Artistic Trio: Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz letters to Henwar Rodakiewicz

Campaign retired. All transcriptions available in LOC.gov


Completed Pages: 584
Registered Contributors: 94
Launched March 8, 2022 and completed March 10, 2022.

About this Campaign

Beginning in 1929, artist Georgia O’Keeffe lived part time at Lake George and in Manhattan with her husband, the photographer and art impresario Alfred Stieglitz, while also traveling and making repeated stays in New Mexico. She met filmmaker Henwar Rodakiewicz and his first wife Marie Garland in Taos in 1929, and painted from their ranch near Alcalde before adopting Ghost Ranch as her ongoing destination---and ultimately, after Stieglitz’s 1946 death, her permanent home.

Stieglitz wrote to Rodakiewicz about show-casing O’Keeffe’s paintings and the work of other key artists at his An American Place gallery, and encouraged Rodakiewicz in his life and career. O’Keeffe’s letters reveal her ambitions and her vulnerabilities, sensibilities, observations, and travels. She writes of her growing attachment to New Mexico, the art commissions she obtained for herself in New York and Hawaii, the intense beauty of natural landscapes, and her development of new subject matter for her art. In writing to Rodakiewicz, she and Stieglitz mention a who’s who of friends and patrons who helped shape the intersecting literary and art worlds of New York and New Mexico in their era.