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And now comes a book that tells us, often in her own words, how O'Keeffe sounded, how she got to where she was going and how she felt about the journey. It is a most remarkable book. "A Woman on Paper: Georgia O'Keeffe" by Anita Pollitzer is a dialogue, a woman's memoir illustrated out of the fabric of two women's lives. Pollitzer's text, written in the present tense about O'Keeffe, provides an easy intimacy between the author and subject.
Pollitzer and O'Keeffe were art students together in New York, and in 1915 when O'Keeffe moved to South Carolina to teach, they began a correspondence and a friendship that lasted until Pollitzer died in 1975. Pollitzer was an artist, a lawyer, an organizer of the National Woman's Party, a champion of the right to vote for women, an unselfish friend and the person who facilitated destiny when she took drawings that O'Keeffe had sent her for criticism to Stieglitz. It was Stieglitz who said when Pollitzer unrolled the drawings, "Woman is, at last, on paper, expressing her relation to the Universe."
Stieglitz, a photographer, ran Gallery 291 in New York, supporting new art. Through his eye, he changed the perception of art in the United States from formalism to the modernity already evident in Europe. He showed Cezanne when he couldn't find a buyer to pay $40 for one of the artist's paintings. And he showed the work of O'Keeffe, loved her, photographed her as a woman has never been photographed before and eventually married her.
"A Woman on Paper" is a book of letters exchanged between Pollitzer and O'Keeffe and provides a rare look into the early private life of O'Keeffe and Stieglitz, of O'Keeffe's relationships with early suitors, and with her work. It is illustrated with photographs of O'Keeffe by Stieglitz and others, of Pollitzer, of O'Keeffe's paintings of Stieglitz himself, of notes, letters, invitations to shows, of the places where O'Keeffe and Stieglitz and Pollitzer spent time.
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(Los Angeles Times)