Georgia O'Keeffe and photography: Her formative years, 1915-1930. (Volumes I and II)

Georgia O'Keeffe's close personal and artistic relationship with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and her swift absorption into the photographic culture of his "291" gallery, contributed significantly to the formation of her mature style. Stieglitz's greatest photography (including the cloud Equivalents) was also profoundly influenced by O'Keeffe. A major factor in this exceptionally creative symbiosis was the little known fact that these two artists already shared a common aesthetic and moral value system before they knew each other: Symbolism; Art Nouveau (Jugendstil); Arthur Wesley Dow's theories of composition; and the writings of Kandinsky and Picabia.;Evidence from her paintings, from photographs, and from letters written by the two artists, and others, during the late 'teens and 1920's, shows that O'Keeffe's multiple borrowings from photography were for the purposes of abstraction and expression, rather than verisimilitude. Her most consistent uses of camera work can be said to fall into three general categories; the adoptive, the adaptive and the innovative. O'Keeffe's earliest micro-views of flowers and leaves, which began as early as 1919, were inspired, in good part, by the close-up photographs Stieglitz was then taking of her face and body parts. By the mid-1920's, she would come to use a wide range of characteristics from the whole photographic process, as her country and city images from this period amply demonstrate.;Although Stieglitz's photography and ideas were the most powerful sources for O'Keeffe's art during the 'twenties, her paintings also contain many formal references to the photography of some of his closest colleagues; Baron de Meyer, A. L. Coburn, Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler and Edward Steichen.;Photography's high intensity of feeling combined with its emotional detachment was well suited to O'Keeffe's reticent sensibility. And the unique synthesis of abstraction and objectivity (photography) that she made helped to propel--and fulfill--Stieglitz's long-range "291" goal to establish a new American art rooted in American experience.