Foursome

October 15, 2018

A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Lee Miller: A Life, Burke here chronicles the story of friendship of premier photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his equally talented wife, Georgia O'Keeffe, with Stieglitz protégé Paul Strand and his wife, painter Rebecca Salsbury.

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December 1, 2018
A biography of two of the 20th century's most famous artist couples, who "prodded, inspired, irritated, and encouraged one another as they grew into modes of relationship that none could have foreseen."Readers could be forgiven for thinking the world doesn't need another biography of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe. However, Burke (No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, 2011, etc.) distinguishes her book from previous treatments by investigating the dynamic between the more famous couple and the artists who would become their protégés and, for several years in the 1920s and '30s, a couple: Paul Strand, the aspiring young photographer who met Stieglitz upon visiting the legendary 291 studio that Stieglitz opened in New York in 1905; and Rebecca Salsbury, better known as Beck, the well-to-do daughter of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show partner and a woman determined to become an artist, "an act of defiance that would meet with her mother's disapproval." Throughout the book, the author quotes liberally from the trove of surviving letters among the four principals. Yet despite the comprehensiveness of the narrative, it has a faint pulse. The linear story is a laundry list of events in the quartet's lives, but it contains relatively little drama. Emmy, Stieglitz's brewery-heiress first wife, is all but missing from the story. One assumes that their marriage overflowed with friction, especially after Stieglitz began cheating on her with O'Keeffe while also conducting a "risqué correspondence" with Beck, but one doesn't fully get that sense from the narrative. Some readers might prefer to know more about that marriage than about Stieglitz's eye pain or O'Keeffe's swollen legs after a smallpox vaccination. Still, there's enough juicy material here to intrigue readers interested in the private lives of artists--e.g., the revelation that Stieglitz and O'Keeffe had nicknames for one another's private parts ("Miss Fluffy" and the reportedly ironic "Little Fella") and, when the couple were apart, Stieglitz "would often ask after Fluffy's welfare."A well-researched if surprisingly cool account of sensual artists.

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Starred review from March 15, 2019
Burke, biographer of Edith Piaf, Mina Loy, and Lee Miller, widens the lens on America's most legendary artist duo, photographer and champion of modernism Alfred Stieglitz and painter Georgia O'Keeffe, by investigating their complex relationships with photographer Paul Strand, initially a Stieglitz prot�g�, and the late-blooming artist Rebecca Salsbury. The dynamics among these four determined and visionary individuals?and, for a spell, two married couples?are deeply intriguing in terms of gender expectations, the role of muse, the battle to establish photography as a fine art, and the quest to push painting into provocative new modes of expression. Extracting gems from vast caches of letters, Burke follows the foursome's artistically and erotically intertwined lives in detail, revealing their distinctive temperaments and the inspiration and anguish of their supportive and competitive interactions. Burke succeeds in portraying iconic Stieglitz and O'Keeffe with fresh insight and in elucidating Strand's elusiveness, while the least-known of the quartet, the daredevil called Beck, steals the show. After enduring the selfish attention and neglect of the other three, Beck travels to New Mexico with O'Keeffe, where she, too, finds and liberates her true self. Burke's expert and enthralling true saga illuminates key intimate and historical aspects of the lives of four extraordinarily creative, intrepid, and influential artists to profound effect.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)