Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography - Softcover

Curiously enough, Whelan's is the first comprehensive biography of Stieglitz, master photographer and tireless arts crusader, though there have been a staggering number of books about his marriage to Georgia O'Keeffe. Naturally, O'Keeffe plays a major role here, but Stieglitz had 23 years on her, so Whelan has plenty of territory to cover before O'Keeffe enters the picture and rescues Stieglitz from his long-standing but loveless first marriage. Whelan analyzes the dynamics of Stieglitz's lively but extravagantly moody family and describes Stieglitz as an insecure child, so intensely preoccupied he earned the nickname Hamlet. Once he got hooked on photography, it didn't take Stieglitz long to formulate his revolutionary aesthetics or to set himself up as a notoriously garrulous gallery owner, critic, and champion of photography as a fine art. Whelan is equally articulate whether he's analyzing Stieglitz's radically evocative photographs, highly influential theories of art, vociferous support of the artists he exhibited (including Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and, of course, Georgia O'Keeffe), or the messier aspects of his hectic personal life. Whelan succeeds in bringing Stieglitz--brilliant and mercurial, creative and indefatigable, maddening and lovable--and his awesome accomplishments into gratifyingly sharp focus. Donna Seaman

The virtue of Mr. Whelan's biography is that it meticulously documents the dozens of people whose paths crossed those of Stieglitz, and enumerates the public and private episodes that make up this long and dynamic life. Mr. Whelan, a freelance writer about art and photography, has traced letters and other papers that reflect Stieglitz's career as a guru of art ever prone to passionate affinities and quarrels. -- The New York Times Book Review, Roger Cardinal