Alfred Stieglitz: The Lake George Years

First published on 6 Apr 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

We can imagine Georgia O'Keeffe's grief as she sifted through the 3,000 photographs left behind by her lifelong lover, Alfred Stieglitz, in 1981, 35 years after his passing. Especially considering how intertwined and tumultuous their lives were in art and love. Of those 3,000, O'Keeffe would have reviewed 300 images of her younger self, butterfly hands featured, and been reminded once again of herself as muse.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales invites us into a personal visual diary of Alfred Stieglitz's artistic life in an exhibition entitled The Lake George Years. Stieglitz grew up in New York State under the cultural influence of his Eastern European immigrant parents. The family would spend every summer at an opulent estate they owned in Lake George, a destination near the Canadian border. The photographs featured in this display of Stieglitz's public album were shot predominantly here. The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC – the institution to whom O'Keeffe gifted most of Stieglitz's body of work – has collaborated with the AGNSW for the last 10 years to present the current exhibition. The time taken shows.

Curator Judy Annear has tried to retain the compilation methods of Steiglitz by, for example, teaming up his abstract cloud series with a misplaced yet infamous photograph entitled ‘Spiritual America' within its narrative. Stieglitz's desire to implement societal change and force his artistic notions upon the American nation are evident in photographs with titles such as ‘Equivalent'. In these, he pushes us to believe that a romantic, black-and-white moon glaring through a dusty cloud formation is a subject worth valuing and that we should reject the mainstream, bankrupt beliefs that ‘Spiritual America,' with its lost verity, is criticising in its tightly cropped horse and straddle representation.

But the works are not just confined to skies and naked female forms. We start to think of Stieglitz not just as a ferocious idealist but also as an ageing, fearful man. Included in his oeuvre, the once flourishing and treasured chestnut trees on the estate are captured as dark, diseased and dying edifices, symbolic of his own fragility.  

With a small yet significant wall dedicated to images of Stieglitz's wealthy love interest Dorothy Norman, there's room to conjecture whether O'Keeffe actually did grieve as she sifted through works, preparing them to be handed over. Or did she relinquish them with pride and relief, happy to rid herself of the memories of the unfaithful Stieglitz? Aimee Wagenheim