Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Although Macmahon was clearly interested, O’Keeffe repeatedly took the lead in the relationship only to be plagued by her own insecurities. “I want to love as hard as I can and I can’t let myself—When he is far away I can’t feel sure that he wants me to—even though I know it—so I’m only feeling lukewarm when I want to be hot and can’t let myself—its damnable.”49

  To further complicate her life, she had a pressing decision to make. On January 5, 1916, she received a letter from R. B. Cousins, president of West Texas Normal College in Canyon, offering her a position as head of the art department. Despite her rough time with the school administrators in Amarillo, she remained passionate about the Panhandle landscape and was eager to return. “There is something wonderful about the bigness and the lonelyness and the windyness of it all,” she said. “Next to New York it is the finest thing I know.” She was uncertain about her future with Macmahon. “Arthur says he will go out soon but the darned fool puts ‘soon’ a long way off—He can’t go during the summer,” she wrote.50 When no marriage proposal was forthcoming, she forced herself to write the necessary application letters for the job.

  Meanwhile, the South Carolina Methodists had gotten on her nerves. “I never was so disgusted with such a lot of people and their ways of doing,” she complained.51 Rainy weather added to her despondency. “I feel like a wreck. It gives me the sensation I used to have when I was a youngster and was going away from home on the train—It is a very special sort of sick feeling.”52 Because her position in Canyon was contingent upon completing a “Methods of Teaching” course with Dow at Teachers College that spring, she left Columbia, South Carolina, for Columbia, New York, and the Methodists were stranded without an art teacher for the remainder of the semester.

  VIII

  Although she needed the teaching credential from Columbia, O’Keeffe was equally concerned with seeing Macmahon. She borrowed two hundred dollars to get through the spring term, and Pollitzer arranged free lodging at the Sixtieth Street home of her uncle, Dr. Sigmund Pollitzer, and his family. Coincidentally, his daughter Aline was studying with Macmahon at Barnard College. Aline thought him too conservative for O’Keeffe, who harbored her own reservations about Macmahon.

  O’Keeffe also wanted to meet the man who had said such wonderful things about her drawings. Despite their brief correspondence and her occasional visits to 291 in 1915, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe had never been introduced. She introduced herself when she went to 291 one day that spring, and Stieglitz made her feel welcome.

  O’Keeffe thought of the older, married Stieglitz as a potential mentor, a position that Stieglitz relished.

  He began showing her the work of the artists in his stable, beginning with Hartley. The tiny gallery was overwhelmed by forty large canvases that Hartley had composed in Berlin, where he lived between the spring of 1914 and the end of 1915. Devastated by the reports of wartime carnage, Hartley had painted a moving, symbolic portrait of his friend Karl von Freyburg, killed in an early battle. Yet Hartley’s particular affection for Germany was such that his paintings unintentionally seemed to celebrate the military. They featured shields, helmets, numbered banners, and iron crosses that were painted in bold blacks, reds, and yellows. Hartley had worried about showing his “Teutonic themes” in New York, but critics responded well to the heraldry and the flags. O’Keeffe related to their musical bounce and likened them to a “brass band in a small closet.” Stieglitz showed her one of Hartley’s more traditional, somber Maine landscapes. “Take it home with you if you wish,” he urged. “If you get tired of it, bring it back.”1

  Four days later, O’Keeffe was back, with the painting in hand. Hartley’s paintings were not to her taste, but she was interested to learn that they sold to top collectors like John Quinn and Mabel Dodge.

  Stieglitz’s unconventional system of lending paintings involved both his own artists and collectors in what he felt was the laboratory-like atmosphere of his gallery. He even purchased works of art, such as Kandinsky’s The Garden of Love (Improvisation 27), with an eye to the influence it would have on the artists in his gallery. Stieglitz represented only five artists, and he expected them to help and support one another.

  While O’Keeffe was getting acquainted with the 291 milieu, she continued to date Macmahon and worked as an observer at the Horace Mann School as a requirement for her teaching credential. During her rare free time, she went to the art studio at Teachers College to continue work on her inventive, free-spirited charcoals.

  Walking into a classroom, where Bement was playing a low-toned record, which his students were interpreting in charcoal, O’Keeffe noted, “This gave me an idea that I was very interested to follow later—the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye, the idea of lines like sounds.”2 Drawing No. 14, an aerial view of the earth with floating blocks and thick black bands arching across its surface, was her first approach to the concept of synesthesia. This early-twentieth-century theory, supported by Dow, and Kandinsky, maintained that music’s essentially abstract nature privileged the spiritual over the material and could influence the direction of nonobjective art. The instructor set up a phonograph in class and played classical music while his students painted or drew. O’Keeffe was sufficiently competent at reading music to play either the piano or violin and once said that in her next life, she’d like to come back as a blond soprano. “I would like to sing very high, very clear notes, without fear,” she noted.3 In a sense, music was a natural inspiration for her creative efforts.

  O’Keeffe was also influenced by Beatrice Irwin’s recently published book The New Science of Color. In her chapter “How to Develop a Color Sense,” the chromotologist suggests that the artist eliminate color and compose only in grays. In her copy of the book, O’Keeffe marked a passage on exercises meant to heighten color sense by working with one color at a time. “I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white,” she recalled.4 She drew one vertical line parallel to another that then branches out at an angle. On another piece of paper, she repeated the execution, this time in black watercolor, and then in dark blue watercolor, the final picture being the 1916 Blue Lines. This minimal etude on the harmony of line is often read as emblematic of male and female principles. Stieglitz was so taken by its simple invention that he later hung it near his office door, where he could easily see it. According to Barbara Buhler Lynes, author of the O’Keeffe catalogue raisonné, this study, which is often compared to Zen ink painting, was based on the artist’s observation of building contours viewed from the window of her New York room. She was also inspired by the photographs of the city by photographers, Stieglitz among them, in Camera Work.

  Without time or money to spare, O’Keeffe took most of her meals at the Teachers College cafeteria. As she sat eating lunch one afternoon, she was told by a friend that “Virginia O’Keeffe’s” drawings were on view at 291.5 She realized that the drawings must be hers and hurried to the gallery. Stieglitz was out on jury duty, and she lingered to take in her liquescent charcoals evenly spaced on the soft gray walls. Light filtered through the skylight and washed over the pictures: her work had never looked so lovely. Nonetheless, O’Keeffe returned the following day to ask Stieglitz why he had hung her work without permission.

  “You will have to take them down,” she insisted.

  “I think you are mistaken,” he said firmly. “. . . You have no more right to withhold those pictures than to withdraw a child from the world.”6

  When he asked if she knew their meaning, she snapped, “Do you think I’m a fool?”

  To avoid further misunderstandings, Stieglitz suggested a nice lunch and, employing his considerable powers of persuasion, not to mention flirtation, he convinced her to leave the drawings in the gallery. Secretly, O’Keeffe wanted her work in the gallery, but she also wanted his respect. Sixty years later, journalists regularly grilled the elderly O’Keeffe about the credibility
of this story. Asked about her capitulation to Stieglitz, she would smile slightly and say, “You try arguing with him and see where you get.”7

  The show in which the “specials” were featured also included watercolors by Charles Duncan and oils by Rene Lafferty. Only O’Keeffe’s work however, was singled out for review in the Christian Science Monitor. Henry Tyrrell wrote that she “draws with unconscious naivete what purports to be the innermost unfolding of a girl’s being, like the germinating of a flower.”8

  Since Tyrell had neither met O’Keeffe nor seen her work before the show, Stieglitz had undoubtedly confided to the critic that the drawings were made by a pretty young woman. “Miss O’Keeffe’s drawings besides their other value were of intense interest from a psychoanalytical point of view,” Stieglitz wrote in Camera Work. “‘291’ had never before seen a woman express herself so frankly on paper.”9 The review generated a ripple of curiosity and, despite that fact that most of his clients had left sweltering Manhattan for the country, Stieglitz extended the show into July.

  One might wonder why Stieglitz, long recognized as an authority on the avant garde, would take on an unknown provincial like O’Keeffe. Her loopy watercolors in the shapes of fiddlehead ferns, indebted to Art Nouveau, demonstrated more potential than originality. Only a month before, he had shown the photographs of Paul Strand, another youthful artist yet to develop his tough, modern style. Sarah Greenough, curator of photographs for the National Gallery, points to the fact that Stieglitz was under pressure from de Zayas and his sometime collaborator Picabia to discover American artists who understood the deeper significance of European modernism in their depiction of American life. Greenough writes, “Stung by [de Zayas’s] criticism yet confident in the ability of his countrymen, Stieglitz sought modern American artists in 1915 and 1916 to refute these claims.” Stieglitz regarded O’Keeffe as an untutored genius from the heartland whose work explored what it meant to be a woman; he saw Strand as a pure product of New York City, a rational and intelligent artist whose work embodied the principles of masculinity. Under his tutelage, Stieglitz believed, both of these promising young artists could mature into practitioners of a uniquely American modern art that was less indebted to Europe than that of the older generation of Hartley, Marin, and Dove.10

  Although she was unaware of Stieglitz’s plans, O’Keeffe’s star was clearly rising. But by the end of April she was sidetracked by family turmoil and tragedy. Her twenty-four-old sister Anita had eloped with Robert L. Young, a nineteen-year-old Texan who had been studying at the University of Virginia. O’Keeffe barely had time to absorb this news when she learned five days later that her mother had passed away. Ida was just fifty-two, thirteen days younger than Stieglitz.

  The O’Keeffes’ landlady had come for the overdue rent on May 2. Refusing to accept the excuses of Claudia, young Ida, or Aunt Jennie, the landlady demanded to see Ida in person. Attempting to walk down the hall to the front door, Ida collapsed and died from hemorrhaging in her lungs. Their neighbor, Holsinger, arrived later to help and noticed that the kitchen cabinets were nearly empty of food.

  Before leaving New York for the funeral, O’Keeffe completed her first sculpture out of modeling clay. She considered this elongated shape of a figure with its head bent in sorrow to be a memento mori, and, later, she had it cast in plaster.11

  On the overnight train to Charlottesville, O’Keeffe pleaded for emotional support from Macmahon. “I’m very much afraid,” she wrote, “I wish you would love me very very much for the next few days.”12 Grim circumstances dictated that she stay with her siblings in the leased boardinghouse where their mother had died. Her father did not return, and it seems that there was barely enough money to send her mother’s body to Madison to be buried in the Totto family plot of the Grace Episcopal Church.

  O’Keeffe remained in Charlottesville to teach her summer courses with Bement, but each morning after teaching her eight-thirty class, she came home and went back to her bed on the sleeping porch. Once, startled from her slumber, she realized the finality of her loss. She confessed to Macmahon, “Everything looked just like it looked when I used to wake up last summer—I just couldn’t stand it . . . I cried good and hard.”13

  Her mother’s death led O’Keeffe to want more support and affection from Macmahon than he was willing to provide, and her letters took on a desperate tone. “It seems so strange—not to give myself—when I want to. . . . Love is great to give—You may give as little in return as you want to—or none at all.”14

  There was another man, however, who could not be supportive enough. Stieglitz sent her a copy of a May 27 review of her drawings in American Art News. Unclear as to how to describe abstract art, the critic had written, “O’Keeffe’s drawings of various curious inanimate objects—in one case a conflagration and in another a stalagtite [sic] shape—are carefully presented and artistic in quality.”15

  Stieglitz then sent her five issues of Camera Work, but she could barely look at them. “It seems absurd to say I’m too tired to read but I have been,” she told Pollitzer. The weather was cool and rainy. “Everything is a wonderful heavy dark green—and the green is all so very clean—but I hate it,” she added. She tried to paint but found the results “awful.” “I have just been too tired to do anything.”16 Reviewing her mother’s tragic life forced her, once again, to contemplate her own uncertain future.

  Although he was genuinely concerned for O’Keeffe, Stieglitz was less successful at resolving the tension within his own family. At Lake George, Emmy had grown hysterical over their daughter’s emergency appendectomy, and after ill-advisedly defending the reputation of her distant cousin Amanda, who was involved in an ongoing affair with Lee Stieglitz, Hedwig Stieglitz suggested that Emmy no longer spend summers at Oaklawn.

  Emmy spent the rest of the season touring the golf courses of New England, once writing to Stieglitz, “It struck me as queer yesterday that you send me kisses and I you and yet how seldom in reality we do kiss . . . ?”17

  Stieglitz responded to Emmy’s letters with notes that were brief and businesslike, especially when compared to his lengthy communiqués to O’Keeffe. He confessed, “Your drawings on the walls of 291 would not be so living for me did I not see you in them.”18

  By the middle of the summer O’Keeffe had overcome her grief-induced fatigue enough to climb Virginia’s Mt. Elliot. She read John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. It is likely that Stieglitz recommended these works to her. “I think I never had more wonderful letters than he has been writing me,” she admitted to Pollitzer. The nine photographs that he had taken of her May exhibition thrilled her. “Isn’t it funny that I hate my drawings—and am simply crazy about the photographs of them,” she sighed. “He is too good to be true.”19

  Although Macmahon’s letters are unavailable for comparison, few writers could compete with Stieglitz’s compassionate and seductive missives. Referring to himself by the name of his gallery, he wrote, “Little did I dream that one day [Anita Pollitzer] would bring me drawings that would mean so much to ‘291’ as yours have meant—nor did you dream when you did them that they would—or could—ever mean so much to anyone as they have to ‘291.’”20

  With this sort of encouragement, it is little wonder that O’Keeffe was able to return to her drawing and painting that summer for solace, producing at least forty works on paper. Despite depression over her mother’s death and anxiety about her romance with Macmahon, she followed T. S. Eliot’s sentiment that art is not the expression, but the repression, of emotion. In half a dozen watercolors, she completely abandoned landscape to make abstract washes titled only by their colors.

  In some cases, she executed watercolors of the charcoal drawings completed in South Carolina. Blanket folds inspired a trio of watercolors of red, blue, and black curves. The fiddlehead fern shape returned in a series of four azure watercolors on thin Japanese rice paper. She reexecuted several of the South Carolina drawings, including Speci
al No. 1, the fountain holding the black ovoid, and Special No. 12, a fiddlehead that she said could be read as “maybe a kiss.”

  Another charcoal, two blue watercolors, and a green oil painting completed in summer 1916 all explore the inward-turning spiral. O’Keeffe said that she had made the drawing of the shape several times, “never remembering that I had made it before—and not knowing where the idea came from.” The idea may have been inspired by the fern tendrils common to undergrowth of the Southeast. But nature melded with culture: the curling fern was also a popular motif in the Art Nouveau vases, glass, and ironwork that O’Keeffe could easily have seen reproduced in magazines or at Tiffany & Co. in New York.21

  O’Keeffe’s walks in the Blue Ridge Mountains generated seven predominantly blue-green watercolors with the shape of a hill in silhouette as well as a vibrant oil of pointy cypress against flaming trees and a cerulean sky. A couple of exercises from that summer reveal rather meticulous planning of certain paintings: on the back of a farmhouse sketch O’Keeffe wrote notes to dictate placement of the lavender house, the red roof, and the blue sky. She also completed watercolor portraits of a boy and girl.

  During a camping trip, O’Keeffe found herself sitting in a darkened tent and looking out through the triangular entrance at a pale, distant light. The sense of isolation, the view to the outside, seemed to echo her emotional state. This sensation of isolation led her to execute a drawing, two watercolors, and an oil painting of the triangular door flap as seen from within the folds of a tent. She was using Dow’s exercise of placing a door in space, but the subject held such emotional resonance for her that from this point on it would appear in dozens of paintings. Whenever O’Keeffe felt herself to be in a state of transition, the image of a door reappeared.