Alfred Stieglitz - The Arc of Photography: A Private East Coast Collection New York Tuesday, October 4, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    From the artist; to Georgia O'Keeffe; to the Estate of Georgia O'Keeffe; Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe; Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

  • Literature

    Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, Volume Two, cat. no. 1582, p. 898

  • Catalogue Essay

    “I never knew him to make a trip anywhere to photograph. His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself.” -Georgia O'Keeffee

    In 1908, drawn to the creative freedom and commitment to the boundaries-pushing principles espoused by Stieglitz’s ‘291’ gallery in New York City, Georgia O’Keeffe met the person whose life would invariably and irrevocably weave in with hers for the next 4 decades. However, it would not be until 1917 that Stieglitz would begin photographing O’Keeffe, by then represented by ‘291’. The first photographs that Stieglitz took of O’Keefe were provocative in their abstraction and endearing in the clear affection directed at his new subject. Images of cropped hands and torso were in keeping with Stieglitz’s Modernist sensitivity as much as they were with his personal sensibility. As the two grew closer, leading to their official union in 1924, the images likewise became more intimate. Stieglitz was neither shy nor ambiguous about his collaboration with and love for O’Keeffe. “When I make a picture,” he once confessed, “I make love.”

    From 1917-1919 Stieglitz photographed O’Keefe in endless roles: seductress; naïve damsel; Eve with an apple, and cross-dressing gender-bender, among others. That said, Stieglitz was not merely interested in who O’Keefe was or what additional roles she could assume, but also what hidden roles were lodged within the woman by whom he was so clearly enchanted. The camera lens allowed him to capture the many facets that O’Keeffe so deftly embodied under his directorship.

    In the years that followed until 1937, Stieglitz continued photographing O’Keeffe, but the manner in which she was presented differed, especially as the role of women in American society changed accordingly. Between the date of their first portrait in 1917 through the one presented in the current lot, 1935, the Women’s Movement saw a tremendous number of changes unfold, including the first woman elected for US Congress in 1917; the right to vote in 1920; the first woman governorship in 1925; the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932; and the first woman in a presidential cabinet in 1933. Women’s contributions to society had irrevocably changed the social, political and cultural scenes, and it is also in the evolution in Stieglitz’s photographs of O’Keeffe that the changes are evident.

    In the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s Stieglitz photographed O’Keeffe by an automobile, an emblem of independence and progress. Likewise, the vast majority of the works from the 1930s show a confident woman who had comfortably settled into her own as a spouse and as an artist, having created what would later become among her most coveted works in the mid-1920’s. The abstraction of the body in the photographs was largely eclipsed by strong frontal closeups of O’Keeffe. As seen in the current lot, O’Keefe meets Stieglitz’s keen lens in a poised but relaxed pose, smiling, her revered hands in sight but not on display, returning Stieglitz’s gaze with the sense of strength and equality that had come to define the era.

THE ARC OF PHOTOGRAPHY: A PRIVATE EAST COAST COLLECTION

251

Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait

1935
Gelatin silver print.
9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. (24.1 x 19.1 cm).

Estimate
$120,000 - 180,000 

Sold for $146,500

The Arc of Photography: A Private East Coast Collection

4 October 2011 6PM
New York