Is it dangerous to mix love and art? Ahead of an exhibition at France's Centre Pompidou-Metz, we revisit the stories of six artist couples whose relationships transformed the landscape of contemporary art forever
Given the intense power of both art and love, the synthesis of the two makes for fascinating, inspiring, and often volatile pairings. Indeed, many of the most acclaimed works of modern and contemporary art have been produced within the context of love (be it lost, found or renewed). Ahead of the upcoming Modern Couples exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, we revisit the stories of six art world couples, whose unique relationships transformed the landscape of contemporary art forever.
1. Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz
In autumn 1915, Georgia O’Keeffe sent a collection of charcoals to a friend in New York, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz was a married art dealer in his fifties, a prominent figure in New York society, already famous for shaping the look of American photography, while she was a twenty-something art teacher in Texas. Stieglitz became instantly infatuated with her and her art, and played a huge part in O’Keeffe’s early success; he was the first to exhibit her abstract drawings. He began taking nude photographs of her, and exerted a clear influence over her work.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), Grey Line with Black, Blue and Yellow, 1923. Oil on canvas.
By 1924, the couple was married and living in New York, and O’Keeffe was considered to be one of America’s most important painters. Nonetheless, Stieglitz remained instrumental in prescribing how O’Keeffe’s work would be received, as he bestowed her paintings with a Freudian interpretation, claiming her abstracted close-up flowers were in fact unconscious expressions of vaginas. Stieglitz proclaimed: “Woman feels the world differently than Man feels it… The Woman receives the World through her Womb. Mind comes second." O’Keeffe herself vehemently disagreed with this simplified reading, arguing, “When people read erotic symbols into my paintings, they’re really talking about their own affairs.” Nonetheless, Stieglitz’s interpretation endured, and continues to shape audience’s understandings of her work to this day.
Just as his sexual readings came to overshadow her mastery of form and color, so too his wayward sexual desires came to overshadow their marriage. In 1929, shortly after Stieglitz began an affair with his much younger gallery assistant, O’Keeffe took her first trip to New Mexico. This dramatic and mysterious landscape inspired a change in direction in the artist’s work, and while the couple spent many years apart, their love endured. They continued to write to each other, expressing their feelings in a torrent of correspondence, amassing to over 5,000 letters, sent up until Stieglitz’s death in 1946.
2. Lee Miller and Man Ray
Lee Miller was an incredible figure; starting out as a model on the cover of Vogue in the 1920s, she was widely considered one of the most striking women of the age — Cecil Beaton described her as looking “like a sun-kissed goat boy from the Appian Way”. During WWII, she became a photojournalist, and was among the first to document the suffering of the victims of the Nazi concentration camps, and reveal it to the world. Between these two periods, she met the acclaimed Surrealist photographer Man Ray — first as student, later as lover.
Despite being 17 years her senior, their artistic partnership was entirely respectful and reciprocal. Miller later recalled: “We were almost the same person when we were working.” Their romantic and artistic partnership reached its apex in 1930 when they accidentally discovered solarisation, a technique that renders a photograph with silvery overtones.
Despite the bohemian tenets of Surrealism, Ray grew increasingly jealous of Miller’s various affairs with Russian Socialites and French Filmmakers, and declared that she must become his wife. Love soon turned to resentment. Everything fell apart one night when Miller took a discarded negative from Ray’s bin and began cropping the image to produce her own work. Ray threw her out in a fit of rage, slashed an image of her neck with a razor and covered it in red ink, and bought himself a gun (pronouncing that he could not decide who to shoot; himself or her).
Man Ray (1890-1976), Object to Be Destroyed, 1923. Photograph on metronome.
In the months after Lee left for New York, Ray produced two of his most famous works. First, Ray stuck a photograph of Miller’s eye to the pendulum of a metronome, creating Object to Be Destroyed (1923), perhaps his most recognisable piece. Then he painted Observatory Time: The Lovers (1936), a canvas of Miller’s red lips floating in the sky over Paris, with the accompanying poem: “I meet you in the even light and empty space, and, my only reality, kiss you”. Ray and Miller were not to meet again until 1937, at which point they formed a deep friendship that lasted until his death in 1976.
3. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo famously said: “I have suffered two serious accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar ran over me….The other accident is Diego.” He was the older, more established master of frescoes, a painter and avid communist, whose work gave voice to indigenous Mexican labourers seeking equality after centuries of colonial oppression. She was the younger, self-mythologising surrealist, whose lifetime struggle with chronic pain (inflicted by her car accident), and a fascination with introspection, magical realism and female expression, precipitated paintings with a captivating beauty. Together, they were two of the most important artists of the 20th Century.
When they married, her parents described them as ‘the elephant’ and ‘the dove’, due to his overwhelming physical size and her comparative petiteness. Their relationship was tumultuous and volatile. For several years, Diego had an affair with Frida’s own sister, Cristina, while Frida had dalliances with various international artists, both male and female, as well as the Soviet leader Leon Trotsky. Eventually this led them to divorce in 1939, only to remarry a year later in 1940. It seems they really couldn’t live apart.
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana), 1943, Oil on masonite, 29 9/10 × 24 in. (76 × 61 cm.)
Frida began painting Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana) (1943) in 1940, during the brief interlude between the couple’s two highly volatile marriages. It depicts the artist herself wearing traditional Mexican lace, surrounded by a surreal shattering of the work’s visual plane, as if her entire spirit has been invisibly broken. In her mind’s eye, Diego sits, resting atop her monobrow. All of her thoughts return to him; she is placing him at the seat of her creativity.
In spite of their fiery relationship, they remained highly respectful of each other’s work. Whilst Diego was the more well-known artist, heralded during their lifetime as Mexico’s greatest painter, he often argued that this title really belonged to Frida. Indeed, her work has posthumously become incredibly well regarded. In hindsight, it is impossible to imagine where either artist might have been, without the intense artistic support of the other.
4. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg
In the late 1950s Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns became lovers and collaborators, producing artworks that lead the movement away from Abstract Expressionism and toward Pop Art, bridging the gap between Pollock and Warhol. During the 6 years they were together, almost everything they produced was a masterpiece — from Rauschenberg’s Combines to Johns’ Flags and Targets, these works were bold, surprising and iconoclastic. Contained within them was a promise, a glimpse, of what lay in store for the future of contemporary art.
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg together in their studio in the late 1950s.
Had it not been for Rauschenberg, Johns would never have been signed by Leo Castelli, the world’s biggest art dealer. In 1958, Castelli was visiting Rauschenberg's flat to consider the artist’s work for exhibition, but got lost and found himself in Johns’ flat directly below. There he discovered a cornucopia of original paintings, never before exhibited, which possessed an entirely novel visual language that turned popular American symbols into subversive abstractions. Castelli signed both artists immediately, and transformed Johns into America’s most successful living artist. The two were exhibited together, discussed together, and united in heralding the end of Abstract Expressionism, with all its macho, individualistic connotations.
But their relationship did not weather well under fame. Rauschenberg later recalled, “What had been tender and sensitive became gossip. It was sort of new to the art world that the two most well-known, up and coming studs were affectionately involved.” By 1961, the romantic relationship that had been so critical in developing a mutual style was in tatters — their personal and professional conflicts irreconcilable. The break up was so intense that both artists left New York, radically changed their visual styles, and opted not to see or speak to one another for over a decade.
5. Charles and Ray Eames
Charles and Ray Eames were the original design power couple. Ray — “my wife not my brother,” as Charles used to say — met her future husband at college in Michigan in 1940, when she was a student, and he was a married teacher. They soon began working together and, having fallen in love, moved to California. There they set about designing some of the most iconic furniture of the 20th century, and eventually founded the world renowned Eames Office. The Eamses are among the most widely imitated designers of all time, and shaped the aesthetic of the latter 20th Century beyond imagination. Whilst their name is inseparable from postwar clean-line design, they were not merely furniture makers. They were diverse and experimental artists, who collaborated in making colorful masks, visual art, military plane nosecones, dazzling kaleidoscopic films and early proto-computers.
Charles and Ray Eames’ designs shaped the aesthetic of the late 20th century in the West.
Their love for one another was strong and enduring. They did everything together, and thought the world of each other. “Anything I can do, Ray can do better,” Charles would often say. They designed and built a house together, which has since been preserved as a museum of modern design, and lived there happily for many years. Charles died in 1978, and by a twist of fate, Ray died on the exact same day ten years later. According to those close to her, in the last days of her life, she kept asking what day it was, as though she was waiting to join him.
6. Ulay and Marina Abramovic
Two internationally renowned performance artists, Marina Abramovic and Ulay met in 1976, and immediately formed an artistic collective based around their distinctive relationship. They began referring to themselves as "the other", conceptualizing themselves as inseparable parts of a two-headed body. They performed many pieces together, perhaps most notably Breathing in/breathing out (1977), in which they breathed into each other's mouths, inhaling only each other’s breath, until they passed out nineteen minutes later from the intake of carbon dioxide. In 1988, the couple’s intense relationship came to an end. They amicably decided to part ways, and marked the end of their time together by walking from either end of The Great Wall of China, until they met in the middle, and said goodbye.
Ulay and Marina Abramovic preparing for the performance piece Breathing in/breathing out, in 1977.
Abramovic went on to enormous worldwide success, and in 2010 she began performing her solo show, The Artist Is Present, at MoMA in New York. The piece entailed her sitting in a chair, and sharing a minute of silence with every stranger that sat down in front of her. One day Ulay arrived unannounced, sat across from Abramovic, and looked her in the eyes for the first time in 22 years. The estranged couple cried and reached out to one another from across the table. The audience were shocked, and the event made international art news. However, the reconciliation was only temporary, as in 2016 Ulay took Abramovic to court, and successfully ordered her to pay him €250,000 — his share of the profits from their artistic collaborations.
Modern Couples runs from 28th April — 20th August 2018 at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France
