Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Other pictures from her first year at the League are unified by their somber palette. An oil painting of a dark-skinned boy with long black hair, wearing a black hat against a penumbral background, is enlivened by the sitter’s red kerchief tied into a knot at the neck with a Chasean flourish of brushstrokes. Her pastel of a white flower against a blue curtain is loosely captured on unconventional black paper. Her mezzotint of a stream winding through verdant hills toward a crimson sunset is executed on gray-blue paper. While all of these pictures are accomplished, and O’Keeffe would return to the landscape and floral subjects, these works still constitute a student’s experiments.

  At twenty, O’Keeffe’s features and manner softened. Her pale skin, blue eyes, and dark hair betrayed her Irish origins, and her classmates nicknamed her Patsy. Instead of taking offence, O’Keeffe felt herself to be popular. “I was everyone’s pet which was sort of nice,” she admitted.8 Her curls were so inviting that “everybody wanted to run his fingers through my hair.”9

  For the first time since leaving Sun Prairie five years before, O’Keeffe did not feel like an outcast having to overcome the stigma of family or poverty. New York City, then as now, accepted all kinds, and the flirtatious advances of her male classmates flattered her. The most enticing was George Dannenberg, a student from San Francisco who was five years her senior. As his date for the Valentine’s Day costume party, she dressed herself as Peter Pan. At the Leap Year dance, where cross-dressing was mandatory, she was photographed in a man’s suit with her bowtie at a rakish angle. Like her father, she loved to dance, yet she recognized the potential risk of such indulgence. “I first learned to say no when I stopped dancing,” she said. “I like to dance very much but if I danced all night, I couldn’t paint for three days.”10

  Dancing was only one of the many temptations offered in Manhattan. Georgia began to feel overwhelmed. After reading a book on decision making, she opened a notebook and wrote “yes” at the top of the left hand page and “no” at the top of the right, then proceeded to confront all of the decisions she needed to make and put them in one of the categories. The simple system revealed what she really wanted to do and what others wanted her to do. It provided a core of discipline that served her well. She later explained, “The essential question was always if you want to do this, can you do that?”11

  Her system was tested by the appearance of Eugene Speicher, a handsome older student who asked her to model. Tiring of her refusals, he blocked her way up the staircase one morning and refused to move unless she posed for him. He teased, “It doesn’t matter what you do. I’m going to be a great painter and you will probably end up teaching painting in some girls’ school.”12

  O’Keeffe pushed past him to mount the stairs to her life class, only to find herself uninspired by the male model. Reconsidering Speicher’s offer, she went to his studio and he spent the afternoon dashing off her portrait. He promised it to her on the condition that he would be allowed to paint another one for himself.

  One snowy day in January 1908, Speicher was painting another likeness of O’Keeffe when a student burst in and suggested that they come along to see drawings by the nineteenth-century French sculptor Auguste Rodin at a gallery called 291. League teachers had encouraged students to see what they considered to be such laughable and offensive modern art.

  Speicher and O’Keeffe joined a group that trooped through the snow for half a dozen blocks to the gallery. They packed into a tiny elevator and tumbled out into a small room. A middle-aged man in pince-nez, his gray hair uncombed, stood with a distracted air, holding a piece of photographic equipment.

  Alfred Stieglitz was New York City’s foremost authority on modern art. The students, largely ignorant of artistic developments in Paris, made rude remarks about the suggestive line drawings of nude women washed with pale watercolor. O’Keeffe thought that they didn’t look like anything she had been taught about drawing. For one thing, there were frankly erotic pictures of women with their legs splayed. Others portrayed women standing or bending over but without the attention to modeling and anatomy taught at the League.

  Stieglitz glared at his visitors. When the bolder ones among them demanded an explanation, Stieglitz was quick to defend Rodin’s deft touch in capturing the essence of the figure in just a few brushstrokes. As the debate grew heated, O’Keeffe stood silently in the corner. Finally, the students left in a pack, taking her with them. Although she thought the Rodins “made no sense,” she was intrigued by 291 and likely returned that April to see the country’s first exhibition of works by Henri Matisse.

  League students discussed at length the merits of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, color theory, and art history. O’Keeffe, however, was more concerned with making a painting that had meaning for her, the way her watercolor of trees on a snowy night had been significant to her as a child. Art theory and personal relevance were not mutually exclusive, but she had not yet come to that conclusion.

  That spring, she walked up Riverside Drive with a few other students. Sitting on the grass in the park near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, she observed the moonlight shining on the lawn, the thick breathy quality of the poplar trees, and the twinkling lights from the other side of the Hudson River. The next morning, she painted the scene from memory. Pleased with the results, she risked showing it to another student, who launched into an explanation of Impressionism while daubing colored bits of paint onto her canvas. O’Keeffe felt he’d ruined her best attempt of that year. The irritation led her to keep the painting for many years to mark “the effort toward something that had meaning to me.”13

  Nonetheless, a painting that had less meaning to her wound up changing the course of her life. Her mahogany-toned still life of a dead rabbit lying diagonally near a copper pot is indebted to Munich School precedents but is unusual in its simplicity. The two items rest against a background of burnt umber, reflecting the influence of Japanese art evident in her monotypes and watercolors. The concentration and the confidence of the picture won the League’s prestigious Chase Award, and O’Keeffe was given a summer study scholarship at the art colony of Amitola, on Lake George in upstate New York.

  Instead of going home to the stifling south, she took the train to Lake George, a glacial body of water surrounded by towering firs and pines at the southern boundary of the Adirondack Mountains. Founded by Spencer and Katrina Trask, patrons of the arts who later established the arts colony Yaddo in Saratoga, Amitola was nestled on one hundred acres of forest on the eastern edge of the lake. An old hotel had been remodeled to create a dormitory for writers and artists who, if not on scholarship, were charged a modest fee. The gothic, sixteen-room wooden structure blended into the pines and was lit at night by rose-colored lanterns.

  Alfred Stieglitz spent that summer at Lake George as he had every year since the turn of the century when his father, Edward Stieglitz, bought his large waterfront estate, Oaklawn. That summer, the older Stieglitz, who was an amateur painter and art collector, was asked to serve on a jury at Amitola and enlisted his son to help. With eerie prescience, the young Alfred awarded Eugene Speicher a fifty-dollar prize for his portrait of a fine-boned beauty—Georgia O’Keeffe.14

  There were twenty other students from the League at Amitola, and the scenery was not primary among O’Keeffe’s concerns. As she put it, “The daisies were blooming, the mountains were blue beyond the lake—but it just didn’t seem to be anything I wanted to paint.”15 Two beaus competing for her affection offered welcome distraction.

  One evening, she agreed to row across the lake with the two young men, one of whom, probably Dannenberg, was furious with the other for infringing on his intimate time with her. Nonetheless, they rowed together and docked the boat to go to the market. When they returned, they found that their boat had been stolen. The unhappy threesome had to walk several miles around the end of the lake to return to Amitola.

  O’Keeffe was glum about the whole episode. Looking over the marshes and tal
l cattails, across the water to the white trunks of birch trees gleaming from within the dark woods, she felt a frisson of recognition, the feeling she had had at Riverside Park that spring. The next morning, she returned to the marsh and painted for the first time out of doors. She termed the results “the best painting of that summer,” but instead of keeping it, she gave it to Dannenberg.16

  Dannenberg and O’Keeffe luxuriated in the time spent together. Strong emotions for men would prove to be the source of numerous artistic breakthroughs for O’Keeffe, but this may be the first evidence of her realization that the landscape could act as metaphor for the tumult of emotion. It was the beginning, too, of a series of triangulated relationships, where two admirers were left fighting one another for the privilege of O’Keeffe’s attention.

  IV

  The early winter visit that O’Keeffe had paid to Stieglitz’s gallery coincided with an important turning point in its history. In 1905, with artist Edward Steichen, Stieglitz had opened The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, known as “291” for its address on Fifth Avenue between Thirtieth and Thirty-first streets. Photography portrait studios had been around since the Civil War, but 291 was the first gallery in the United States to exhibit photographs as fine art. The Rodin exhibition visited by O’Keeffe and her classmates was the beginning of a new departure for Stieglitz as he began to show the modern art being made in Paris by Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, whose art was not yet known in New York.

  An acknowledged pioneer of fine art photography, by 1908 Stieglitz was also an impresario, writer, publisher, and dealer. He was already a legendary personality, a combination of perspicacity and egocentricity, generosity and searing criticality, experimental sensibility and nineteenth-century Romantic ideals.

  Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on New Year’s Day 1864, Alfred Stieglitz was the first son of well-to-do, German-born, Jewish parents, Edward and Hedwig Stieglitz. Edward, who had come to America in 1849, had developed his own business importing woolen cloth and manufacturing shirts. He was a rigid perfectionist and disciplinarian with a weakness for women. Rather handsome, and smartly dressed, he flirted extravagantly with Hedwig’s unmarried sisters Ida and Rosa Werner.1 Although there were three live-in servants, in 1865 Rosa came to reside with her sister and brother-in-law, ostensibly to help care for their growing brood of children. Rosa and Edward are thought to have become intimate over the next six years whenever Hedwig was indisposed by her sequential pregnancies. After the birth of Alfred, Hedwig gave birth to Flora in 1865, twin boys, Leopold and Julius, in 1867, Agnes in 1869, and Selma in 1871.

  After the last child was born, Edward Stieglitz moved his family from the middle-class German neighborhood in New Jersey to a posh, newly built area of New York City. He bought a five-story brownstone at 14 East Sixtieth Street, off Fifth Avenue, overlooking the undeveloped pasture of Central Park. Endowed with such conveniences as gas chandeliers, steam heat, and refrigerated water, it also had separate bedrooms for Edward and Hedwig.

  Edward’s business, Hahlo and Stieglitz Company, had flourished after the Chicago fire of 1871 when he profited from the scarcity and escalated prices of woolen goods. After this sudden influx of wealth, he reinvented himself as a gentleman and patron of the arts. A weekend painter, he adopted the elevated view that amateurism was the requirement and blessing of his status as an American aristocrat. His friends were not businessmen but artists. They included the German painter Fedor Encke and the American sculptor Moses Ezekiel. When they were invited to dinner on Sundays, young Alfred was flattered to be asked to fetch wine from the cellar or to play billiards with the men.

  Alfred’s competitive nature led him to practice billiards so fervently that, by the age of nine, he could beat his father at the game. Such victory was short-lived. In the struggle between father and son, Alfred always capitulated. He had inherited many of his father’s personality traits—his dedication to financial support for artists, his perfectionism, and his short temper.

  He also had his father’s business acumen, but he rejected it on principle, believing that finances were the cause of his parents’ unhappiness. He watched his father berate his mother for not adhering to the household budget. Alfred sided with his mother, though he admitted, “Even while rebelling against my father and finding him vain, impatient and impossible to speak to, I admired him.”2

  To escape Edward’s tirades, Hedwig read popular novels and listened to music. Alfred escaped through hypochondria, or tried to gain his parents’ approval through hyperactivity. As a youngster, he immersed himself in the pursuits of a Victorian gentleman: following horse races, collecting autographs, studying piano, competing at billiards and archery.

  In the fall of 1871, seven-year-old Alfred was sent to the best private school in New York, The Charlier Institute, which emphasized a Christian education. Neither of his parents practiced the Judaism of their German parents. Determined to assimilate into New York society, Edward Stieglitz became the first Jewish member of New York’s Jockey Club.

  He also started bringing his family to the gracious resorts of Lake George in 1872. In 1880 he rented Crosbyside, the grand “cottage” later purchased by the Trasks to accommodate the artists’ colony Amitola. Alfred, in his memoirs, would insist that he spent the summer in the very room that was to be assigned to O’Keeffe twenty-eight years later.

  A year before graduating from Charlier, Alfred’s parents sent him to public high school so he could qualify for admission to the City College of New York. Alfred found the courses ridiculously easy, and his father decided that all of his children must be educated according to the rigorous standards of German schools.

  In 1881, Edward Stieglitz sold his shares of Hahlo and Stieglitz Company for four hundred thousand dollars, invested in the stock market, and retired with his family to Europe. On board the oceanliner, Alfred met Joseph Obermeyer and Louis Schubart, Jewish boys of German origin who were slightly older but would remain his close friends for the next thirty-five years.

  In Germany, Alfred and his brothers began their studies at the Realgymnasium in Karlsruhe while Agnes and Selma studied at a school in Weimar. Flora studied piano at the conservatory there. With their children in school, Edward, Hedwig, and Rosa traveled to the European capitals to take in the theater, music, and spas. This vision of two women pampering and caring for their father was to have an effect on all the Stieglitz sons.

  Alfred entered Berlin’s Technische Hochschule in mechanical engineering in 1882. Bored by his studies and living on a generous allowance of twelve hundred dollars a month, he mostly read novels and hung around cafes. La vie bohème was less compelling for Alfred after he met the chemistry department’s Professor Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, who taught photography and had invented the technique of retouching collodion negatives for portrait photography. Alfred enrolled in Vogel’s course and soon was helping his teacher test chemicals and learning the wet-collodion process. In thrall to a discipline that integrated his creative and scientific inclinations, he went to the Klosterstrasse in 1883 and bought his first view camera, which used dry plates, as well as a tripod and plate holder.

  Two years later, Edward Stieglitz, his wife, and daughters returned to America, but his sons remained in Germany. Although his brothers were pursuing doctorates, Alfred was told not to worry about advanced degrees or professional training. He was free to pursue photography in Berlin, and the following year he won honorable mention for seven holiday photographs published in The Amateur Photographer. He was beginning to formulate the belief that photography could be practiced as an art form. He was goaded by some Berlin artists who told Vogel that Alfred’s pictures could be art if only they’d been made by hand, not a machine.

  In 1888, Alfred and his brothers returned to New York for the first time in seven years to attend Flora’s wedding to Alfred Stern, manager of the Los Angeles office of Charles Stern, who produced California wines and brandies. They returned to Germany that fall. Soon afterward, Alfred became involved wit
h a prostitute known as Paula. Although he was twenty-five, it is likely that she was his first sexual relationship. He invited her to live with him at his apartment at 44 Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse. Although no nude portraits survive, she is the subject of Sunlight and Shadows—Paula, made in 1889. Formally dressed in a long, ruffled black dress with lace collar, her blond hair in a French twist under a large, dark hat, Paula is writing at a table, her back to the viewer, with stripes of sunlight pouring through the venetian blinds. Pinned to the wall in the photograph are Alfred’s other portraits of Paula, including a close-up of her face with her hair down; in it, she is suggestively lying in bed. This relationship was of such significance to Alfred that after they parted in 1890 he continued to send Paula one hundred and fifty dollars a month until he heard that another patron had established her as the proprietress of a café.

  In early 1890, Flora died while delivering a stillborn child. This family tragedy led Edward and Hedwig Stieglitz to summon their far-flung sons. Julius, awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin, had returned to New York in 1889; Lee would return after graduating summa cum laude in medicine from Heidelberg in 1891. Alfred’s friends Joe Obermeyer and Lou Schubart had received doctorates in chemistry from the University of Berlin and were ready to resume life in Manhattan. Only Alfred, whose photographs had received the silver medal in an exhibition and been published in prestigious magazines, did not wish to return to a city that he now considered vulgar and uncultured. When his father threatened to cut his allowance in 1890, he reluctantly sailed home.

  Alfred considered himself an artist with a camera and refused to sell his photographs or seek employment. His father helped him get a job as director of the Heliochrome Company, where he soon employed his friends Schubart and Obermeyer. When that company failed, his father bought the equipment, and in 1891 Alfred started the Photochrome Engraving Company, with Schubart and Obermeyer as managers. As at Heliochrome, Alfred demanded such quality in the production and paid the employees such high wages that it was nearly impossible to make a profit.