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"ART IS A WICKED THING. IT IS WHAT WE ARE"
by Benita Eisler
Doubleday, 1991
Excerpt from a Wash. Blade review,
by Loraine Hutchins
She was a poor midwestern farm girl who rose to become the first woman
artist awarded one-woman shows by major museums. She liked to close the door
to her studio, take off her clothes, and get down on her knees on the floor.
She'd sketch out broad strokes on paper that became lush, womb-like flowers
and stark desertscapes, limned from memory. He was a New Yorker born to wealth,
an artists' patron, one of America's first great photographers. When her
friend first visited his gallery to show him O'Keeffe's charcoal drawings
he exclaimed, "Finally a woman on paper!" Thus the relationship between
this married, middle-aged man and this woman young enough to be his daughter
began. Their artistic, professional and personal relationship lasted til
his death. She survived him by 40 years. They both also had relationships
with others; he with women, she with both women and men. At least once they
were lovers with the same woman. This woman, Rebecca Strand -- wife of the
famous photographer Paul Strand and an artist in her own right-- was friends
and lovers with O'Keeffe for many years. Their relationship lasted beyond
both marriages. The fascinating and intricate story of these two couples'
relations (each was also attracted to the other's spouse) and much more,
is told in Benita Eisler's new double biography: O'Keeffe and Stieglitz:
An American Romance.
...
Most exciting and validating for gay and bisexual people is the new
account Eisler offers of how one of America's beloved icons loved her own
sex. She was not a paragon of virtue in how she loved them, but love them
she did. She also had at least one lesbian sister, Claudia, who lived with
a Beverly Hills real estate woman for thirty years.
Georgia often fell in love with couples, same sex ones or mixed. One of
her crushes was on Margery Latimer and Blanche Matthias. Latimer was in New
York writing a novel and Matthias had repeatedly urged Stieglitz to introduce
her to his wife. They ended up becoming great friends, going out to all-night
bohemian parties like those thrown by Carl Van Vechten and his actress wife
Fania Marinoff, where the host "often made his appearance in drag." As Eisler
says, "Whether she functioned as audience, player, or director..." in her
relations with each couple, "probably depended on the couple."
In New York there was the heady artists' world of famous collectors like
Eugene and Agnes Myer and Duncan Philips and galleries and salons exhibiting
the work of her contemporaries Rodin, Picasso, Matisse, and Gertrude Stein.
But out west was where real freedom reigned.
According to Eisler many professional, wealthy and independent women
(ethnologists, archaelogists, anthropologists, artists) moved west at that
time. They wore men's clothing, rode horses and hiked alone. When O'Keeffe
and Strand moved there they bought a Model A Ford together which O'Keeffe
later made into a mobile desert studio by removing the back seat and putting
an easel there....