Photographs by Alfred Stieglitz: A Gift from The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation

May 02, 2003 - January 25, 2004

The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation has honored the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum with an extraordinary gift of 24 photographs by Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), the internationally known photographer and America's earliest champion of modern art.

Stieglitz's career began in the 1880s, and over the next fifty years, he distinguished himself many times over not only for his extraordinary accomplishments as a photographer, but also for his successful advocacy of photography as a fine art as well as of modern art. Ultimately, Stieglitz concentrated on promoting the work produced by a handful of American artists.

As a New Yorker, Stieglitz was concerned with the forms and energies of the modern city, which he explored again and again in photographs dating from the 1890s through the mid-1930s. He was equally fascinated by the shapes and forces of the natural world, as is evident in the hundreds of photographs he made around Lake George, where he usually spent summer and fall at his family's upstate residence. It was at Lake George in the early 1920s that Stieglitz began his remarkable series of cloud photographs, titled "Equivalents," which realized his idea that visual, objective records of reality could express subjective feelings.

His portraits of family and friends, however, are among his most insightful and provocative works — particularly his more than 300 photographs of O'Keeffe, which he made between the late 1910s and the late 1930s and considered components of a single portrait. In addition to being one of his most constant photographic subjects, O'Keeffe (who became his wife in 1924) was among the artists whose work he assiduously and successfully promoted.

The Foundation's gift to the Museum represents various aspects of Stieglitz's outstanding achievement. There are 12 photographs of O'Keeffe that range in date from 1917, the year he began photographing her, to 1935, two years before failing health forced him into retirement. Several of these depict O'Keeffe with examples of her art that are now part of the Museum's collection. Moreover, the gift includes photographs of New York buildings, the trees and architecture of Lake George, and six prints from Stieglitz's celebrated "Equivalents" series.

We were indeed pleased to present these extremely beautiful and rarely seen Stieglitz photographs along with several that have been graciously loaned to the Museum by docent, friend, and patron, Joy Weber. We are deeply grateful to Joy and want to offer our very special thanks and appreciation to the Foundation as well for its thoughtfulness and generosity.