ART REVIEW : Scenes of Intimacy : Stieglitz Show Includes Photos of O’Keeffe Never Seen Before

If American photography and modern art had a godfather, it was Alfred Stieglitz. He’s so well known from his pictures, his tempestuous marriage to Georgia O’Keeffe, his tireless crusading for avant-garde art and his tyrannical temperament, there would seem to be little left to learn. Yet Weston Naef, the J. Paul Getty Museum’s curator of photography, has managed it in his tight, 50-work exhibition “Alfred Stieglitz: Seen and Unseen.” About 50% of these pictures have never before been publicly exhibited.

Before he died in 1946, at age 82, Stieglitz took thousands of pictures ranging through painterly, Pictorialist socially conscious images of the turn of the century, sharp-focus, lyrical, myth-making portraits of O’Keeffe and his circle and finally his near-abstract “Equivalents.”

Most pictures were intended for exhibition. A fraction were embargoed from being shown until he and O’Keeffe were dead, notably the intimate images of her. Such portraits take up a significant fraction of the show.

Current American fascination with celebrity guarantees the O’Keeffe images the greatest attention. One shows her looking soulful in a derby-style hat. Taken in 1923, it’s set in Stieglitz’s legendary Gallery 291, against an exhibition of photos by Paul Strand. An accompanying label explains the subtext of the picture. In 1917 O’Keeffe and Strand had an infatuation, but he married Rebecca Salisbury. In 1921, Stieglitz developed a crush on Rebecca, writing to her sometimes twice a day. Behind O’Keeffe’s head hangs an unfocused image of Rebecca by her husband.

Thus Stieglitz set up a delicately nuanced scenario about the sometimes tangled emotions of romantic bohemians. The real fun of it, however, is O’Keeffe’s expression. It’s a little too melodramatic, as if she’s kidding the whole thing. If she wasn’t, both artist and subject were taking themselves too seriously.

In 1924, Stieglitz divorced his wife of more than 30 years and married O’Keeffe. She was 37. He, turning 60, adored her, rough patches notwithstanding. None of these circumstances would be germane if they didn’t appear to have had an odd effect on these newly revealed images. They’re often taken from a low, worshipful angle. Her expression goes from indifference to flirtatious to sulky. In one shot she looks like a handsome guy, in the next a censorious, leathery frontier schoolmarm.

Psychologically the works are fascinating, artistically they look like the work of an artist so enraptured he’s lost aesthetic distance. O’Keeffe’s dramatic features just swallow the images. These pictures impart the slightly icky satisfaction of a clandestine peek into somebody’s diary.

Stieglitz recaptured his wits when he left out O’Keeffe’s head. A vertical composition of her nude torso is ripe and earth-motherly. A horizontal is so youthfully fresh it might as well be, as Naef observes, one of Edward Weston’s teen-age girlfriends.

Shots of O’Keeffe’s remarkable hands are the best. No matter how she posed them they come out looking like Bernini sculptures. A composition where she lightly strokes the metal of a polished spare-tire case can give a fellow goose-bumps.

There’s a strong suggestion in all this that Stieglitz was, at heart, a brain. As a youth he studied mechanical engineering and photochemistry in Berlin. He knew how to change the emotional impact of his pictures with technical devices. There are two versions of “The Hand of Man” on view. One of his early signature images, it depicts a locomotive entering a railroad yard. A photogravure print from 1903 suppresses reflections so the image is atmospheric and dreamy. A 1930s gelatin silver print from the same negative plays up reflections so the impact is hard-edged, steely and ominous.

Beginning in the early 1920s Stieglitz’s imagery became evermore abstract while at the same time evermore preoccupied with nature. A natural tendency to ascribe this leaning to his association with semi-abstract artists like Arthur Dove, Alfred Maurer and Marsden Hartley may be backward. They more likely rekindled an impulse pre-existent in Stieglitz.

Either way, his “Equivalents” pictures impart a wonderful sense of inevitability and open up a world of pure poetic sensation detached from human sources. Tree bark become sheer roughness. A series of clouds are like moods that come and go for no reason. Most delicious are images that do two things at once. There are clouds that are also feathers and clouds that are surf breaking on the beach.

The exhibition appears with the publication of a paperback on Stieglitz that’s part of a useful Getty series of crisp and informative photographer monographs.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, through Jan. 7, closed Mondays, advance parking reservations required, (310) 458-2003.