16. Barbara Rose, “O’Keeffe’s Originality,” The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (New York: Abrams, 1997), p. 102;
17. PS to AS, May 26, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
18. PS to AS May 30, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
19. PS to AS, May 29, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. In previous biographies, Boerne has been spelled incorrectly as Burney, based on Strand’s misspelling in his letters to Stieglitz. The name Zoeller was also spelled incorrectly in earlier accounts.
23. PS to AS, May 28, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
24. AS to PS, May 27, 1918, PSC, CCP.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. PS to AS, June 1, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
28. Ibid.
Book Two
Chapter I
1. AS to ESD, June 16, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
2. Susan Young Wilson to Laurie Lisle, May 31, 1977, cited in Lisle, Portrait, p. 125.
3. Robinson, A Life, p. 218.
4. AS to ESD, July 2, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
5. AS to Arthur Dove, June 18, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
6. Kotz, “A Day with Georgia O’Keeffe.”
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. O’Keeffe, A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz.
10. Ibid.
11. Malin Wilson-Powell, “Blind Spot: Alfred Stieglitz’s Pornography Collection and his Portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe,” Art Issues, Nov. 1994.
12. AS to PS, Nov. 17, 1918, PSC, CCP, cited in Sarah Greenough and Juan Hamilton, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art in association with Callaway Editions, 1983), p. 231.
13. I thank Getty Museum photography curator Weston Naef for his observations on Stieglitz’s methods of posing O’Keeffe.
14. AS to ESD, ca. June 13, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
15. AS to Arthur Dove, late July 1918, Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove, edited by Ann Lee Morgan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), p. 61.
16. AS to Emmeline Stieglitz, July, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
17. AS to Marie Rapp Boursault, July, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
18. AS to Joe Obermeyer, Oct. 31, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
19. O’Keeffe quoted in “Can a Photograph Have the Significance of Art?” Manuscripts, Dec. 1922. Looking back as a woman in her eighties, she was gentler: “The house was . . . so very full of all kinds of things collected by a traveling family” (O’Keeffe, A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz).
20. Lisle, Portrait, p. 121.
21. Robinson, A Life, p. 212.
22. See Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, “Stieglitz, in Sharp Focus,” Los Angeles Times, Calendar, Oct. 19, 1995. “The only times you get hints of that is in some of the exquisite photographs of the thirties. Even if it’s a sardonic smile, it’s a smile and you can read an enormous amount out of her expression—when she’s by the car and so forth. There is a life to the eyes and mouth and general expression that is more complete than the nudes. It’s a curious phenomenon and sad that the general public doesn’t get a true picture of their happiness. It was there, if even through periods of torture. Their reconciliations were always joyous.” Author’s telephone interview with Sue Davidson Lowe, Oct. 1995.
23. O’Keeffe, A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz.
24. Ibid.
25. AS to PS, Aug. 20, 1918, PSC, CCP.
26. PS to AS, Sept. 20, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
27. Ibid.
28. PS to AS, Sept. 13, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
29. Lisle, Portrait, p. 123.
30. Ibid. (Benita Eisler speculates that this might be investor Jacob Dewald, who had bought an O’Keeffe drawing and would buy one of her first oils painted at Lake George.)
31. Ibid.
32. O’Keeffe, A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz.
33. Kitty Stieglitz to AS, July 21, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
34. Kitty Stieglitz to AS, July 24, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
35. AS to PS, Aug. 22, 1918, PSC, CCP.
36. Kitty Stieglitz to AS, Aug. 10, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
37. Emmeline Stieglitz to AS, Aug. 31, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
38. Kitty Stieglitz to AS, Sept. 26, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
39. Ibid.
40. AS to PS, Sept. 15, 1918, PSC, CCP.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. PS to AS, Sept. 20, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
44. After World War I, Ted Reid became principal and then superintendent of Fairview schools, then school superintendent in Silverton. In 1925, he was made superintendent of Dumas Schools in Hollerie, N.M., where he lived with his wife and three children for fourteen years. He did not contact the woman who had been an inspiration to him, however, until he moved back to Texas after World War II.
45. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
46. AS to PS, Sept. 27, 1918, PSC, CCP.
47. AS to PS, Nov. 11, 1918, PSC, CCP.
48. GOK to unknown (Leah Harris?), New York City, Nov. 11, 1918, ASA, YCAL. Cited by Charles C. Eldredge, Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with Inter Cultura, Fort Worth, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Abiquiu, N. M., 1993), p. 213.
49. Claudia O’Keeffe to GOK, Feb. 7, 1919, ASA, YCAL.
50. AS to PS, Nov. 16, 1918, PSC, CCP.
Chapter II
1. Kitty Stieglitz to AS, Nov. 26, 1918, ASA, YCAL.
2. AS to Emmeline Stieglitz, Feb. 7, 1919, ASA, YCAL.
3. Kitty Stieglitz to AS, Spring 1919, ASA, YCAL.
4. AS to PS, Mar. 28, 1919, ASA, YCAL.
5. AS to Kitty Stieglitz, Apr. 7, 1919, ASA, YCAL.
6. Kitty Stieglitz to AS, Apr. 25, 1919, ASA, YCAL.
7. AS to PS, Apr. 22, 1919, PSC, CCP.
8. O’Keeffe, A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz.
9. AS to Anne W. Brigman, Dec. 31, 1919, ASA, YCAL.
10. Dorothy Seiberling, “Horizons of a Pioneer,” Life, Mar. 1, 1968.
11. Elizabeth Hutton Turner makes this point in the catalogue to the Phillips Collection exhibition Two Lives: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz; A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs, edited by Alexandra Arrowsmith and Thomas West (New York: Callaway Editions in association with the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1992); Peters, too, analyzes these relationships in Becoming O’Keeffe.
12. Tomkins, “The Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty Fine.”
13. Seiberling, “Horizons.”
14. Lisle, Portrait, p. 157.
15. AS to PS, May, 20, 1919, PSC, CCP.
16. Dijkstra, “America and Georgia O’Keeffe,” The New York Years, p. 119.
17. AS to PS, Nov. 16, 1918, PSC, CCP.
18. Tomkins, Notes.
19. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
20. GOK to John I. H. Baur, Apr. 22, 1947, cited in Lynes, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, p. 155.
21. This point is analyzed by Russell Bowman in his essay for the catalogue for O’Keeffe’s O’Keeffes: The Artist’s Collection, Milwaukee Art Museum (New York: Thames and Hudson and Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2001).
22. Tomkins, Notes.
23. Author’s interview with Sue Davidson Lowe, Oct. 1, 1995, Los Angeles, Calif.
24. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (Elbert Hubbard, 1905), p. 14.
25. GOK to ESD, Oct.–Nov. 1920, ASA, YCAL.
26. AS to Herbert J. Seligmann Sept. 15, 1920, ASA, YCAL.
27. Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz Talking, pp. 61–62.
28. Edmund Wilson, “Paul Rosenfeld: Three Phases,” Paul Rosenfeld: Voyeur in the Arts, edited by Jerome Mellquist and Lucie Wiese (New York: Creative Age Press, 1948), p. 7.
29. Paul Rosenfeld to AS, Oct. 29, 1920, ASA, YCAL.
30. Tomkins, Notes.
Chapter III
1. Henry McBride, “O’Keeffe at the Museum,” New York Sun, May 18, 1946.
2. Lewis Mumford in America and Alfred Stieglitz, edited by Waldo Frank et al., p. 57.
3. Paul Rosenfeld, “Stieglitz,” Dial, Apr. 1921.
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sp; 4. Norman, Seer, p. 142.
5. Grace Glueck, “Art Notes: It’s Just What’s in My Head,” New York Times, Oct. 18, 1970.
6. Lynes assesses this point: “There is no question that she was convinced of the significance of his photographs from the beginning and because she never considered them as anything other than an expression of his aesthetic vision, she must have expected others to respond to them in the same way” (Critics, p. 57).
7. Ibid., p. 43.
8. Lisle, Portrait, p. 168.
9. Florine Stettheimer to Ettie Stettheimer, Dec. 9, 1922, Ettie and Florine Stettheimer Collection, YCAL.
10. Kotz, “A Day with Georgia O’Keeffe.”
11. “Regarding the Modern French Masters Exhibition: A Letter,” Brooklyn Museum Quarterly, July 1921.
12. Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 422.
13. GOK to Mary E. Adams, “The Underside of the Iris,” The Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon, edited by Christopher Merrill and Ellen Bradbury (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992), p. 218.
14. Katherine Hoffman, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Celebration of Music and Dance (New York: Braziller, 1997), p. 21.
15. GOK to Arthur Dove, Apr. 6, 1921, ASA, YCAL.
16. Unidentified author, “I Can’t Sing, So I Paint! Says Ultra Realistic Artist; Art Is Not Photography—It Is Expression of Inner Life!: Miss Georgia O’Keeffe Explains Subjective Aspects of Her Work,” New York Sun, Dec. 5, 1922.
17. Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum, edited by Weston Naef (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), p. 60.
18. Paul Rosenfeld to GOK, Sept. 9, 1921, ASA, YCAL.
19. Paul Rosenfeld to GOK, Oct. 1921, ASA, YCAL.
20. Paul Rosenfeld, “Stieglitz,” Dial, Dec. 1921.
21. AS to Herbert J. Seligmann, July 6, 1921, cited by Lynes, Critics, p. 60.
22. Glueck, “It’s Just What’s in My Head,” New York Times.
23. GOK to Mitchell Kennerley, 1921, Mitchell Kennerley Papers, New York Public Library.
24. GOK to Doris McMurdo, July 1, 1922, Chatham School, Chatham, Va., in Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 169.
25. Kotz, “A Day with Georgia O’Keeffe.”
26. Not only did this facilitate Strand’s move into filmmaking, his still photographs of the camera’s gleaming mechanism and the lathes and drill presses of the Akeley camera repair shop celebrate the Machine Age.
27. RSS to AS, July 10, 1922, ASA, YCAL.
28. AS to RSS, July 13, 1921, ASA, YCAL.
29. Paul Rosenfeld to AS, July 6, 1922, ASA, YCAL.
30. Cited by Lynes, Critics, p. 58.
31. AS to RSS, July 5, 1922, ASA, YCAL.
32. AS to RSS, n.d., 1922, ASA, YCAL.
33. RSS to PS, 1922, PSC, CCP, cited by Eisler, American Romance, p. 264.
34. Suzan Campbell, “In the Shadow of the Sun: The Life and Art of Rebecca Salsbury James,” abstract of PhD dissertation, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services, May 2002), p. 112.
35. RSS to PS, Oct. 1922, PSC, CCP.
36. AS to RSS, Nov. 1, 1922, ASA, YCAL.
37. Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., Gilles Mora, Karen E. Hass, The Photography of Charles Sheeler: American Modernist (Boston, New York, and London: AOL Time Warner Book Group, 2002), pp. 15–21. Charles Sheeler had shown his photographs at de Zayas’s Modern Gallery and was friendly with O’Keeffe’s circle of acquaintances until he wrote a review critical of Stieglitz’s photographs in 1923. Sheeler’s photographs of barns in Bucks County, Pa., and the doors and windows of his house in Doylestown were undoubtedly admired by O’Keeffe for their spare geometric composition and possibly inspired some of her own paintings. The artists shared an ability to find modern form in vernacular architecture. Sheeler based his precisionist paintings and drawings on his photographs but disguised the fact at the urging of Edith Halpert, his dealer after 1931. She was not alone in thinking that a painter’s reputation could be hurt if people knew that the work was based on photographs.
38. AS to RSS, Oct. 28, 1922, ASA, YCAL.
39. AS to RSS, Nov. 1, 1922, ASA, YCAL.
40. AS to RSS, Oct. 28, 1922, ASA, YCAL.
41. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
42. Ibid.
43. Tomkins, Notes.
44. These paintings have confusingly similar titles: Landscape—Lake George, N.Y., Mountains to North—Autumn—Lake George, N.Y., Landscape on Lake George, Lake George, Lake George Autumn, Untitled (Lake George Reflection).
45. Marjorie P. Balge-Crozier, “Still Life Redefined,” catalogue essay for Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, exhibition at Phillips Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Dallas Museum of Art, 1999), p. 54.
46. Charles C. Eldredge, catalogue essay for exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: Natural Issues 1918–1924, at Williams College Art Museum, 1992, pp. 26–43.
47. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
48. Paul Rosenfeld, “The Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe: The Work of the Young Artist Whose Canvases Are to Be Exhibited in Bulk for the First Time This Winter,” Vanity Fair 19, Oct. 1922.
49. N.a., “I Can’t Sing, So I Paint!”
50. Georgia O’Keeffe, “To MSS and MS 33 Subscribers and Others Who Read and Don’t Subscribe!” letter to the editor, Manuscripts, no. 4, Dec. 1922, cited in Lynes, Critics, p. 182.
Chapter IV
1. Exhibition brochure, Anderson Galleries, Jan. 28–Feb. 10, 1923, n.p.
2. Cited by Ann Middleton Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner and O’Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 32. O’Keeffe also told Christine Taylor Patten that she had found Duchamp’s studio to be “strange.” “It was large and empty except that at one end he had put a bathtub where he took baths,” she recalled. “Can you imagine? It was so cold!” Patten and Cardona-Hine, Miss O’Keeffe, p. 89.
3. Lynes clarifies the discrepancies between what the critics said and what the artist herself had to say about early exhibitions. “Reviewers associated O’Keeffe’s imagery with several things they understood about women: that they were more closely linked to the natural world than men and that their bodies were the source of their creativity” (Lynes, Critics, pp. 66–68).
4. Helen Appleton Read, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Show an Emotional Escape,” Feb. 11, 1923, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, cited by Lynes, Critics, p. 67.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Henry McBride, “Woman as Exponent of the Abstract: Curious Responses to Work of Miss O’Keefe [sic] on Others,” New York Herald, Feb. 4, 1923.
8. GOK to HMB, Feb. 1923, ASA, YCAL.
9. Exhibition brochure, Anderson Galleries, Jan. 29–Feb. 10, 1923.
10. GOK to SA, Sept.? 1923, cited in Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 174.
11. The portraits included those of relatives like Claudia O’Keeffe, now teaching school in New Jersey, Selma Schubart, Donald Davidson, artists John Marin and Charles Demuth, and writer Sherwood Anderson.
12. Mary Daniels, “The Magical Mistress of Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1973.
13. GOK to SA, Aug. 1?, 1923, Newberry Library, Chicago (hereinafter NL), ASA, YCAL.
14. Eisler, American Romance, p. 297.
15. AS to ESD, Oct. 11, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
16. Weston Naef, photography curator at the Getty Museum, made this observation to me in May 2003.
17. AS to RSS, Nov. 1, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
18. Lee Simonson, “What is 291?” Camera Work 47 (July 1914).
19. GOK to SA, June 24, 1924, NL.
20. AS to RSS July 12, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
21. AS to Paul Rosenfeld, July 10, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
22. AS to RSS, Aug. 23, 1923, cited by Robinson, A Life, p. 259.
23. Paul Strand, in “Art Observatory,” The (New York) World, Feb. 11, 1923.
24. AS to RSS, Aug. 6, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
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25. AS to RSS Aug. 15, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
26. AS to RSS, Aug. 16, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
27. AS to RSS, July 28, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
28. GOK to ESD, Sept., 8, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
29. RSS to PS, 1923, PSC, CCP.
30. GOK to ESD, Sept. 8, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
31. Seaweed, 1923, figure 440, Lynes, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I. This painting was sold to Alma Morganthau Wertheim in New York in 1924. She brought it to An American Place in 1946 to have it reframed, and it was stolen. It was recovered by O’Keeffe in 1980.
32. RSS to AS, Oct. 8, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
33. AS to RSS, Nov. 17, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
34. Eisler, An American Romance, p. 313.
35. AS to RSS, July 28, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
36. GOK to ESD, Nov. 24?, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
37. Ibid.
38. AS to RSS, 1923, ASA, YCAL.
39. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
40. Balge-Crozier, “Still Life Redefined,” The Poetry of Things, p. 53.
41. AS to RSS, Feb. 18, 1924, ASA, YCAL.
42. GOK to SA, Feb. 11, 1924, in Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 176.
43. GOK to Walter B. Rideout, Sept. 6, 1977, YCAL.
44. Royal Cortissoz, “Random Impressions in Current Exhibitions,” New York Tribune, Feb. 11, 1923, cited in Lynes, Critics, p. 191.
45. Read, “Sincerely Feminine.” Lynes thoroughly documents the ways in which critics employed sexual innuendo in their language to bring about suggestive readings of the paintings in Critics, p. 79.
46. Virgil Barker, “Notes on the Exhibitions,” The Arts 5 (Apr. 1924).
47. Read, “Sincerely Feminine.”
48. Ibid.
49. Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York: Essays on Fourteen American Moderns (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1924), pp. 205–8.
50. Paul Strand, “Georgia O’Keeffe,” Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire 9, July 1924.
51. RSS to PS, Aug. 8, 1924, PSC, CCP.
52. RSS to PS, Aug. 4, 1924, PSC, CCP.
53. GOK to Catherine O’Keeffe Klenert, Feb. 8, 1924, cited in Robinson, A Life, p. 264.
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