Alfred Stieglitz was 54 when Georgia arrived in New York...23 years her senior. Educated in Berlin, he had studied engineering and photography before returning to the States at the turn of the century and opening the 291 gallery. He pioneered the art of photography, and single-handedly introduced America to the works of Picasso, Matisse, and Cezanne at the gallery...along with publishing his well respected "Camera Works" magazine. Shortly after her arrival, Alfred took Georgia up to the Stieglitz family home at Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains. They would return to the lake home each summer for years to come. Georgia produced many paintings of the Lake George countryside during these years. Stieglitz had become obsessed with photographing Georgia since the beginning of their relationship. He would take over 300 portraits of her between 1918 and 1937. Most of the more erotic poses would be in the first few years of their marriage. Read more here
Georgia O'Keeffe—Hand and Breasts 1919
This photograph, one of more than 300 images Stieglitz made of O'Keeffe (1887–1986) between 1917 and 1937, is part of an extraordinary composite portrait. Stieglitz believed that portraiture concerned more than merely the face and that it should be a record of a person's entire experience, a mosaic of expressive movements, emotions, and gestures that would function collectively to evoke a life. "To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person," he claimed, "is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still."
The photographs of O'Keeffe taken in those first twenty four months document the most intense, passionate, and complex transaction ever recorded between a man and woman by a camera. Stieglitz's portrait embraces the most public and private extremes of O'Keeffe's being: icons of a remote, enigmatic woman that merged with her paintings to create her identity as artist together with sexual explorations of her body so intimate they have yet to be published
This is one of the photos I sneaked at The Whitney, where there is a no photograph rule.
George Segal (1924–2000), Walk, Don’t Walk, 1976. Plaster, cement, metal, painted wood, and electric light, 109 × 72 × 74 inches (276.9 × 182.9 × 188.9 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
This one really wowed me. I'd never seen it before. It's as close to a portrait than any other Hopper I've seen. A ballerina mending a slipper?
More on the exhibition in the next couple of days. It's good to be back in Massachusetts, though much colder than the city. We stayed in Soho and got around Little Italy and Chinatown a good deal. The hustle and bustle is interesting to watch as is the experience of looking squarely into a trash bin full of live frogs! :-)
And what do the Smiths have to do with New York City? Nothing...and...everything.
Smile as if you're Mona Lisa, kids.
"And if you've got five seconds to spare I'll tell you the story of my life..."
"When the Amherst sphinx styled herself a pagan, she meant she didn’t believe in the biblical God. What sort of deity, if any, she did believe in is hard to pinpoint." -- Gary Sloan, "Emily Dickinson: Pagan Sphinx,"
I believe that the images and writing posted here fall under the "fair use" section of the U.S. copyright law http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107, as they are intended for educational purposes and are not in a medium that is of commercial nature.