Georgia O’Keeffe (1887 – 1986), Radiator Building—Night, New York, 1927
Stieglitz Collection, Fisk University/Crystal Bridges
Thanks to the finalization of an art-sharing agreement between Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville and Fisk University in Tennessee, an important collection of art and objects by Alfred Stieglitz will remain intact, and go on display this fall in Northwest Arkansas.
The collection, which includes 101 works by some of the giants of American and European modernism such as Picasso, Renoir, Cezanne and Diego Rivera, will run Nov. 9 through Feb. 3 at Crystal Bridges in a new exhibition titled The Artists’ Eye: Georgia O’Keeffe & the Alfred Stieglitz Collection.
The exhibition marks the end of a seven-year legal battle in Tennessee that began after Fisk University agreed to sell the collection to Crystal Bridges in an effort to help keep the school afloat amid financial struggles. Problems arose over the fact that the collection, which was given to the school in 1949 by Stieglitz’s widow – renowned artist Georgia O’Keeffe – had been donated under the condition that it never be sold or separated.
A settlement was eventually reached giving Crystal Bridges a 50 percent stake in the collection for a reported $30 million.
From a recent news release:
Alfred Stieglitz was not a collector in a traditional sense, but was instead an impresario who supported the artists he felt were most important in developing a uniquely American version of Modernism. This exhibition features artists Stieglitz most favored, including O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin, among several of the earlier European Modernists who inspired them, including Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The exhibition also includes 19 photographs by Stieglitz himself. The Artists’ Eye celebrates not only the “eye” of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe as patrons and collectors, but also as artists who interpreted America through brush and camera.
For more information on the exhibit, visit crystalbridges.org.
