At the same time that Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe were charting the course of modern (American) art, they were also showing us what love looks like. Stieglitz, who pioneered photography as an art form and promoted artists, did so through the hundreds of pictures he took of O’Keeffe. (Writing in Vogue, the art historian Eugene Goossen called these a “composite portrait.”) O’Keeffe did so through large-scale, erotic flower paintings and images of the southwestern landscape that stirred her so deeply.
While not without complications, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe’s May-December romance endured for 22 years, until the photographer’s death in 1946. Nearly three decades later, O’Keeffe met a young sculptor, Juan Hamilton, who became her assistant, companion, and inheritor of her estate. As Stieglitz’s estate was bequeathed to his wife, Hamilton became the guardian of both. On March 5 Sotheby’s will present Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Juan Hamilton: Passage, a sale that will disperse these two legacies. “It has been a privilege to live with and care for these works for many years,” Hamilton said in a statement. “But it is now time to allow others the opportunity to enjoy and learn from these treasures.”
The sale contains many important artworks by all three artists, but what makes it of deep and poignant significance is the inclusion of artifacts—like Stieglitz and O’Keeffe’s wedding certificate and shared address book—that offer a rare glimpse of their life together and their shared intimacies. Vogue can now exclusively reveal that pieces from O’Keeffe’s wardrobe will be included in the Passage sale. These are perhaps the most personal lots of all.
O’Keeffe’s style was well defined and has been much celebrated. A 2017 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern,” paired the painter’s garments with her artworks. Maria Grazia Chiuri’s 2018 resort collection was in part an homage to the painter’s style, which was in many ways opposite to that of her brightly colored canvases. O’Keeffe’s “paintings were stylized and so was she,” noted critic Barbra Rose in Vogue. “What she had learned about the way the camera transformed reality, she also learned about herself.”
Sartorially, O’Keeffe preferred a more ascetic look, the signatures of which are a brimmed, sun-shading hat, and a monogram “OK” pin that was first made and given to her by Alexander Calder. Decades later, on a trip to India, O’Keeffe had a copy of the original made, and this graphic swirl of a brooch is included in the sale. Also going under the hammer is a skirt suit made for O’Keeffe by tailor K. C. Chang, as well as a number of coats and dresses that are thought to have been hand-sewn by O’Keeffe. She “made herself and her art memorable by subjecting both to a kind of discipline and rigor that resulted in a streamlined spareness,” Rose observed. “She had the ultimate elegance of understatement. Her painting and her person together provide a lasting drama of artistic and human interest.” Similarly, O’Keeffe’s style endures.
