Alfred Stieglitz 1864-1946

The photographer to Georgia O'Keeffe

Doris Bry, New York, as agent

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the above, 1976

Other prints of this image:

Greenough 478 and 479

Waldo Frank et al., America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait (New York, 1934), pl. XXIII-A

Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York, 1973), pl. XXXIV; Aperture edition, p. 121 

William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the American Avant-Garde (Boston, 1977), pl. 114

Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O'Keeffe, A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997, second edition), pl. 52

Keith Davis, An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital: The Hallmark Photographic Collection (Kansas City, 1999, second edition), pl. 180

In 1928, Alfred Stieglitz selected a group of 22 photographs that he felt were his best and most representative images to donate to The Metropolitan Museum of Art; these were the first photographs acquired by the Museum as art.  Of the many studies of Georgia O’Keeffe that Stieglitz had made up to that point, he chose 7 of these for the gift, including a print of the image offered here.  

Stieglitz gave Georgia O’Keeffe her first solo exhibition in 1917.  Special #15, the charcoal drawing seen in the photograph offered here, was included in this show at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, and was one of a series of charcoals inspired by O’Keeffe’s visits to Palo Duro Canyon, in Texas.  It is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

In 1916, while working as a teacher at Columbia College in South Carolina, O’Keeffe sent a group of charcoal drawings to Anita Pollitzer in New York City.  Pollitzer, a friend and former classmate from O’Keeffe’s time at Columbia Teachers College in New York, was a frequent visitor at 291 and was acquainted with Stieglitz.  Pollitzer was impressed by the drawings and showed them to Stieglitz, who found them truly original and wholly absorbing.  It was through these drawings that Stieglitz first became acquainted with O’Keeffe, and the two began a correspondence.  In 1916, without asking O’Keeffe’s permission, Stieglitz mounted an exhibition of these drawings along with those of Charles Duncan and René Lafferty.  The critical response was tentative, but positive.  In April of 1917, Stieglitz offered O’Keeffe her first solo exhibition, in which Special #15 was included.   

Special #15 serves as the background for a number Stieglitz’s portrait and figure studies of O’Keeffe (cf. Greenough 471-482, 494-498).  It is interesting to note that Stieglitz’s earliest photographs of O’Keeffe, made in 1917, show the artist in front of her work.  These images focus primarily on O’Keeffe’s face and/or her hands, and show Stieglitz’s fascination with both her work and her person. 

Doris Bry, who was directly responsible for organizing the Stieglitz gifts to the National Gallery of Art and elsewhere, notes that the print offered here was described by Georgia O’Keeffe as a ‘black palladium’ or ‘black palladiotype’ print.  According to Bry, this terminology referred to prints that were characterized by strong, neutral dark tones, and were distinct in their appearance from tonally-softer platinum prints and warmer-toned palladium prints.  Recent examination has determined that the print offered here contains both platinum and palladium metals. 

In Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs, Sarah Greenough locates in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., a platinum print (Greenough 478) and a palladium print (Greenough 479) made from this negative (OK 15 A).  In addition to these, there are 5 other prints of the image extant, comprising a platinum-palladium print at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; a platinum print at the Hallmark Photographic Collection, Kansas City; a ‘black palladiotype’ (likely a platinum-palladium print) at The Art Institute of Chicago; a gelatin silver print formerly in the collection of Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc., San Francisco, now in a private collection, and another print in a private collection.