This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of Agnes Ernst Meyer (1887-1970), Katharine Nash Rhoades (1885-1965), and Marion H. Beckett (1886-1949), a trio that brought a notable feminine presence to Alfred Stieglitz’s New York galleries between 1905 and 1925. Nicknamed “the Three Graces,” they enacted multiple roles within the Stieglitz Circle: Meyer collected modern art, Rhoades and Beckett were artists themselves, Rhoades and Meyer wrote poetry, and all three modeled for other artists. This study examines the women’s artistic production, personal alliances, and self-presentation against the background of Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue and a broader cultural context, considering the various ways they shaped their identities as modern women and modern artists. As “New Women” of the early twentieth century, Meyer, Rhoades, and Beckett reached adulthood at a transitional societal moment, when models of Victorian femininity were being replaced by modern ones, and they often responded to shifting opportunities and expectations with a sense of ambivalence. They negotiated their personal and professional selves by performing their individual subjectivities through modes of dress, social behavior, their own art, and their collaborations with other artists.

For these women, modern portraiture played a key role in a complex process of feminine identity formation. In photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, paintings by Steichen, caricatures by Francis Picabia, drawings by Marius de Zayas, and paintings by Arthur B. Carles, the women presented themselves and were represented in a range of styles. They also depicted each other and their artist friends in return, in styles that combined academic training with recent exposure to Fauvism and abstraction. In their creative processes, including those in which they collaborated and engaged with other artists, they reshaped the longstanding tradition of the muse and blurred the line between subject and artist. This dissertation acts as a corrective to the limited previous scholarship on Meyer, Rhoades, and Beckett by demonstrating their more active, multivalent roles in the Stieglitz Circle and the ways they complied with--and then disrupted--the boundaries of feminine identity and modernism through their two-fold participation in portraiture.