Georgia O'Keeffe's Cybertruck.
It's complicated.
When Georgia O’Keeffe bought a car, it was an opening salvo in a personal revolution. At least part of the appeal of the automobile was precisely what Alfred Stieglitz hated about it—but not the only part.
Cars and the eugenicists who love them.
“Every time I see a Ford car something in me revolts,” Stieglitz wrote to the novelist Sherwood Anderson.
“I hate the sight of one because of its absolute lack of any kind of quality feeling. And I try to persuade myself I’m prejudiced even though I know I’m not.—They are just ugly things in line & texture.”
Anderson shared Stieglitz’s disdain:
“Ford in Detroit has done more than any other man of my day to carry standardization to its logical conclusion . . . [Ford will] come to be looked upon as the great killer of his age.”1
If Stieglitz was a modernist, he also gripped to a peculiar elitism. Certain technology, certain populism was good. Cubism, photography, motion pictures—Stieglitz was fascinated. But he saw in Ford the crushing conformity of factory-worker, the product, the consumer, and ultimately, the culture.
And there was something more insidious. In 1920, Ford began pushing out a series of articles on “The International Jew” in the Dearborn Independent. Tagline: “The World’s Foremost Problem.”2 “The international financiers are behind all war. They are what is called the international Jew . . Here [in America] the Jew is a threat.”
The series used the specter of the international Jewish cabal to harass labor, immigrants, and farm worker organizations—all infiltrated by international Jewish sleeper cells.
Stieglitz was broadly demure about his own Jewish heritage. His 1921 exhibition included an artist statement: “I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.”3 He was nonetheless sensitive to anti-semitism—and not infrequently targeted in the press. The most aggressive attack, by the critic Thomas Craven, follows Ford’s talking points, dismissing Stieglitz’s American-ness and linking him to “exploitation” and “impurity” via clandestine international networks:
“Stieglitz, a Hoboken Jew without knowledge of, or interest in, the historical American background, was—quite apart from the doses of purified art he swallowed—hardly equipped for the leadership of a genuine American expression, and it is a matter of record that none of the artists whose names and works he has exploited has been noticeably American in flavor.”4
In 1927, Stieglitz and his protégé Paul Strand were in the midst of a skirmish with their erstwhile colleague, Charles Sheeler. Sheeler had come to moved to New York in 1919, exhibiting alongside Stieglitz’s circle of modern artists, and collaborating with Strand on the 1921 film Manhatta, a landmark in avant-garde film-making. But by 1923, the three photographers had reached an impasse. Stieglitz exhibited his landmark Equivalents series, his abstract photos of clouds.5 In the pages of Arts magazine, Sheeler praised Stieglitz’s Equivalents in terms that Strand found condescending; Strand fired back at Sheeler’s work in the New York Sun. Strand would have his own rifts with Stieglitz, but his tiff with Sheeler would last until long after Stieglitz’s death.
Ford’s screeds against the Jewish menace continued until the American Farm Bureau Federation sued Ford for libel, winning a mixed victory. After a settlement out of court, Ford offered a public apology, using the time-honored excuse that the man at the top of an operation as vast as the Ford Motor Company could hardly be held to account for what the press office was doing. “Whether the retraction of 1927 was genuine or not,” Lauren Kroiz summarized the outcome in her excellent chapter on the affair, “in that year the Dearborn Independent ceased publication, the Ford Company prepared to launch its Model A, and Ford brought Sheeler to the River Rouge Plant.”6
Another reason for Stieglitz to hate Sheeler, and little reason to credit Ford with anything but knowing which way the winds were blowing. Obviously Ford’s Model T was unlike Tesla’s cybertruck in terms of popularity, but when taking the virulent nativism of their figureheads into account, both became, for a period, icons of public loathing.7
So it must have stung when Stieglitz’s wife bought one.
Freedom.
John Marin bought a car in 1922; Edward Hopper got one in 1927.8 When they could afford to, modern artists of the day bought cars, and it changed their lives in just the way you’d expect: it gave them a mobile studio, access to the “American Scene,” access to solitude—in a word, freedom.
In 1929, Georgia O’Keeffe was in sore need of some. She was married to her dealer, a photographer who had used her body as the subject for many of his most successful photographs. While Stieglitz developed romantic relationships outside of their marriage, he exerted control over who could look at his wife, and how. Seeking a break, she took off with Paul Strand’s wife, Rebecca Salisbury, and headed to New Mexico—fifteen hundred miles from Alfred Stieglitz. That summer, she and Rebecca bought a Model A Ford, and learned to drive.
When she returned to New York, things came to a head. O’Keeffe learned of one of Stieglitz’s affairs; she struggled with a mural commission; she hit a wall in her work and in her career. She had a nervous breakdown.9
Stieglitz coped with the conflict differently—he stilled it and tamed it within the frame of a photograph. We have his photograph Georgia O’Keeffe—After Return from New Mexico, which he gave the title Equivalent O, linking it to the series of clouds. She smiles in satisfaction, her cheek rested on her hand, her hand resting on her Ford. It’s sensual, in a way; she is entirely self-possessed, leaning away from the photographer who seems to have lost her to his rival. She’s not leaning against any mere “thing.” To O’Keeffe, it was her own independence—her apartness from Stieglitz.
O’Keeffe recovered from her breakdown, and remained married to Stieglitz the rest of his life; New Mexico became the place we most associate with the painter.
As quoted in Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle, 2012, p. 133.
As quoted in Kroiz, p. 134.
Alfred Stieglitz, An Exhibition of Photography by Alfred Stieglitz: 145 Prints, Over 128 of which Have Never Been Publicly Shown, Dating from 1886–1921, exh. cat. (Anderson Galleries, 1921), n.p.
As quoted by Kroiz, p. 187.
“How I Came to Photograph Clouds,” 1923, full text here.
“The Promise of Cinema,” in Kroiz, p. 135.
Add to Stieglitz and Anderson Ford’s villainy in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World.
Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape, 2023, p. 142.
Susan Danly, Georgia O'Keeffe and the Camera: The Art of Identity, p. 11.