Review by Choice Review
A practical, thorough biographer, Burke brings new understanding of well-known early-20th-century luminaries Stieglitz, O'Keeffe, and Strand by adding the perspective of the much less known artist and writer Rebecca Salsbury (who was married to Strand for a decade). Drawing on compelling letters written between the two couples--who were enamored with, and loyal to, each other--Burke provides an in-depth account of "mercurial ties" between these talented and driven artist-celebrities. New York City is the pivot point for shared experiences as art makers and art promoters. Months in Maine, Vermont, Lake George, and abroad were ballasted by the inevitable return to Manhattan, where flirtation and admiration were common. The short chapters and chronological organization of Foursome allow readers to skip around without upsetting the narrative, which reveals the period from 1921 through 1934 as it was for artists commonly referred to as the Stieglitz Circle. Of the 18 color reproductions, 6 are Salsbury's surrealistic paintings. These are particularly welcome, and they are refreshing alongside celebrated works by O'Keeffe. Burke concludes with a section titled "Aftermath," in which she discusses each of the four as an individual elder artist but reveals them all as still touched by a shared love for each other and belief in the power of visual art. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Margaret Rose Vendryes, York College, City University of New York
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Born in 1864 to German Jewish parents who soon moved the family from Hoboken, N. J., to Manhattan, Stieglitz was called "Little Hamlet," because of his brooding. Goethe was a favorite author. During a family sojourn in Germany in the 1880s, Alfred got a camera and learned photography. He returned to New York with a love of bohemian culture and an antipathy toward Kodak and what it stood for - the idea that photography is a simple hobby anyone can pick up. His mission became to put the medium on an equal plane with painting. His financial backing came from the family of his wife, Emmy Obermeyer, a brewer's daughter, with whom he had a loveless marriage. Stieglitz's great pictures of New York, heavy with symbolism - "The Terminal," "The Hand of Man," "The City of Ambition" - marked him as an important photographer, but his gallery made him a cultural force. He opened it at 291 Fifth Avenue in 1905, eight years before the Armory Show that's usually cited as the introduction of modern art to the United States. The aim of Stieglitz's gallery, known simply as 291, was to import art by the likes of Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse and to establish a homegrown modernism by showing and nurturing painters (Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Max Weber, Arthur Dove and O'Keeffe) and serious photographers (including David Octavius Hill, Edward Steichen and Gertrude Käsebier). The first of the foursome to meet Stieglitz was Strand, who was also raised in New York by German Jewish parents. The maker of such great photos as "Blind Woman" and "Wall Street," Strand comes across in Burke's account (which is based largely on recently available correspondence among the foursome) as a humorless, hapless, heavy-handed zero. As a student visiting 291, he quickly fell under Stieglitz's spell. At first the feeling was mutual. Stieglitz saw in Strand a possible son. Although he criticized Strand's early photographs, describing one as an "agreeable blur" in which "grass looks like water," he gave Strand a show in 1916. But Stieglitz's praise of Strand grew fainter until he was eventually left to fend for himself. Why the cooling? As Strand matured he embraced a social and documentary role for photography that was at odds with Stieglitz's modernist aims. (This rift reflected a general split among artists that widened during the Depression.) But something else about the young Strand bugged the not-so-young Stieglitz. And this something, Burke suggests, was virility; Stieglitz knew it was Strand who initially caught O'Keeffe's fancy. A farm girl from Wisconsin born in 1887, O'Keeffe first visited 291 in 1908 to see its newest sensation, or "howler" - a show of Rodin's nude drawings. She derided them as scribbles, but the arguments she overheard about them drew her in: "There wasn't any place in New York where anything like this was shown." Although she kept coming back, she didn't meet Stieglitz until years later. A friend of hers had sent him some of the abstract charcoals that O'Keeffe termed her "Specials." Stieglitz was bowled over. He hung them - without her permission - calling them "the purest, finest, sincerest things," and declaring them emblems of "Woman unafraid." O'Keeffe, unafraid indeed, stormed in, saying he had no right to hang them. He replied: "You have no more right to withhold those pictures ... than to withdraw a child from the world." Soon he was taking photographs of her with her work. So started one of the most charged relationships of modern art. Eventually, the letters and photos got quite steamy and so did the correspondence between O'Keefe and Stieglitz (in which O'Keeffe is strikingly funny and forward). But first came O'Keeffe's crush on Strand. As Burke reports: "Georgia was thunderstruck when he showed her his new prints. A charged look passed between them." Strand moved to Texas, where O'Keeffe was teaching. And if it hadn't been for his fear that Stieglitz would be hurt if he made a move, and O'Keeffe's irritation with Strand's worship of Stieglitz and his general dependence - she called him "the most helpless, slow, unseeing creature I ever saw" - the course of art history might have been different. Once O'Keeffe was done with Strand, she returned east, and she and Stieglitz set about creating the mind-blowing, multipart art object that would bind the foursome together for years: a series of photographs of O'Keeffe known as "Portrait." Stieglitz photographed her clothed and nude, in parts and whole, standing before her paintings and on his radiators. Contrary to popular belief, Burke notes, Stieglitz and O'Keeffe didn't immediately fall into bed. After Stieglitz's wife caught them during a (chaste) photo session, they moved into the same house, but their sleeping arrangement was like the last scene of "It Happened One Night": A blanket hung between them. A month later, though, the blanket was lifted. ("It's a wonder I didn't give you a child," Stieglitz boasted.) He was Man. She was Woman. His sex organ had a name (Little Man) and so did hers (Miss Fluffy). Sex was "fluffing." The public wasn't privy to their romance, but when gallery goers saw prints from the "Portrait" series on display at the Young Women's Hebrew Association in 1919, some felt that they were. From that point on, the public's view of O'Keeffe's paintings, which Stieglitz often showed in his gallery, would be inflected by what viewers saw of her body, much to her dismay. Critics embarked on a mad quest for metaphors, drenched in innuendo, to describe her paintings - a flower unfolding, plastic form penetrated by the scientific spirit, the essence of woman opening herself. What did this have to do with Strand and Salsbury? By 1922, Strand was married to the beautiful, buxom, boisterous Rebecca - "Beck" - a daughter of Rachel Samuels, a Jewish opera singer, and Nate Salsbury, Buffalo Bill Cody's partner in the Wild West show. Still hankering for Stieglitz's approval, Strand wanted to emulate Stieglitz's fine romance with O'Keeffe, "Portrait" and all. And Beck did too. But Beck wasn't able to stay still for the camera and Strand couldn't make her. This ate away at them both. At one point Strand put her in a head clamp. To no avail. To make matters worse, Stieglitz made a number of portraits of Beck - one showing her bare breasts floating like lily pads, another water droplets beading on her beaming face - that blew her husband's portraits out of the water. Stieglitz, ever competitive, ever anxious about his manliness (he compared an imperfect picture to "an incomplete erection"), bragged that he'd made Beck, like 0'Keeffe, one of his "Immovables." However, Beck was no immovable object. She was restless. She thought she might become a writer. Or artist. Or typist. Or muse. Or mother. From the moment she met Stieglitz she was scrambling for her station. And at last she found it. She wanted to be 0'Keeffe. She copied O'Keeffe's unconventional dress - loose black dresses and tunics - and even added a twist of her own, trousers, until O'Keeffe told her to stop. She married a photographer from the 291 circle, like 0'Keeffe, even though she and her husband never seemed to click. She tried to paint nude, like O'Keeffe. She painted flowers. Although Paul failed at being Alfred and Beck failed at being Georgia (so Burke implies), Strand eventually found his way as a photographer and filmmaker in Mexico and Italy, and Salsbury found her way as a harddrinking artist in Taos, doing reverse paintings on glass. In the end, though, Beck did forge the final link among the foursome - with O'Keeffe. She and O'Keeffe traveled together to New Mexico, and they had the time of their lives. Salsbury divorced Strand and married a Westerner named William James. And O'Keeffe, who'd grudgingly married Stieglitz, only to find him a cheat, at last found her home alone in the desert. The sad thing about this foursome is that only two really thrived in it - Stieglitz and O'Keeffe. The other two remained shadows. In a threesome, one person is always left out. In a foursome, I suppose, two are. "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, who has also written biographies of Mina Loy, Lee Miller and Edith Piaf, it becomes clear that the electric center of this group isn't Stieglitz, the impresario, as one might guess, but 0'Keeffe, the loner. šarah boxer is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a critic at Photograph. She is the author of two psychoanalytic comics, "In the Floyd Archives" and its forthcoming sequel, "Mother May I"
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Burke, biographer of Edith Piaf, Mina Loy, and Lee Miller, widens the lens on America's most legendary artist duo, photographer and champion of modernism Alfred Stieglitz and painter Georgia O'Keeffe, by investigating their complex relationships with photographer Paul Strand, initially a Stieglitz protégé, and the late-blooming artist Rebecca Salsbury. The dynamics among these four determined and visionary individuals and, for a spell, two married couples are deeply intriguing in terms of gender expectations, the role of muse, the battle to establish photography as a fine art, and the quest to push painting into provocative new modes of expression. Extracting gems from vast caches of letters, Burke follows the foursome's artistically and erotically intertwined lives in detail, revealing their distinctive temperaments and the inspiration and anguish of their supportive and competitive interactions. Burke succeeds in portraying iconic Stieglitz and O'Keeffe with fresh insight and in elucidating Strand's elusiveness, while the least-known of the quartet, the daredevil called Beck, steals the show. After enduring the selfish attention and neglect of the other three, Beck travels to New Mexico with O'Keeffe, where she, too, finds and liberates her true self. Burke's expert and enthralling true saga illuminates key intimate and historical aspects of the lives of four extraordinarily creative, intrepid, and influential artists to profound effect.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Seasoned biographer Burke's (No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf; Lee Miller) march-of-time book chronicles the intertwined lives of four 20th-century influencers who propelled American photography and painting through momentous decades. It's a solidly researched, dishy reinforcement of the notion that artists can be difficult people while showing how human contradictions often make friendship worth it. Alfred Stieglitz, "the father of modern photography," is particularly uncompanionable: paranoid, possessive, prone to soliciting nude photo sessions from young women. Lusty missives and anatomical pet names are quoted to excess, and Georgia O'Keeffe's decades-long struggle to extract her identity from his is a primary driver of the narrative. Photographer Paul Strand's prolific talent vies with his dedicated but preachy-left politics, and, until she jumped ship, his wife, Rebecca Salsbury, remained more cheerleader than participant. Too few illustrations convey the work of this mixed bag of virtuosi: so, read this with image-searching at hand. Although it's too undistilled, Burke does stir in some terrific ingredients: O'Keeffe's battle against sexism, Strand's attempts to make a living as a filmmaker, the establishment of the Taos art community, the tension between the Stieglitz ethos and 1930s agitprop, and the predictable marital collapses. VERDICT This granular, intervowen group biography will be of most use to devotees of any one of these fascinating figures. [See Prepub Alert, 9/24/18.]-Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 protgs 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 "risqu 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 artistse.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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
