New York author Benita Eisler posed sportingly in front of several of Georgia O`Keeffe paintings on a recent trip to Chicago to promote her tell-all dual biography, ”O`Keeffe & Stieglitz: An American Romance” (Doubleday, $29.50).
The chatty, witty Eisler dubbed one of her least favorite O`Keeffe`s
”the Chiclets painting,” for its mosaic of soft-edged white rectangles. Formally titled ”Sky Above Clouds,” the mural-sized painting commands a brightly lit foyer at the Art Institute of Chicago where Eisler discussed her provocative biography.
”If you`re not telling all, why aren`t you? Why do a book if you`re not prepared to find all and tell all?” she says.
Certainly she followed her own advice in her unflinching but highly readable approach to some of the less-than-visionary aspects of two visionary artists-he the godfather of modern art in America and she arguably the most famous woman artist the country has produced.
Eisler starts out by confirming the romantic scene in which Alfred Stieglitz, presented with O`Keeffe`s drawings for the first time in 1916, comments, ”Finally a woman on paper!” and proceeds to fall in love with her and her work. She was 28, he was 52 and holding court at his legendary 291 gallery in New York.
Their relationship endured for 30 years until Stieglitz`s death in 1946. But the romance went downhill shortly after their marriage in 1924 and Eisler is the first to caution that the subtitle of her book is ironic. She certainly doesn`t romanticize the passion and pain of both lives as she exhaustively documents them.
What Eisler profiles is a relationship between two giants that was anchored in the successful business partnership of promoting O`Keeffe but buffeted by enough love affairs on both sides to make the daytime soap stars blush.
Such details don`t change the influence of O`Keeffe, who gave a popular face to avant garde art, or Stieglitz, who helped pioneer contemporary photography and gave the first solo shows in America to artists such as Henri Matisse and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Still, Eisler makes some startling character revelations despite the well-worn paths of past research surrounding her hero and heroine. She goes on the record with O`Keeffe`s bisexuality in print for the first time, and reports evidence that Stieglitz, with O`Keeffe`s collusion, fabricated a record sale of her work to boost her prices.
Eisler`s documentation consistently was aided by a circle of compulsive letter writers, none more prolific than Stieglitz himself.
Rebecca Strand, the first wife of the trailblazing modern photographer Paul Strand, wrote her husband daily letters during the summer of 1929 that she and O`Keeffe spent in New Mexico, later to become O`Keeffe`s permanent home.
”To my astonishment, these daily letters detailed the course of her affair with O`Keeffe,” Eisler says.
This relationship and O`Keeffe`s other attachments with women had been known for years, Eisler says. ”It was not a tellable story during O`Keeffe`s lifetime. She would have extracted the most implacable revenge.” But even authors writing about O`Keeffe after her death in 1986 remained silent on the point.
As for the price setting, Eisler calls it a hoax and says she happened upon the story in Matthew J. Bruccoli`s 1986 biography of publisher Mitchell Kennerley.
”Stieglitz let it out that about six of the `Lilies` paintings were about to leave the country for the record sale of $25,000. There was no buyer, there was never a cent exchanged,” she says. She maintains Kennerley took the paintings on consignment at a point when he needed money with the hope of selling them to his wealthy mistress but the sale never materialized.
Eisler also unearthed a folder of drafts of letters Stieglitz had written to his first wife, Emmeline, their daughter Kitty and Emmeline`s brother. O`Keeffe had found them after Stieglitz`s death and placed them in the Beinecke Library of Yale University, to be opened in 1968 or five years after her death, whichever came later.
In the book, Eisler summarizes the letters to Kitty as a promise: ”He will give her the love she has never received from him if she will repudiate her mother and accept Georgia as her friend.”
Eisler says the letters confirmed in her mind the other documentation of Stieglitz as an immensely creative artist with an obsessive drive to control people.
She reaffirms that O`Keeffe was herself a victim of Stieglitz` cruelty and manipulation. This ranged from the humiliating public comparison between her and his young mistress in a 1932 exhibition that included photographs he had taken of each of them, to outrage over any perceived loss of control of her work. He raged even at the prospect of her 1946 retrospective at the New York`s Museum of Modern Art.
”She would never forget all she owed him: his effort on behalf of her career, the constant example of his genius as an artist, his humility in the exercise of work. For these gifts, she had forgiven much,” Eisler writes in the book.
Eisler says she first became fascinated with Stieglitz after reading an undergraduate thesis written years ago by her husband Colin Eisler.
”What attracted me to the couple is that the relationship was more than the sum of their parts. They were so evenly matched in ambition, force of character and mutual self-promotion. There was so much invested in the couple that it made a whole other story, particularly in its less-lovely aspects of the way in which he marketed her and the way in which she colluded in the repackaging and reinvention of herself,” says Eisler.
”I don`t know why there`s such a vested interest in the purified version of O`Keeffe. It`s so boring and she was such a fascinating woman,” Eisler says. But she gives Stieglitz credit as the greater artist.
