ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation / Thesis: “LIVING ON PAPER ...

1910s, presumably led by Stieglitz, discussed drawings by male modernists like Picasso
and Matisse, they often considered the intellectual play and creative processes of graphic
art rather than the gendered body of the artist. Charles Caffin, for instance, found
Picasso’s,
in fact, the most original, intrepid and logical mind among all those which to-day
are bent upon intellectualizing their sensations in pictorial terms.
It is the kind of mind that, though one may not be able appreciate its
products, is worth examining for the sake of its processes.
. . . the processes of Picasso’s mind, as laid bare in these drawings, might
well be studied by our artists, not for imitation – they are too personal to this
particular artist – but for the purpose of eliminating from their work its concrete
superfluities and raising its capacity of intellectual suggestiveness. 108
Perhaps the reviewer who made the most reference to Picasso’s body was Elizabeth
Luther Cary, who credited the Spaniard’s drawings to “that one brain and that one pair of
hands.” 109
During the 1920s, however, Stieglitz and the critics who followed his lead,
particularly Paul Rosenfeld, placed increased emphasis on the gender and bodies of
artists of both sexes. The application of Marin’s watercolor medium, for instance, now
was made parallel to the ejaculation of semen. 110
O’Keeffe became the standard female
artist against whom such male artists as Dove and Marin were played to assert their
masculinity.
Graphic Art Within the Multiplicity of Stieglitz’s Composite Portrait of O’Keeffe
There can be little doubt that Stieglitz’s carnal view of O’Keeffe was vital to him.
He was an aging man in love with a beautiful young woman and he certainly found
tremendous sexual excitement in her body. But he found many other qualities to
contemplate in his lover, as one can see in the range of images he made of her, both with
and without her art. The eye and mind, as well as the hand, interacted with the artists’s
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