Book 36: Foursome by Carolyn Burke

This is a biography that I picked up on a whim when I saw it at the library, and I'm not mad I read it, but I am sort of mad at what it ended up being. It's a book about the relationships between Georgia O'Keeffe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and art collector, and Paul Strand and Rebecca Salsbury, who were colleagues of theirs and also artists. I really enjoyed the time period explored (1900-1930s New York, primarily) and I discovered that there was a lot about O'Keeffe's biography before she went to the Southwest that I didn't particularly know. But it's this odd book that reads much older to me than it is; it was published in 2019, and yet there is so much in the way of "contemporary readers might think this suggests lesbianism or gayness or various other things but we assure you: no" commentary that I barely felt like I knew what I was reading. This is especially true when out of the four the person with the greatest modern fame is by far O'Keeffe, and so there was a certain confusion for me in terms of why this wasn't solely focused on her, or perhaps her and her husband, who played a major role in her career as an artist. I enjoyed learning more about some of the figures and times in this book, but not the actual thrust of this book, on the whole.

Grade: B