in Anita Pollitzer, by O’Kee e to the Eastman House or diaries. The Stieglitz collection A Woman on Paper: Georgia O’Keeffe, were made during the time that she tells much about the intertwining The Letters and Memoirs of a Legendary and Stieglitz spent together at Lake lives and ambitions of Stieglitz and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schus- George. A source of constant influ- O’Keeffe. Importantly, it also relates ter, ), , .
E ASTMAN H OUSE