Marjorie Content

Marjorie Content (1895–1984) was an American photographer active in modernist social and artistic circles. Her photographs were rarely published and never exhibited in her lifetime, but have become of interest to collectors and art historians. Her work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art; it has been the subject of several solo exhibitions.^[1]

Her husbands included Harold Loeb, the editor of the avant-garde journal, Broom, and the writer Jean Toomer, to whom she was married more than 30 years.

Early years

Marjorie Content was born into a Jewish family in New York in 1895, the daughter of wealthy Manhattan stock-broker Harry Content and his wife Ada.^[2] She was educated at the private Miss Finch's School. During these years, she began a lifelong friendship with Alfred Stieglitz, the uncle of a school friend and a prominent artist, photographer, and gallery owner.

In 1914, Content left school at age 19 to marry writer Harold Loeb, also of New York. She returned with him to Alberta, Canada, where he had been working on a ranch. Their two children, Jim and Susan Loeb, were born in quick succession in 1915 and 1916.^[3]

After the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in the Great War, the couple returned to New York. Loeb worked in San Francisco for a time with a business of his maternal Guggenheim relatives. He entered the Army when the United States entered the world war. Due to poor eyesight, Loeb was assigned to a desk job in New York City.^[2][4]

In 1919, Content became a manager of The Sunwise Turn bookshop, a female-run bookstore devoted to new writing.^[5] It was partly owned by her husband, who also worked there. In 1921 Loeb founded Broom, which deepened Content's connections to the literary and art world. One of his partners, Lola Ridge, the magazine's American editor, hosted artists in the office of Broom, which was located in the basement of Content's brownstone. Loeb set up publishing of Broom in Rome in 1922. The two separated in 1921,^[6] and their divorce became final in 1923.

Photographic years (1926–1935)

Content began serious photography while married to her second husband, the painter Michael Carr. She used a 3 ¹⁄₄ × 4 ¹⁄₄ inch Graflex, and, after 1932, a 5x7 inch Graflex, as well.^[6] Despite reports that Stieglitz taught her developing techniques, some scholars believe it was her friend Consuelo Kanaga. Content sometimes worked in Kanaga's darkroom.^[7]

Her travels in the West and Southwest with painter Gordon Grant influenced her style toward a more formalist aesthetic. She briefly worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs photographing rural Native American life. She married a third time, to Leon Fleischman.

In the 1930s Content was also close to painter Georgia O'Keeffe. In 1933 she traveled with her to Bermuda to nurse her through a depression. The following year, she drove with her to New Mexico, where O'Keefe had settled.^[6] Other close friends of this period included Stieglitz, Ridge, Sherwood Anderson, Paul Rosenfeld, and Margaret Naumburg, at whose Walden School in New York City both of her children were educated.^[8]

Later life

In September 1934, one day after her divorce from Leon Fleischman was completed, Content married writer Jean Toomer in Taos, New Mexico. A resident of New York in the 1920s and 1930s, the widower was of mixed-race ancestry and determined to be known as "an American." He was best known for his modernist novel, Cane (1923), an exploration of black culture in the Deep South and urban North. For the previous decade, he had been deeply involved in studying the ideas of Georges Gurdijieff. They collected his two-year-old daughter, who lived with them from this time on.

One scholar calls Content's marriage to Toomer "a doomed alliance" and blames it for the end of her years of serious art-making.^[9]

The couple continued to visit New Mexico together. In 1940 they settled on a farm bought with Content's money from her father in Bucks County, Pennsylvania near Doylestown. It was a popular area with artists and writers from New York, and had summer theater nearby. They became active in reviving the local Quaker meeting. The two remained married until Toomer's death in 1967.

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