"Eyeh -- wassup, Alf?" |
"All these possibilities, before we stampede towards the..." |
Stieglitz was himself a hetero late-in-mid-life dude when he first encountered O'Keeffe (my present age exactly, in fact). His initial excitement over O'Keeffe was intellectual -- a mutual friend passed along some of O'Keeffe's early charcoal drawings, which Stieglitz promptly exhibited in his NYC gallery. It was some months before O'Keeffe found out about any of this; her response was to take the train up from South Carolina, where she was (assistant) teaching art, and personally bitch him out for showing her work without her consent (they want us to ask permission -- who knew?).
An epistolary relationship ensued and, erm, flowered. After two years of increasingly impassioned penmanship, she moved to New York City where Stieglitz arranged for a pair of modest suites -- for each to abide, separately, in presumed chastity, while Stieglitz figured out how best to divest himself of "Emmy," his long-suffering wife of 25 years. The ruse was abandoned within weeks and the ensuing genitive hijinx were duly Olympian.
Stieglitz was 52, O'Keeffe 29.
O'Keeffe was not the first woman in her late-20s to turn Stieglitz's head, nor was she to be the last, either. Still, what they had going for them seems to have worked out well for both (give or take a few nervous breakdowns), not just personally but professionally, and they remained married until he died 28 years later. Aside from her considerable chops as painter, O'Keeffe had the gift of Blarney, the absolutely indispensable trait of every successful artist, while Stieglitz took his camera and energetically competed for attention among the international avant garde and their very public avant garde proclivities (e.g., Nude Torso, etc). Attention was paid, with financial success in its wake.
Even an ideal marriage of passion and intellect was not enough to curb Stieglitz's impulse to philander, alas. Faced with her husband's infidelities, O'Keeffe appears to have eventually permitted herself a single fling -- with Stieglitz's one-time mistress Beck Strand. It was what it was (or may-have-been what it may-have-been -- accounts vary). At the end of it all, O'Keeffe opted for a hermetic life in New Mexico, entertaining the occasional arty-type guest, while largely devoting the rest of her life to just doing the work.
And this was the work that finally "reached" me, when I surveyed the O'Keeffe exhibit at the AGO this past weekend.
Black Door With Red, 1954 |
Alongside My Last Door, 1955 |
Of course, family and friends have assured me (unsolicited, I might add) of that which I am already well aware -- they can conjure no lower form of stoopid than to envision me stepping out on my lovely wife in hopes of reinvigorating myself with the affections of a younger woman.
Which leads me to my final thought on the show: Yo, gallerists and curators! These works weren't produced by gods who walked the earth, no matter what their stentorious claims at the time -- they're the byproduct of fallible primates, just like the rest of us, prone to some gobsmacking errors in personal judgement.
So how's about injecting a pinch of sass and irreverence into the "Great Artist" narrative already? Don't you think it's just a little way overdue?
2 comments:
Not as though I have anything to inform anyone reading here of by saying so, but the gallerists & curators who’ve made it undoubtedly owe their slot amid the economic strata to keeping that idea of the godlikeness of the artists — the dead ones particularly — alive. Maybe the best we can say for them is (to borrow a line from another figure notoriously accorded divinity by a perhaps not entirely disinterested class of professional impresarios, critics, & theoreticians in his wake) that they have their reward.
Wal, shore -- give 'em a spot on Olympus and the rubes'll pay anything to see the work. Still, some years back there was a terrific Munch exhibit that included a little down-and-dirty gossip (including an x-ray of the hand that suffered a self-inflicted gunshot, suffered while having a lover's spat) as well as the spacier effects his super-serious work has had on the larger culture (Homer Simpson does The Scream, etc). It didn't take anything away from The Legend -- at least so far as I was concerned.
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