LETTERS: My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, 1915-1933Edited by Sarah Greenough Yale University Press, 814pp. £28

IN ENEMIES OF PROMISE, Cyril Connolly warned of the dangers facing any artist unwise enough to place love ahead of creativity. Aside from his famous caveat that "there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall", Connolly also advised against marriage for the artist except "where there is enough money to save him from taking on uncongenial work and a wife who is intelligent and unselfish enough to understand and respect the working of the unfriendly cycle of the creative imagination". Leaving aside the inherent gender bias of the period ( Enemies of Promisewas, after all, published more than 70 years ago), what strikes one about this remark is an assumption that the only possible partner for an artist is someone, male or female, of passive personality. It did not seem to occur to Connolly that a relationship between two artists might be feasible, and yet, looking at the evidence from such pairings, perhaps he was right not to give thought to such a proposition.

The recent exhibition of work by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the Irish Museum of Modern Art offered ample evidence how tempestuous such a coupling can be. But it also revealed something else: how the assessment of a creative couple’s respective abilities can undergo a posthumous shift. In the case of Kahlo and Rivera, for example, during their lifetimes he was the better-known of the pair, she frequently identified only as his wife. That evaluation began to alter drastically only in the 1980s, thanks to the appearance of books, films and exhibitions celebrating Kahlo and presenting her as a heroine of feminist art history. Today, her work is more widely recognised than that of her husband.

The same is likely true of another stormily married creative couple, Alfred Stieglitz and his second wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, she today more an icon of the art world than is he. Yet, as these two books make clear, at least at the start of their relationship the roles were very much reversed. They met in 1915, when Stieglitz, then aged 52, was renowned as not just a pioneering photographer and proselytiser on behalf of photography but also a gallery owner who had done much to encourage interest in a wide range of contemporary art disciplines within the United States. More than 20 years his junior, O’Keeffe was still trying to find her way as an artist, having abandoned the struggle on at least one occasion and worked as an art teacher instead.

From their letters, of which more than 5,000 survive, it is clear that at the start of the association Stieglitz assumed the role of master and O’Keeffe that of pupil. Her opening exchanges are respectful and eager: “Things I feel and want to say”, she wrote to him in January 1916, “haven’t got words for it – you probably know without my saying it”. The initial purpose of their correspondence was to discuss art, but it very quickly grew more intimate, and before long each was engaged in personal revelation to the other. The 650 letters included in Greenough’s volume trace a familiar trajectory of love, from dawning awareness of empathy to the revelation of passion and, thereafter, the gradual shift to a cooler, more tempered mutual feeling.

That course can be seen in the way Stieglitz and O’Keeffe’s letters, initially devoted to themselves and their own concerns alone, slowly admit references to a broader, humdrum world. “The beginning of our togetherness was much simpler than it became later,” he admitted to her in July 1928. “The question of practical daily living is not as simple as it was – or we thought it was. And we are both older.” Indeed by this date he was 62 and acknowledged, much to his satisfaction, as one of the key figures in the American art world.

He was also already engaged in another passionate relationship with a still-younger woman, Dorothy Norman, who, like O’Keeffe before her, at the onset regarded her mentor with gratifying awe. A telling pair of photographs by Stieglitz dating from around 1930 helps to explain why Norman had supplanted her predecessor in his affections. As Greenough writes, that of O’Keeffe presents the artist as “mature and accomplished but also wary, aloof and sexless”. Norman, on the other hand, offers the embodiment of wide-eyed docility, her delicate features contrasting with those of the weather-beaten O’Keeffe.

THE TIES THAT BOUND O’Keeffe to Stieglitz never broke, but they were greatly stretched as, from the close of the 1920s onwards, the couple spent more and more time apart, following both O’Keeffe’s discovery of New Mexico and his infatuation with Norman. “For me he was much more wonderful in his work than as a human being,” she declared more than 30 years after Stieglitz’s death. “I could see his strengths and weaknesses. I put up with what seemed to me a good deal of contradictory nonsense because of what seemed clear and bright and wonderful.”

There was certainly much that could be deemed nonsensical, and worse, about Stieglitz’s behaviour, his temperament a not-unfamiliar blend of arrogant confidence and self-pity, the latter exemplified by lifelong hypochondria. His zeal to promote the cause of photography’s acceptance into the pantheon of fine art left him indifferent to the feelings of others, even those in his immediate circle. So while he expressed regret for failures as a father to Kitty, the only child of his first marriage, he rarely saw her after she was institutionalised for schizophrenia and had only minimal contact with his grandson.

Stieglitz was the Nietzschean Ubermensch preoccupied with realising his own destiny at no matter whose expense. In the decades prior to his meeting O’Keeffe he had devoted his time, and his first wife’s money, to ensuring the betterment of photography’s public status, through the promotion both of his own work and that of a handful of other practitioners, members of what he styled the Photo-Secessionist group, whose output met with his approval. By assuming responsibility for the Camera Club of New York, editing Camera Notes (and later Camera Work) and finally opening his own gallery he was able to guarantee the realisation of his ideas and take control of his popular image. After his death, in July 1946, the New York Times astutely described him as a “famed photographer” and, more significantly, noted, “A most incessant talker, he raised his voice for more than half a century to proclaim his powers as a prophet, soothsayer, and arbiter of all matters pertaining to the free spirit of mankind.”

By outliving him for four decades, O’Keeffe in turn was able to create and perpetuate her own myth. And in this endeavour she superseded Stieglitz, just as Frida Kahlo has Diego Rivera. Tellingly, eight of the nine most expensive Stieglitz photographs sold at auction have been of O’Keeffe, with the highest price of $1.47 million being achieved five years ago. Impressive as this sum is, it remains less than a quarter of $6.16 million, the top price realised to date by an O’Keeffe painting. In his guise as a gallery dealer, Stieglitz would have recognised the significance of this price difference.

Robert O’Byrne’s most recent book is a biography of Desmond Leslie, published by the Lilliput Press