Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Scarcely anyone in Canyon understood her efforts. O’Keeffe showed the pictures to her landlord, explaining that her painting of sun-colored spheres was a representation of her feelings about Palo Duro Canyon. Shirley laughed and joked in his hearty Texas twang, “Well, you must have had a stomach ache when you painted it!”19

  For the most part, O’Keeffe got along with the Shirleys, but she crossed a line after meeting a prosecuting attorney at a Christmas party. When he came to call on her, she cavalierly invited him up to her room. During his second visit, the Shirleys established some rules—no male visitors upstairs. Not to be deterred, he suggested a drive in his car. It was a moonlit evening and he put his arm around O’Keeffe’s shoulders, never anticipating that she would dissolve in helpless laughter. “Beautiful lavender moonlight—and that well-fed piece of human meat wanting to put his arms round me,” she howled.20

  Yet O’Keeffe longed for a meaningful relationship and so wanted children of her own that she had volunteered to teach first and second graders. A naive watercolor of a yellow house with giant flowers growing in the front yard and another of a cartoonish chicken against a sunrise look as though they were painted for children to study. She wrote to Macmahon that her sister Anita had had an abortion before eloping. With startling candor, she told Macmahon that she wanted him to father her child.

  Once again, she had taken the lead, and once again, Macmahon balked. O’Keeffe stopped writing to him.

  After Christmas, Pollitzer asked timidly, “Does Arthur still mean a lot to you? Or is the world you live in too big to look at a little lump in it?”21 To which O’Keeffe responded coolly, “He is bound to mean a lot to me always. I haven’t had time to think much about him. . . . Haven’t had but about an hour to myself all week—That was yesterday so I got a box of bullets and went out on the plains and threw tin cans into the air and shot at them. It’s great sport.”22

  Acting as the equal to a man, O’Keeffe was living far ahead of her time, in an era when women were not allowed to vote. She had no role models, but she followed her own strong instincts. Whether by temperament or circumstance, she had never learned the rules of the game between the sexes. In any case, she was falling in love with another world, one that Macmahon would not even visit.

  In large part, Stieglitz’s compulsive letter writing made up for Macmahon’s reticence and lack of support. The gallerist had arranged for one of her works to be included in a group show with Hartley and Marin at the People’s Art Guild at the outset of 1917. Pollitzer received the catalogue and gushed, “You’re hanging with Marin—and with Marin means a big fine thing.—and I wonder how near you are to Vermillion Hartley—Gosh you two can’t be on the same wall—no one could stand it—!”23

  Stieglitz sent O’Keeffe volumes of essays on modern art by critics like Willard Huntington Wright, Clive Bell, Marius de Zayas, and Arthur Jerome Eddy. Although she was already familiar with much of the material, she studied it more thoroughly in preparation for a lecture on modern art she presented in the middle of January to college faculty.

  “It was a great success,” she crowed afterward. Although it had been scheduled for three-quarters of an hour, her talk lasted three hours, and she was asked to repeat it the following week. “It was so funny to see them get so excited over something they had doubts about the value of,” she added.24 Possibly in an attempt to demonstrate the Cubist technique, O’Keeffe made a tiny pen and ink drawing of the deconstructed forms of cup, saucer, and table.

  In her copy of the Eddy book, she made furious annotations that reveal some of her thinking on modern art. Eddy wrote, “In the compositional painting which is developing today we see signs of the attainment of the higher step of pure art, in which the remains of the practical desire (all evidences of objectivity) can be perfectly separated, which can speak from soul to soul in purely artistic language.” O’Keeffe underlined the words “can” and added in pencil, “Will it?”

  Eddy continues, “The past teaches us that the development of humanity consists in the increasing spirituality of various factors. Among these factors art takes the first place.” O’Keeffe responded with the penciled words, “No. Philosophy always does.” Referring to Eddy’s words “increasing spirituality,” she wrote at the bottom of the page, “Art has nothing to do with ‘spirituality.’ Art is a form of sensation.”

  Eddy’s theories were illustrated by a reproduction of Kandinsky’s Improvisation No. 30, and O’Keeffe, of course, was familiar with the Russian artist’s writing about the spiritual potential of abstract art. Kandinsky and Eddy are often cited as having been formative influences in the putative spiritual dimension of O’Keeffe’s abstract paintings. Yet here we have evidence of the artist herself disputing such assumptions. In her own handwriting, she claims that philosophy, not art, has the ability to increase an awareness of spirituality. Art’s function, according to O’Keeffe, is to arouse “sensation.” What did she mean by sensation? She meant its literal definition, a state of heightened interest or emotion. She might also have been referring to the ability to feel or perceive in terms of physical sensibility. Later in life, O’Keeffe earned a reputation as one of the most sensual of painters. The impetus derived from this early decision to generate “sensation.”

  When she painted a landscape as swollen and alive, O’Keeffe must have been considering Wright’s arguments on art and the human body. “The body is the microcosmos of all life; and art, in all of its manifestations, is, in its final analysis, an interpretation of the laws of bodily rhythm and movement. The perception of art is an activity of our own consciousness. Art cannot exist as an isolated absolute; in order to be perceived it must be relative to ourselves. Our bodies are our only basis of reaction. Therefore art must accord with that basis. Furthermore, the sources and the end of nature are in the body.”25

  A month after O’Keeffe’s lecture to the faculty, on a frigid February afternoon, Reid volunteered, “Painting—Sculpture—Architecture—A fine pattern—a fine chair or a table—is just another way of expressing yourself—saying what Life is and means to you.” O’Keeffe was stunned to hear her own philosophy played back with such simplicity. “I wondered if what I had taught him was right,” she mused to Pollitzer. Then, she joked, “I don’t know what Art is but I know some thing it isn’t when I see them.”26

  As O’Keeffe fought for her own ideas in art, Pollitzer felt embarrassed by her “sleek middle-class comfort” in Charleston and decided to devote herself to politics after attending a lecture on “Women and War” by Elsie Hill, a member of the National Woman’s Peace Party and a suffrage leader. After Pollitzer submitted three different articles on Hill for the local papers, Hill met with her, and convinced Pollitzer to work for the cause of suffrage and to organize enough people to send a delegation to the local congressman. The experience led Pollitzer to become a potent activist for women’s rights.

  On April 3, 1917, O’Keeffe’s first solo exhibition—with the plumed watercolors and charcoals of South Carolina, the Texas landscapes in watercolor and oil, and the plaster figure—was presented at 291. Brancusi, who had shown at the gallery three years before, commented of O’Keeffe’s work, “There is no limitation of Europe in her. It is a force, a liberating, free force.”27

  Tyrrell, who had praised O’Keeffe’s art of the previous summer, made observations that set a certain tone for writing about her work. “Miss O’Keefe [sic] has found expression in delicately veiled symbolism for ‘what every woman knows,’ but what women heretofore have kept to themselves, either instinctively or through a universal conspiracy of silence.” After mentioning her upbringing in Virginia and Texas, which he had gleaned from Stieglitz, he went on to speculate, “The loneliness and privation which her emotional nature must have suffered put their impress on everything she does.”28

  Having seduced the press with juicy revelations of O’Keeffe’s personal history and what he thought of as her exile in Canyon, Stieglitz concocted evocative titles for even her nonobje
ctive work. The watercolor of two blue lines was called Two Lives, which led Tyrrell to describe it as “a man and a woman’s, distinct yet invisibly joined together by mutual attraction.”29

  It was at this solo show that O’Keeffe made her first sale: a charcoal drawing of a train rounding a curve and spewing an enormous cloud of smoke garnered two hundred dollars. From her second-story classroom window in Canyon, O’Keeffe could see the train coming into town, but she also had photographic sources, such as Stieglitz’s many pictures of trains and rail yards, in particular his 1902 The Hand of Man, reprinted in a 1911 issue of Camera Work.30

  In Camera Work’s final issue, William Murrell Fisher complimented O’Keeffe’s show, picking up on her interest in synesthesia. “Of all things earthly, it is only in music that one finds any analogy to the emotional content of these drawings—to the gigantic, swirling rhythms, and the exquisite tenderness so powerfully and sensitively rendered—and music is the condition toward which . . . all art constantly aspires.”31

  An encouraging letter from Dow boosted her morale further. “I was interested in the simplicity of your designs and the harmonious rhythm that you had expressed so well.” Unable to let go of his professorial role, however, he disapproved of her abstract washes of color and light. “It did seem to me . . . that there were too many of those vague things. I remember your excellent work in color printing and think it would be worth your while next time to show a greater variety.”32

  The semester ended in May, leaving a three-week recess before the summer session. Reid wanted to be more than a friend to O’Keeffe. As a result, though attracted to him, she felt the need to escape. On a whim, she went to her bank manager’s house on a Sunday afternoon and convinced him to open so she could collect her two hundred dollars in savings.

  She took the train to New York and, in the course of ten days, visited Bement, recently married to an actress who would act as his agent selling paintings; teacher Charles Martin, discouraged at the lack of encouragement for his art; Dorothy True; and, of course, Macmahon. “He improves and he doesn’t—Queer—I sort of feel that I have gone on past,” she mused. “I don’t know. I doubt if I would have let him know I was there if Dorothy hadn’t insisted. He is really pretty fine. I had a great letter a few days ago—The greatest he ever wrote me.” Of Stieglitz, she admitted, “It was him I went to see.”33

  Stieglitz had been interviewed that April by the writer Djuna Barnes:

  His hair was longer than usual with men, and turning then iron gray. The eyebrows were bushed, the eyes deep-set and assumed a certain uncertainty. He asserts that he was born in this country, yet I noted then that his mouth had that fine and sudden stoppage of lip seen mostly in the south of Germany. . . . He has a manner of speaking at once quick and hesitating, perhaps a little because he speaks through his nose. . . . while he gave advice on pictures, he seemed to be giving advice on life.34

  O’Keeffe turned up at the gallery one day without an appointment. Stieglitz felt a presence behind him, turned and saw her standing in a long black dress with a white collar. Her exhibition had been taken down, but he was so excited by her unexpected arrival that he rehung every picture for her to see. Then, he took out his camera and tripod and photographed her posing demurely in front of her work, her elegant hands placed in feminine gestures before her paintings of plumes and canyons. He announced plans to print a portfolio of her drawings in the fall edition of Camera Work. But that issue was never published. Georgia O’Keeffe was the last show in the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. At that time, neither artist realized that it was both the end of an era, and the beginning.

  X

  During her whirlwind trip to New York, Stieglitz introduced O’Keeffe to a few of the artists who had recently entered his circle, including Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, inventors of what they termed the synchromist style of abstract painting. It was probably on this trip that O’Keeffe saw Dancer-Airplane-Propeller-Sea, the 1915 painting by Gino Severini that Stieglitz owned. Borrowing from the Synchromists and the Futurists’ unconventional combinations of volume and color, O’Keeffe started to feather gradations of hue into one another to imbue her forms with an energized radiance.1

  No one, however, was as influential as Paul Strand, who had a terrific impact on her art and no little impact on her life. The attraction between the younger artists was palpable and immediate. At twenty-seven, Strand was Stieglitz’s most recent acolyte. Eager to impress, he showed O’Keeffe his photographs of bowls, chairs, and fruit-subjects that he enlarged and cropped to enhance the abstract shapes. O’Keeffe was felled by their luminous rigor, and intrigued that Strand also admired the raw beauty of the Texas Panhandle. When he had traveled there in 1915, Strand wrote to his parents, “the way the monotonous plain is broken by shacks and little white houses is quite fascinating.”2

  Born in 1890 to middle-class Jewish parents in New York, Strand attended public schools until the age of fourteen, when he enrolled in the Ethical Culture School. An outgrowth of the humanist movement founded by Dr. Felix Adler in 1878, the Ethical Culture School’s classes stressed the importance of moral responsibility and social reform, issues that would later affect Strand’s own art. Classes in math, science, and language were buttressed by courses in crafts and photography. Strand’s teacher was the socially conscious Lewis Hine, who photographed the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and the exploitation of children as laborers.

  In 1907, when Hine brought his photography class to visit 291, he introduced Strand to Stieglitz. Strand was thrilled to meet the man who had done so much to establish pictorialist photography and the Photo-Secession. Strand began reading Camera Work and the following year joined the Camera Club of New York, where Stieglitz’s support for pictorialist photography still held sway.

  For the next five years, pictorialist soft-focus technique and nostalgic subject matter dominated Strand’s own work. On a trip to Europe in 1911, he took pictures of Venice canal scenes that were indebted to Stieglitz’s photos of the 1890s. By the time he was introduced to O’Keeffe three years later, he had made his break from pictorialism.

  Although he was a generation younger than most of the 291 artists, Strand thought that they “all talked the same language” in their desire to validate American modernism, but Strand’s understanding of Cubism—that it embraced formal analysis over symbolism—was well advanced. After the Armory Show, Stieglitz claimed that it was meaningless “to go on doing merely what the camera does better,” and determined that the mission of photography must be the same as that of modern art: to invent, not imitate, in order to reveal emotional, psychological, or spiritual conditions. According to de Zayas, the mission of photography could only be “the pure expression of the object.”3

  During the summer of 1916, Strand was staying at his parent’s vacation home in Twin Lakes, Connecticut. In an attempt to clarify for himself the abstract methods of the Cubists, he photographed still lifes of ladder-backed chairs and stacks of bowls. By taking the pictures up close and at dizzying angles, bowl rims, porch shadows, and chair rungs were reduced to pure ovals and angles: his own brand of “anti-photography.”

  Hartley, Dove, and Marin all experimented with studies in form and color divorced from subject matter. O’Keeffe made her own forays into abstract painting during these years.4 Strand was a pioneer in applying his understanding of Cubism to what he called “photographing in the real world.” By that fall, he had completed works like The White Fence. Bracing white pickets march across the frontal plane of a traditional picture of barns and houses to meld a modernist sensibility with the symbolism of a quintessentially American domestic architecture. Similarly, in Twin Lakes, Connecticut, the upper corner of his porch is photographed at such a sharp and unexpected angle, it seems to float in the cloud-studded sky.

  After these efforts, he returned to New York and embarked upon a fresh project—photographing people with a false lens attached to the side of his camer
a. Later, he used a prism lens, but either way, he had the camera pointing in a direction different from the one in which he was photographing so that his subjects would be caught off-guard. In this manner, he completed disorienting and disturbing portraits such as Blind Woman, New York. By photographing people often overlooked on the busy streets of New York, Strand felt that his work correlated with Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology: a book of poems of remembrance for those buried in a midwestern cemetery. At this time, Strand also photographed skyscapers and streets rather than people, as the principal subjects of the city. In Wall Street, for instance, the towering architecture dwarfs the few people walking along the sidewalk. Strand wanted to depict movement as abstract and controlled, and to make photographs with an energy and angularity that underscored their modernity.

  Stieglitz called Strand’s photographs “the direct expression of today.”5 He exhibited them at 291 in 1916 and featured them in the last two issues of Camera Work, the same issues that contained reviews of O’Keeffe’s shows.

  Although it is certain that O’Keeffe had seen them reproduced, Strand’s prints felt like a Great Plains wind to O’Keeffe. Intuitively she identified the influence of Japanese art in his use of an uptilted picture plane, and admired his use of fractured abstraction. With uncharacteristic candor, she admitted, “He showed me lots and lots of prints—photographs. And I almost lost my mind over them—Photographs that are as queer in shapes as Picasso drawings. . . . He is great.”6

  But it was not just the work that excited her. As O’Keeffe revealed to Pollitzer, “Dorothy (True) and I both fell for him.”7 O’Keeffe’s feelings for Stieglitz at this point were friendly, perhaps idolizing, but not romantic. After all, Stieglitz was married.

  True bowed out of a Decoration Day outing to Coney Island with O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, and Strand, and the threesome went with Stieglitz’s friend, Henry Gaisman, who had invented the Autograph Camera. The Autograph was equipped with an open compartment on the back so that the photographer could make notes on the edges of his negatives, a patent for which Eastman Kodak paid Gaisman a record three hundred thousand dollars.