Georgia O'Keeffe and the
Women of the Stieglitz Circle
February 9 - May 4, 2008
Wall text panels and object labels for the exhibition
- [Georgia O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle,
Text Panels]
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- [Quote for Opening Gallery]
- "Women don't make good painters, they said. I had
never thought of it that way. I just painted, that was all." - Georgia
O'Keeffe
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- Georgia O'Keeffe & the Women of Stieglitz's Circle
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- In the early decades of the twentieth century, New York
photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz promoted the work of European
and American modernist artists at his Little Galleries at 291 Fifth
Avenue (opened in 1905). Stieglitz's circle of artists included Arthur
Dove, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin, as well as several extraordinary
women; the most celebrated among them was Georgia O'Keeffe.
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- Prior to his discovery of O'Keeffe, Stieglitz championed
a number of women artists whose work confirmed his belief that a woman's
essential femininity was expressed in the creative process. From the paintings
and photographs of Gertrude Käsebier, Anne Brigman, Pamela Colman
Smith, Georgia Engelhard, and Katharine Nash Rhoades, Stieglitz fashioned
the concept of the woman artist's vision as pure, innocent, and even childlike
-- as he would later characterize O'Keeffe's art. This exhibition brings
together for the first time the work of these six women artists, whose
contributions to the feminine role in modernism shaped Stieglitz's vision
of O'Keeffe as the iconic woman modernist.
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- Gertrude Käsebier
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- A highly accomplished photographer, Gertrude Käsebier
found a widespread audience from 1897 to 1910. Although she was one of
several women in Stieglitz's Photo-Secession society -- a group of photographers
dedicated to making photographic images that rivaled painted images --
it was Käsebier whom he chose as the feminine face of pictorial photography.
Her signature image depicts a mother dressed in white, evoking motherhood
as a pure, spiritual state of being. Käsebier's aesthetic of whiteness
cast the modern woman as a vision of purity and, simultaneously, as a creator
in her own right -- an important paradigm in Stieglitz's presentation of
the woman modernist.
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- Anne Brigman
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- Stieglitz published and exhibited the photographs of
California artist Anne Brigman from 1906 to 1913. Many of Brigman's photographs
picture the female nude intertwined with nature, the figure bursting forth
from the wild landscape in poses reminiscent of the rhythmic movements
of modern dance. Visualizing the body as a vehicle for expressing the inner
self, Brigman viewed her images as suggesting the modern woman's struggle
for personal and artistic freedom. For Stieglitz, Brigman's nudes offered
a view into nature's mystery only a woman could offer, demonstrating that
a woman's art could uncover the hidden truths of feminine sexuality.
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- Katharine Nash Rhoades
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- When they met in 1911, Katharine Nash Rhoades -- a young
artist captivated by modernist art and philosophy -- appeared to be Stieglitz's
ideal woman. Rhoades prided herself on her purity of vision, often referring
to herself as childlike and full of wonder, supporting Steiglitz's belief
that the woman's true self was partly a child self. As their friendship
progressed over the next five years, Stieglitz attempted to cast Rhoades
as the figure of the "woman child" whose hidden creative potential
was realized though her sexuality -- a role Stieglitz ultimately cast on
O'Keeffe as the "Great Child."
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- Pamela Colman Smith
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- The first one-woman exhibition at Stieglitz's 291gallery
featured the watercolors and drawings of Pamela Colman Smith. Smith specialized
in children's literature, illustration, and theatre. She adopted the nickname
"Pixie," consciously playing on her image as an artist whose
life was totally immersed in the fantasy life of children. Fashioning her
persona as an authentic mystical, childlike voice, she appeared in the
Little Galleries -- her head wrapped in bright scarves and feathers complementing
a colorful costume that resembled gypsy attire-reciting West Indian nursery
tales and chanting ballads by W. B. Yeats.
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- Georgia Engelhard
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- For Stieglitz, children's art represented the model of
"pure" artistic vision. He mounted four exhibitions of children's
art at 291, the last one devoted to the work of his ten-year-old niece,
Georgia Engelhard. During summers spent with the Stieglitz family at Lake
George in the 1920s, O'Keeffe adopted "Georgia two" or "Georgia
minor," as the younger Georgia was called, as a painting partner.
Later, Engelhard embraced the abstract, rhythmic manner and the themes
O'Keeffe explored in her paintings from the mid- to late-1920s, as seen
in Engelhard's Jack in the Pulpit (on view here) which prefigures
O'Keeffe's well-known series of the same flower.
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- Georgia O'Keeffe
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- Stieglitz's excitement upon first seeing O'Keeffe's drawings,
which he interpreted as personally expressive and wholly feminine, ignited
a professional and personal relationship that would last nearly thirty
years. Soon after Stieglitz became her mentor in 1916, O'Keeffe began exploring
the child's way of making pictures. Both O'Keeffe and Stieglitz regarded
this method of drawing as preserving the child's intuitive way of seeing
and picturing the world. Exploring the essence of her chosen subjects through
a subtle balance of intense color and linear precision, O'Keeffe went on
to adapt a reductive abstract vocabulary to a variety of motifs.
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- Alfred Stieglitz
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- Alfred Stieglitz advocated the advancement of photography
as an art form. He practiced and promoted a pictorial approach to photography,
composing photographic images to achieve effects similar to those of painted
images. Pictorialism, as the style came to be called, was an international
movement that included several highly accomplished American photographers,
such as Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Gertrude Käsebier.
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- In 1917 Stieglitz began an extended photographic portrait
of his muse and future wife, O'Keeffe. Through these photographs (many
of which are on view here) Stieglitz crafted O'Keeffe's persona as the
woman-modernist who, above all, possessed the pure, intuitive vision
of the child.
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- Georgia O'Keeffe: The Woman Modernist
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- After O'Keeffe's arrival in New York in 1918, Stieglitz's
investment in her iconic stature made certain that the women of his circle
were eclipsed by her presence. As a lone woman among men, O'Keeffe had
the greatest power to represent Stieglitz's modernist ideology. O'Keeffe
embraced the concept of the modernist artist as a childlike visionary but
dismissed interpretations of her work that focused on her sexuality, stating,
"I am often amazed at the spoken and written word telling me what
I have painted."
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- Filling her canvases with monumental floral and plant
forms, dynamic abstractions, and simple yet powerful landscape views, O'Keeffe
was one of the most experimental artists to emerge from Stieglitz's circle.
Following Stieglitz's death in 1946, O'Keeffe relocated to New Mexico,
where she lived and worked for nearly forty years, painting the desert
landscape and creating some of her most famous images.
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- [Tombstones & Extended Labels]
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- 1
- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- Soul of the Blasted Pine, 1907
(negative, 1906)
- Platinum print
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- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933 (33.43.111)
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- In the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Brigman
sought relief for her shattered nerves by hiking in the Sierra Mountains.
Sleeping under the open sky, she awakened once after a thunderstorm and,
with the light still eerily illuminating the landscape, began to visualize
the female figure as part of the trees and rock formations. By focusing
on her own body expressively posed in the rugged landscape, Brigman projected
her inner life into her pictures.
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- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- The Dying Cedar, 1908 (negative,
1906)
- Toned gelatin silver print
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- Wilson Centre for Photography, London
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- 3
- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- Minor, the Pain of All the World, ca. 1906-1910
- Bromoil print
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- Wilson Centre for Photography, London
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- 4
- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- The Cleft in the Rock, 1905
- Gelatin silver print
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- Wilson Centre for Photography, London
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- 5
- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- Dawn, 1909
- Gelatin silver print
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- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933 (33.43.100)
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- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- Self-Portrait in the Studio, ca.
1910
- Platinum print
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- Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles
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- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- The Bubble, 1910
- Gelatin silver print
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- Wilson Centre for Photography, London
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- 8
- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- Self-Portrait in Doorway, ca.
1910
- Platinum print
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- Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles
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- 9
- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- Self-Portrait with Guitar, ca.
1910
- Platinum print
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- Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles
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- 10
- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- Via Dolorosa, 1911
- Gelatin silver print
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- Wilson Centre for Photography, London
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- 11
- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- Finis, 1912
- Photogravure mounted on silk paper
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- The Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Notre
Dame, Indiana
- Funds provided by the Samuel J. Schatz Purchase Fund
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- 12
- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- The Breeze, 1918 (negative,
ca. 1910)
- Gelatin silver print
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- The Art Institute of Chicago
- Julien Levy Collection, gift of Jean Levy and the Estate
of Julien Levy (1988.157.11)
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- Following an extended stay in New York in 1910, when
she immersed herself in Stieglitz's circle, Brigman went through a period
of crisis. In 1911 she separated from her husband of seventeen years and
suffered a breakdown. Thereafter, she began to interpret her photographs
as images relating to her autobiography -- her personal metamorphosis.
By choreographing her own body in harmony with the rhythmic movements of
the landscape-or, in this case, the wind-Brigman dramatizes the euphoria
she experienced making these photographs at the site.
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- 13
- Anne Brigman
- American, 1869-1950
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- Sphinx, 1927
- Gelatin silver print
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- International Museum of Photography at George Eastman
House, Rochester, New York
- Gift of Willard M. Nott (81.1013.0016)
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- 14
- Georgia Engelhard
- American, 1906-1986
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- Black Horses, 1916
- Watercolor on paper
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- Owings-Dewey Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico
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- 15
- Georgia Engelhard
- American, 1906-1986
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- The Doll's Bungalow, Lake George, 1916
- Watercolor on paper
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- Owings-Dewey Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico
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- 16
- Georgia Engelhard
- American, 1906-1986
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- Jack in the Pulpit, ca. 1927
- Oil on canvas
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- Gerald Peters Gallery, New York
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- 17
- Gertrude Käsebier
- American, 1852-1934
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- The Manger, 1901 (negative,
1899)
- Platinum print
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- Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Gift of Mrs. Hermine M. Turner
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- Käsebier's reputation was solidified in 1900 when
Stieglitz published this photograph along with Blessed Art Thou Among
Women (on view nearby) in his influential photography magazine Camera
Notes. In both images, the body of the maternal figure is hidden by
luminous draping, giving it an ethereal quality. Similarly, the women in
both photographs turn their faces away from the viewer in representation
of the universal mother.
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- 18
- Gertrude Käsebier
- American, 1852-1934
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- Emmeline Stieglitz and Katherine Stieglitz, ca. 1899
- Platinum print
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