Narrator Amanda Carlin delivers a straightforward performance of this biography of four influential artists of the early twentieth century. The story centers around the established photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and his complicated relationships with the young painters Georgia O’Keefe and Rebecca Salsbury and his protégé photographer, Paul Strand. The artists alternatively inspire, antagonize, and flirt with each other while trying to maintain their own independence. Carlin gives subtle differences in voice to the passages taken from the journals and letters of each artist, although it is sometimes hard to differentiate among them. The years between WWI and WWII were a transformative period in the history of American art, and the lives of these fascinating and pivotal characters make for an absorbing listening experience. J.E.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury
Narrated by Amanda Carlin
Carolyn BurkeUnabridged — 16 hours, 57 minutes
Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury
Narrated by Amanda Carlin
Carolyn BurkeUnabridged — 16 hours, 57 minutes
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Overview
New York, 1921: acclaimed photographer Alfred Stieglitz celebrates the success of his latest exhibition-the centerpiece, a series of nude portraits of his soon-to-be wife, the young Georgia O'Keeffe. The exhibit acts as a turning point for the painter poised to make her entrance into the art scene. There she meets Rebecca Salsbury, the fiancé of Stieglitz's protégé, Paul Strand, marking the start of a bond between the couples that will last more than a decade and reverberate throughout their lives. In the years that followed, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz become the preeminent couple in American modern art, spurring on each other's creativity.* Observing their relationship leads Salsbury to encourage new artistic possibilities for Strand and to rethink her own potential as an artist.
Editorial Reviews
Foursome is a group portrait of three formidable 20th-century American artists—the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe and the photographer Paul Strand—plus one rambunctious cowgirl in search of an identity, Rebecca Salsbury. As they couple and uncouple in this fascinating, well-told history by Carolyn Burke…it becomes clear that the electric center of this group isn't Stieglitz, the impresario, as one might guess, but O'Keeffe, the loner.
12/10/2018
The lives of a quartet of some of the most influential painters and photographers of the early 20th century are chronicled in this intimate and exhaustively researched group biography. Burke (No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf) follows the careers of Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, and Rebecca Salsbury as they made a “ ‘quiet challenge’ to those who refused to see photography as art.” The book opens in 1921 with Stieglitz’s New York City exhibit that contained his works of an unidentified nude that, Burke writes, captured the “creative zest and sexual desire in his portraits.” From there, Burke follows Stieglitz, O’Keeffe, Strand, and Salsbury all over New York City as they held popular exhibits, and, later, to Taos, N.Mex., where they became part of the town’s art scene. The four inspired each other professionally, through mentorship and as photo subjects (O’Keeffe posed for Stieglitz’s early nudes), and romantic relationships between the two couples (Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, Strand and Salsbury) developed: Salsbury once described her connection to Strand by saying, “You... seem to be in my hands, my feet, my breasts, stirring in my womb—and outside me too in everything that is beautiful.” This biography offers detailed insight into one of the most important periods in American art. (Mar.)
"A fabulous read. A wonderful book."—Diane Johnson
"Fascinating ... compelling ... thoroughly researched and capacious."—Wendy Lesser, The Wall Street Journal
"Deeply researched and richly imagined ... Burke focuses on two marriages in a way that amplifies the personal and artistic lives of a quartet of painters and photographers and magnifies their powerful influence on 20th-century art ... ingenious."—The National Book Review
"Expert and enthralling ... illuminates key intimate and historical aspects of the lives of four extraordinarily creative, intrepid, and influential artists to profound effect."—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
"Fascinating, well-told."—Sarah Boxer, The New York Times Book Review
"[A] sharp-eyed group portrait of two artistic couples ... [Burke depicts] in rich detail the complex interactions among four vibrant people during a seminal era in American culture—a task she accomplishes in astute, lucid prose."—Wendy Smith, The Washington Post
"Seasoned biographer Burke ... chronicles the intertwined lives of four 20th-century influencers who propelled American photography and painting through momentous decades ... solidly researched."—Library Journal
"Intimate and exhaustively researched ... offers detailed insight into one of the most important periods in American art."—Publishers Weekly
"A well-researched account of sensual artists."—Kirkus
Narrator Amanda Carlin delivers a straightforward performance of this biography of four influential artists of the early twentieth century. The story centers around the established photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and his complicated relationships with the young painters Georgia O’Keefe and Rebecca Salsbury and his protégé photographer, Paul Strand. The artists alternatively inspire, antagonize, and flirt with each other while trying to maintain their own independence. Carlin gives subtle differences in voice to the passages taken from the journals and letters of each artist, although it is sometimes hard to differentiate among them. The years between WWI and WWII were a transformative period in the history of American art, and the lives of these fascinating and pivotal characters make for an absorbing listening experience. J.E.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
2018-11-07
A biography of two of the 20th century's most famous artist couples, who "prodded, inspired, irritated, and encouraged one another as they grew into modes of relationship that none could have foreseen."
Readers could be forgiven for thinking the world doesn't need another biography of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe. However, Burke (No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, 2011, etc.) distinguishes her book from previous treatments by investigating the dynamic between the more famous couple and the artists who would become their protégés and, for several years in the 1920s and '30s, a couple: Paul Strand, the aspiring young photographer who met Stieglitz upon visiting the legendary 291 studio that Stieglitz opened in New York in 1905; and Rebecca Salsbury, better known as Beck, the well-to-do daughter of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show partner and a woman determined to become an artist, "an act of defiance that would meet with her mother's disapproval." Throughout the book, the author quotes liberally from the trove of surviving letters among the four principals. Yet despite the comprehensiveness of the narrative, it has a faint pulse. The linear story is a laundry list of events in the quartet's lives, but it contains relatively little drama. Emmy, Stieglitz's brewery-heiress first wife, is all but missing from the story. One assumes that their marriage overflowed with friction, especially after Stieglitz began cheating on her with O'Keeffe while also conducting a "risqué correspondence" with Beck, but one doesn't fully get that sense from the narrative. Some readers might prefer to know more about that marriage than about Stieglitz's eye pain or O'Keeffe's swollen legs after a smallpox vaccination. Still, there's enough juicy material here to intrigue readers interested in the private lives of artists—e.g., the revelation that Stieglitz and O'Keeffe had nicknames for one another's private parts ("Miss Fluffy" and the reportedly ironic "Little Fella") and, when the couple were apart, Stieglitz "would often ask after Fluffy's welfare."
A well-researched if surprisingly cool account of sensual artists.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169153910 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 03/05/2019 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Born in Hoboken
1864-1905
"I was born in Hoboken. I am an American,” Stieglitz declared in his Anderson Galleries catalog. In 1921, at a time of renewed patriotism, his German-Jewish origins made him seem doubly foreign. To those who questioned his right to speak for the country, he objected that he was as American as they were.
***
Hoboken, New Jersey, was then a middle-class town, which owed its prosperity to the steamship companies lining its docks. Edward Stieglitz had brought Hedwig Werner, his bride, to reside there in 1862, when so many of their compatriots lived in Hoboken that it was called “Little Germany.” Edward purchased a three-story house with a view of Manhattan soon after Hedwig gave birth to Alfred, their first child, on January 1, 1864.
Born Ephraim Stieglitz in Münden, Germany, Alfred’s father changed his name to Edward when he came to the United States after the 1848 revolution. Within a short time, he became a successful wool merchant and aspired to live like a gentleman. Hedwig never learned English well, but she passed on her love of the arts to her firstborn. Of their six children, Alfred remained his parents’ favorite, even though he believed that he had been displaced by his twin brothers, Julius and Leopold, born when he was three. “[He] would spend the rest of his life,” one biographer writes, “searching for a twin of his own.”
Their house was full of guests, Stieglitz recalled, “musicians, artists, and literary folk, rather than business people. We had many books and pictures. Our dining room in Hoboken was in the basement. . . . I had my hobby horse there and while the men would drink, talk and smoke, I loved to sit on my horse, riding and listening to the conversation.” His parents’ hospitality made a strong impression: “They created an atmosphere in which a certain kind of freedom could exist. This may well account for my seeking a related sense of liberty as I grew up.”
The Stieglitzes moved to Manhattan in 1871, after the birth of their last child. Their brownstone on East Sixtieth Street had modern comforts like steam heat; the sparsely settled terrain near Central Park allowed Alfred the liberty he craved. Edward enrolled him at the nondenominational Charlier Institute for Young Gentlemen, where he was first in his class, despite his refusal to memorize the poems he was assigned in declamation, a talent in which he would always excel. The school emphasized a high-mindedness that was compatible with his father’s rejection of Jewish beliefs in favor of a principled atheism.
Alfred learned as much at home as he did at school. Edward taught him his own hobbies, including billiards, a love of horsemanship, and a knowledge of wines, but he became angry when Alfred failed to satisfy his demands for excellence. Edward stressed ethical probity rather than spiritual training. That the family was Jewish was not discussed. At a time when Reform Judaism appealed to many of their middle-class brethren, the Stieglitz children thought of themselves as “ex-Jews,” members of a small aristocratic tribe presided over by Edward.
Fortunately for her children, Hedwig was a woman of great warmth. She was also an avid reader, particularly of the German romantics—Schiller, Heine, Goethe, whose emphasis on the “living quality” of thought she shared with her son. As a boy, Alfred alternated between bouts of exercise and stints of reading everything from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Goethe’s Faust. When Hedwig asked his opinion of Faust, he replied, “There are two things that attract me in it, Marguerite and the Devil.” (A biographer notes that “in the pure and virtuous Marguerite he saw his mother—and in the clever, cavalier, powerful, and wicked Mephistopheles, his father.”) Alfred was aware of Edward’s nightly trips to visit the chambermaid. Rereading Faust in his teens, he was drawn to Helen of Troy, the Eternal Woman whose aura blended the stirrings of sexual feeling with the wish for unconditional love. He suffered so often from dark moods that family members called him “Little Hamlet.”
Alfred’s melancholy lifted every summer when the Stieglitzes repaired to Lake George, a step deemed necessary for his health and for his father’s avocation, oil painting. They stayed at fashionable watering spots until 1886, when Edward purchased Oaklawn, an imposing Queen Anne house on the ten-mile stretch known as Millionaires’ Row. This gabled mansion became the family compound, and, in time, the antidote to Stieglitz’s life in New York.
He observed years later that he had been uprooted by his father’s decision to take him out of the Charlier school to prepare for a career as an engineer—a profession in which he had no interest. Alfred was accepted by the City College of New York’s engineering program but felt uprooted there, although he did well. In 1881, Edward decided to sell his business and live for a time in Germany, where, he believed, teaching standards were more exacting.
Stieglitz often said that his engineering course at the Berlin Polytechnic had meant little to him. At the time, while these classes did not stir his imagination, the discovery of a photography shop inspired him to learn the new medium. After buying a camera, developing trays, and a manual, he set up shop in his student quarters. Stieglitz believed that he had taken up photography as a free spirit; one might also see in his chosen medium one that avoided competition with his father.
The young man then began to take Hermann Vogel’s Polytechnic classes in photography, where he worked diligently for the next two years, experimenting with the chemistry and optics of the medium—the effects of light on the reactions that take place in the printing process. Alfred soon outstripped Vogel’s expectations, spending weeks printing his photographs of classical images, including a statue of Goethe with the muses of poetry, drama, and science beneath his feet.
Alfred’s Berlin years afforded him an education in living differently from his father. (Ironically, it was Edward’s business sense that produced in his son a fierce opposition to commercialism while providing his modest allowance.) Like his parents, he attended concerts, plays, and the opera, but he also frequented the racetrack and the Bauer Café, which was open day and night. It was the time in his life when he felt most free, with no social obligations and no one to interfere with his calling.
The young man was also free to dream about his feminine ideal. In a journal begun the day after his twentieth birthday, Alfred wrote that his idea of good fortune was to be loved, but that he despaired of finding someone who would do so. Like many twenty-year-olds, he was self-absorbed, moody, and keenly interested in the opposite sex. Although he claimed to have had his first sexual experience that year, it seems likely that his initiation did not take place until he was twenty-five, when he returned to Berlin from New York to show work in an 1889 exhibition timed to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of photography’s invention.
Judging by the photographs Alfred took that summer of a woman named Paula, he was in love with her, even though she was a prostitute. Sun Rays—Paula, Berlin shows his model in a large feathered hat and her hair in a chignon (signs of respectability) as she sits writing at a table (another sign of respect). The light streaming through the blinds casts patterned shadows on the wall; the photographs behind her include Alfred’s self-portrait, a head shot of Paula, and three valentines. This ode to domestic bliss, suggesting a Vermeer interior, symbolized his coming of age. (Stieglitz later said that he had fathered a child by another woman in Munich, to whom he sent an annual allowance.)
By then, Stieglitz was steeped in the geist of bohemian Berlin and the romanticism of German culture. Deeply impressed by Wagner, he believed in the idea of expressing the times through new forms of art. And while Goethe remained his favorite author, he was also reading Byron, Zola, Whitman, and Twain—reminders of his roots, like the American flag he placed above a portrait of his mother in an early photograph entitled My Room.
Yet being American would not have blinded him to the nascent anti-Semitism of the time, when the Christian Socialists made prejudice a plank in their platform and extremists called Jews a national threat. Anti-American sentiments were also freely expressed. After one of his teachers told the class that the recently completed Brooklyn Bridge would soon collapse, Stieglitz stood up for this marvel of Yankee engineering: “It was, after all, my America I was defending.”
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