The Young and the Restless : O’KEEFFE & STIEGLITZ: An American Romance, <i> By Benita Eisler (Doubleday: $29.50; 560 pp.)</i>

The relationship between artists Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the art world’s most elaborately embellished and best-loved myths. Though the aristocratic Stieglitz was older than poor farm girl O’Keeffe by several decades, this unlikely pair married in 1924, forging a creative partnership that served both of them well despite the fact that it was wracked by endless emotional upheaval that continued up until Stieglitz’s death in 1946.

A visionary art dealer obsessed with the promotion of what he saw as the future of art, Stieglitz is largely credited with introducing America to the work of the European avant-garde during the first two decades of this century. At his taste-making 291 Gallery located in the heart of Manhattan, he hosted the debut U.S. showing of countless European modernist masters, was an early champion of photography, and worked tirelessly to define and establish an American modernist school. As an artist, Stieglitz experimented with various modes of abstraction in photography, and turned out a handful of images regarded as ground-breaking classics. However, his best-known contribution to art history is the “discovery” of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Born in 1887 into a poor family in Sun Prairie, Wis., O’Keeffe rose--with considerable help from Stieglitz--to become the first woman artist in America to be regarded as an equal in the male-dominated art world. Blending elements of Cubism, Precisionism and Realism, her work takes its central cue from organic forms occurring in nature, and her intensely sensual landscapes and still lifes of flowers are celebrated as a distinctly feminine--and pointedly sexual--interpretation of abstraction (a reading she loathed).

An outspoken and fiercely independent woman, O’Keeffe retired to an isolated existence in the deserts of Abiquiu, N.M., during the ‘50s, and she continued to live there until her death in 1986. Viewed as a pioneering feminist hero by many women, O’Keeffe has been the subject of countless major exhibitions and several books over the past two decades, and at this point, she’s nothing less than a legend.

We all know what America does to its legends, so Benita Eisler’s revisionist view of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe should come as no surprise. Nonetheless, this book is quite an eye-opener. In taking an objective look at this mythical couple (O’Keeffe in particular has been fast approaching sainthood of late), Eisler has done something long in need of doing, but she performs her task a little too well.

The undisguised glee with which she reports the dirt she’s dug up--and there are mighty shovelfuls--is disturbingly mean-spirited; Eisler seems to view O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s every utterance in as negative a light as possible, and in her hands both of them come off as thoroughly reprehensible people. In fact, it’s initially difficult to stay with this book because the central characters are so cold-blooded and unlikable. One soon becomes fascinated, however, as the story picks up speed and the Stieglitz/O’Keeffe web of abuse and revenge grows ever more labyrinthine.

Eisler establishes at the outset that both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were products of dysfunctional families, yet she shows remarkably little empathy for the behavior that handicap induced in them. This is surprising, considering that Eisler grounds her book in psychoanalytic theory. She’s particularly big on Freud--Oedipal interpretations turn up in chapter after chapter--and she suggests that unresolved infantile rage coupled with misguided sexual energy was the rudder that steered the ship of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s life together onto the rocks.

It’s hard to say which of the two comes off looking worse, but Eisler’s picture of Stieglitz certainly is not a pretty one. A controlling narcissist who insisted on dominating everyone around him, he’s portrayed as a lying, dogmatic blowhard whose favorite pastime was haranguing anyone within earshot with his grandiose art manifesto. Eisler also suggests that photographer Edward Steichen was the real guiding intelligence behind Stieglitz’s legendary 291 Gallery, that Stieglitz was an anti-Semitic Jew who was unspeakably cruel to his invalid mother just prior to her death, and that he spent his life freeloading off his relatives.

Among other character flaws Eisler attributes to Stieglitz: He was a manic-depressive hypochondriac; he enjoyed being bitten, scratched and clawed; he drove both his daughter and O’Keeffe into depressions so severe as to require extensive hospitalization, and he wanted his daughter to have a lobotomy. Sexist and misogynist, he tolerated only women he had created; he dumped one girlfriend when she became pregnant because he found pregnancy “unaesthetic,” and he cruelly informed a model (O’Keeffe’s sister Ida) that her behind had become too fat to photograph.

He intentionally kept painter Arthur Dove on the brink of starvation during the Depression as a way of controlling him, and was a pedophile who sexually molested his young nieces (at the age of 70 he fell in love with his 14-year-old niece). Needless to say, Doubleday’s lawyers played a major role in the publication of this provocative book.

On the evidence provided here, there doesn’t seem to have been great sexual passion between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe; rather, their life together was a merging of two colossal egos with a common goal. Georgia did, however, have a voracious sexual appetite and she seemed to compulsively seduce everyone, male or female, who struck her ever-changing fancy. According to Eisler, she was a merciless sexual tease who liked nothing better than to engineer an emotional menage a trois with herself positioned at the center as the coveted prize.

Like Stieglitz, she was wildly jealous, vindictive, and an unrepentant elitist who had no interest whatsoever in the social upheavals that went on around her throughout her life. A racist who was ashamed to appear in a restaurant with a black friend, she was cruel to children (she smacked her 3-year-old niece in the face because the child called her “Aunt”), was possibly infected with syphilis, and was an incompetent householder who took credit for work done by her Abiquiu assistant, Maria Chabot (whom she referred to as “my slave”). She turned on countless friends and froze them out of her life after her move to New Mexico, where she also embarked on romantic involvements with petty criminals 30 years her junior. Ansel Adams described her as “psychopathic.”

Eisler establishes a strong case for the theory that history is made by people hungry for glory who pointedly disregard any inconvenient facts that don’t jibe with their idealized version of themselves. That certainly describes the modus operandi adopted by Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, both of whom were media-savvy social climbers who relentlessly cultivated people in positions of power. With the full knowledge of O’Keeffe, Stieglitz helped create a market for her work by falsely reporting major sales that never took place. The O’Keeffe legend emerges here as a carefully thought out publicity campaign.

Eisler’s descriptive passages of O’Keeffe’s work are quite beautifully written. Her chronicle of the birth of Modernism in America--the loyalties, feuds and style wars--is thorough and astute, and she’s an extremely self-confident biographer in that she never shirks from drawing her own conclusions. But mostly this book is a collection of nasty anecdotes, and as such, it raises troubling questions about rights of privacy.

Who is served by the airing of the fact that O’Keeffe’s and Rebecca Strand’s severe PMS was the subject of much commiserating between Stieglitz and photographer Paul Strand? Living in the age of full disclosure, we as readers must decide how low we want to go, and there are passages in this book that go too low for comfort and serve only to discredit Eisler’s considerable scholarly research.

Stieglitz and O’Keeffe finally can rest in peace, though, as there’s surely nothing left to exhume about these two difficult people. Eisler’s picked the bones clean.