Foursome by Carolyn Burke
Alfred Stieglitz by Phyllis Rose

By Wendy Lesser, Wall Street Journal
April 5, 2019

Spring brings us not one but two new books focusing on the enormous achievements and remarkable personality of Alfred Stieglitz. Given their different aims, both books can profitably and pleasurably be read side by side, and certainly Stieglitz deserves this degree of attention, in this or any other season. Born in Hoboken in 1864 and active up to the end (he died, in 1946, at age 82), Stieglitz almost singlehandedly changed the American view of photography by presenting it for the first time as a fine art rather than a mechanical craft. He was a master photographer himself, and is revered by many viewers, critics and curators as one of the greatest early practitioners in the field. But his interests were not limited to photography. In his small, idiosyncratically run New York galleries, beginning in 1905 with the famous 291 (named for its address on Fifth Avenue), he introduced the American public to works on paper by European artists like Matisse and Rodin. He also fostered and developed a whole school of modern American artists, including John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand and, not least, his soulmate and eventual wife, Georgia O’Keeffe.

His personal life was admittedly irregular, but of how many artists is that not true? Stieglitz spent his teenage years and early 20s in Germany, to which his father (a well-to-do German-Jewish immigrant) had transplanted the entire family for a few years in order to further his children’s education. The young Alfred, who studied first engineering and then photography at the Berlin Polytechnic, went on to live the life of a Bohemian artist, complete with a fetching German lover (possibly a prostitute) whom he immortalized in a compelling early photo titled “Sun Rays—Paula.” Upon his return to America, he was set up in business, unsuccessfully, by his father. He solved his financial problems by marrying an heiress, Emmy Obermeyer, a marriage that was never satisfying in personal terms (it apparently took them a good four years to consummate it) but that gave Stieglitz the wherewithal to indulge his aesthetic side. Meanwhile, he continued to have a sure eye for the ladies, including their artistic talent as well as their physical attractiveness. But it does not seem that he indulged in any actual love affair until he met Georgia O’Keeffe, when he was in his 50s and she was not yet 30.

His relationship with the budding Midwestern-born painter O’Keeffe—whom he encouraged in a series of long letters when they were in distant parts of the country, whose work he then promoted vigorously at his gallery, whose body he chronicled in a vast series of nude portraits, and whom he eventually married after Emmy finally gave him a divorce—was so central to his life that most biographies of him are actually dual biographies of the couple. Carolyn Burke, in “Foursome,” goes one step further and makes her book a chronicle of the relationship among Stieglitz, O’Keeffe and two younger artists, Paul Strand and his wife, Rebecca Salsbury. This is a fascinating subject, and Ms. Burke does it complete justice, following each member of the foursome from the initial encounter with the others to their separate (and in some cases separated) deaths. That all four had unusual ideas about sexuality and honesty, as well as about creativity and art, makes for a compelling story.

Alfred Stieglitz first met Paul Strand in 1915, when the younger photographer came into 291 to show Stieglitz some of his work, as many emerging artists did in those days. In fact, 291—like Stieglitz’s later galleries—was more a salon than a showroom, offering its proprietor a chance to expound his favorite subjects all day long to whomever would listen. Strand soon became a staunch follower, and it is quite likely that his own evolving photographic practice—his close-ups of inanimate objects, his feeling for textures and shapes, and the depth and richness of his black-and-white prints—in turn influenced Stieglitz. At around the time Stieglitz was getting to know Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe also entered his life—first in the form of watercolors, which were shown to Alfred by a friend of hers, then in a long series of letters, and finally in person. When O’Keeffe at last showed up at the gallery in 1917, to meet Stieglitz and see the works of hers he had hung there, she also met Paul Strand; and when she returned to her job as a schoolteacher in Canyon, Texas, she began passionately corresponding with both men. Stieglitz knew nothing about the O’Keeffe/Strand letters, apparently, so it was Strand he sent out to fetch her back to New York when her health deteriorated alarmingly. According to Ms. Burke, O’Keeffe remained a virgin until she went to bed with Stieglitz on August 9, 1918 (a date the couple celebrated ever after as “Virginity Day”), but her relationship with Strand was and remained inflected with some kind of sexual charge.

The fourth member of the quartet, Rebecca Salsbury, entered the circle as Strand’s lover and then wife. The half-Jewish daughter of an American show-biz manager, Nate Salsbury, who was known for promoting Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, Rebecca—or Beck, as she came to be called—was perhaps the most temperamentally adventurous member of the group. At the beginning she was more of a helpmeet and supporter than an artist herself, and though she eventually came to produce a number of “reverse paintings on glass” (her chosen form, and an oddity even then), she never achieved the artistic level of the other three. But she was, in a way, the glue that held them together. Younger and a bit prettier than O’Keeffe, but sharing much the same rangy, boyish quality, she took over from Stieglitz’s wife the job of acting as his nude model. In picture after picture shot at the Stieglitz summer compound at Lake George, N.Y., Salsbury’s glowing face, nude breasts, and water-drenched flanks and buttocks come forth joyfully in a way that O’Keeffe’s more spiky and recessive portraits often don’t. Phyllis Rose, in “Alfred Stieglitz,” her entry in the Yale Jewish Lives series, amusingly quotes Geoff Dyer’s witty observation about the two different Stieglitz series of naked women: “Stieglitz is not the only great photographer to have made erotically charged pictures of his wife but he is, perhaps, the only great photographer to have made erotically charged photographs of another great photographer’s wife.”

Wit and cleverness are among Ms. Rose’s own fortes, and they make her slender book a delight to read. To go from Ms. Burke’s thoroughly researched and capacious volume to Ms. Rose’s relatively snappy tour through the highlights of Stieglitz’s life is like stepping off a gigantic ocean liner on which one rarely spots the captain and setting foot on a small, luxurious yacht where the genial host serves up cocktails and animated conversation every afternoon. Ms. Burke lets her characters do most of the talking, through their letters, diaries and reported speech; and if Strand comes across in her book as the least tangible of the foursome, it may be because many of his letters have been lost. Ms. Rose, in contrast, controls the narrative from the very beginning, entering in as a first-person voice as early as the prologue (“I want others to appreciate him [Stieglitz], as I do, for his versatility and also for the rarity and the depth of that versatility”) and championing her subject throughout.

One of the best forms her advocacy takes lies in her astute and careful analyses of specific pictures. Ms. Rose has clearly learned a great deal about the technical side of photography in preparation for writing this book, and she gives us the benefit of this knowledge. But even more important are her precise, descriptive accounts of what makes each Stieglitz photo especially notable. She uses both “The Steerage” (from 1907) and “Sun Rays—Paula” (from 1889) to discuss his intense awareness of geometric form, but she also compares the former to a Rembrandt and the latter to a Vermeer as a way of exploring their content. Giving us two different versions of “Winter—Fifth Avenue,” which was shot during a blizzard in 1893 but printed and then reprinted only years later, she shows us how Stieglitz used cropping to emphasize the structural and atmospheric qualities of the picture. If other artists and photographers get relatively short shrift by comparison, it is because Ms. Rose is focusing the whole of her intense beam on Alfred Stieglitz. Even O’Keeffe, whom she thinks might have been the greater artist of the two (an opinion with which I, for one, vehemently differ), comes in for significantly less attention.

Given the publishing series in which she appears, it is natural that Ms. Rose should spend more time than Ms. Burke focused on Stieglitz’s Jewishness. He was raised in an agnostic and assimilated family, so the religious influence of Judaism on his work is virtually non-existent. But that anti-Semitism was a factor in his life is undeniable. As late as 1935, an obnoxious art critic (named, as if by Dickens, Thomas Craven) called him “a Hoboken Jew without knowledge or interest in the historical American background”—a statement that, at that particular moment, was both demonstrably untrue and dangerously allied with what was going on overseas. The fascist overtones were instantly picked up on by Stuart Davis, who, in defending Stieglitz from the attacks of Craven, Thomas Hart Benton, John Gould Fletcher and other reactionaries, pointed out how closely their remarks resembled Nazi ideas about degenerate art. Phyllis Rose uses this teapot-sized art-world battle as an occasion to voice some larger and still-pertinent questions, such as “Who was to control the story of American identity? Who was to decide which people were central and which outliers? Was America the land of the Puritans or a country of immigrants?”

Very occasionally, Ms. Rose’s desire to make her story relevant to today’s readers misfires. For instance, it is jarring when she says of the efforts to promote O’Keeffe as a “free, modern, unrepressed” woman: “She became a Kardashian of her day, the star of a reality show called the love affair of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe.” Well, no. But such slips are infrequent in this extraordinarily well-written book. More common—not only in Ms. Rose but in Ms. Burke as well—is that prime pitfall of the biographer, the attempt to take a guess at what was going on behind the evidence. “Probably,” “perhaps,” “may have” and “it seems likely to me” signal the moments when Ms. Rose is about to go off the proven trail and hazard a flimsy assertion. In Ms. Burke’s case, the warning phrase is more likely to be “one wonders” or “one can imagine.” Since both writers are experienced biographers, I was a bit surprised at the extent to which each yielded to this kind of temptation—but then, as a biographer myself, I know exactly how tempting it can be. The written and spoken record never adequately penetrates such complicated life-stories, and in telling them, one always longs for the freedom of a novelist.

Oh, and just one more thing: Can we please dispense with the contemptuous word “mistress” entirely, now that we have reached the 21st century and do not believe that anyone in a love relationship is the master? Both Ms. Burke and Ms. Rose use it sparingly, and almost never to describe Georgia O’Keeffe, but they do use it on Stieglitz’s pathetic Paula and his annoying Dorothy Norman as well as on Stanford White’sEvelyn Nesbit Thaw, and in at least one instance Ms. Burke applies it to O’Keeffe herself. Can’t we all agree to adopt the ungendered, non-pejorative word “lover,” which works just as well?

—Ms. Lesser is the author, most recently, of two biographies, “You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn” and “Jerome Robbins: A Life in Dance.” She edits the arts quarterly the Threepenny Review.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/foursome-and-alfred-stieglist-review-the-intimate-gallerist-11554476394