As fall approached, O’Keeffe was offered a full-time position with a pay increase at the University of Virginia. Accepting the seemingly secure position would have been the safest choice for many artists, but to O’Keeffe, whose family’s difficulties grew increasingly burdensome, Charlottesville felt claustrophobic compared to the freedom she had experienced on the Texas plains. O’Keeffe was relieved to board the train to Amarillo in the fall of 1913.
VI
On the evening of February 17, 1913, a traffic jam of chauffeur-driven automobiles and horse-drawn carriages clogged Lexington Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth streets as four thousand well-dressed guests filed into the 69th Regiment Armory, which had been rented for the International Exhibition of Modern Art. The Armory Show, as it was called, introduced America to European modernism.
Nearly thirteen hundred works were shown by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors—a loose-knit group of artists who sought to establish an alternative to the restrictive salons held by the conservative National Academy of Design. These younger artists wanted to introduce Americans to modern art and to bolster enthusiasm for their own efforts.
On opening night, after a fanfare of trumpets, art collector and attorney John Quinn—who had acted as the association’s legal counsel, announced: “American artists—young American artists, that is—do not dread, and have no need to dread, the ideas or the culture of Europe. They believe that in the domain of art only the best should rule.”1 He backed up his enthusiasm by spending over five thousand dollars on paintings and sculpture in the show.
Organized by the Symbolist-inspired painter Arthur B. Davies and the expressive realist Walter Kuhn, the exhibition opened with the nineteenth-century French painters Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Gustave Courbet, and the Impressionists Edgar Degas, Claude Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissaro. After such fare, most viewers were shocked by the Post-Impressionists Cézanne, Gauguin, and Matisse, the Cubist painting of Picasso, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia, and the abstract “Improvisation” of Kandinsky. (Although the anarchic Futurists had been invited to exhibit, they never managed to get their work shipped to New York.)
Picabia, renegade of a wealthy Cuban family and living in Paris, was the only European artist to be in New York during the show. His extreme pronouncements were widely quoted in the papers: “Away with form! Out with perspective! Down with all effort toward materialization! Make way for the rhythm of impulse, the tonality of emotion, the equilibriumized expression of the inevitable.”2
The modern European painting not only stirred the greatest commotion, it generated the most sales, eclipsing contributions of the progressive American artists whose work made up two-thirds of the show. Selected by realist painter William Glackens, the American art looked tame compared to stacks of cubes said to represent the female form. Even the progressive Chase, O’Keeffe’s former professor at the Art Students League, had not been invited to participate.
Inspired by Roger Fry’s exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, held at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910 and 1911, Kuhn and Davies had traveled in Germany, France, and England, where they were assisted by expatriate artists such as Walter Pach and the well-connected Steins to select art that provoked. The artists divided the huge armory into a hive of temporary octagonal galleries with burlap-covered walls. Sculptor and heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney paid one thousand dollars for decorative garlands of laurel and pine. Arthur B. Davies, acted as an informal art advisor to Lillie Bliss, Abby Rockefeller, and other society matrons. In return, they raised ten thousand dollars to cover the shipping and exhibition costs.
On the whole, however, the organizers anticipated a profit from admission fees, catalogues, postcards and, most importantly, art sales. The latter tallied nearly forty-five thousand dollars, with painting and sculpture entering the collections of the influential rich. These pieces were later to become part of the core collections at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other museums in the United States.
Arthur Jerome Eddy, a Chicago-based lawyer, bought paintings by Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Picabia, André Derain, and Maurice Vlaminck. When the Armory Show traveled to Chicago, Eddy visited again. By the end of the tour, he had spent nearly five thousand dollars on eighteen paintings and seven lithographs. The following year he wrote one of the earliest books on modern art, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, in which he reproduced Arthur Dove’s 1912 Leaf Forms, possibly the first abstract picture by an American artist and one that O’Keeffe acknowledged as a particular influence.3
Mabel Dodge was galvanized by the Armory Show. The high-profile heir to the White Sewing Machine fortune, Dodge spent much of her life compulsively outdistancing her bourgeois childhood in Buffalo, New York. Her first husband—by whom she had her only son, John Evans—was killed in a hunting accident. With her second husband, architect Edwin Dodge, she spent eight years decorating and restoring the Villa Curonia in Florence, but rumors of war forced her return to New York in 1912. Plump, given to lavish costumes and plumed hats, Dodge wanted to insinuate herself into the burgeoning Greenwich Village scene and soon established a salon for artists and intellectuals at her home on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, next to the Hotel Brevoort. “It was not dogs or glass I collected now, it was people. Important people,” she wrote in her memoirs.
On account of her friendship with Gertrude Stein, who had penned “Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia,” Dodge was asked to write about the connection between abstract writing and the abstract art at the Armory Show. “It became, overnight, my own little Revolution,” she wrote.4 She gave the sponsors two hundred dollars, and was chauffered around the city, collecting works for the exhibition and generating publicity.
Stieglitz, usually chary of the salons that mushroomed throughout Manhattan, understood Dodge’s contrarian nature, and he attended the evenings held in Dodge’s white rooms, which were embellished by white linen curtains, a white marble fireplace, and a white bearskin rug. Certain of Stieglitz’s friends, including the Harvard-educated New York Globe columnist Hutchins Hapgood and his writer wife, Neith Boyce, were regulars, as was the writer Carl Van Vechten.
A refugee from Iowa, Van Vechten interviewed Dodge for the New York Times and soon became her best friend, providing her with all the necessary introductions. Although he’d twice been married, Van Vechten was primarily interested in men, and thereby escaped becoming one of Dodge’s hapless ex-husbands or lovers, among them the Bolshevik author John Reed, who spent the summer of 1913 enmeshed in a tumultuous love affair with her.
Initially, the Armory Show was hailed by the press as “sensational,” “magnificent,” and “unquestionably the most important event ever held in New York.” The conservatives at the Academy were ridiculed.5 But after the exhibition made news nationally and abroad, conservative critics weighed in with their insults, and the yellow press began touting the Armory show as a great joke made at public expense. Cartoons based on Duchamp’s Cubistic painting Nude Descending a Staircase mockingly renamed the work, “Explosion in a Shingle Factory.”
Nonetheless, nearly eighty-eight thousand people paid the twenty-five-cent admission fee to see the New York show. After it traveled to Chicago and Boston, nearly a quarter of a million people had seen it.
Stieglitz had shown European modern art for seven years at 291, but his audience comprised the cognoscenti. The Armory Show paved the way for a larger public’s awareness of modern art. Stieglitz not only lent his Picasso drawing and sculpture to the show, as well as six Matisse drawings, he also bought five drawings by the Russian constructivist Alexander Archipenko for $135, one of Arthur B. Davies’s drawings for $65, and, at the recommendation of Picasso, Spanish sculptor Manuel Manolo’s statuette for $67.50, as well as the only Kandinsky painting in the show, the large arrangement of color form called The Garden of Love, Improvisation #27, for $500.
S
tieglitz had dedicated his life to the idea of change, the very keystone of modern art. Since change meant progress, modern art appealed to most Americans: even conservatives could accept progress as an accumulation of lessons from the past. For Stieglitz, change was associated with the biological process, or what he called the “life forces.” The moral standards of good and evil had been replaced by the characterizations of “life” and “death.” The old art was “dead.” Stieglitz and his group believed in the factor of instinct in the execution of modern art. This nineteenth-century Romantic notion had been revitalized by Sigmund Freud’s writings, which Stieglitz had read in the original German, and by Henri Bergson’s philosophy concerning élan vital. The latter’s book Creative Evolution was a best-seller in 1911. Stieglitz endorsed the notion that modern art was vital because it tapped into the elemental forces of the human psyche.6
Although awarded the title of honorary vice-president, Stieglitz refused to help organize the Armory show, in part because he didn’t like Kuhn, and in part because he had already introduced American audiences to European modern art. Yet he welcomed his role as a figure of some authority, and as the opening drew near, he weighed in with his opinion in the New York Times of January 26: “The dry bones of a dead art are rattling as they never rattled before. The hopeful birth of a new art that is intensely live is doing it. A score or more of painters and sculptors who decline to go on doing merely what the camera does better, have united in a demonstration of independence—an exhibition of what they see and dare express in their own way—that will wring shrieks of indignation from every ordained copyist of ‘old masters.’ . . . If a name is necessary in writing about these live ones, call them ‘Revitalizers.’ That’s what they are, the whole bunch. They’re breathing the breath of life into an art that is long since dead, but won’t believe it.”7
Liberals could justify, as an expression of individuality, what might appear to conservatives as anarchism, narcissism, or sheer self-indulgence. With the Armory Show, the creative act, the nature of genius, was synonymous with individuality. Like the notion of progress, individualism was a touchstone of American philosophy. Even conservatives couldn’t argue with progress and individualism.
After the Armory Show closed on March 15, members of the Academy held their annual salon. As the New York Herald observed, “The walls are monotonous in their representation of picture after picture painted by the half dozen recognized formulas that have grown to constitute American art . . . few of them present either ideas or emotions that stir the spectator.”8
To balance the disproportionate amount of press given to the Europeans during the months leading up to the Armory Show, Stieglitz had turned his attention to the modern art produced in his own country. In January, he showed works by Marin, including five silvery watercolors of the Woolworth Building that progressed from figuration to abstraction. Marin explained that the buildings themselves seemed alive in New York. “I see great forces at work, great movements . . . pushing, pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards. I can hear the sound of their strife and there is great music being played. And so I try to express graphically what a great city is doing.”9 In his choice of Marin, whose Woolworth Building paintings went on to be exhibited in the Armory Show, Stieglitz was placing an American artist and New York itself at the forefront of the international avant garde movement.
Drawing attention to his eminence, Stieglitz had staged a survey of his own photographs during the show. Roughly half of the thirty prints concerned New York City, with pieces like The Flatiron, The City of Ambitions, and Old and New New York. Since photography had been excluded from the Armory Show, Stieglitz considered the exhibition “a diabolical test of photography’s strength” and an attempt to illustrate the role that photography had played in the development of modern art. Reviewers picked up on his message. Edgar Chamberlin wrote in the New York Mail that “everything rendered at all by photography is already better rendered by photography than it possibly could be by painting.” He advised painters to “devote themselves to subjects and methods which photography cannot touch—to futuristic pictures, in short.”10
After the close of the Armory Show, Picabia opened at 291 with “An Exhibition of Studies Made in New York,” including ten depictions of the artist’s experience in Manhattan. Instead of actual views of the Flatiron or Woolworth buildings, Picabia said, “I gave you the rush of upward movement, the feeling of those who attempted to build the Tower of Babel—man’s desire to reach the heavens, attain infinity.”11
Picabia’s endorsement continued in the February 16, 1913, New York Times. “It is in America that I believe that the theories of the NEW ART will hold most tenaciously,” he told a reporter. “I have come here to appeal to the American people to accept the New Movement in Art.” He noted, “You have passed through all the old schools and are the futurists in word and deed and thought.”
Stieglitz mused that the Armory Show was “a sensational success, possibly primarily a success of sensation.”12 While others might have luxuriated in that hard-earned success, or capitalized on being at the forefront of the movement, Stieglitz embarked on the search for fresh opposition. In 1913 five galleries opened to take advantage of the frenzied attention European modern art was receiving. Stieglitz, who truly saw 291 as a place of experimentation rather than consolidation of status, continued to dedicate himself to the less-appreciated Americans like Marin, Hartley, and Arthur Dove, all of whom he had shown with Steichen in 1910 in Younger American Painters in Paris. In short, he began competing with his own success.
There was another factor in Stieglitz’s decision to feature lesser-known American artists at 291. The escalation of World War I in the winter of 1914 forced Steichen and his family to flee from their home in Voulangis and return to America with no more than what they could carry. The following year, de Zayas returned, with trunks of art from the Picabias and from dealer Paul Guillaume, who hoped to receive desperately needed cash in return, in tow. This inventory subsidized a series of provocative exhibitions at 291, including the first American shows of African art held in a gallery (from Guillaume’s collection), and a show of drawings by Picasso and Braque.13 But the logistics of bringing work from Europe were growing too complicated. Without Steichen or de Zayas in Paris to provide the connections, Stieglitz would have little advantage in the suddenly competitive market for modern art.
Shortly after Alfred’s forty-ninth birthday, Joseph T. Keiley, the friend and photographer who had assisted him for sixteen years in the publication of Camera Work, died of Bright’s disease. Stieglitz was devastated. The magazine came out irregularly after Keiley’s death in 1914. That summer, Stieglitz published a special issue that revealed his confusion over these transitions in his life. He asked friends and colleagues, “What is 291?” Sixty-eight responses came from such gallery habitués as Djuna Barnes and Henry McBride, Mabel Dodge and Hutchins Hapgood, as well as the secretary and the elevator operator. While the majority of them were complimentary, Steichen, annoyed with his old collaborator, considered Stieglitz’s inquiry “impertinent, egoistic, and precious.”14
Angered by Steichen’s crack, Stieglitz withdrew to the comfort of predictable allies such as Emil Zoler, sometime handyman and patient listener, and Abraham Walkowitz, the Russian-born Cubist who showed four times at 291. During dinner, at his apartment, the three quoted at length from Max Eastman’s leftist magazine The Masses, insisting that the Paterson, New Jersey, strike of February 1913 had done for political consciousness what the Armory Show had done for art. Stieglitz never joined any political party, but he felt a kinship with all opponents of orthodoxy. Emmy, however, was fed up. Instead of supporting the artists, she suggested that they go out and get jobs instead of talking at 291.
Stieglitz was unsure how to proceed at 291. His hesitancy led Marius de Zayas to open the Modern Gallery in October 1914, with Stieglitz’s blessing, and financial backing from Haviland and Eugene and Agnes Meyer. Referred to as “the daughter of 291,”1
5 the gallery offered art by many of the European moderns. They launched a magazine, called 291, and the cover of the first issue featured de Zayas’s caricature of Stieglitz as a black box camera. At first, Stieglitz served as friendly advisor to both ventures, but within a few months, Agnes Meyer was warning de Zayas to have nothing more to do with his old friend.
In any case, for the next few years, neither Stieglitz nor de Zayas would have much luck selling modern art. On December 30, 1914, Stieglitz described the glum state of the art market to Picabia’s wife Gabrielle. “Many of the ‘rich’ are really poor. . . . The values of stocks have been cut nearly into two. . . . Nobody in the whole world, either here or in Europe will dream of paying ante-war prices today.”16
While Stieglitz was suffering self-doubt and confusion in New York, O’Keeffe was experiencing a less rewarding second year in Amarillo. Despite the ruling of the Texas legislature, she refused to adopt the required textbooks, a demonstration of independence that did not sit well with the high school administration. Unlike her first year, which had been full of adventure and promise, teaching now seemed a struggle. The cold winter months crept along. If O’Keeffe made any art of her own, it has been lost. In the summer of 1914 she returned to the University of Virginia, without an invitation to teach again in Amarillo.
Bement encouraged her to read Eddy’s Cubists and Post-Impressionism and Kandinsky’s The Art of Spiritual Harmony, published in English that year. (Part of the essay was featured in Camera Work in 1912, to which O’Keeffe subscribed, along with the satire magazine 291 and The Masses.)
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