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Indepth Arts News:
"Focus Exhibition on Works: Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe"
2005-03-26 until 2005-06-12
Amon Carter Museum
Fort Worth, TX,
USA
the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth presents Stieglitz and O’Keeffe at Lake George, a small exhibition consisting of two paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) and nine photographs by Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), four of which are recent museum acquisitions. This installation focuses on a period during the 1920s when these two towering figures of American art experienced their most fruitful artistic collaboration. All of the Stieglitz photographs and O’Keeffe’s White Birch (oil on canvas, 1925) are from the Carter’s permanent collection. O’Keeffe’s Storm Cloud, Lake George (oil on canvas, 1923) is on loan from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M. The visual dialogue created by this group of artworks conveys the couple’s rich intellectual and emotional partnership.
“The confluence of their personal and professional lives at Lake George held momentous ramifications for both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, resulting in some of their most affecting work,” said Jane Myers, senior curator of prints and drawings. “Displaying a few key works by each artist yields surprising and provocative insights into their artistic temperaments.”
The artists’ common vocabulary was informed by Lake George, a summer resort nestled in the foothills of New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Beginning in 1918, at the commencement of their relationship (they were married in 1924), and concluding in 1929, when O’Keeffe began spending part of each year in New Mexico, the couple traveled to Lake George annually to spend the summer and fall seasons at the Stieglitz family estate. The close relationship between painter and photographer transformed the work of both artists as they probed their responses to the region’s natural beauty.
Having already secured his legacy through his promotion of photography and European modernism, Stieglitz absorbed O’Keeffe’s distinctive style, enabling him for the first time to merge his own photographic work with innovations of the modernism he championed. Twenty-five years Stieglitz’s junior and just attaining her artistic stride, the more introspective O’Keeffe took from the language of photography such visual aesthetics as framing and depth of field.
Eventually, personal tensions came between the two, but still their seasons at Lake George were punctuated by extraordinary glimmers of creative and emotional collaboration.
This exhibition is on view through June 12. Admission is free.
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