Two Lives, Georgia O'Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs

HarperCollins Publishers/Callaway Editions in association with the Phillips Collection, New York and Washington D.C., 1992. Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Prior owner's blind stamp initials at bottom of title page. 1st. 143 pp., illus. (some col.); 28 cm. Exhibition held at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., December 12, 1992 to April 4, 1993 and at three other museums. Firm binding, clean inside copy. Wraps lightly soiled. OVERSIZE! No priority/international, except by special arrangement. "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. Photography historian Belinda Rathbone, the author of a forthcoming biography of the American photographer Walker Evans, looks at the couple's life together from the perspective of Stieglitz who, at the age of fifty-two, was thoroughly rejuvenated when Georgia entered his life. Art historian Elizabeth Hutton Turner examines the relationship from O'Keeffe's point of view. She portrays how a gifted but inexperienced artist came into Stieglitz's world at the age of twenty-nine and in a short space of time evolved from apprentice to collaborator and finally to a leading artist in her own right. As Associate Curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., Dr. Turner organized the traveling exhibition that accompanies this book. Two Lives reproduces the work of both artists with the stunning quality and fidelity for which Callaway books are known. Together, the reproductions and the three essays form a unique account of two lives and two artists." - Publisher. Size: 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall. Exhibition Catalogue. Also includes brochure from The IBM Gallery of Science and Art in NYC.…