Alfred Stieglitz 1864-1946

The photographer to Georgia O'Keeffe, 1919

Doris Bry, New York, acquired from the above

Houk Friedman Gallery, New York

Acquired by the present owners from the above, 1995

Another print of this image:

Greenough 506

In Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs, Sarah Greenough locates only one other print of this image, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Stieglitz’s extensive series of pictures of Georgia O’Keeffe was begun soon after the two became lovers, in 1917.  Over the next two decades, in dozens of sittings, this famous ‘composite portrait’ of one woman recorded not only her face, her hands, and her torso, but also her moods and multifaceted personality.  When O’Keeffe was first photographed by Stieglitz, she was twenty-nine years old, an obscure artist teaching in West Texas.  By 1937, hundreds of Stieglitz photographs later, she was a woman approaching fifty, and had fully settled into her persona. 

The image offered here is one of several made in 1918, in which O’Keeffe poses on a radiator with a gauzily-curtained window as a backdrop (cf. Greenough 505-513).  Taken one year into their relationship, this study shows Stieglitz’s concentration on O’Keeffe’s sensuality.  While earlier studies had focused solely upon O’Keeffe’s face or upper torso, this image represents one of the first in the series in which Stieglitz included her whole body in a full-length pose within the frame.