by Karen Karbo
I realize that a few chapters back I made what I hope is a convincing case for the power of sublimation. But, like anything in life, it can be taken to an extreme. Sometimes, rather than funneling our frustrations and forbidden feelings into our work, we must let the crockery fly. We must stand our ground and open our mouths and let the truth roll out and scorch everything in the room. To refuse to say anything is often to burn down the city. O’Keeffe knew what was going on, and yet she said nothing.
Because O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were frugal, and their investments modest, they didn’t suffer much when the stock market crashed in October; however, Stieglitz was forced to give up the Intimate Gallery. This did not sit well with Dorothy Norman, who needed Stieglitz to be ensconced in a gallery if she was going to continue to worship him as a guiding luminary of the American art scene. She was able to squeeze $3,000 from her husband, Edward, to underwrite the opening of a new space. She solicited money from Paul and Beck Strand and a few other investors, and in December 1929, An American Place opened in a new office building on Madison Avenue. Stieglitz authored its manifesto: “No formal press reviews, no special invitations, no -isms, no theories, no game being played.”
Norman had realized her dream of being indispensable to Stieglitz. She managed the gallery, wrote the bills, kept track of the exhibition artwork. O’Keeffe banished herself. The only time she set foot in the place was to hang the shows, which Norman had neither the skill nor guts to do.
Once again Mabel Luhan had invited O’Keeffe to Taos for the summer. O’Keeffe agonized over her decision, remembering how tortured Stieglitz had been the summer before. But she was still and always a feminist. That same year she had participated in a public debate with Michael Gold, editor of New Masses, during which he excoriated her for failing to take up the cause of the oppressed§ in her art, and she coolly informed him that women were among the oppressed and always had been, and that as a woman expressing a female aesthetic—just read the critics!—she was furthering the cause of all women. He blustered and quoted Karl Marx, or one of those guys. She said she thought perhaps he was simply confused, and invited him to come to dinner with her and Stieglitz.
Still, when it came to her personal life, things weren’t quite so cut and dried. O’Keeffe had not wanted to get married, but now that she was, she felt like a “heartless wretch” to just up and leave her husband for months at a time. She wasn’t such a modern wife that she could justify leaving simply because he was cheating on her. It didn’t seem right to go, but she couldn’t forget the euphoria of the previous summer, the sense of coming back to what was truest about her, every day.
Before leaving for Taos, she made a special trip to Lake George to open the house for the summer. She was frustrated, wounded, anxious, and guilty. Still, her habits of creativity were deeply ingrained. While taking a walk in the woods near the lake she stumbled upon a patch of maroon and green jack-in-the-pulpits.¶ Always up for proving to the world that her paintings were not actually lady parts, she knocked out six oils of the phallic jacks, each one more abstract than the one preceding it, and left them in the care of Stieglitz. The paintings, which would become among her most admired, were a reminder: She was neither young nor wealthy, but she could paint, the one thing Dorothy Norman would never have on her.
After she arrived in Taos, O’Keeffe didn’t stay long at Los Gallos. Mabel required intrigue. She suspected her female guests, including O’Keeffe, of angling to steal handsome, chivalrous Tony away from her. Georgia and Tony had developed a genuine friendship: Both were silent types who loved the land and could ride on horseback for hours without talking, but there was nothing else between them. O’Keeffe couldn’t stand the drama, and decamped to a nearby inn. Mabel was furious and disinvited her from a special night of entertainment, arranged with difficulty by Tony. A group of peyote singers were coming from the pueblo to perform at one of Mabel’s soirees. When Tony heard that his wife had told Georgia she was no longer welcome, he refused to go, which enraged Mabel even further. On and on it went.
O’Keeffe really couldn’t have cared less about what went on in Mabeltown. She painted like she was possessed, which she was. Mountains and foothills, black crosses, pueblos, adobe churches, and always, flowers. Stieglitz, for his part, had calmed down considerably. He spent the summer in Lake George playing miniature golf.
Once again, their reunion in the fall was sweet, as was becoming their custom. He made some pictures of her holding a cow skull she had sent back to New York. He didn’t think the skull-and-bones phase would last. It was simply too weird.
Dorothy Norman had a second baby. Since O’Keeffe carried on as if nothing were going on, Stieglitz took no pains to hide his concern for Norman and his interest in her pregnancy, nor his sympathy pains. One can only imagine O’Keeffe’s cold fury and sense of injustice: Stieglitz had denied her a child, yet here he was behaving like an expectant father. Maybe he was an expectant father. Given the amount of times per week Alfred and Dorothy were knocking it out, it’s hard to believe he wasn’t, but Edward Norman, who’d studied at the O’Keeffe Institute for Turning a Blind Eye, claimed the child as his own.
That year, O’Keeffe bumped up her departure to April. She stayed in Alcalde, forty miles southwest of Taos, at H & M Ranch, owned by Marie Garland. Like Mabel, Marie was flamboyant, but less annoying. Every day for weeks on end O’Keeffe got up at dawn, hopped in her Model A, and drove until she found something she wanted to paint. It was the year she discovered Abiquiu, the village where she would one day own a house. She collected more bones: long thigh bones, horse skulls, entire vertebrae.
Meanwhile, Stieglitz had adjusted to his bachelor summers quite nicely, thank you very much. He who had spent decades proud of his refusal to travel anywhere, except Lake George, visited Dorothy and her husband at their summer home in Cape Cod. He shamelessly trumpeted his adoration of Norman. Even Margaret Prosser, the housekeeper at Lake George, got an earful about “the full-hipped Child-Woman with soul-brimming eyes . . .” Naturally, O’Keeffe was kept in the dark.
Stieglitz had had lovers before, most of whom wound up naked before his lens, but he’d never embarked on a big photographic portrait like the one he’d made of Georgia when they had first become lovers. Now, he began one of Dorothy Norman. That fall, not long after Georgia turned forty-four, history repeated itself. One day O’Keeffe, who had been at Lake George, returned to New York earlier than expected to find Stieglitz in their apartment at the Shelton, photographing Norman in the nude. Georgia was not Emmy; she was not going to offer an ultimatum. Her natural defense mechanism wasn’t hysteria but stone-cold silence. Even though she was supporting Stieglitz by now and could have easily thrown him out on his ear, she refused. I yearn to believe her behavior was mystifying, but I suspect I’ve fallen prey to Hollywood movie logic, where the only acceptable response to such betrayal is to stuff his clothes in a suitcase, always inexplicably at hand,* and throw it out the window. Instead, O’Keeffe did what she always did: She left.
In February 1932, Stieglitz opened a forty-year retrospective of his work. Prominently displayed were pictures of the new Woman-Child in town, next to some new ones of O’Keeffe. Georgia was handsome and interesting-looking, but Dorothy was young. Also, when Stieglitz photographed Dorothy, he instructed her to whisper his name over and over, to capture the proper expression of adoration.† The result was as you might imagine: The Woman-Child looked dewy and innocent, and O’Keeffe looked like the “before” picture in an ad for banishing fine lines.
Georgia fought back in the only way Georgia could: She created a new aesthetic, completely disavowing Stieglitz’s influence. The one thing that had always united them was their art, their ability and willingness to influence one another’s work. By the mid-1930s, O’Keeffe’s art was completely her own. She might not have been divorced from Stieglitz, but her work was. In midlife, she reinvented herself, just as th
e current crop of women’s magazines advises.
O’Keeffe’s fascination with clean, elegant bones was not a passing phase. “To me they are as beautiful as anything I know . . . The bones seem to cut to the center of something that is keenly alive,” she said in one of her increasingly frequent interviews. She painted a horse skull with a powder-pink rose resting jauntily in one eye socket‡‡ and a cow skull floating over low red hills, red and yellow flowers suspended in the clouds behind it.§§ As with her erotic-wait-they-are-erotic-right? abstractions of twenty years earlier, the critics weren’t sure what was going on. Dead animal bones? Seriously? And in the same way that back then the theories of Freud were on everyone’s mind, so O’Keeffe paintings must be Freudian, now surrealism was all the rage, which meant her work must be related somehow to Salvador Dali’s melting clocks or René Magritte’s large, lone hats. This isn’t to say O’Keeffe wasn’t influenced by the times, but even as she came into her own, and was gradually being acknowledged as the weird and singular genius that she was, it was still difficult for the critics to believe she came up with this stuff all on her own.¶¶
A marriage is a civilization, the couple at the center of it, king and queen. When it falls apart, the entire population suffers. In 1932 Stieglitz opened a show featuring the work of his old friends, Paul and Beck Strand—his photographs and her paintings. Dorothy Norman disapproved of them both. She felt that Beck was a bad influence on Georgia (who, by running off to Taos, had caused Stieglitz to suffer), and Paul was a schlemiel to put up with her. She didn’t like their art, either. And so their exhibit, which was not even given a catalog, flopped. Strand turned in his key to An American Place, which he’d helped found, and the twenty-five-year-long friendship between him and his mentor was over.
The degree to which O’Keeffe was saddened by this, on top of everything else, is unknown. She believed in forward motion. She believed in living life in the moment, long before the Beatles went to India and returned to the West with a bad case of Eastern thinking. Years passed. Things got worse. No one said a word. Sex is merely sex. Love, too, is mere. Stieglitz, not satisfied with Norman’s role in his life as patron, office manager, and lover, gave her a camera. To fully replace O’Keeffe, she needed to be an artist, too.
Stieglitz had hated museums since he was a young man working to convince the establishment that photography was art. His loathing intensified in November 1929, when the new Museum of Modern Art opened on the twelfth floor of a new building on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. The founding members were three women who had married money: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) and two of her art-loving friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Stieglitz was hurt and enraged that these . . . these . . . ladies would dare to open a museum of modern art without including him.
He’d been slightly appeased when the museum’s second show, Nineteen Living Americans, included pictures by his artists—Demuth, Marin, and O’Keeffe—but then, in the spring of 1932, O’Keeffe was invited, along with sixty-four other artists, to submit a proposal for a mural show. Without breaking a sweat, and without consulting him, his wife whipped out a cubist-inspired red, white, and blue skyscraper-scape, with a few trademark O’Keeffian flowers tossed in for good measure. The show bombed, but O’Keeffe’s contribution was praised, and she was offered another commission: A brand-new performance venue called Radio City Music Hall asked her to paint a wall in the ladies’ lounge. She would be paid $1,500, the same amount as every other contributor.
Stieglitz was so furious it’s amazing the stroke that would kill him years later didn’t drop him in his tracks there and then. Where to start? He despised murals—he called them “that Mexican disease”—and all that Diego Rivera peasant, man-of-the-people stuff that went with them. He was angry that Georgia had allowed herself to appear next to a bunch of hacks in the MOMA show, and then, even worse, that she would go behind his back and accept a commission to paint the bathroom wall** in a place of commerce, and then accept the paltry sum of $1,500, when he, the great Stieglitz, had spent decades carefully managing the outflow of her artwork, and making sure he placed each work with the most appropriate, appreciative collector, massaging the prices ever upward as her fame grew. Even worse, she did all this on her own.
When O’Keeffe informed him of the project—can’t you just see her folded hands and smooth forehead, his eyes bulging out of his head like a cartoon character, with the accompanying sound effect spelled, I believe, aoooooooga?—he marched over to wherever he marched over to—the designer’s office? the project headquarters?—and demanded that the agreement be nullified, saying that his wife was a child—not even a Woman-Child—and had no idea what she was doing.
The Radio City Music Hall people were unmoved. O’Keeffe had signed a contract. The next day, Stieglitz revised his request: His wife would paint the ladies’ lounge for free, but she would require $6,500 in expenses. But the sway Stieglitz had held in the world of New York culture was no more. All those images he and his circle of artists had made, depicting the dehumanizing effect of unparalleled urban growth and the rise of technology, really did reflect the reality of the modern world. The contract stood.
In September 1932, O’Keeffe was set to begin work painting the mural, but construction was behind schedule. The room still wasn’t ready by November 15, her forty-fifth birthday, even though the hall was scheduled to open for the Christmas season. O’Keeffe was given the go-ahead to begin sketching her mural, but as she began, the canvas started peeling off the wall. Or, she was standing in the room having a conversation with the designer, and the canvas started peeling off the wall. However it went down, the canvas came away from the wall.
Then, she either marched out, as was her custom, or burst into hysterical tears, which, then and now, makes men nervous. O’Keeffe did suffer an eventual breakdown, but not then. She was well enough to travel to Lake George the next day to prepare for her December show, and also to return on her own to Manhattan. But Stieglitz, thrilled to have an excuse to break the contract, called the Radio City Music Hall people the very next morning and said his wife had suffered a complete nervous breakdown and had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Although this was untrue, the Radio City Music Hall people—smelling too much crazy somewhere in the mix—released O’Keeffe from her obligation.
A few months passed. Georgia complained of skull-splitting headaches. She couldn’t sleep or eat. She couldn’t stop crying. In February 1933, she was admitted to a swanky facility called Doctors Hospital under the care of Alfred’s doctor brother, Lee. The initial diagnosis was early menopause, but Lee must have known that was bogus, because his first order of business was to forbid his brother to see her. After a month, Alfred was allowed to visit Georgia for ten minutes a week. Meanwhile, An American Place, which was apparently now also in the business of legitimizing Dorothy Norman as an artist, published a book of Norman’s poetry, after no publisher†† would touch it.
At the end of March, O’Keeffe was declared recovered. She couldn’t bear the thought of going home, so she went to Bermuda for a few months. There, she swam, walked on the fine sand beach, and bicycled to the point of exhaustion. She didn’t go to New Mexico that summer, but instead holed up at Lake George. Stieglitz came and went. The housekeeper fed her and she ate and ate. She slept late and got fat.‡‡‡ She didn’t draw or paint. Her “recovery,” it seemed, was a lateral move into clinical depression.
In the midst of all this mishigas, Stieglitz faithfully opened an O’Keeffe exhibit every year. One can’t help but think this was his guilt at work, even though he maintained to the end that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, that he loved Dorothy because she was Woman, and to him Woman was God, and by worshipping her he was only . . . I can’t go on. You get the idea.
Anyway. In January 1933 he showed a few dozen oils, but there was no new work. During his weekly visit to O’Keeffe, he broug
ht pictures of the exhibit, the packed gallery, the admiring crowd. The next year, 1934, there was still nothing new. The show was announced as a retrospective, focusing primarily on the early abstractions that Stieglitz loved. The New Yorker reviewed the show and declared that Georgia O’Keeffe’s work was universal. The hallowed Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased its first O’Keeffe: Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur. O’Keeffe was too bored and tired of her own self to really care.
How to Repair a Marriage that’s Beyond Repair
Stay together and hope things improve before you kill each other.§§§
Arnold Newman, a photographer who made a name for himself by making arresting and revealing pictures of iconic artists and politicians, made a picture of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe in 1944 that’s about the saddest picture of a pair of famous people I’ve ever seen. She’s sitting in a chair facing sideways, her chin slightly lowered, eyes cast down, looking defeated. He stands facing the camera, wearing his black cape and holding a book, his hair thin and white and flyaway. He glares at the camera as if to say, “It’s not my fault,” or, possibly, “How on earth did this happen?” The same year O’Keeffe completed a modest pastel of two gray rocks on a pinkish-coral background. O’Keeffe almost never gave her work titles that contributed anything to their interpretation. A Calla Lily was a calla lily, the D. H. Lawrence Pine Tree, just that. She called this little pastel, My Heart.
