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Georgia O’Keeffe knew as soon as she met Anita Pollitzer that they had nothing in common. Anita looked like a china doll, small boned and delicate, and obviously well-to-do in her fashionable tunics and hobble skirts. She had the kind of mouth that settled naturally into a smile, which irritated O’Keeffe, who had no time for dewy-eyed girls. Yet this first impression was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that had a tremendous impact on both women and on twentieth-century America.
In Georgia and Anita Liza Bennett tells the little-known story of their enduring friendship and its ultimately tragic arc. It was Pollitzer who first showed O’Keeffe’s work to family friend and mentor Alfred Stieglitz, the world-famous photographer whose 291 Gallery in New York City was the epicenter of the modern art world. While O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, and their circle of friends were at the forefront of American modernism, Pollitzer became a leader of the National Woman’s Party and was instrumental in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote. Based on extensive research, including their fifty-year correspondence, Georgia and Anita casts light on the friendship of these two women who, in different ways, helped to modernize the world and women’s roles in it.
