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Georgia O'Keeffe's Love Letters
Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918 by Alfred Stieglitz (Courtesy of the Whitney)
The steamy correspondence between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz has been kept under seal for 20 years. Judith H. Dobrzynski reveals their epistolary romance. VIEW OUR GALLERY.
When Georgia O’Keeffe met photographer Alfred Stieglitz, sparks flew. O’Keeffe—nearly 24 years his junior—was an unknown, struggling to define her art; Stieglitz owned the famed Gallery 291, a cauldron of avant-garde art. Soon they became storied lovers.
Now we can hear the story in her words: Tucked into the catalogue for Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, a new blockbuster exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, are excerpts from recently unsealed letters—sometimes steamy, always emotional—that O’Keeffe wrote to the man who encouraged, marketed, photographed, married, and cheated on her.
View Our Gallery of O’Keeffe’s Art and Love Letters
The exchange began in January 1916, when O’Keeffe, living in South Carolina, learned that a friend had sent her drawings to Stieglitz. At first, she sought his advice. Soon she was verbally flirting with him, and in June 1918, she moved from Texas to New York to be with him, though he was married. That summer, Stieglitz began shooting the shockingly frank nude photographs of O’Keeffe that made her famous, but led critics to see eroticism in her works where, she said, she had not intended it.
The couple married in 1924—and the correspondence dropped off until 1929, when O’Keeffe began spending summers in New Mexico, seeking new artistic horizons and alleviating marital tensions. When O’Keeffe died in 1986, she left the letters, under seal for 20 years, to Yale, where Sasha Nicholas, a curatorial assistant at the Whitney, combed them for excerpts. They are published for the first time in the catalogue and, in part, here. All misspellings and mistakes in punctuation are O’Keeffe’s own.
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Judith H. Dobrzynski, formerly a reporter and a senior editor at The New York Times and at BusinessWeek, as well as a senior executive at CNBC, is a writer based in New York. She blogs about the arts at www.artsjournal.com/realcleararts.
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The life of Georgia O'Keefe is on Lifetime. I very much enjoyed it. Her work is so beautiful. It is truly inspiration for an artist.
I actually visited the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu last month, along with the O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe. So of course I am now a complete expert!! I'd lived in New Mexico years ago, but never read her biography until this year. Quite a lady! I felt the Lifetime movie was a little flat, however...can't say why, but maybe because the real locations/paintings were so fresh in my mind, the tv version seemed bland. Wish I could get to the Whitney for this exhibit.
I've never been a fan of O'Keeffe's work and you can't get away from her legacy here in New Mexico. There are so many talented artists in this state that get overlooked because of the fixation on her, but then that could be said of all famous artists versus aspiring ones.
I taught next door to a lady that had been her assistant. Unfortunately she refused to discuss her former employer.
pmprescott: yeah, she's sort of the NM mascot, but think of it this way-- a lot of people will come seeking her and end up discovering other artists they might not have ever encountered. Re: your next door lady--I suspect Georgia was a nasty old cuss and she's just too polite to dish. But damn...those flowers!
Thank you.
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