The Two Cultures Today' O'Keeffe and Stieglitz: Painting and Photography wed in America

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The Two Cultures Today. O'Keeffe and Stieglitz
Painting and Photography wed in America
by Joseph SiryOctober 13, 2006AGLSP Conference,
Santa Fe, New Mexico
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A changing nation

• In Alfred Stieglitz photography and Georgia
  O'Keeffes paintings an equivalence between
  technic and organic sides of human expression
  emerge at the very cusp of those decades just
  before and at the dawn of the atomic age.

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Photographs of ordinary subjects could have "a
permanent value. A. Stieglitz, 1899
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• The Hand of Man, 1902

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Making photographs into works of art, was
Stieglitz desire.

• Tied to but transforming the conditions of
  existence, photographic images altered painting
  and revealed radiation from particles too small
  for the eyes to see.
• Both painting and photography froze the first
  light of an uncertain age.
• In the expressive art of O'Keeffe and photographs
  of Stieglitz there emerges a wedding of the two
  cultures, today fissured to such a degree that we
  may analyze their imagery for clues to how
  technology revolutionized perception.

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Two Cultures

• Charles Percy Snow gave the Rede
• Lecture at Cambridge University in
• May 1959, where he warned of a
• fatal fragmentation in western
• industrial society concerning applied
• sciences achievements of and the
• traditional education of literate
• people. Critical of literary elites he
• argued that too few among them
• appreciated the industrial revolutions
• positive impacts on vast numbers of
• middle and working class people.

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the gap between the rich and the poor.
Snow posited three menaces which now stand in
our wayH-bomb war, overpopulation, the gap
between the rich and the poor. As a physicist
and novelist, he was so worried that education
was unable to deal with these intractable
problems. (p. 48) He admonished his audience that
This is one of the situations where the worst
crime is innocence.
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Photography was a transformative and revealing
technology.

• To what extent did
• photography free
• or freeze artists to represent or imagine reality?

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How photography altered art.

• Lake George, Martin Johnson Heade, 1862.

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O'Keeffe's, Lake George, 1930.
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Stieglitz in a series of photographic studies
called Equivalents, explored the relation of
one image with another suggesting the camera
frees art from mere representation of things.
"I have a vision of life and I try to find
equivalents for it sometimes in the form of
photographs. Alfred Stieglitz
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Snow called attention to science after Stieglitz
had hoped to find in Equivalents a common ground
between photography and a reality more real than
ordinary existence. Both worked at a time when
physical findings about nature became ever more
abstract, less distinct, and more
counterintuitive.

• To what extent can abstraction in painting assist
  in
• comprehending uncertainty in physics and
  stochastic
• variation in biology? Both findings make science
  more
• difficult to express in widely comprehensible
  images.

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Splintered, modernity unravels

• The gulf between the
• arts and the sciences,
• central to Snows,
• critique of higher
• education and society in
• general has fragmented
• further since he stated
• the fractures existence.

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OKeeffes visions explore in paint the
abstracted patterns of natural form and are
collectively called an American awakening.
Scared to death. But I never let it stop me.
Never.
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New Mexico where the nothingness is several
sizes larger than in Texas. OKeeffe, 1917
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Her paintings reveal as Darwin imagined the
lands profoundly ancestral life.

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Humanity in their works emerges from an ageless
working of natural limitations.
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Taos pueblo
She would hold out a rock and ask What do you
see? remembrance of Vidal Martinez of
Abiquiu.
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Resolution eludes us even in liberal studies
because science is built of irresolvable
complexity.

• We are hagridden by the power of nature which we
  should command, because we think its command
  needs less devotion and understanding than its
  discovery. J. Bronowski

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Reconciliation despite deep rifts is attainable
with a shared vision.