On Georgia
O’Keefe, Alfred Stieglitz, and the similar yet often opposing pulls of artistic
and romantic passions.
In her
seminal 1963
text “The Problem That Has No Name” (that’s just an excerpt), the opening
chapter in her equally pioneering The
Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan focuses on a variety of complex issues
and struggles facing young married women, from media images and gender ideals
to the day to day challenges of marriage, parenting, and home. Yet at heart of
her analyses, at the core of that unnamed problem, lies a pair of contradictory
pulls: on the one hand the desires for family, for marriage, for romantic and
human connections; and on the other the desires for education, for career, for
individual and professional successes. While there’s no doubt that the 1950s
society Friedan analyzes privileged the former over the latter for these young women,
I think she recognizes—and I know I would argue—that both pulls are also a part
of most individuals, and that their contradictions thus stem at least in part
from the complexities of our own identities and lives.
Those
contradictions and complexities affect all of us who hope to balance family and
career, but they are perhaps particularly pronounced for artists, and even more
especially in artistic geniuses. While the idea of a “muse” might be somewhat clichéd,
it also accurately defines the way in which great artists are so often pulled
to do their work, driven to produce by the same kinds of obsessions and forces
that can characterize romantic connection and passion. Certainly that seems to
have been the case for the modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe, both in her pursuit
of her artistic career and in her lifelong romantic connection to photographer Alfred
Stieglitz. That connection, which began in 1916 when O’Keeffe was 28 (and
Stieglitz 52 and married), led to a professional partnership and a multi-decade
marriage, and did not end until his death in 1946, was captured and preserved
in the
roughly 25,000 letters sent between the two; My
Faraway One, the first of two
planned volumes of selected letters, was published last year.
I don’t
want to reduce O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s relationship to any one issue, no more
than one painting or photograph could illustrate each artist’s career and
talents. Yet it seems clear that O’Keeffe’s 1929 decision to move back west—she
had come to New York in 1918 to live and work with Stieglitz, and they had been
married in 1924—and live in the burgeoning artistic community of Taos, New Mexico (at
the home and compound of Mable
Dodge Luhan) was a true turning point, a moment when the painter chose to
follow her craft and muse (which the west unquestionably was to O’Keeffe). When
Stieglitz wrote to her that “I am broken” (and sent her the above picture with
one of his July 1929 letters), she responded with one of the most powerful
statements of that artistic pursuit: “There is much life in me … I realized it would
die if it could not move toward something … I chose coming away because here at
least I feel good – and it makes me feel I am growing very tall and straight
inside – and very still.” Their marriage survived and endured, and American art
and culture were significantly enriched by O’Keeffe’s works. Not a bad love
story all the way around.
Final
lovers tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Any artistic love stories you’d highlight?
6/7 Memory Day nominee: Louise
Erdrich, the Chippewa
and German American poet, storyteller, and novelist whose interconnected
series of multi-generational
novels comprise some of the most
significant American
fiction of the last thirty
years.
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