Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  A twenty-five-year-old teacher named Marcus Lee Hansen who had visited O’Keeffe in Charlottesville began writing to her in Columbia. O’Keeffe was sufficiently intrigued to describe him as “too fine to drop—and too fine to keep.” Despite her infatuation with Macmahon, she slyly encouraged Hansen, so effectively, it seems, that his fevered letters left her feeling that her “soul had been peeled and sandpapered.”11

  O’Keeffe sent one of Hansen’s particularly passionate missives to Pollitzer for review, explaining that his purple prose inspired the “wild blue picture with the yellow and red ball in the corner.” That “wild” work visually depicted O’Keeffe’s feelings for Hansen: “It was what I wanted to tell him only didn’t dare in words—words seem to me such a poor medium of expression for some things.”12

  O’Keeffe’s lithe sensuality easily attracted the attentions of men and, unlike the tomboy of her past, she had learned to flirt. She was not entirely comfortable with the inevitable response and such new attentions brought about a gamut of unfamiliar feelings—desire and fear, need and confusion. After a few weeks in Columbia, she jettisoned Hansen in an effort to devote herself to Macmahon, a man who was proving unreliable at best. Exasperated when his letters retained their guarded tone, she declared love a sentiment not to be trusted. “It was disgusting,” she said. “Simply because I hadn’t anything else to work off my energy on.”13

  Throwing off thoughts of suitors, she declared, “I am starting all over new . . . I’m feeling happier . . . maybe it would be better to say that I feel as if I have my balance.”14

  With the air of one who had vanquished the dragon of romance, she asked Pollitzer, “Don’t you think we need to conserve our energies—emotions and feelings for what we are going to make the big things in our life instead of letting so much run away on the little things every day. Self control is a wonderful thing—I think we must even keep ourselves from feeling too much—often—if we are going to keep sane and see with a clear unprejudiced vision. . . . I don’t love him—I don’t pretend to . . . I almost want to say—don’t mention loving anyone to me . . . if you value your peace of mind—it will eat you up and swallow you whole.”15

  But O’Keeffe’s high-minded self-reliance didn’t last long, and within a week, she longed for Macmahon’s affection and wondered whether art was worth trading love and companionship for. Vogue magazine reproduced her floral watercolor, and her monotype of Dorothy True, which were featured in the Twenty-Sixth Annual Exhibition of the New York Watercolor Club. Around this time, O’Keeffe’s painting of a single tree was being shown at the Philadelphia Watercolor Club. Instead of exultation at her successes, however, she derided these small advances as a “farce.”

  “What is Art anyway?” she demanded of Pollitzer. “What are we trying to do—what is the excuse for it all—If you could sit down and do just exactly what you wanted to right now for a year—what in the dickens would you do—The things I’ve done that satisfy me most are charcoal landscapes—and . . . the colors I seem to want to use absolutely nauseate me . . . Why don’t most of us grow worthwhile personalities instead of the pitiful little things we are”16

  The conservative views of her colleagues at Columbia College offered scant intellectual distraction, and O’Keeffe spent her free time reading the recommended authors of Pollitzer and Macmahon who advocated independence and women’s rights: Olive Schreiner’s Women and Labor and a suffrage issue of The Masses. She also took a subscription to The Forerunner, a publication edited by the feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

  In a 1915 essay, “The Dress of Women,” Gilman criticized the impracticality of high-heeled shoes and corsets, pointing out that such clothing was largely designed for a woman who was to serve as little more than display. “The man did not have to please the woman by the small size of his feet but by the large size of his bank account. His feet were organs of locomotion, hers of sex attraction,” wrote Gilman.17 O’Keeffe, who already favored practical footwear, was no doubt comforted to discover such sentiments in print. Meanwhile, in New York City, a parade of twenty-five thousand people marched in support of the vote for suffrage.

  O’Keeffe was grateful for any news from New York. “You get mightily twisted with yourself at the tale [sic] end of the earth and no one to talk to,” she wrote Pollitzer. “The thinking gets more serious when you wonder and fight and think alone.”18

  “I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something—anything I had done—than anyone else I know of.”19

  In the smaller of the college’s two art studios, O’Keeffe worked late into the night with charcoal, which she considered “a miserable medium for things that seem alive.”20 By the middle of November, she finally deemed two of the drawings suitable to send to New York. “I don’t know what to say about it,” admitted Pollitzer. “I’d love to ask Mr. Stieglitz. . . . Of course I never should till you said the word and I don’t feel the time’s come yet—but keep on working this way like the devil.”21

  O’Keeffe was surprised and elated when Macmahon wrote and asked to spend Thanksgiving weekend with her before he traveled on to give a lecture at the university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “His letter this afternoon was like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky—nothing could have astonished me more,” she exclaimed.22 She told him, “I’m the gladdest person in the world.”23

  Traveling by train, Macmahon arrived in Columbia the morning after Thanksgiving. The next four days were spent walking and talking, and the couple made such a happy connection that they planned to rent a cottage in the hills of North Carolina that spring. Macmahon had decided that he wanted to invite his mother and brother to meet O’Keeffe. During their long walks in the woods, O’Keeffe gleaned more ideas for drawings, and later composed charcoals of angular sprouts shooting up against the horizon. One afternoon, she and Macmahon sat dabbling their feet in a stream running red from the clay soil. As the result of a conversation with Macmahon about abstractions made from nature, she drew two pastels of gold and copper swirling into aqua, twin bursts of color in a body of work primarily confined to black and white. Calling them Special No. 32 and No. 33, she said, “I went home and made two pastels to illustrate to him what I meant.”24

  Macmahon’s departure threw O’Keeffe into a state of delirium. “I feel stunned—I don’t seem to be able to collect my wits—and the world looks all new to me,” she confessed to Pollitzer. “I don’t mean that I feel depressed over his being gone. . . . It’s all queer—I just can’t talk about it.”25

  O’Keeffe may have had her first sexual experience with Macmahon on his weekend visit to Columbia. Whatever the case, she was both joyful and distressed over their holiday interlude, and vacillated between dependence and independence. Shortly after Macmahon left, she wrote to apologize for her forwardness, for being the one to initiate the first kiss. Now, as before, he was slow to respond.

  In retrospect, O’Keeffe considered this torturous period of longing and fulfillment to be the fulcrum that launched her into the abstract language of her imagination. She insisted, “I had been taught to work like others and after careful thinking I decided that I wasn’t going to spend my life doing what had already been done.” After putting up all of the work from her months in Virginia and New York, she saw nothing but the influence of others. “I said to myself ‘I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me—shapes and ideas so near to me—so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.’”26

  Ultimately, O’Keeffe understood this difficult period as one that was crucial to her development as an artist. “This was one of the best times of my life,” she said. “There was no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown—no one to satisfy but myself.”27

  As late autumn brought cool weather, she worked in the school’s art studio churning out voluptuous and ornamental charcoal drawings. Borrowing from nature—ferns, cloud
s, waves—she simplified forms in accordance with Dow’s theory of self-exploration through art. Dow often told his students, “The subject is in you, nature giving only the suggestions.”28

  In one charcoal a luminous pedestal of water supports a mysterious black ovoid. In the serial manner advocated by Dow, O’Keeffe dismantled the fountain in subsequent charcoals to render plumes and sprays of melting, spurting, dripping curves. In other drawings, the plump black spheres are interspersed with sharpened zigzags. Whether referencing liquidity or pattern, there is more than a nod to Art Nouveau, whose artists often relied on the curving top of a fern or a cresting wave to inspire their design. As art historian Sarah Whitaker Peters points out, “It may have been Art Nouveau’s dual aspect of imaginative form and rational construction that appealed to her, for she could work in freedom yet keep to the reasonably strict rules of logical design, in the approved Dow fashion. Perhaps, the frank fecundity of Art Nouveau’s subject matter seemed to her an appropriate way to equate abstraction with creation.”29

  All of O’Keeffe’s formative influences began to coalesce. The Art Nouveau line derived in part as a result of her studies in Chicago and from the commercial art she produced for advertising agencies; the sparse quality and balance obtained in her paintings was influenced in part by her affinity for Japanese prints and Dow’s exercises; the biomorphic aspect of her subjects stemmed from years of painting flowers; and the abstractions within her art were influenced by the nonobjective painting of Dove and Kandinsky that she had seen reproduced in Camera Work.

  By working quickly on inexpensive paper without censoring her ideas or gestures, she completed dozens of drawings, many of which teetered on the verge of abstraction. She described her work Blanket Drawing as “something I never saw except in the drawing. When one begins to wander around in one’s own thoughts and half-thoughts what one sees is often surprising.”30 Of course, she had seen the forms of the subject when she composed a still life using a similarly striped Indian blanket in 1905. Inverted, as Abstraction with Curve and Circle, the folds become entirely abstract. Realistic objects and scenes incubated in O’Keeffe’s memory to be later transmuted as her own shapes and forms: her first original art. As a group, she rightly labeled these charcoals “Specials.”

  By December 4, she had received three encouraging letters from Macmahon. She wrote to Pollitzer in an amorous daze, “He has the nicest way of saying things and making you feel he loves you—all the way round—not just in spots.”31

  She had little faith that their spring plans would materialize and steeled herself against the feelings of uncertainty that so often accompany the first stages of a relationship. “I had such a hard time making myself think right about it. . . . I feel as if I will never get mixed up again,” she admitted to Pollitzer.32

  O’Keeffe oscillated between her longing to be with Macmahon and her need to be alone. In what would become a typical pattern throughout her lifetime, she felt frantically in need of her lover once her emotions had been aroused. And if she had been invited to New York for Christmas, it’s likely that O’Keeffe would have spent all of her savings on a train ticket despite her need for financial security and her mother’s failing health. The invitation did not come and, although Charlottesville was within a day’s train travel, she remained in Columbia for Christmas. On Christmas Day, she wrote to Macmahon, “I want to put my hand on your face and kiss you today—not your lips—it’s your forehead—or your hair—that’s all.”33 Around this time, she used charcoal to evoke roiling clouds with droplets falling on sinister waves. Special No. 9, she said, was “the drawing of a headache.”

  For a young woman who had been emotionally abandoned by her father, O’Keeffe’s alternating states of elation and despair during her first love affair were painful. But by their very nature, they helped fuel the dramatic transition in her art. “Did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side of the wall wouldn’t be big enough to say it on and sit down on the floor and try to get it on to a sheet of charcoal paper . . . ?” she asked Pollitzer. “And when you had put it down look at it and try to put into words what you have been trying to say with just marks. . . . I wonder if I’m a raving lunatic for trying to make these things.”34

  Pollitzer remained an encouraging supporter, telling her friend, “Keep at it. Cezanne and Van Gogh and Gauguin were all raving lunatics:—but they didn’t mind a little thing like that.”35

  When Pollitzer unwrapped the charcoals that O’Keeffe had sent, she immediately realized that they were, indeed, “special.” “They’ve gotten past the personal stage into the big sort of emotions that are common to big people,” she told O’Keeffe. “They’ve gotten there as far as I’m concerned. . . . You’ve said something!”36

  On New Year’s Day, tucking the roll of drawings under her arm, Pollitzer walked downtown to 291. Although it was his fifty-second birthday, Stieglitz had taken refuge from family by going to the gallery. Shambling into the twilit room with his mussed hair and rumpled clothes, he greeted Pollitzer amiably and invited her into the back room. After a long time spent looking at O’Keeffe’s charcoals, he announced, “Finally a woman on paper.” (This is not part of the original letter from Pollitzer. It’s written in the margins as though added later—possibly by Pollitzer. In any case, it is in keeping with his later remarks on O’Keeffe’s works.)

  “Why they’re genuinely fine things,” he added. “You say a woman did these—She’s an unusual woman—She’s broad minded. She’s bigger than most women, but she’s got the sensitive emotion—I’d know she was a woman—Look at that line.” He summoned Walkowitz from the other room and asked his opinion. The artist agreed, “Very fine.”37 Stieglitz asked, “Are you writing to this girl soon? . . . Tell her . . . they’re the purest, finest, sincerest things that have entered 291 in a long while. . . . I wouldn’t mind showing them . . . one bit—perhaps I shall—For what they’re worth.”

  He gave them back to Pollitzer, adding, “You keep them. For later I may want to see them and I thank you . . . for letting me see them now.”38

  Pollitzer was nervous about breaking her promise to keep the drawings to herself, but her concerns were allayed with the next letter from South Carolina. O’Keeffe wrote “There seems nothing for me to say except thank you—very calmy and quietly.”39

  Stieglitz’s encouragement was well received by O’Keeffe, who had been thrown into great doubt over her efforts: not a soul in Columbia comprehended her pictures. Even her friend Professor Ariail remarked, “Why it’s as mad as a March hare.” After staying up all night working, she felt the results to be “effeminate” but she was unsure of the implications. “It is essentially a woman’s feeling—satisfies me in a way,” she admitted. “There are things we want to say—but saying them is pretty nervy.” Once again, she was thinking that it was all “a fool’s game” when she learned of Stieglitz’s approval.40

  Ultimately, O’Keeffe was less concerned with having her work shown than knowing that Stieglitz had comprehended the drawings. She wrote to him directly. “Mr. Stieglitz: If you remember for a week why you liked my charcoals . . . I would like to know. . . . I ask because I wonder if I got over to anyone what I wanted to say.”41 Despite having no recollection of having met O’Keeffe, Stieglitz responded in the intimate tone that so endeared him to women.

  My dear Miss O’Keeffe:

  What am I to say? It is impossible for me to put into words what I saw and felt in your drawings. As a matter of fact I would not make an attempt to do so. I might give you what I received from them if you and I were to meet and talk about life. Possibly then through such a conversation I might make you feel what your drawings gave me.

  I do want to tell you that they gave me much joy. They were a real surprise and above all I felt that they were a genuine expression of yourself. I do not know what you had in mind while doing them. If at all possible I would like to show them, but we will see about that. I do not quite know where I am just at present. The fu
ture is rather hazy, but the present is very positive and very delightful.42

  O’Keeffe was ecstatic. “It just made me ridiculously glad. . . . He must have a pretty fine time living. . . . I just like the inside of him.”43

  Heartened by Stieglitz’s response, Pollitzer showed O’Keeffe’s drawings to an enthusiastic Bement, who offered to visit 291 in an effort to sing his former student’s praises. Pollitzer protested, but the savvy Bement snapped, “Do you know what Stieglitz is waiting for? He’s waiting for a good round $100 check.” He pressed his point: “Art and business are closely related. A man needn’t be ashamed to be in Art for the game of it—but business is a game too.”44 With that, Bement borrowed O’Keeffe’s charcoal drawing of plumes to show Dow.

  O’Keeffe felt confident about Bement. “I like him because he can see and understand so many different things in so many different ways—I don’t think it would be possible for you to understand him like I do,” she loftily informed Pollitzer. “He would not make a mistake about Steiglitz [sic]—he is too clever—too sensitive—and too tactful.”45

  At the same time, she hoped Bement would not flash her drawing around to others. “It is probably the mercenary element in me that objects to showing what I feel and think when I get nothing for it—I could stand it to sell it—for ideas that would help me to go on working—or for money—money gives us the things we need to help us say things—but I hate to give it away—just to be laughed at maybe.”46

  O’Keeffe remained sensitive to the implications of her charcoals embodying “a woman’s feeling.” They were evidence that she was “balancing on the edge of loving like I imagine we never love but once.” She told Pollitzer, “Something—that I don’t want to hurry seems to be growing in my brain—heart—all of me. . . . I can’t explain it even to myself but I’m terribly afraid the bubble will break.”47 She wrote impetuously to Macmahon, “Let me tell you what I want so much to do? I want to love you.” She hoped he didn’t mind “a woman daring to—feel—and say so without being urged in the least.”48