Alfred Stieglitz Presents One Hundred Pictures: Oils, Water-Colors, Pastels, Drawings, by Georgia O’Keeffe, American
- SIGNED
- New York: Anderson Galleries, 1923
New York: Anderson Galleries, 1923. first edition. Very Good. EXHIBITION PROGRAM FOR O’KEEFFE’S FIRST MAJOR ART SHOW, SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY O’KEEFFE.
Inscribed by O’Keeffe on cover in pencil: “I am sorry you cant come – / Hope all is well with you / Sincerely / Georgia O’Keeffe.”. O’Keeffe’s first major show – opening at Anderson Galleries in New York on January 29, 1923 –was a sensation. “The reviews were excellent. Henry McBride pleased O’Keeffe ‘immensely’ when his piece for the New York Herald stated that in the show ‘there is a great deal of clear, precise, unworried painting,’ which Stieglitz was calling ‘color music.’ The Sun’s critic, Alan Burroughs, marveled that in the concurrent exhibition of still lifes and flower pieces by the likes of Cézanne, Manet, Monet, and Renoir at Durand-Ruel, ‘one sees no canvases with the intensity of Miss O’Keeffe’s.’”
“As many as five hundred people a day thronged the galleries. Although many went out of curiosity aroused by Stieglitz’s photographs of the artist, once there they mostly liked what they saw. O’Keeffe’s work was sensuous, easily understandable, greatly appealing, often decorative, and much of it seemed quite overtly sexual in a fashionably liberated way. Some twenty paintings were sold, for a total of about $3,000…” (Whelan).
There was no catalog for the show - for as Stieglitz wrote explicitly on the back page of the program, “There is no catalogue. The pictures have no titles, but are numbered and dated” – so this program is the only significant printed documentation of the exhibition. And significant it is, for it opens with an artist’s statement by O’Keeffe that is one of the most important and revealing things she ever wrote.
She opens with a blunt, almost anti-romantic autobiography: she “grew up pretty much as everybody else grows up,” and then describes a turning point “one day seven years ago” when she realized she couldn’t keep living by other people’s rules — “I can’t live where I want to… I can’t even say what I want to.” She identifies painting as “the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself” and discovered that she could say things “with color and shapes” that she couldn’t say any other way — “things that I had no words for.”
She almost cheekily anticipates some criticism (“Some of the wise men say it is not painting, some of them say it is. Art or not Art – they disagree. Some of them do not care.”) before shifting her narrative to credit Stieglitz not only for this exhibition, but for her famous introduction to the art world when Stieglitz exhibited the drawings shown to him by O’Keeffe’s friend Anita Pollitzer years earlier.
In a bluntly forthright final paragraph she expresses her ambivalence, but also her need to have her paintings shown: “I say that I do not want to have this exhibition because, among other reasons, there are so many exhibitions that it seems ridiculous for me to add to the mess, but I guess I’m lying. I probably do want to see my things hang on a wall as other things hang so as to be able to place them in my mind in relation to other things I have seen done. And I presume, if I must be honest, that I am also interested in what anybody else had to say about them and also in what they don’t say because that means something to me too.”
––––––––
New York: The Anderson Galleries, 1923. 6.25x9.5 inches. Two sheets, making eight pages when folded (as issued). With a printed extract on O’Keeffe by Marsden Hartley, headed: “Extract from ‘Some Women Painters’ in ‘Adventures in the Arts’ by Marsden Hartley.” on pages 5-6. Mailing folds, some general light soiling. Housed in custom presentation folder.
RARE: We are not aware of another signed copy that has been on the market.
References:
Whelan, Richard. Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995, pp. 437-9.
Inscribed by O’Keeffe on cover in pencil: “I am sorry you cant come – / Hope all is well with you / Sincerely / Georgia O’Keeffe.”. O’Keeffe’s first major show – opening at Anderson Galleries in New York on January 29, 1923 –was a sensation. “The reviews were excellent. Henry McBride pleased O’Keeffe ‘immensely’ when his piece for the New York Herald stated that in the show ‘there is a great deal of clear, precise, unworried painting,’ which Stieglitz was calling ‘color music.’ The Sun’s critic, Alan Burroughs, marveled that in the concurrent exhibition of still lifes and flower pieces by the likes of Cézanne, Manet, Monet, and Renoir at Durand-Ruel, ‘one sees no canvases with the intensity of Miss O’Keeffe’s.’”
“As many as five hundred people a day thronged the galleries. Although many went out of curiosity aroused by Stieglitz’s photographs of the artist, once there they mostly liked what they saw. O’Keeffe’s work was sensuous, easily understandable, greatly appealing, often decorative, and much of it seemed quite overtly sexual in a fashionably liberated way. Some twenty paintings were sold, for a total of about $3,000…” (Whelan).
There was no catalog for the show - for as Stieglitz wrote explicitly on the back page of the program, “There is no catalogue. The pictures have no titles, but are numbered and dated” – so this program is the only significant printed documentation of the exhibition. And significant it is, for it opens with an artist’s statement by O’Keeffe that is one of the most important and revealing things she ever wrote.
She opens with a blunt, almost anti-romantic autobiography: she “grew up pretty much as everybody else grows up,” and then describes a turning point “one day seven years ago” when she realized she couldn’t keep living by other people’s rules — “I can’t live where I want to… I can’t even say what I want to.” She identifies painting as “the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself” and discovered that she could say things “with color and shapes” that she couldn’t say any other way — “things that I had no words for.”
She almost cheekily anticipates some criticism (“Some of the wise men say it is not painting, some of them say it is. Art or not Art – they disagree. Some of them do not care.”) before shifting her narrative to credit Stieglitz not only for this exhibition, but for her famous introduction to the art world when Stieglitz exhibited the drawings shown to him by O’Keeffe’s friend Anita Pollitzer years earlier.
In a bluntly forthright final paragraph she expresses her ambivalence, but also her need to have her paintings shown: “I say that I do not want to have this exhibition because, among other reasons, there are so many exhibitions that it seems ridiculous for me to add to the mess, but I guess I’m lying. I probably do want to see my things hang on a wall as other things hang so as to be able to place them in my mind in relation to other things I have seen done. And I presume, if I must be honest, that I am also interested in what anybody else had to say about them and also in what they don’t say because that means something to me too.”
––––––––
New York: The Anderson Galleries, 1923. 6.25x9.5 inches. Two sheets, making eight pages when folded (as issued). With a printed extract on O’Keeffe by Marsden Hartley, headed: “Extract from ‘Some Women Painters’ in ‘Adventures in the Arts’ by Marsden Hartley.” on pages 5-6. Mailing folds, some general light soiling. Housed in custom presentation folder.
RARE: We are not aware of another signed copy that has been on the market.
References:
Whelan, Richard. Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995, pp. 437-9.
Details
Title
Alfred Stieglitz Presents One Hundred Pictures: Oils, Water-Colors, Pastels, Drawings, by Georgia O’Keeffe, American
Author
O’KEEFFE, GEORGIA; STIEGLITZ, ALFRED
Condition
Very Good
Publisher
Anderson Galleries: New York
Date
1923
Edition
first edition