Two lives

HarperCollins

1992

143 pages

Includes bibliographical references and index

978-0943044170

The great American thing / Roger Shattuck -- Like nature itself / Belinda Rathbone -- "I can't sing so I paint" / Elizabeth Hutton Turner

In 1918 Alfred Stieglitz, then a world-famous photographer and the champion of modern art in America, asked an art teacher from Texas named Georgia O'Keeffe to come and live for a year in New York. She agreed, and thus began one of the great artistic partnerships in American history." "Two Lives: Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz explores in pictures and in words the dialogue that inspired and united both artists. Under its influence, each created, in O'Keeffe's own words, a body of "clear and bright and wonderful work." Despite frequent physical separation, this same conversation of paintings and photographs joined them spiritually until the end, when Stieglitz died in 1946." "The art that was made during this creative alliance is captured in a sequence of images that covers its evolution from 1916, when the painter first sent her drawings to 291, Stieglitz's famous gallery, until the early 1930s when O'Keeffe grew tired of New York and turned to New Mexico for fresh inspiration. Arranged in pairs of a Stieglitz photograph and an O'Keeffe painting, many images bring out striking similarities of form, style, and subject matter. Others hint at a deeper level of emotional and poetic complicity. Seventy-four large reproductions lead one towards the unverbalized core of a singular aesthetic and personal adventure." "The purely visual evidence of two lives spent together is accompanied by essays written by three distinguished scholars. Well-known writer and teacher Roger Shattuck, author of The Banquet Years, opens his account of this adventure with a fable that captures the emotional and imaginative bonds that unite two people, Carl and Miranda, alias Alfred and Georgia. In his essay, he goes on to examine the questions of influence and of inspiration by putting both into the larger context of artistic collaboration, which has often been a feature of both art and literature

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