“Foursome” is a group portrait of three formidable 20th-century American artists — the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe and the photographer Paul Strand — plus one rambunctious cowgirl in search of an identity, Rebecca Salsbury. As they couple and uncouple in this fascinating, well-told history by Carolyn Burke, who has also written biographies of Mina Loy, Lee Miller and Edith Piaf, it becomes clear that the electric center of this group isn't Stieglitz, the impresario, as one might guess, but O'Keeffe, the loner.
The early chapters are all about Stieglitz, who was a generation older than the others. Born in 1864 to German Jewish parents who soon moved the family from Hoboken, N.J., to Manhattan, Stieglitz was called “Little Hamlet,” because of his brooding. Goethe was a favorite author. During a family sojourn in Germany in the 1880s, Alfred got a camera and learned photography. He returned to New York with a love of bohemian culture and an antipathy toward Kodak and what it stood for — the idea that photography is a simple hobby anyone can pick up. His mission became to put the medium on an equal plane with painting. His financial backing came from the family of his wife, Emmy Obermeyer, a brewer's daughter, with whom he had a loveless marriage.
Stieglitz's great pictures of New York, heavy with symbolism — “The Terminal,” “The Hand of Man,” “The City of Ambition” — marked him as an important photographer, but his gallery made him a cultural force. He opened it at 291 Fifth Avenue in 1905, eight years before the Armory Show that's usually cited as the introduction of modern art to the United States. The aim of Stieglitz's gallery, known simply as 291, was to import art by the likes of Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse and to establish a homegrown modernism by showing and nurturing painters (Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Max Weber, Arthur Dove and O'Keeffe) and serious photographers (including David Octavius Hill, Edward Steichen and Gertrude Käsebier).
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