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My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz
There are few couples in the history of 20th-century American art and culture more prominent than Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) and Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946). Between 1915, when they first began to write to each other, and 1946, when Stieglitz died, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged over 5,000 letters (more than 25,000 pages) that describe their daily lives in profoundly rich detail. This long-awaited volume features some 650 letters, carefully selected and annotated by leading photography scholar Sarah Greenough.
In O'Keeffe's sparse and vibrant style and Stieglitz's fervent and lyrical manner, the letters describe how they met and fell in love in the 1910s; how they carved out a life together in the 1920s; how their relationship nearly collapsed during the early years of the Depression; and how it was reconstructed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. At the same time, the correspondence reveals the creative evolution of their art and ideas; their friendships with many of the most influential figures in early American modernism (Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Paul Strand, to name a few); and their relationships and conversations with an exceptionally wide range of key figures in American and European art and culture (including Duncan Phillips, Diego Rivera, D. H. Lawrence, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Marcel Duchamp). Furthermore, their often poignant prose reveals insights into the impact of larger cultural forces—World Wars I and II; the booming economy of the 1920s; and the Depression of the 1930s—on two articulate, creative individuals.
In O'Keeffe's sparse and vibrant style and Stieglitz's fervent and lyrical manner, the letters describe how they met and fell in love in the 1910s; how they carved out a life together in the 1920s; how their relationship nearly collapsed during the early years of the Depression; and how it was reconstructed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. At the same time, the correspondence reveals the creative evolution of their art and ideas; their friendships with many of the most influential figures in early American modernism (Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Paul Strand, to name a few); and their relationships and conversations with an exceptionally wide range of key figures in American and European art and culture (including Duncan Phillips, Diego Rivera, D. H. Lawrence, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Marcel Duchamp). Furthermore, their often poignant prose reveals insights into the impact of larger cultural forces—World Wars I and II; the booming economy of the 1920s; and the Depression of the 1930s—on two articulate, creative individuals.
832 pages, Hardcover
First published May 10, 2011
64 people are currently reading
1232 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
December 20, 2011
I enjoyed taking my time with these letters, reading several letters a day. As with every person, not everyday is exciting, there are times that are monotonous and the letters do reflect that, on the other side there are some that are more exciting and interesting.
I would recommend this for anyone who likes to take their time reading over a cup of coffee or hot chocolate (picturing an idealistic setting here with snow in the background).
I won this from Goodreads Firstreads.
I would recommend this for anyone who likes to take their time reading over a cup of coffee or hot chocolate (picturing an idealistic setting here with snow in the background).
I won this from Goodreads Firstreads.
August 15, 2017
Delicious.
In Stieglitz's absence O'Keeffe was surprised to realize that she had a "feeling of quiet--of being a whole person all by myself that I seem to rather like--I seem to be only a very small fraction of a person when you are around--and I believe I like to be a whole one all by myself."
In Stieglitz's absence O'Keeffe was surprised to realize that she had a "feeling of quiet--of being a whole person all by myself that I seem to rather like--I seem to be only a very small fraction of a person when you are around--and I believe I like to be a whole one all by myself."
February 3, 2022
One giant collection but so fun to read. So human and relatable!
December 28, 2020
This is a long book and for research purposes I skimmed it to find what I needed it. But I felt the author did such a great job with the presentation and catching up the reader with the times, usually as O’Keefe moved around the US. I had always thought the O’Keefe/Stieglitz marriage was a grand love story that made fairy tales seem to come true. Well, this book showed that it wasn’t. Stieglitz was more than old enough to be O’Keefe’s father (even grandfather) when they met and started an affair. Stieglitz wanted an open marriage, so instead of waiting around to see what he would do, O’Keefe continued to be her own person and didn’t let her husband keep her down. Stieglitz seemed obsessed with being O’Keefe’s first romantic partner. He certainly wrote about a lot, many years after the fact. What may have seemed a sweet love story back then and even a decade ago now appears as a tale of an immature, needy man who used young women—they became younger as he grew older—to make him feel something. Powerful? Manly? Validated? Lord only knows. In any case, these letters show a different time, a time in which O’Keefe and Stieglitz and all their peers participated in one of the most creative eras when it came to modern art and literature.
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July 25, 2011From NPR's website:
From 1915 until 1946, some 25,000 pieces of paper were exchanged between two major 20th-century artists. Painter Georgia O'Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz wrote each other letters — sometimes two and three a day, some of them 40 pages long. The correspondence tracks their relationship from acquaintances to admirers to lovers to man and wife to exasperated — but still together — long-marrieds.
The first volume of those letters has just been published. My Faraway One, edited by Sarah Greenough, features 700-plus pages of the couple's correspondence, sent between 1915 and 1933.
When Stieglitz and O'Keeffe met in 1916, he was 52 and famous — an internationally acclaimed photographer, with an avant-garde gallery in Manhattan. She, on the other hand, was 28 and unknown.
"Stieglitz was the most important person in the New York art world," explains Greenough, head of the photography department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. "And O'Keeffe was a schoolteacher" — teaching art in Texas.
I'm getting to like you so tremendously that it some times scares me.
- Georgia O'Keeffe, 1916
The couple's correspondence — O'Keeffe's in sweeping squiggles and curlicues; Stieglitz in thick, decisive slanting black lines — cascaded over the years as their relationship deepened.
"I'm getting to like you so tremendously that it some times scares me," O'Keeffe writes from Canyon, Texas, on Nov. 4, 1916. " ... Having told you so much of me — more than anyone else I know — could anything else follow but that I should want you — "
Letter by Alfred Stieglitz, Nov. 4, 1916.
Enlarge Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Letter by Alfred Stieglitz, Nov. 4, 1916.
Letter by Alfred Stieglitz, Nov. 4, 1916.
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Letter by Alfred Stieglitz, Nov. 4, 1916.
Stieglitz becomes her guide and mentor. He exhibits her work in his gallery, and, unannounced, O'Keeffe visits him in New York. As she's about to return to Texas, Stieglitz writes to her on June, 1, 1917: "How I wanted to photograph you — the hands — the mouth — & eyes — & the enveloped in black body — the touch of white — & the throat — but I didn't want to break into your time — "
He's beginning to yearn. Miserable in his first marriage, he starts to see her not as O'Keeffe the artist, but as O'Keeffe the woman. Years later, he will photograph her — with what she described as "a kind of heat."
"Stieglitz was an immensely charismatic person, amazingly egotistical and narcissistic," Greenough says, "but he had this ability to establish a deep communion with people."
All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.
- Alfred Stieglitz, 1918
O'Keeffe decides to move to New York, and before she arrives, Stieglitz writes to her on May 26, 1918:
"What do I want from you? — ... Sometimes I feel I'm going stark mad — That I ought to say — Dearest — You are so much to me that you must not come near me — Coming may bring you darkness instead of light — And it's in Everlasting light that you should live."
Letter by Georgia O'Keeffe, Nov. 12, 1916.
Enlarge Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Letter by Georgia O'Keeffe, Nov. 12, 1916.
Letter by Georgia O'Keeffe, Nov. 12, 1916.
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Letter by Georgia O'Keeffe, Nov. 12, 1916.
Stieglitz worries that he won't be able to provide for her. He has no head for business. Still, eagerly, he gets a small studio cleaned and aired for her, and writes: "All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us."
O'Keeffe comes to New York, and she and Stieglitz begin living together almost immediately. They marry in 1924. "They were entranced — passionately in love," Greenough says. "And yet by the mid-'20s, difficulties start creeping into the relationship; you can see the cracks in the relationship."
O'Keefe deeply wants to have a child, and Stieglitz does not, Greenough explains. The couple lives with Stieglitz's family, which proves difficult for O'Keeffe. They spend every summer at Lake George in New York with the Stieglitz family, "and that family very much intruded on O'Keeffe's time to paint," Greenough says.
O'Keeffe becomes a famous artist — thanks in large part to Steiglitz's promotion of her. She grows increasingly restless and, according to Greenough, starts making little trips. In the summer of 1929, she decides to go to New Mexico — a seminal decision that will forever change their lives.
"This really isn't like anything you ever saw — and no one who tells you about it gives any idea of it," she writes to Stieglitz from Taos, N.M., on May 2, 1929.
My Faraway One
My Faraway One
Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: 1915-1933
by Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz and Sarah Greenough
Hardcover, 832 pages | purchase
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* Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: 1915-1933
* Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, et al
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"She is so happy," Greenough says of O'Keeffe, who was staying with Mable Dodge Luhan, a woman who liked to surround herself with famous artists and writers.
"Mabel's place beats anything you can imagine about it — it is simply astonishing," O'Keeffe writes. "... The drive up here — seventy-five miles — was wonderful — It is bedtime and I am not a bit sleepy — not even tired — I lay in the sun a long time this afternoon — the air is cold and the wind — but the sun is hot — "
O'Keeffe, now 42, is coming alive in New Mexico. She finds the subjects and colors that will place her work in every major museum. Her letters are full of adventures and sunshine. Back in New York, Stieglitz, now 65, falls apart. "I am broken," he writes, desperate that he has lost her and will never get her back.
After two months in Taos, O'Keeffe explains her time away in a letter dated July 9, 1929:
There is much life in me — when it was always checked in moving toward you — 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 — Maybe you will not love me for it — but for me it seems to be the best thing I can do for you — I hope this letter carries no hurt to you — It is the last thing I want to do in the world.
Today it rains —
"This letter to me seems to express what any modern woman feels," Greenough says, "trying to reconcile the desires for work, their art, with a marriage."
A very modern marriage, which lasts — with changes, variations, temptations, an infidelity and, of course, letters — until Stieglitz dies in 1946. Throughout, each groped for personal and professional fulfillment — and achieved so much. The relationship, from 1915 to 1933, is traced in Volume 1 of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.
From 1915 until 1946, some 25,000 pieces of paper were exchanged between two major 20th-century artists. Painter Georgia O'Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz wrote each other letters — sometimes two and three a day, some of them 40 pages long. The correspondence tracks their relationship from acquaintances to admirers to lovers to man and wife to exasperated — but still together — long-marrieds.
The first volume of those letters has just been published. My Faraway One, edited by Sarah Greenough, features 700-plus pages of the couple's correspondence, sent between 1915 and 1933.
When Stieglitz and O'Keeffe met in 1916, he was 52 and famous — an internationally acclaimed photographer, with an avant-garde gallery in Manhattan. She, on the other hand, was 28 and unknown.
"Stieglitz was the most important person in the New York art world," explains Greenough, head of the photography department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. "And O'Keeffe was a schoolteacher" — teaching art in Texas.
I'm getting to like you so tremendously that it some times scares me.
- Georgia O'Keeffe, 1916
The couple's correspondence — O'Keeffe's in sweeping squiggles and curlicues; Stieglitz in thick, decisive slanting black lines — cascaded over the years as their relationship deepened.
"I'm getting to like you so tremendously that it some times scares me," O'Keeffe writes from Canyon, Texas, on Nov. 4, 1916. " ... Having told you so much of me — more than anyone else I know — could anything else follow but that I should want you — "
Letter by Alfred Stieglitz, Nov. 4, 1916.
Enlarge Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Letter by Alfred Stieglitz, Nov. 4, 1916.
Letter by Alfred Stieglitz, Nov. 4, 1916.
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Letter by Alfred Stieglitz, Nov. 4, 1916.
Stieglitz becomes her guide and mentor. He exhibits her work in his gallery, and, unannounced, O'Keeffe visits him in New York. As she's about to return to Texas, Stieglitz writes to her on June, 1, 1917: "How I wanted to photograph you — the hands — the mouth — & eyes — & the enveloped in black body — the touch of white — & the throat — but I didn't want to break into your time — "
He's beginning to yearn. Miserable in his first marriage, he starts to see her not as O'Keeffe the artist, but as O'Keeffe the woman. Years later, he will photograph her — with what she described as "a kind of heat."
"Stieglitz was an immensely charismatic person, amazingly egotistical and narcissistic," Greenough says, "but he had this ability to establish a deep communion with people."
All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.
- Alfred Stieglitz, 1918
O'Keeffe decides to move to New York, and before she arrives, Stieglitz writes to her on May 26, 1918:
"What do I want from you? — ... Sometimes I feel I'm going stark mad — That I ought to say — Dearest — You are so much to me that you must not come near me — Coming may bring you darkness instead of light — And it's in Everlasting light that you should live."
Letter by Georgia O'Keeffe, Nov. 12, 1916.
Enlarge Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Letter by Georgia O'Keeffe, Nov. 12, 1916.
Letter by Georgia O'Keeffe, Nov. 12, 1916.
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Letter by Georgia O'Keeffe, Nov. 12, 1916.
Stieglitz worries that he won't be able to provide for her. He has no head for business. Still, eagerly, he gets a small studio cleaned and aired for her, and writes: "All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us."
O'Keeffe comes to New York, and she and Stieglitz begin living together almost immediately. They marry in 1924. "They were entranced — passionately in love," Greenough says. "And yet by the mid-'20s, difficulties start creeping into the relationship; you can see the cracks in the relationship."
O'Keefe deeply wants to have a child, and Stieglitz does not, Greenough explains. The couple lives with Stieglitz's family, which proves difficult for O'Keeffe. They spend every summer at Lake George in New York with the Stieglitz family, "and that family very much intruded on O'Keeffe's time to paint," Greenough says.
O'Keeffe becomes a famous artist — thanks in large part to Steiglitz's promotion of her. She grows increasingly restless and, according to Greenough, starts making little trips. In the summer of 1929, she decides to go to New Mexico — a seminal decision that will forever change their lives.
"This really isn't like anything you ever saw — and no one who tells you about it gives any idea of it," she writes to Stieglitz from Taos, N.M., on May 2, 1929.
My Faraway One
My Faraway One
Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: 1915-1933
by Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz and Sarah Greenough
Hardcover, 832 pages | purchase
close
Purchase Featured Books
* My Faraway One
* Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: 1915-1933
* Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, et al
* Amazon »
* Independent Booksellers »
Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?
* Nonfiction
* Art & Design
* NPR reviews, interviews and more
* Read an excerpt
"She is so happy," Greenough says of O'Keeffe, who was staying with Mable Dodge Luhan, a woman who liked to surround herself with famous artists and writers.
"Mabel's place beats anything you can imagine about it — it is simply astonishing," O'Keeffe writes. "... The drive up here — seventy-five miles — was wonderful — It is bedtime and I am not a bit sleepy — not even tired — I lay in the sun a long time this afternoon — the air is cold and the wind — but the sun is hot — "
O'Keeffe, now 42, is coming alive in New Mexico. She finds the subjects and colors that will place her work in every major museum. Her letters are full of adventures and sunshine. Back in New York, Stieglitz, now 65, falls apart. "I am broken," he writes, desperate that he has lost her and will never get her back.
After two months in Taos, O'Keeffe explains her time away in a letter dated July 9, 1929:
There is much life in me — when it was always checked in moving toward you — 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 — Maybe you will not love me for it — but for me it seems to be the best thing I can do for you — I hope this letter carries no hurt to you — It is the last thing I want to do in the world.
Today it rains —
"This letter to me seems to express what any modern woman feels," Greenough says, "trying to reconcile the desires for work, their art, with a marriage."
A very modern marriage, which lasts — with changes, variations, temptations, an infidelity and, of course, letters — until Stieglitz dies in 1946. Throughout, each groped for personal and professional fulfillment — and achieved so much. The relationship, from 1915 to 1933, is traced in Volume 1 of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.
April 19, 2020
The book My Faraway One - Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz VOLUME 1, 1915–1933, gives an intimate portrait of the life of two of the greatest American artist of the last century. The painter Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the most legendary and iconic American artist, and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz enjoyed a very unique bond and relationship based on a deep love and understanding of each other as a person as well as an artist. The letters help to appreciate the deepness of the feelings expressed in their art and enhance an understanding of its complexity.
I very much enjoyed the book and can now appreciate their artwork much better.
I very much enjoyed the book and can now appreciate their artwork much better.
February 6, 2022
Georgia O'Keeffe has fallen in love with Stieglitz, easily of-her father's age or to say Stieglitz has fallen in love with a girl of his daughter's age or can also pass as a granddaughter.
O’keefe is mostly in New Mexico travelling within the US and Stieglitz lives in New York running an art gallery, they exchange letters to keep the relationship going. Some letters are nice while the majority made me tone deaf because thousands of these letters contain trivial daily life details like routine excitement, work, politics, routine, observation, food, sadness, desires etc.
Maybe through this collection some of the history of that time period is archived.
O’keefe is mostly in New Mexico travelling within the US and Stieglitz lives in New York running an art gallery, they exchange letters to keep the relationship going. Some letters are nice while the majority made me tone deaf because thousands of these letters contain trivial daily life details like routine excitement, work, politics, routine, observation, food, sadness, desires etc.
Maybe through this collection some of the history of that time period is archived.
December 29, 2020
I am listing this one as read even though I am working my way through it. I received it as a birthday present last February and have been slowly reading it since. It may take me forever to read the entire book! It really is an interesting look at how people connected through the written word, how relationships are documented through letters, and how this particular couple lived. Very interesting!
February 5, 2018
I'll come back to this off and on forever, I think, but the magic is in their voices - it doesn't need to be read front to back.
April 8, 2019
waaaay more in-depth than I ever dreamed. Not a book I could read from start to finish... I only made it partway, and am sure at some point I'll pick it up again.
June 7, 2011
I won this novel, My Faraway One, selected letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933, through Goodreads giveaway contest.This novel represents a moving account of the lives of two of America's artists and gives a history of information on twentieth-century American art and culture.The selection of letters written between Georgia and Alfred gives a passionate account of their daily lives in New York, Texas and New Mexico during the months that they were apart, between 1915 and 1946, when Stieglitz died.The letters span two world wars, the 1920's, and the depression of the 1930's.The letters are written with much love, and the reader is able to share a point in history and appreciate their story.A beautiful story and well written. Thank you so much Sarah and Goodreads for allowing me to experience their love and friendship.
January 5, 2015
Even though George O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz wrote thousands of pages of letters to each other, that doesn't mean they all need to be reprinted in order to share their major themes and reveal the surrounding environment that shaped them. However, this 800 book makes the reader feel as though s/he is reading every single letter they wrote to each other regardless of the mundane and tediousness or pure boredom that can ensue -- and it's only volume one! I gave up after the first quarter and just read the editors remarks between letter sets -- which made for a much more interesting read but then lost the opportunity for me to read in their own words some of their emotions -- which is why I wish the editor had pulled passages to emphasize these themes rather than putting in hundreds of letters to prove a point.
Want to read
July 11, 2011 June 6--OMG--This book has arrived today and it is over 700 pages! It is going to be awhile before I'm able to review it
July 11 --I have been staring at this tome trying to figure out how to read it and do the review justice.
Have decided on a plan of attack for that 700+ page selected letters of O'Keeffe=Stieglitz ! Grew up on snail mail so will read them as though I just wrote and wait a couple of days to read the response.But I will immediately read " my " response. May take me awhile but I think I will enjoy it more bite by bite rather than huge meals in one sitting.!
July 11 --I have been staring at this tome trying to figure out how to read it and do the review justice.
Have decided on a plan of attack for that 700+ page selected letters of O'Keeffe=Stieglitz ! Grew up on snail mail so will read them as though I just wrote and wait a couple of days to read the response.But I will immediately read " my " response. May take me awhile but I think I will enjoy it more bite by bite rather than huge meals in one sitting.!
January 23, 2012
3Nov2011
I'm a bit more than midway through this book. Currently in my reading - O'Keeffe is on her first trip to Taos and the letters to AS are full of incredibly happiness and growth. The letters from AS to GO are full of panic, fear, and neurotic ramblings. It's difficult while reading someone's personal letters to not feel like a voyeur.
I'm a bit more than midway through this book. Currently in my reading - O'Keeffe is on her first trip to Taos and the letters to AS are full of incredibly happiness and growth. The letters from AS to GO are full of panic, fear, and neurotic ramblings. It's difficult while reading someone's personal letters to not feel like a voyeur.
Read
October 19, 2011I couldn't finish it. There were moments that were really engaging and interesting, and then moments that were a real struggle to get through. The editor's footnotes and omission of certain letters between Georgia and Alfred frustrated me. I wanted to finish, to know what happens, but the monotonous description of her time in New Mexico is more than I can bear.
Want to read
January 11, 2012Very interesting NYRB review re this and other books about O & S. I appears that GO was as fascinating a writer as artist.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...
Want to read
May 21, 2011O'Keeffe's paintings and Stieglitz's photographs were among my favorites long before I knew they were married. Would LOVE to have this book!!
Want to read
July 21, 2011Just heard about it on Morning Edition; sounds great. Another to the 'to read' shelf.
Currently reading
September 15, 2011This is going to be a long process. I think I'll read a few letters at a time and let them sink in a bit. I so admire these two people in many ways. I look forward to getting to know them better.
abandoned
September 25, 2011it's 800 pages (and it's only volume 1) and if my to-read pile wasn't growing, I would continue to read this...the intimacy of the letters is fascinating.
September 29, 2012
I adore this book. A more beautiful account of love has yet to be collected...
Want to read
April 5, 2013Not done yet - it's a large book 700 plus pages! I'll have to buy a copy and so I read at my leisure.
June 1, 2016
sublime.
April 5, 2017
The artist Georgia O'Keeffe and her husband, photographer/art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, exchanged more than 5,000 letters (more than 25,000 pages worth) over the three decades of their relationship. They often wrote throughout the day, sometimes in addition to having seen each other or spoken on the phone the same day. This 739-page book is a hefty, beautifully annotated portion of their correspondence through 1933. Volume 2, which has yet to be published, will cover the years from 1940 to Stieglitz' death in 1946.
When they began writing each other in 1916, O’Keeffe was 28 year old art student and a virgin, though she had had boyfriends. Stieglitz was 52, married, an acclaimed art photographer and owner of small art gallery through which he gave modern artists such as Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso their first shows in the U.S.
O’Keeffe sent some of her drawings to an art school friend, who showed them to Stieglitz, who was so excited about them he wanted to exhibit them. They inspired each other to greater heights of artistic productivity and fell in love through their letters. "You-believing in me—that making me believe in myself—has made it possible to be myself," she wrote him in 1917. The next month she sent him a series of nude self portraits (abstract water colors.) By 1918, she had moved to New York, he had left his wife and they were living together.
The arc of their relationship unfolds in the letters, which are often intimate. Their passion for each other during the early years together definitely comes through, as do their differences. Stieglitz was a notorious womanizer and O'Keeffe spent her first summer in New Mexico in 1929 to find relief from some of the pain that brought her. He was an emotional basket case while she was gone, afraid he would lose her, and reading his letters from that summer is the only time I've ever felt any empathy for him. Sadly, by the next summer he had taken up with a younger married woman, Dorothy Norman, beginning a long-lasting affair that left O'Keeffe so depressed she was hospitalized for two months in 1933 and stopped painting for a year. Yet I don't think they ever stopped loving each other.
This is a five-star book for sure for students of art history or of the New York cultural scene before World War II. Sarah Greenough has done a great job curating, indexing and annotating the letters, most of which are held in the Yale library. For the casual reader, though, I think this is likely to be a "did not finish," for its sheer length and the repetitive nature of much of the daily life chronicled in the letters. (I think Alfred tells Georgia every time he takes a bath.)
If you decide to read this, I highly recommend having on hand a copy of "Georgia O'Keeeffe," Vol. 1, by Barbara Buhler Lynes (I got one from the library.) All of the O'Keeffe art works mentioned in "My Faraway One" are listed by their number in the Lynes book. Without the Lynes book, you don't know what's being referred to. Stieglitz' photos are referenced to an earlier Sarah Greenough book, "Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set," so you might want to have that too.
When they began writing each other in 1916, O’Keeffe was 28 year old art student and a virgin, though she had had boyfriends. Stieglitz was 52, married, an acclaimed art photographer and owner of small art gallery through which he gave modern artists such as Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso their first shows in the U.S.
O’Keeffe sent some of her drawings to an art school friend, who showed them to Stieglitz, who was so excited about them he wanted to exhibit them. They inspired each other to greater heights of artistic productivity and fell in love through their letters. "You-believing in me—that making me believe in myself—has made it possible to be myself," she wrote him in 1917. The next month she sent him a series of nude self portraits (abstract water colors.) By 1918, she had moved to New York, he had left his wife and they were living together.
The arc of their relationship unfolds in the letters, which are often intimate. Their passion for each other during the early years together definitely comes through, as do their differences. Stieglitz was a notorious womanizer and O'Keeffe spent her first summer in New Mexico in 1929 to find relief from some of the pain that brought her. He was an emotional basket case while she was gone, afraid he would lose her, and reading his letters from that summer is the only time I've ever felt any empathy for him. Sadly, by the next summer he had taken up with a younger married woman, Dorothy Norman, beginning a long-lasting affair that left O'Keeffe so depressed she was hospitalized for two months in 1933 and stopped painting for a year. Yet I don't think they ever stopped loving each other.
This is a five-star book for sure for students of art history or of the New York cultural scene before World War II. Sarah Greenough has done a great job curating, indexing and annotating the letters, most of which are held in the Yale library. For the casual reader, though, I think this is likely to be a "did not finish," for its sheer length and the repetitive nature of much of the daily life chronicled in the letters. (I think Alfred tells Georgia every time he takes a bath.)
If you decide to read this, I highly recommend having on hand a copy of "Georgia O'Keeeffe," Vol. 1, by Barbara Buhler Lynes (I got one from the library.) All of the O'Keeffe art works mentioned in "My Faraway One" are listed by their number in the Lynes book. Without the Lynes book, you don't know what's being referred to. Stieglitz' photos are referenced to an earlier Sarah Greenough book, "Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set," so you might want to have that too.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 9, 2017
A beautiful book.
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