Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Every so often, Lillian was “sent up to Mendocino or Napa for a ‘cure’ ” and Consie would be sent to friends of the family or boarding school. When she was home, Consie’s “each day was about a year long. . . . My mother used to put me out in the backyard and expect me to keep myself amused for hours. I talked to the trees, I talked to the stones, which, in those days, I thought were alive. . . . I used to make little chores for myself, like most kids make mud pies, but that was too quick. . . . I used to grind up old bricks, and then make mud pies. . . . I was in solitary confinement.” She recalled despising her mother, finding her “physically repulsive.” She clung to her father desperately but he would not intervene. When he couldn’t bear being with Lillian any longer, he left Consie there, helpless.13

  A century later, we wonder why Maynard did not take responsibility for her, but that was not a customary option in 1916, when he left for good. The dominant family ideology did not expect fathers to care for children—although among the poor, many fathers did so—and certainly not an artist. Had he taken her from her mother, he would only have placed her out with another family member, probably his sister Reb. Besides, the ruling standard was that young children needed their mothers, although a child-protection agency would have been alarmed had it seen what went on in Consie’s home.

  Consie first met Dorothea in 1919, when Maynard took her to one of the tea soirees in the photography studio. Consie recalls being shocked at how young Dorothea looked—her hair in a “Dutch bob,” dressed in “worn out riding pants and sneakers.” Consie thought she was about sixteen. She did not give Dorothea much thought, since she had “developed a jaundiced view” of the women who wanted to catch her father and “came to the conclusion that he was invulnerable, would not remarry.” Like many children of divorce, she expected him to return to Lillian. Besides, she said, “I was madly in love with him myself, and for years my objective had been to get rid of my incompetent mother and move in with Daddy.” Lillian first registered Dorothea as a threat and characterized her as a nymphet, a “ ‘little rosebud,’ ” but Consie knew that description to be “hilarious.” She saw Dorothea as “quite aggressive and even somewhat masculine, and a successful career woman . . . no ‘rosebud’ she.”14

  Still, Dorothea seemed at least marginally tolerable to Consie at first, and she begged to be allowed to live at the “little house.” Recently transferred to a day school in San Francisco, she began dropping in uninvited on her way home, staying as long as possible.

  Dorothea imagined being a good wife, but not a good mother. She had no inkling of what she was in for with the arrival of an abused ten-year-old who had never had secure parenting and was uncontrollably jealous of this rival for her father. Consie was furious at him for remarrying, but so dependent on his love that she could not express—not even let herself feel—this anger. Her insecurities created no such internal censorship over her feelings about Dorothea, and she treated her stepmother with hostility and sullenness. Dorothea had complementary resentments, unprepared for how a child could come between her parents, let alone how much attention she would demand. As an adult, Consie would realize that Dorothea was only mature enough to be a big sister at best. But the child Consie was afire with jealousy. In this tiny cottage, she could hear all the sexual moans and groans as they “wrastled” with each other, and knew they were doing something unspeakably disgusting.15

  Dorothea’s own childhood led her to expect helpfulness and responsibility from a ten-year-old. Implemented gently, with a reasonably secure child, this expectation might have worked well. Consie enjoyed working in the darkroom, retouching negatives and spotting positives. But Dorothea also asked the girl to do housekeeping chores and responded angrily when she did not oblige. That they lived in such a tiny place did not help.

  Maynard, eager to shed the burden of worry about Consie that he had carried, remained an affectionate and playful father but backed out of responsibility for her emotional well-being. He simply handed her over to Dorothea and continued his frequent trips to sketch and paint. He would announce his travel plans, not supposing that Dorothea and Consie should be consulted, let alone exercise veto power, and Dorothea remembered, with considerable resentment, that “he was always going for a month or six weeks but he never came back inside of four months.”16 Even allowing for a bit of exaggeration on Dorothea’s part, it is not surprising that Consie felt deserted. Lange felt reluctant to reduce her work hours because they needed the money—and because work made her happy, while Consie did not. So Dorothea coped. She was reliable, always there to provide meals, clothing, homework help, a parental presence, but she sent out a great deal of disapproval toward Consie. Sometimes she exploded, and Consie retaliated. Consie claimed (although some of Dorothea’s friends doubted this) that Dorothea lost patience and slapped and hit Consie.17 Whether she did or not, she was clearly unable to find a way to nurture this unhappy child.

  Dorothea made photographs of Consie, as if this were a way to give her love. One shows her on a horse, her hair flying, her body easy, and her legs dangling without stirrups.18 Several photographs Lange made of Consie in 1923, when she was thirteen, exude complicated emotions. A fine studio portrait of Consie against a wall shows a tall, attractive girl with lustrous hair, looking like a softer, rounder Maynard. She is so pensive, even melancholy, but also so relaxed, that we have to credit the photographer with insight into Consie’s pain, even if she could not relieve it.19 More troubling is a nude torso, with neither head nor legs and thus anonymous: an exquisite fine-textured print of a literally budding adolescent—breasts just beginning to enlarge, the finest sprinkling of pubic hair visible.20 It seems unlikely that Consie was pleased, and given adolescent girls’ typical sensitivity about their bodies, she could well have been seized with embarrassment and fury.

  Maynard and Dorothea sent Consie to the Presidio Open Air School, a private progressive school founded by the same wealthy Jewish community that supported so many cultural institutions.21 The school director took a John Dewey approach—encouraging children’s free expression, teaching through creative activity, and providing individual attention to children. Yet Consie remembered this school too with bitterness: the others were “rich kids,” she recalled, who arrived “in limousines with uniformed chauffeurs—and sometimes even footman—and they all had charge accounts at Blums,” while she was limited to a one-dollar-a-month allowance. She accused Maynard and Dorothea of sending her to that school so that they could make contacts with potential customers. Consie’s anger colors all these memories. There was no action by Dorothea that she would fail to ascribe to a selfish motive. She complained also about her hand-me-down clothes,22 which one could see, rather, as a comment on their priorities—that they were willing to stretch their budget to send her to a school that they thought would be best for her. Nevertheless, there is an edge of truth to Consie’s charge, however distorted, because Maynard and Dorothea did want to feel a part of the cultured community at the school.

  5.2. TORSO OF CONSIE, CIRCA 1923

  The conflicts ebbed when they made weekend outings as a threesome. When they did not head north to Marin, the Dixons often took the train to Carmel, where many artists and writers had settled after the earthquake, and where Maynard visited so often that some thought he was a resident. A village situated in extraordinary natural beauty, its residents in the early 1920s included Robinson and Una Jeffers, Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter, Jack London, Edward Weston, journalist Ray Stannard Baker, novelists Will and Inez Irwin, author Charles Erskine Scott Wood and his wife, poet and feminist Sara Bard Field, lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow, and George Sterling. Other San Francisco friends often came too, and Maynard like introducing them to campfire-cooked meals.

  More often, however, Dorothea was alone with Consie as Maynard continued his trips to the desert to paint. Dorothea could not afford to close down her studio for weeks to accompany him; besides, it was her income that paid for his trips.

  Occasionally
Dorothea and Maynard escaped together by leaving Consie in the care of others—usually the Wilsons, sometimes Imogen and Roi Partridge—while they trekked on their own. Such farming out of children was not uncommon at the time. In 1922 Consie was “placed out,” as the practice was then called, for four months while they stayed on a Navajo reservation at Kayenta, Arizona, where their guides were John and Louisa Wetherill, whites noted as explorers and scholars of the Navajo lands and culture.23 Dorothea wrote, in what might have been Maynard’s voice, “We went into a country which was endless, and timeless, and way out and off from the pressures that I thought were part of life.”24 This memory was with her forever: she bought, probably at the Hubbell trading post, a heavy, wide-ribbed Navajo silver cuff bracelet, dramatic and simple, and wore it every day of her life thereafter.

  It was on this trip that Maynard first registered Dorothea’s social consciousness. At the Tuba City Indian school, the harsh treatment of the children infuriated her. Further evidence of these emotions appeared throughout the 1920s, notably in her sympathy for Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrant anarchists who were framed and then executed for murder and became the subjects of a large international protest. Their persecution continued a xenophobia and anti-Red hysteria that had begun with World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. The pro-business conservatism of the decade disgusted San Francisco’s bohemians, including Dorothea and Maynard, and had the effect of driving them further away from politics.

  Meanwhile, Maynard’s very success made him frustrated with the limited western art market. Searching for entrée into the eastern market, they traveled to Chicago and New York in 1923 in search of galleries and museums to show Dixon’s work. Trying the Chicago Art Institute, Maynard was shocked to learn that it was booked two years in advance—an indication of the relative parochialism of California artists. In New York a gallery put up a Dixon show, but no paintings sold. Dorothea loved being back east and she and her mother got on well, but Maynard responded negatively to the New York art scene: “Hot-house art atmosphere and fake modernisms.” They visited the Stieglitz gallery for an O’Keeffe show, and the autocrat of New York art and photography made Dixon even more infuriated: “After listening to exploiter Stieglitz expatiate, and observing so much cleverness and futility, I was glad to quit that stale-air existence and come West.”

  Maynard’s derision did not extend to patrons of his own work, such as Anita Baldwin, despite her ostentatious lifestyle. She had not only bought his paintings but had commissioned him to create murals, including twelve for her Pasadena mansion. This eccentric daughter of Comstock Lode millionaire “Lucky” Baldwin, possibly one of Maynard’s ex-lovers, had decided she wanted to write an opera on Indian themes. She invited Maynard and Dorothea to accompany her, later in 1923, on a trip to Indian lands to gather recordings of authentic Indian chants. They agreed and placed out Consie again. Baldwin sent a check for $250 so that Dorothea could buy riding boots and other necessities. They traveled in a private railway car with two cooks, two stewards, and Baldwin’s bodyguard. Baldwin insisted they travel with all the blinds drawn so no one could see in, and this intensified the heat. Dorothea was frustrated because she could not look. Once in Arizona, they camped out in lavish style, having brought tents shaped like Chinese pagodas, colored sands (for the Hopi to use in sand paintings), peacock feathers (supposedly sacred to the Hopi), caviar, wine, and elaborate food, which Dorothea was expected to cook. Baldwin paid the Hopi to come down to the camp every night to sing so she could find inspiration for her composition.

  Dorothea was largely observer and cook, but she also did some of her first noncommissioned photography. As was her practice throughout her life, she destroyed negatives she considered unworthy, and only a few survive. They include a portrait of a Hopi man, cropped and enlarged so that it becomes a high-modernist abstraction; another that could have been a study for one of Maynard’s paintings; a meditative shot showing (from the back, prefiguring much of her later work) a line of Hopis in black and white climbing stairs to a mesa, as if proceeding to a religious observance (see plate 3); a Pueblo woman with her chickens; a Navajo mother and child that ranks among her most beautiful Madonnas. Other portraits are weaker, owing to her inability to communicate with her subjects. The faces are beautiful and entirely expressionless—the only exception a resentful boy glowering at the camera. Others are modernist abstractions. The best are those taken from enough distance to show what people are doing and how they hold their bodies. Here is a glimpse of what would become a major dimension of her work.

  5.3. HOPI MAN, 1923

  5.4. DOROTHEA WITH HER SONS, 1928–29

  5.5. MAYNARD WITH HIS SON DANIEL, PROBABLY 1925–26

  5.6. DANIEL DIXON, 1930

  Lange and Baldwin returned to California alone. Dixon, for whom the Indians lived in humility with the natural environment and united individual and community, work and art and play, stayed four more months. His lengthy trips continued throughout their marriage—to New York in 1924, Arizona in 1926, Nevada in 1927, Sacramento in 1928, the Mojave Desert in 1930.

  MAYNARD AND DOROTHEA, like her parents, were a modern couple—they used birth control, waiting five years to have their first child. Dorothea never doubted that she would have children of her own, but she was, understandably, cautious: She often worked a twelve-hour day at the studio, then returned to domestic work and a conflicted relationship with Consie. Still, she probably felt she could not wait longer. Twenty-nine, her age when her first child was born, was, in those days, considered extremely late for a first birth.

  Daniel Rhodes Dixon was born on May 15, 1925, named for the western writer Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a close friend of Maynard. Maynard and Dorothea’s second son, John Goodnews Dixon, arrived on June 12, 1928—his middle name was a whim of Maynard’s and was later changed to Eaglefeather. They were beautiful children and, of course, Dorothea made hundreds of photographs of them. Her pleasure seems to make the picture surfaces especially tactile—velvety or glistening, and when she appears in snapshots, she is herself aglow. She loved to photograph them with Maynard, and his gentleness and playfulness shine. One of the most loving shows Maynard holding the baby, his long, fine hands up against the delicious chubbiness of the baby’s feet, bottom, and back. Maynard, in turn, made photographs of her with the boys, and through his eye her delight is also unmistakable. As the boys grew older, the family images continued to multiply—typically outdoors shots of swimming, picnicking, and camping—and they vibrate with pleasure. Often the boys are running around naked, and even the adults are skinny-dipping. Throwing off clothes was a symbol of freedom for this generation of bohemians.

  As happens to so many women trying to manage work and children, Dorothea underestimated the labor of motherhood. Years later, she recollected “how cocky I was when Dan was born. I well remember the first two weeks at home. After that it was smoother but those two weeks must have been fierce or I would have long since forgotten it, as I have so much else.”25 Her work schedule became staggering. She did housework before heading for the studio—this meant not only cleaning and dressing the boys but arranging their care and schedule, planning meals, and shopping for food. Since the couple had to pay for child care, she needed to earn more, which increased the strain. When she arrived home, of course, there was no time to rest—she turned immediately to cooking, washing the dishes, and spending time with the boys, while Maynard, if he was present, often returned to his work after supper. Maynard was away when John was born; John’s original middle name, Goodnews, came from Maynard’s words on the phone when he was told of the birth.

  Dan and John looked up to their stepsister, who took on some of their care. But their presence did not make things easier for Consie, and one terrible fight with Dorothea sent her away from her home: In 1927, when Maynard was away for four months, one of Consie’s jobs was to wash baby Dan’s bottle when she got home from school so it would be ready for him. She was late one day, the bottle remained unwashed, and when D
orothea arrived home, she flew into a rage. She and Consie came to blows—Consie bashed her stepmother with a telephone—and both sustained minor injuries. Consie, now seventeen, left to live with Aunt Reb, Maynard’s sister. It was not a permanent separation—Consie would live with Maynard and Dorothea again in the future—but for now she was in exile.

  Soon the Dixon-Lange household enlarged to take in two teenagers, and this burden, too, fell mainly on Dorothea. The first was John Collier, Jr., later a superb photographer, son of John Collier, Sr., who would be appointed commissioner of Indian Affairs by Franklin Roosevelt. John Senior and Maynard shared a passion for Indians and membership in the American Indian Defense Association—they had collaborated on an article defending the Pueblos—and Maynard and Dorothea visited the Colliers in their homes in Mill Valley and Taos. Hit by a car at age seven, the young John Jr. suffered permanent injury to one arm and his brain, becoming deaf and severely dyslexic and soon dropping out of school. Dorothea found him particularly winning, his disability adding to his appeal for her. Meanwhile, his artistic abilities grew stronger and, as was common practice, his parents sent him to apprentice with Dixon. Off and on between 1924 and 1933, John lived with Maynard and Dorothea and attended the California School of Fine Arts. He adored Maynard, whom he began to address as “Uncle,” but spent more time with Dorothea and learned from her to love photography.26 He bonded especially with Consie, three years his elder, and this friendship fortified her; John often took her side in the conflicts with Dorothea, and internalized some of her animosity toward Dorothea. A decade later, however, Dorothea would get him a photography job at the Farm Security Administration, and for the rest of her life she figured as a mentor not only to John but also to his wife, Mary, a superb photographer as well.27 In later years, as John aged and his and Dorothea’s disabilities worsened, their attachment grew stronger. Their relationship was typical for Lange: not always easy to get along with, she was nevertheless a loyal and generous friend.