Lecture Artist Research: Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O Keeffe

In week four, we had a lecture series two with two artists, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O Keeffe. Our tutor Zoe had shared about their life, the works they had done and how they keep influencing each other. I had dropped down some notes and here I would talk about some introduction and my own opinion of them. 

Alfred Stieglitz was a famous photographer who born in New Jersey. He had proven that photography was a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture in his life, and also he became a leader of photography’s fine-art movement in the United States .

Georgia O’Keeffe was an American painter who born in Wisconsin, she had created innovative impressionist images and modernist paintings, good at painting with enlarged flowers, skyscrapers and landscapes. She was already interested in art when she was small, although she studied and worked in the art school, she was still not satisfied with her work and kept longed for a style of her own, wanting to capture the feelings and gracefulness that she had seen in the world.

In 1916, they met in the exhibition of Marsden Hartley works, 58 years old Alfred Stieglitz was already a famous internationally acclaimed photographer and O’Keeffe was only 28. He was totally obsessed with O'Keeffe, they just shortly fell in love and began a romance and artistic journey.

After they got married, O’Keeffe had started painting the flowers. Her flower paintings were filled with bright, expressive color and passion, they really attracted viewers wanted to have a closer observation even though she had already enlarged the size of the flowers, she just succeeded in arousing people to take time to observe these beautiful things. For me, it just seems like using the close-ups function to capture the moment. It's really interesting that we are like using the point of bees, butterflies to view with those flowers, huge and seductive.

I really appreciate and like her work, they are so simple with the colours, shapes and lines. Especially after Stieglitz had passed in 1946,  O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico to work on her paintings which were really peaceful and solitude. She captured the vastness of nature : the long cloudscapes of the southwestern desert, the adobe, the shadows and natural curves of the bleached animal bones. Most of these paintings had only just worked with 3 to 4 colours, but she had created a sense of poetic style, bringing out a calm and patchy feeling.

Reference :

1. https://www.npr.org/2011/07/21/138467808/stieglitz-and-okeeffe-their-love-and-life-in-letters?t=1613001209517

2. Jackson, K (2019). The Symbolism of Flowers in the Art of Georgia O’Keeffe [online] artdependence. Available at: https://www.artdependence.com/articles/the-symbolism-of-flowers-in-the-art-of-georgia-o-keeffe/ [Accessed 10 February 2021]

3. https://www.artst.org/okeeffe/

4.https://www.npr.org/2011/07/21/138467808/stieglitz-and-okeeffe-their-love-and-life-in-letters?t=1613001209517