by Karen Karbo
Meet the Stieglitzes
During the early summer of 1918, when most of the pictures were taken, Georgia stayed alone in Elizabeth’s studio, in bed. Stieglitz tended to her during the day and returned to his wife, Emmy, at night. Their marriage was one in name only; despite Alfred’s avant-garde aesthetic, he was an old-fashioned Victorian who, in his heart of hearts, didn’t believe that being miserable in a marriage was a reason to leave it. He and Emmy had been estranged for years; he slept in a dressing room. Who knows how long this would have gone on if O’Keeffe hadn’t sent him her drawings?
One day while Emmy was out, Stieglitz, resorting to a time-honored technique favored by people who want out of a relationship but can’t bear to think of themselves as someone who would initiate a break-up, brought Georgia to the apartment for a photo shoot. Emmy returned from her errand and “surprised” them while Georgia was posed before Alfred’s lens. Emmy demanded to know what was going on, in that slightly insane way betrayed lovers always want to know what’s going on, when, of course, they know exactly what’s going on. Stieglitz was incensed: Couldn’t she see they weren’t doing anything but making some pictures? Emmy, less savvy about how to play this game than O’Keeffe would be when it was her turn to be the betrayed wife, succumbed to her outrage, ordering them both out.
Later that night, Emmy’s behavior illustrated a good life lesson: Never allow yourself to be provoked into issuing an ultimatum. The only time you should ever issue an ultimatum is if you can easily accept the worst outcome. This is a conundrum; if you can accept the worst outcome, you usually aren’t moved to issue an ultimatum.
She said, “Get rid of that O’Keeffe woman or it’s over, Alfred!”
He said, “Okay.”
In less than two hours it was done: Stieglitz packed up his stuff and fled to Georgia’s tiny studio, euphoric over his coup: He could now tell everyone “My wife threw me out over nothing. I am a photographer, and I was simply photographing Miss O’Keeffe.”
The next day Emmy relented, begging him to come back, but it was too late. Alfred and Georgia, for better and much worse, were the love of each other’s lives. They gave themselves to one another, but they also gave each other a new view of themselves. She was the red Porsche purchased by his middle-aged man; he was the football hero who falls in love with her awkward new girl in school. Anne Roiphe, in Art and Madness, speaks of “the thing of insanity that makes for both trouble and excitement” that’s necessary for great, enduring love, and Alfred and Georgia were rich in this regard.
A few weeks later, the couple was summoned to Oaklawn, the Stieglitz estate in Lake George, by Hedwig, Stieglitz’s mother and the family matriarch. After Edward, Stieglitz’s late father, made his riches in woolen goods, he bought a “cottage” in the country, twelve acres of waterfront property*** on Lake George, in the southern Adirondacks. The lake is long and narrow, surrounded by forested hills and studded with small islands. Stieglitz had spent summers there for thirty years, in a turreted, many-roomed Gilded Age monstrosity, furnished with gloomy oil paintings in gilt frames and heavy furniture designed in a way to make sure you banged your knee every time you passed through one of the dark rooms. He was more attached to Lake George than he was (or would be) to any woman in his life. It would cause problems, but Georgia didn’t realize that yet.
It was a little awkward, as you can imagine. Then, as now, no one knows what to say when one of the brothers shows up with a Woman Not His Wife, and everyone is supposed to pretend nothing’s different. But Hedwig knew better than to cross her favorite son, and at dinner she placed Georgia at her side.
This first visit was charmed, as it always is when you’re in the love shack. Alfred and Georgia tramped around the lake and took the rowboat out after dinner, and after lunch they left the table before everyone else was quite finished, giggling—giggling—and skipped upstairs to take a “nap,” slipping out of the sleeves of their sweaters as they went. Their afternoon routine consisted of sex and photography. He took a picture of her sitting on the ground before a flower bed, her paper and watercolors at her side. She is wearing a white dress and a dark cardigan. One hand is around her knees and she holds a small brush. Her head is turned. She looks back and up at Stieglitz in an expression that says, to me anyway, “You’re interrupting me. You will always be interrupting, and my heart will allow me no choice but to be interrupted by you.”
They marveled at the signs that proved their unlikely union was meant to be. Georgia remembered how she had studied at Lake George one summer, on the scholarship she received from the Art Students League. Alfred realized that years earlier, his father, Edward, who had become a respected patron of the arts and amateur painter, had been asked to judge an art contest. Since Alfred was the family-appointed artist, his father had asked him to choose the winning entry. The fifty-dollar first prize went to Eugene Speicher’s portrait of a young woman named Georgia O’Keeffe.
The first visit ended in a flourish of typical Stieglitzian drama. Alfred’s daughter, Kitty, had spent the early part of the summer at camp, after which she was expected at Oaklawn. Emmy had begged Alfred to allow their daughter, who was traumatized by their separation, to enjoy her visit without being forced to deal with the presence of her father’s new lover. Alfred promised Emmy, then either forgot, or assumed that once Kitty met Georgia she would love her just as he loved her. Kitty arrived and pitched a red-faced fit, and Georgia and Alfred fled to New York.
O’Keeffe had fully recovered from her “flu,” or whatever it was she’d suffered from in the spring. She was expected back in Canyon to teach the fall term. Stieglitz had no intention of letting her go, and made an extravagant offer: He wanted to underwrite a year of painting for her. Would she accept that? Would she allow him to be her patron of the arts?†††† She said yes. How could she not? She sent to Texas for her things, giving up everything that nourished her: the sense of liberation that comes with wide, windswept places, her agency over her own life. Was it worth it?
How to Manage Living with the In-Laws
In our modern world that believes in the power and righteousness of romantic love, no one looks past her lover to see the army of irritating people with linked arms standing behind him: his family. Every mother-in-law joke is about someone else. So blinded by love are we, usually, we never stop to think that unless our beloved was grown in a petri dish, he’s got a mother.
As long as possible, find the in-laws entertaining.
Hedwig Stieglitz ruled Oaklawn. Every day she served three artery-clogging meals, plus a full tea with cakes and sweets, to a table of sons and daughters, their sons and daughters and nieces and nephews, and a handful of guests Stieglitz had invited to stay for the month. There could be twenty people at a meal, all talking at once, preferably arguing. The best meal would be one with a heavy sauce and an emotional outburst. If someone left the table in tears, the meal would be considered a complete success.
Like Alfred, they talked at you until you felt as if your eardrums would break from simple usage. They seemed to possess the gene that compels you to say every thought that comes into your head, especially if it provokes an argument. The O’Keeffes were Midwesterners who tended toward stoicism, silent keepers of the elephants in the room. Georgia’s crazy love for Alfred was a case of opposites attract: The huge tribe of Stieglitzes was opposite her as well.
At first, O’Keeffe found the Stieglitzes to be eccentric and energetic. One of O’Keeffe’s greatest gifts was her ability to delight in the ordinary things of this world, and the wild and crazy Stieglitzes were, for a time, one of the things that amused her. She had spent so much time alone in Texas that it was fun to be part of this huge, rollicking gang.
Eventually, of course, her essential introversion reasserted itself, and she began to find the chaos first exhausting, then annoying. She survived, I think, by watching their antics as though she was wat
ching a play or a movie. She didn’t spend much time at the theater, and there is no evidence at all that she liked movies. The Stieglitzes seemed to meet whatever need she had for madcap entertainment. Admittedly, this only works for so long, or only works intermittently.
Find a shack of one’s own.
It pays to have a good sense of how much you can take of your beloved’s family before you do something everyone will regret. If your beloved’s family is more along the Stieglitz model than the O’Keeffe model, pitching a fit probably won’t cause much upset. Your contribution to the bedlam might even be appreciated. But Georgia internalized everything. She was inclined toward silent resentment, which always evolved into some psychogenic ailment that felled her like a redwood: brutal headaches, insomnia, weight loss.
This was a dilemma. Every year from 1918 on, Alfred and Georgia spent the late spring, summer, and early fall at Lake George. There was no question they would go anywhere else. Alfred despised travel. Georgia was torn. She preferred any countryside to New York, where she never felt at home, but Lake George was not really her landscape: The crush of foliage, the tall pine and oak that crowded the house, the undergrowth, the humidity and smell of composting leaves, even in summer, didn’t float her boat.
In 1920, Hedwig suffered a stroke. Georgia read her confusion and trembling accurately, called for medical help, and saved her life, or so Alfred claimed. But in 1922, Hedwig died; the Victorian-era days at Oaklawn were over, and the mansion was sold.‡‡‡‡ Fortunately, there was a farmhouse on the property suitable for refurbishing.§§§§ It was called The Hill, because the Stieglitzes belonged to a class of people who could only summer at a place with a name. The Hill was homier, more in keeping with what Georgia was used to, but much smaller. The staff was also reduced to a trustworthy local couple of a certain vintage, who worked as cook and caretaker.
Can you see where this is going? The same herd of family and friends came and went every summer, packing themselves into the smaller space, eating, sleeping, debating, shouting, making up, tromping in, tromping out. Georgia found herself unable to breathe.
Two things kept her from a rubber room. The first was the garden, which she made her own. It spoke to the farm girl in her, and she found herself restored by digging in the earth and all that hard, sweaty labor. The Stieglitzes, who believed in hiring people to do the sweaty work, watched her from a distance, mystified.
The other thing she did was claim one of the outbuildings as her studio. Stieglitz wanted to share “The Shanty” with her, but she told him no and closed the door, thus predating Virginia Woolf’s radical call for a room of one’s own by ten years. It hardly matters which cultural icon got there first: It still holds true. What neither of them realized is that having your own place to go to, where you don’t have to answer to anyone, where you don’t have to make conversation or listen to family squabbles, or eat heavy tea cakes every afternoon at four o’clock, helps to preserve everyone’s good feelings for each other.
Bury Judith.
It never hurts—and indeed, it can help to solidify your position with the in-laws—to ally yourself with the most popular member of the family, which is usually the youngest.
In this regard, Georgia lucked out. She was fond of Alfred’s younger sister Agnes, who had a teenage daughter also named Georgia who was energetic and sassy and pretty much everything teenagers would be known for forty years down the road, when the concept entered popular culture.¶¶¶¶ Everyone started calling her Georgia Minor, and Georgia Minor called O’Keeffe GOK. Alfred was a strict teetotaler, and sometimes GOK and Georgia Minor would meet up at The Shanty for a drink or two. The best prank they ever pulled, in concert with a few of the other younger Stieglitzes, was the burying of Judith.
GOK despised the heavy Victorian furnishings of Oaklawn, particularly a hideous plaster bust of a woman that served no purpose other than taking up space. Judith, as she’d named the bust, stood for everything she hated in the art she’d refused to respect when she was at the Art Institute of Chicago: It was phony, fussy, meaningless, dead. A lot of the furniture was sold with Oaklawn, but Judith managed to make her way to The Hill. One night Georgia Minor and GOK stole the bust and buried it. They did such a good job, Judith was never found.****
†Verklempt, because Stieglitz was clearly completely, desperately in love with her, in a way that their husbands, who didn’t own a camera (much less know how to operate one) were not in love with them.
‡Which I do, since the film was directed by the esteemed Bob Balaban, also an actor who costarred in Capote, where he played William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, a magazine that has always been obsessed with getting the facts right.
§Or the 1921 equivalent, which may have actually been “What the fuck, Alfred?”
¶Thank you, film school, for teaching me this handy, slightly pretentious phrase.
*According to Henry McBride, critic for the New York Sun, who saw through a lot of the nonsense and realized that O’Keeffe’s work was more complex than people gave her credit for.
††Except in 1932 and 1938; in 1931 he opened her exhibit in December and it carried over into the next year. In 1937 he opened exhibits in both February and December. Stieglitz may not have been a faithful husband, but I defy anyone to find a more devoted promoter of a wife’s art.
‡‡For a woman of the time she would have been considered educated.
§§O’Keeffe was actually a practical and pragmatic intellectual, well-read in the classics.
¶¶Thirty-two years old.
**Sure, all things being relative.
†††She’d never been to Europe.
‡‡‡The song was called “Sodomy.” It’s a tribute to my mother’s essentially tolerant worldview that she never flinched when I put the album on the stereo and blared it throughout the house.
§§§In the ’20s, American literature was reinventing itself; to capitalize on the trend, Stieglitz founded a literary magazine. O’Keeffe designed the cover.
¶¶¶One of Freud’s famous primitive defense mechanisms.
***Perhaps there’s a question half-forming in your mind. Why did Stieglitz and O’Keeffe live like grad students when there was obviously a load of Stieglitz money? Then, as now, just because the father makes a fortune, that doesn’t mean the son has access to it. Alfred was a trust fund baby, but only to a point. The money he received from his father covered his photographic pursuits; his living expenses were covered by his wife Emmy.
††††Stieglitz borrowed $1,000 (about $15,000 in today’s dollars) from a well-to-do friend to finance his promise.
‡‡‡‡It may have been sold in 1919. Accounts differ. I find it hard to care.
§§§§The farmhouse had belonged to a pig farmer, but the Stieglitzes bought the farmer out and sold the pigs. They lived downwind from the farm, and the odor ruined their vacations.
¶¶¶¶The term received its first big airplay in 1952, by Bill Haley.
****The Quarters at Lake George vacation condos were eventually built on the Stieglitz property. There were no reports of any hideous Victorian busts unearthed during construction. Book online and bring a shovel.
Georgia O’Keeffe
American (1887–1986)
The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., 1926
Oil on canvas, 123.2 x 76.8 cm (48½ x 30¼ in.)
Gift of Leigh B. Block, 1985.206. The Art Institute of Chicago
7
REBEL
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant . . . making your unknown known is the important thing.
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe. By the mid-’20s they had become a Famous
Art Couple. There was no one like them. People began to recognize them on the streets of Manhattan, walking arm in arm in their twin loden capes, or sitting across from one another in a modest restaurant, eating soup. Georgia’s black dresses had become uniforms. Sometimes, she donned a black turban.
Greenwich Village was the center of bohemian life, but O’Keeffe and Stieglitz lived in Midtown, and Lenox Hill. When O’Keeffe was first dazzled by Stieglitz, as an art student visiting 291, she had imagined he had money—or at least a lot more than she did. She was a poor student in a rented room, a potted red geranium her only decor. Stieglitz ran his own gallery, published his own magazine, and in hard times was so generous to his artists he practically supported them, buying their paintings when no one else did, and accepting artwork in lieu of commission when they did make a sale.†
How dazzled Georgia must have been, how relieved. After years of scraping by on a teacher’s salary, here was an older man who was obviously successful and apparently settled. Not long after she moved to New York, however, it became apparent that Stieglitz had no real income of his own. During his marriage to Emmy, it was her family money that kept them afloat, which allowed him to invest every penny of his small monthly trust settled on him by his father in his photography. Now, his trust had to support him, and Georgia. This didn’t seem to bother Georgia much;‡ she was with the man she loved, and was free to paint. She was used to scrimping, and she didn’t need much to get by. Also, Stieglitz was a high priest of modern art, and like high priests everywhere it was to be expected that he find money beneath his concern (an attitude made easier to hold since he also enjoyed the support and affection of a large, well-off family with apartments in upscale Manhattan neighborhoods).
