Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America & Ambition and Love in Modern American Art - Book Review

Had O'Keeffe taken on the project, it would have constituted a send-up of Stieglitz's own exclusive Intimate Gallery, remaking intimacy into the embarrassing privacy of body functions, the purity of the gallery space into the "cleanliness of the washroom," and the communication between artist and audience into "the gossip of women before their mirrors." By agreeing to undertake a large work both popular and commercial in nature, she moved into the realm of everything her impresario husband and his elitist group most vehemently despised. O'Keeffe's acceptance of the project also represented an attack on the Stieglitz coterie's conception of her work as an intense personal expression of what it meant to be a woman." Although it is not known what design O'Keeffe had in mind, Weinberg believes it likely that she would have based it on one of her signature floral themes, closely identified with her inner feminine spaces yet distanced and decisively depersonalized in the new, public context.

Weinberg conjectures that O'Keeffe abandoned the project because "she could not find a way of actually making the space her own, which she had said all along was her goal. Initially the powder room commission might have offered her the opportunity not only to declare her independence from Stieglitz but also to make an aggressive public statement distinct from masculine bravado." Ultimately, she "lost faith in her ability to shift the parameters built into the powder room. That is, as a quasipublic space meant only for women to perform necessary but shameful body functions, the powder room, "abject and glamorous at once ... too neatly mirrored her own marginalized position as the Great American Woman Artist of the New York art world" (p. 123). The paradoxes of O'Keeffe's marginalization extend as well to the modernist concept of the purely autonomous work of art. O'Keeffe's powder-room mural implied that the pure and the impure, or, in the words of her ultramodernist detractor Clement Greenberg, "hygiene and s catology," were inseparable, the one always in the process of becoming the other (p. 137).

The above rather neatly encapsulates Weinberg's project as a whole. He, too, wants to mix the pure and impure in his stories of modern American artists. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that this mode of history writing could have emerged at any time prior to the 1990s, that era of the tell-all public confession and the celebrity expose. This is not to denigrate Ambition and Love--far from it--but simply to note that in its insistence on incorporating the body, its needs, desires, abjection, and perversions, into historical narrative and interpretation, it is very much the child of its time. Much more intensely personal than Baigell's, Weinberg's book incorporates his own feelings and his desire to penetrate into the most private and personal artistic spaces, physical or psychological, and to merge them with more public histories to create a rich and occasionally pungent brew.