A STATEMENT

THIS exhibition is the sharp focussing of an idea. The one hundred and forty-five prints constituting it represent my photographic development covering nearly forty years. They are the quintessence of that development. One hundred and twenty-eight of the prints have never before been seen in public. Of these seventy-eight are the work since July, 1918. Some important prints of this period are not being shown, as I feel that the general public is not quite ready to receive them. The fifty other prints never shown before were produced between the years 1908-1919. Of the earlier work I show but a few significant examples. With more the exhibition would become needlessly large.

The Exhibition is photographic throughout. My teachers have been life—work—continuous experiment. Incidentally a great deal of hard thinking. Any one can build on this experience with means available to all.

Many of my prints exist in one example only. Negatives of the early work have nearly all been lost or destroyed. There are but few of my early prints still in existence. Every print I make, even from one negative, is a new experience, a new problem. For, unless I am able to vary—add—I am not interested. There is no mechanicalization, but always photography.

My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper. To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the road I have chosen.

I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.

ALFRED STIEGLITZ

PLEASE NOTE: In the above STATEMENT the following, fast becoming "obsolete", terms do not appear: ART, SCIENCE, BEAUTY, RELIGION, every ISM, ABSTRACTION, FORM, PLASTICITY, OBJECTIVITY, SUBJECTIVITY, OLD MASTERS, MODERN ART, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AESTHETICS, PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY, DEMOCRACY, CEZANNE, "291", PROHIBITION.

The term TRUTH did creep in but may be kicked out by any one.

EARLY PRINTS

<table><tr><td>1</td><td>MY FIRST-PRIZE WINNER</td><td>1887</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>STREET IN BELLAGIO</td><td>1887</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>SUNLIGHT AND SHADOW</td><td>1889</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>MY FATHER</td><td>1890</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>THE TERMINAL, NEW YORK</td><td>1892</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>WINTER, FIFTH AVENUE</td><td>1892</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>HARVESTING</td><td>1894</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>LITTLE MILKMAID</td><td>1894</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>CLOUDS AND MOUNTAIN TOPS</td><td>1894</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>GOSSIP—KATWYK</td><td>1894</td></tr><tr><td>11</td><td>SCURRYING HOME</td><td>1894</td></tr><tr><td>12</td><td>ICY NIGHT, N. Y.</td><td>1898</td></tr><tr><td>13</td><td>THE STREET, WINTER, N. Y.</td><td>1898</td></tr><tr><td>14</td><td>SPRING SHOWERS, N. Y.</td><td>1899</td></tr><tr><td>15</td><td>BABY—KITTY</td><td>1899</td></tr><tr><td>16</td><td>FROM MY WINDOW, "1111"</td><td>1900</td></tr><tr><td>17</td><td>THE HAND OF MAN</td><td>1902</td></tr><tr><td>18</td><td>RAILROAD-YARD, N. Y.</td><td>1903</td></tr><tr><td>19</td><td>THE STEERAGE</td><td>1907</td></tr><tr><td>20</td><td>THE CITY OF AMBITION</td><td>1910</td></tr><tr><td>21</td><td>OUTWARD BOUND</td><td>1910</td></tr></table>

THE DAYS OF "291"

<table><tr><td>22</td><td>JOSEPH T. KEILEY</td><td>1907</td></tr><tr><td>23</td><td>J. B. KERFOOT</td><td>1909</td></tr><tr><td>24</td><td>JOHN MARIN</td><td>1911</td></tr><tr><td>25</td><td>OSCAR BLUEMNER</td><td>1913</td></tr><tr><td>26</td><td>PAUL B. HAVILAND</td><td>1913</td></tr><tr><td>27</td><td>EMIL C. ZOLER</td><td>1913</td></tr><tr><td>28</td><td>ABRAHAM WALKOWITZ</td><td>1913</td></tr><tr><td>29</td><td>JOHN MARIN</td><td>1913</td></tr><tr><td>30</td><td>MARIUS DE ZAYAS</td><td>1914</td></tr><tr><td>31</td><td>ARTHUR B. CARLES</td><td>1914</td></tr><tr><td>32</td><td>KONRAD CRAMER</td><td>1914</td></tr><tr><td>33</td><td>ANDREW DASBURG</td><td>1914</td></tr><tr><td>34</td><td>MARIE RAPP</td><td>1914</td></tr><tr><td>35</td><td>KATHARINE N. RHOADES</td><td>1914</td></tr><tr><td>36</td><td>MARSDEN HARTLEY</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>37</td><td>MARSDEN HARTLEY</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>38</td><td>FRANCIS PICABIA</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>39</td><td>CHARLES DUNCAN</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>40</td><td>GEO. F. OF</td><td>1917</td></tr><tr><td>41</td><td>CHARLES H. CAFFIN</td><td>1911</td></tr><tr><td>42</td><td>BECKY EDELSON</td><td>1917</td></tr><tr><td>43</td><td>LEO STEIN</td><td>1917</td></tr><tr><td>44</td><td>HODGE</td><td>1917</td></tr></table>

FROM THE BACK-WINDOW—"291"

<table><tr><td>45</td><td>BUILDINGS IN SNOW</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>46</td><td>BUILDINGS, NIGHT, SNOW</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>47</td><td>CLEAR NIGHT</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>48</td><td>BUILDINGS MOVING NORTHWARD</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>49</td><td>VANDERBILT HOTEL, NIGHT</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>50</td><td>AUGUST STORMLIGHT</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>51</td><td>SNOW-COVERED TREE, BACK-YARD</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>52</td><td>BUILDING IN CONSTRUCTION</td><td>1915</td></tr><tr><td>53</td><td>WALL CLOSING IN</td><td>1915</td></tr></table>

I grew up pretty much as everybody else grows up and one
day seven years ago found myself saying to myself—I can't
live where I want to—I can't go where I want to—I can't do
what I want to—I can't even say what I want to—. School
and things that painters have taught me even keep me from
painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not
to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when
I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that
didn't concern anybody but myself—that was nobody's busi-
ness but my own.—So these paintings and drawings happened
and many others that are not here.—I found that I could say
things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other
way—things that I had no words for. Some of the wise men
say it is not painting, some of them say it is. Art or not Art
—they disagree. Some of them do not care. Some of the
first drawings done to please myself I sent to a girl friend
requesting her not to show them to anyone. She took them
to 291 and showed them to Alfred Stieglitz and he insisted
on showing them to others. He is responsible for the pres-
ent exhibition.

I say that I do not want to have this exhibition because,
among other reasons, there are so many exhibitions that it
seems ridiculous for me to add to the mess, but I guess I'm
lying. I probably do want to see my things hang on a wall as
other things hang so as to be able to place them in my mind
in relation to other things I have seen done. And I presume,
if I must be honest, that I am also interested in what anybody
else has to say about them and also in what they don't say
because that means something to me too.

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

*Extract from “SOME WOMEN PAINTERS” in “AD-VENTURES IN THE ARTS” by MARSDEN HARTLEY.*
*[Boni and Liveright, 1920.]*

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

With Georgia O'Keeffe one takes a far jump into volcanic
crateral ethers, and sees the world of a woman turned inside
out and gaping with deep open eyes and fixed mouth at the
rather trivial world of living people. "I wish people were all
trees and I think I could enjoy them," says Georgia O'Keeffe.
Georgia O'Keeffe has had her feet scorched in the laval effu-
siveness of terrible experience; she has walked on fire and lis-
tened to the hissing of vapors round her person. The pictures
of O'Keeffe, the name by which she is mostly known, are prob-
ably as living and shameless private documents as exist, in
painting certainly, and probably in any other art. By
shamelessness I mean unqualified nakedness of statement. Her
pictures are essential abstractions as all her sensations have
been tempered to abstraction by the too vicarious experience
with natural life. She had seen hell, one might say, and is the
Sphynxian sniffer at the value of a secret. She looks as if she
had ridden the millions of miles of her every known imaginary
horizon, and has left all her horses lying dead in their tracks.
All in quest of greater knowledge and the greater sense of
truth. What these quests for truth are worth no one can pre-
cisely say, but the tendency would be to say at least by one who
has gone far to find them out that they are not worthy of the
earth or sky they are written on. Truth has soiled many an
avenue, it has left many a drawing room window open. It has
left the confession box filled with bones. However, Georgia
O'Keeffe pictures are essays in experience that neither Rops
nor Moreau nor Baudelaire could have smiled away.

She is far nearer to St. Theresa's version of life as expe-
rience than she could ever be to that of Catherine the Great
or Lucrezia Borgia. Georgia O'Keeffe wears no poisoned
emeralds. She wears too much white; she is impaled with a
white consciousness. It is not without significance that she
wishes to paint red in white and still have it look like red.
She thinks it can be done and yet there is more red in her pic-
tures than any other color at present; though they do, it must
be said, run to rose from ashy white with oppositions of blue
to keep them companionable and calm. The work of Georgia
O'Keeffe startles by its actual experience in life. This does not

imply street life or sky life or drawing room life, but life in
all its huge abstraction of pain and misery and its huge pro-
pensity for silencing the spirit of adventure. These pictures
might also be called expositions of psychism in color and
movement.

Without some one to steady her, I think O'Keeffe would
not wish the company of more tangible things than trees. She
knows why she despises existence, and it comes from facing the
acute dilemma with more acuteness than it could comprehend.
She is vastly over-size as to experience in the spiritual geo-
metric of the world. All this gives her painting as clean an
appearance as it is possible to imagine in painting. She soils
nothing with cheap indulgence of wishing commonplace things.
She has wished too large and finds the world altogether too
small in comparison.

What the future holds for Georgia O'Keeffe as artist depends upon herself. She is modern by instinct and therefore cannot avoid modernity of expression. It is not willed, it is inevitable. When she looks at a person or a thing she senses the effluvia that radiate from them and it is by this that she gauges her loves and hates or her tolerance of them. It is enough that her pictures arrive with a strange incongruous beauty which, though metaphysically an import, does not disconcert by this insistence. She knows the psychism of patterns and evolves them with strict regard for the pictural aspects in them which save them from banality as ideas. She has no preachment to offer and utters no rubbish on the subject of life and the problem. She is one of the exceptional girls of the world both in art and in life. As artist she is as pure and free from affectation as in life she is relieved from the necessity of it.

If there are other significant women in modern art I am
not as yet familiarized with them. These foregoing women*
take their place definitely as artists within the circle of women
painters like Le Brun, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and are
in advance of them by being closer to the true appreciation of
esthetics in inventing them for themselves.

* Madame Delaunay Terek, Marie Laurencin, Georgia O'Keeffe. —Editor.

CLOUDS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STIEGLITZ

A wheel is made of thirty sensitive spokes but it is on
account of the non-sensitive central void of the hub that
it turns.

Pottery is made of sensitive argil, but it is the non-sensitive hollow that is useful.

It is from the non-sensitive that efficiency and results come.

ALSO:

A tempestuous wind does not last long; a torrential rain
does not last a day. Nevertheless those effects are produced
by Heaven and Earth. If Heaven and Earth cannot main-
tain a forced action, how much less man could.

Many believe but little, others not at all.

So said the sage.

Photography can be made not to be art if only the non-sensitive camera is left to be efficient and produce results.

A forced action, Art, cannot and does not live forever.
Nature does. Let the non-sensitive show us the eternal.

Photography begins to be photography for until now it
has only been art.

MARIUS DE ZAYAS

ART OR NOT ART THAT IS IMMATERIAL
THERE IS PHOTOGRAPHY I CONTINUE ON MY
WAY SEEKING MY OWN TRUTH EVER AFFIRMING TO-
DAY WHAT IS SHOWN HERE IS PRIMARILY THE
ESSENCE OF THE WORK DONE SINCE THE EXHIBITION
HELD IN THESE GALLERIES TWO YEARS AGO NEW
YORK IS STILL NOT READY FOR SOME OF THE MOST
SIGNIFICANT PHOTOGRAPHS I HAVE MADE

ALFRED STIEGLITZ

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

WOMEN

<table><tbody><tr><td>1-4</td><td>MARGARET TREADWELL</td><td>1921</td></tr><tr><td>5-11</td><td>HELEN FREEMAN</td><td>1922</td></tr><tr><td>12-15</td><td>KATHARINE DUDLEY</td><td>1922</td></tr><tr><td>16-21</td><td>REBECCA SALSBURY STRAND</td><td>1922</td></tr><tr><td>22-23</td><td>AGNES E. COOKE</td><td>1922</td></tr><tr><td>24-26</td><td>EVA HERRMANN</td><td>1919</td></tr><tr><td>27-28</td><td>CLAUDIA O'KEEFFE</td><td>1922</td></tr><tr><td>29-36</td><td>GEORGIA O'KEEFFE</td><td>1922</td></tr><tr><td>37-44</td><td>GEORGIA O'KEEFFE</td><td>1921</td></tr><tr><td>47-50</td><td>GEORGIA O'KEEFFE</td><td>1920</td></tr><tr><td>51</td><td>GEORGIA O'KEEFFE</td><td>1919</td></tr><tr><td>52-58</td><td>ALMA WERTHEIM</td><td>1922</td></tr><tr><td>59-61</td><td>MRS. STIEFFEL-AGE</td><td>1921</td></tr><tr><td>62</td><td>DOROTHY TRUE</td><td>1919</td></tr><tr><td>63</td><td>SELMA SCHUBART</td><td>1922</td></tr></tbody></table>

MEN

<table><tbody><tr><td>64-66</td><td>JOHN MARIN</td><td>1922</td></tr><tr><td>67</td><td>DONALD DAVIDSON</td><td>1922</td></tr></tbody></table>

Again I am asked to write a statement for my catalogue. I present herewith Messrs. Henry McBride, Allan Burroughs and Royal Cortissoz on my exhibition of last year. My reason for the present exhibition is that I feel that my work of this year may clarify some of the issues written of by the critics and spoken about by other people. Incidentally I hope someone will buy something. I have kept my pictures small because space in New York necessitated that.

Mr. Henry McBride in the Herald, Feb. 4, 1923, said in part:

... Younger critics than myself speak of the "punch", but I am not particularly interested in the punch unless there should be a knockout, when of course I must take notice. What I prefer is style, which occurs all along the line and makes the whole encounter interesting from start to finish...

To be whispered about in America is practically to be famous. A whisper travels faster and further than a shout, and eventually registers upon every New York ear ... ... Such a scuffling about for draperies there never was since the première of Monna Vanna. Even many advanced art lovers felt a distinct moral shiver. And, incidentally, it was one of the first great triumphs for abstract art, since everybody got it...

To this day those paintings are whispered about when they are referred to at all. Even Marsden Hartley, who is a fine writer with many colorful words in his possession, whispers ...

If all those vapors had not been shattered by an electrical bolt from the blue, O'Keeffe would have undoubtedly suffocated from the fumes of self. There would have been no O'Keeffe. In definitely unbosoming her soul she not only finds her own release but advances the cause of art in her country. And the curious and instructive part of the history is that O'Keeffe after venturing with bare feet upon a bridge of naked sword blades into the land of abstract truth now finds herself a moralist. She is a sort of modern Margaret Fuller sneered at by Nathaniel Hawthorne for a too great tolerance of sin and finally prayed to by all the super-respectable women of the country for receipts that would keep them from the madhouse. O'Keeffe's next great test, probably, will be in the same genre. She will be besieged by all her sisters for advice—which will be a supreme danger for her. She is, after all, an artist, and owes more to art than morality. My own advice to her—and I being more moralist than artist

can afford advice—is immediately after the show, to get herself to a nunnery...

... we have peace in the present collection of pictures. There is a great deal of clear, precise, unworried painting in them. Alfred Stieglitz calls it color music, which is true enough. It sings almost as audibly as the birds in the "Cherry Orchard" do when the Russian actress opens that window to breathe in the morning air ... ...

Mr. Allan Burroughs, in The Sun, February 3, 1923, said in part:

Georgia O'Keeffe's exhibition at the Anderson Galleries easily leads the new shows, provided one defines the leading as the most intense and the most capable in accomplishing what the artist intended... She combines a strictly disciplined personality with a luxurious taste for color...

Certainly Miss O'Keeffe makes other women painters in America seem inconsequential. To quote Marsden Hartley again, "She has no preachment to offer and utters no rubbish on the subject of life and the problem." She paints neatly, yet not meticulously; thoughtfully, broadly and with a beautiful sense of textures. Flowers and fruit burn in her conception of them with deep, luminous colors that have no names in spoken or written languages. Her abstract designs and shapes are in the same key. Even more so than the still lifes they convey a sense of suppressed utterance, of song without song, words without words.

At the Durand Ruel exhibitions of still lifes and flower pieces one sees no canvases with the intensity of Miss O'Keeffe's. And here are two Cézanne *pommes*, Manet flowers, Monet tulips, Pissarro *pommes, cruches, verre*, evanescent Renoirs and an honest Sisley. Here are masculine qualities in great variety and reserve. But as in this unfair world, though the man spends a lifetime in careful consideration of a question his answer may seem no more sure than the one the woman gets by guesswork.

Royal Cortissoz in the Sunday Tribune, said:

Miss Georgia O'Keeffe, at the Anderson Galleries, has been showing a quantity of formless oils, water colors and pastels, formless in the sense that they disclose no intelligible elements of design. They are redeemed by their color. Miss O'Keeffe's tints are often beautiful. It seems a pity that a sensuous glow like hers shouldn't be governed by some pictorial purpose. There is much pretty talk among modernists about the virtues of "abstract" art. The painting itself, as on this occasion, leads nowhere.

EXHIBITIONS TO-DAY [9-6 P.M.] AT THE
ANDERSON GALLERIES

[MITCHELL KENNERLEY, PRESIDENT]

PART FIVE OF THE
GREAT MODERN LIBRARY OF
MR. JOHN QUINN

INCLUDING EXTRAORDINARY COLLECTIONS OF
FIRST EDITIONS & MANUSCRIPTS

OF STEVENSON, J. M. SYNGE, SYMONDS,
ARTHUR SYMONS, SWINBURNE, WHITMAN,
OSCAR WILDE, W. B. YEATS

THE FINAL & MOST INTERESTING
SALE OF THE GREAT
JOHN QUINN LIBRARY

ILLUSTRATED BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CATALOGUE, ONE DOLLAR

To be sold by Mr. Quinn's order Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday afternoons and evenings, March 17, 18, 19, 20, at 2:30 and 8:15

FREE PUBLIC EXHIBITON

THIS WEEK ONLY

PHOTOGRAPHS
BY ALFRED STEIGLITZ

PAINTINGS
BY GEORGIA O'KEEFE

WILLIAM MORRIS'S PRESS

ON WHICH HE PRINTED
THE KELMSCOTT CHAUCER

OWNED BY
FREDERIC W. GOUDY

WHO IS PRINTING ON THIS PRESS
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY'S "RENASCENCE"
WHICH WILL ONLY BE PRINTED AND SOLD
DURING THIS EXHIBITON

PHOTOGRAPHS · PAINTINGS · PRINTING
BY AMERICANS

SALES CONDUCTED BY MR. F. A. CHAPMAN AND MR. A. N. BADE

ON EXHIBITION FROM MONDAY, MARCH NINTH
TO SATURDAY, MARCH TWENTY-EIGHTH, 1925
[OPEN WEEK-DAYS 9-6, SUNDAYS 2-5 P. M.]

This Exhibition is an integral part of my life.
The work exhibited is now shown for the first time.
Most of it has been produced within the last year.
The pictures are an integral part of their makers.
That I know.
Are the pictures or their makers an integral part of
the America of to-day?
That I am still endeavoring to know.
Because of that—the inevitability of this
Exhibition—American.

ALFRED STIEGLITZ

ALFRED STIEGLITZ

PRESENTS
SEVEN AMERICANS

159 PAINTINGS PHOTOGRAPHS & THINGS
RECENT & NEVER BEFORE PUBLICLY SHOWN

BY
ARTHUR G. DOVE
MARSDEN HARTLEY
JOHN MARIN
CHARLES DEMUTH
PAUL STRAND
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
ALFRED STIEGLITZ

489 PARK AVENUE AT FIFTY-NINTH STREET, NEW YORK

That I know.

Are the pictures or their makers an integral part or
the America of to-day?

ALFRED STIEGLITZ

ALFRED STIEGLITZ

PRESENTS
SEVEN AMERICANS

AT THE ANDERSON GALLERIES