Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  A few weeks after the declaration of war, O’Keeffe, en route to New York, stopped in Chicago to visit her brother Alexius. The twenty-five-year-old engineer had enlisted in the Officers Corps of Engineers and was expected to be among the first to go to France. She was stunned by the effect of the uniform on her lively brother: “A sober—serious—willingness—appalling. He has changed so much—it makes me stand still and wonder—a sort of awe—He was the sort that used to seem like a large wind when he came into the house.”34

  The experience of seeing Alexius in uniform combined with the antiwar sentiments voiced by Stieglitz, Strand, and Pollitzer, led the usually apolitical O’Keeffe to become an unpopular opponent of the war in a highly patriotic community. Rumors printed in the newspaper that Texas was to be returned to Mexico as compensation for Mexico’s cooperation with Germany had even the most judicious Lone Star resident up in arms. O’Keeffe, despite her remarks to Strand, had remained involved with Reid and talked him into getting his high school diploma before joining the Air Service Signal Corps. This did not endear her to the locals.

  O’Keeffe seethed with impatience over the conformity and pettiness of the Canyon community. By the end of October, she told Strand, “Everything seems to be whirling or unbalanced—I’m suspended in the air—can’t get my feet on the ground—I hate all the folks I see every day—hate the things I see them doing. . . . There is no one here I can talk to—it’s all like a bad dream.”35

  Hearing of her unhappiness, Stieglitz prodded his niece Elizabeth to offer O’Keeffe her New York studio. Stieglitz could not have extended such an invitation himself. O’Keeffe was somewhat baffled by Elizabeth’s solicitation but by December, started to consider it. At two in the morning, unable to sleep, she wrote to Elizabeth asking, “would you get up and leave these stupid maddening sort of folks . . . or would you stay and fight it out?”36

  O’Keeffe’s insomnia may have been the result of the latest scandal. She had told the drugstore owner that his Christmas cards depicting the Statue of Liberty with a printed suggestion that America “wipe Germany off the map” were not in keeping with the Christian spirit. Her heretical opinion got out to the Canyon populace and back to her. “It’s amazing to see what is in their heads,” she mused.37 In retaliation, a few months later, she painted The Flag, a watercolor of a blood-colored flag disappearing into a storm of roiling blue.

  Although she wrote Strand that she had broken up with Reid, fifty years later O’Keeffe bitterly recalled her student’s “dropping me like a hot cake.”38 Reid cut off their relationship abruptly after he was visited by a group of faculty woman who warned him that he would not receive a diploma if he continued to see O’Keeffe. Without bothering to inform her of the faculty visit, Reid ended their relationship. O’Keeffe’s flirtation with a teenage student and her less than patriotic point of view had combined to make her persona non grata around Canyon.

  O’Keeffe turned thirty in November in an atmosphere of considerable alienation. She stuffed paper down the front of her dress to buffer the blistering winds. Claudia was away, working as a student teacher in Spur, Texas. Georgia spent Christmas feeling vulnerable and weak. She developed a sore throat that grew so painful she wrote to the president of the college to take six weeks off. On February 21, 1918, the Randall County News announced that she had taken a leave of absence due to illness. She had contracted Spanish flu, an epidemic that was sweeping the country.

  News of the illness sent Stieglitz into a panic, and he urged her to come to New York to be cared for by his brother Lee, the physician. O’Keeffe was too sick to travel such a distance, though she managed to take the train some six hundred miles south to Waring, the considerably warmer southeastern corner of Texas. She was invited by her friend Leah Harris, who had taught home economics at West Texas State Normal College, to stay at a boardinghouse called Oaks Ranch. (She had visited Harris six months previous, on the return from her Colorado trip.) The Oaks attracted guests who needed “health cures,” especially consumptives who could benefit from the warm and dry climate of the hill country. Harris’s brother-in-law, a physician, probably made the arrangements and helped O’Keeffe recover from her flu before it progressed to tuberculosis.39

  For two months, Stieglitz and Strand discussed O’Keeffe’s future on a daily basis. In May, without consulting O’Keeffe, Stieglitz gave Strand funds to take a train to San Antonio. Neither Strand nor Stieglitz knew what to expect from the trip west, and Stieglitz specifically instructed Strand not to encourage O’Keeffe but to allow her to make her own decision about coming to New York.

  XI

  Stieglitz sent Strand to rescue O’Keeffe, but at the same time he harbored his own feelings for her. In essence, Strand was sent to discover whom, if anyone, O’Keeffe could love.

  Affection was expressed between the artists in an epistolary appreciation of one another’s work. To compliment the art was to honor and even to court the artist. The passion of these convictions was evident in their correspondence. Stieglitz told O’Keeffe, “Your drawings . . . would not be so living for me did I not see you in them . . . how I understand them. They are as if I saw a part of myself.”1 O’Keeffe paraphrased Stieglitz’s sentiment, writing to Strand, “You would not be what you are to me at all if I had not seen the part of you that is in the big prints. . . . I feel that you are going to do much more wonderful things than any of us have seen yet—that you are only just beginning.”2

  Strand arrived in San Antonio on Sunday, May 12, and took a one-dollar-a-night room at the Hotel Lanier. Nearly two hundred thousand troops were stationed nearby, and most of the soldiers seemed to be swarming the streets that night. The following morning, Strand called O’Keeffe, who was staying in town with friends and must have been greatly relieved to hear from him. O’Keeffe arranged a rendezvous in a nearby park. Sitting on a bench by the bandstand, he watched the approach of her tiny figure in a long black dress and black hat and felt as though he were in a dream.

  Rarely given to verbosity, O’Keeffe talked ceaselessly in her excitement, guiding Strand around balmy San Antonio, where pecan trees and tropical flowers bloomed along the banks of the river.

  O’Keeffe was pleased that Strand had come, not realizing, of course, that he had been sent by Stieglitz. Leading him to the garden behind the Alamo where the pomegranate trees were dotted with deep orange flowers, she plucked one of the bright blooms and pinned it to her black dress, preening before the appreciative Strand. The word “alamo” is old Spanish for “cottonwood,” the trees that grew along the irrigation canal in the mission. Forty years after Strand’s visit to San Antonio, O’Keeffe would pursue a series of paintings of cottonwood trees. One can only wonder if the artist, so conscious of symbolic meaning, wasn’t recalling the magical moments as a young woman walking under those gray-leaved trees.

  At the Cafe Del Rio, the couple sat by a window overlooking the river, eating enchiladas and beans and talking until three in the afternoon. When Stieglitz’s name came up, O’Keeffe remarked casually, “Oh, I would like to talk to him.”3

  Strand mentioned a return to the east, but O’Keeffe protested that she had to teach summer school in Canyon because she had no money. In addition, she was concerned for Claudia, who was finishing school there. “She doesn’t fit and I’m wondering whether I should steer her into fitting,” the concerned sister remarked.4

  Strand moved into a local boardinghouse a few doors away from O’Keeffe’s lodging. For several days, there were more strolls through town, followed by long lunches at the Mexican cafe. O’Keeffe took Strand to the barrio, where the Mexicans from south of the border lived in low adobe houses decorated with flowers. She stopped to paint watercolors of the picturesque scenes, and the locals gathered around her to watch.

  When Strand brought out his camera to photograph La Villita, as the area was known, the locals ran away. But Strand did manage to shoot a dozen plates in the first three days, many of O’Keeffe, though they have since been lost. “She
is just like a child,” he wrote Stieglitz. “Stopping to look at something . . . everything giving her such a good time.”5 Strand confessed that they’d been together every day and every evening. It was hard to find time to write: “She is very wonderful—very beautiful. I know pretty well now that it isn’t an idea. No, it’s all very real.”6

  Remembering the purpose of his visit, to discover O’Keeffe’s feelings, and whether she would be returning to New York City, he assured Stieglitz, “I am saying very little—neither urging or the reverse. Just trying to let things clarify—as they will freely. She is very much mixed up and it ought to unravel without pressure of any kind—for the present.”7

  On Wednesday morning, Strand met Leah Harris, whom he described as “a tall, thin girl—a Jewess, very nice but not at all good-looking.”8 Harris’s brother-in-law was the local doctor and, as a favor, treated O’Keeffe for free. Harris, who still took treatments for the tuberculosis she’d suffered a year before, told Strand that O’Keeffe had veered dangerously close to contracting the illness. Strand learned that tuberculosis ran in the O’Keeffe family.

  After speaking with Harris about O’Keeffe’s health, Strand determined that Harris was more stable than O’Keeffe. They agreed that she needed someone to take care of her.

  Neither Strand nor Stieglitz knew the true state of O’Keeffe’s poverty before Strand’s visit. Having associated mostly with middle- or upper-class women with independent or family income, they were uncertain how to proceed. O’Keeffe mentioned the need for money several times to Strand. “She certainly doesn’t need very much—that isn’t what she means—but I fancy she hasn’t anything left to speak of,” he reported to Stieglitz.9

  On Sunday, May 17, Strand mailed what he called “letter X” (so Stieglitz could refer to it and identify it from the others sent previously). In it, he told Stieglitz,

  Georgia is a child and yet a woman but there is a clash. Leah said she didn’t think anyone could satisfy her—She can’t stand anyone for long—and that he would have to be a millionaire. “Georgia needs money.” Of course, that is largely true. I’ve seen it very well and if we weren’t going out to Waring tomorrow, I’d soon be broke.

  Not of course that she wants the money itself but it doesn’t mean anything to her. There are so many things she would like to do and it’s really a wonder that she paints at all. But there is no stability of living to match the stability of fineness and spirit.

  I don’t believe she could keep a home because she couldn’t do any work. . . . She would have to be done for practically all the way thru. When you said it takes money—you are right. But I’m not certain she has found herself yet—not at all—The relative importance of some values in living are not clearly crystalized. Leah herself said . . . “she has a mind but she does not use it.”10

  Confronted with this portrait of O’Keeffe as financially and emotionally dependent, Strand had to face the limitations of his own circumstances. A young artist of modest family origins, he could hardly support himself, let alone another artist. He wrote to tell Stieglitz that he was bowing out. “If I had some money I might be able to help her—I know I wouldn’t be afraid despite all the difficulties of living with such a person. But I haven’t,” he wrote. “So it is all very clear that I am not the one.” Then, in a surprising declaration, Strand told Stieglitz that he felt his two friends were destined for one another: “So it seems that you and she ought to have the chance of finding out what can be done—one for the other.”11

  He added, “New York may clarify things for her and may even lead to at least some consummation. I think before she could go with you—there would be many things to be given up. . . . She may be able to do it because she is seeking—deep down—something with finality in the sense of a tangible solid living basis. . . . She really looks wonderful—and she is wonderful . . . I love her very much—You know my feelings for you.”12

  Before receiving Strand’s remarkably honest assessment of their situation, Stieglitz had worked himself into a manic state of anxiety. “Of course I’m human and I suffer terribly at moments . . . life—death—I want her to live—I never wanted anything a much as that—She is the Spirit of 291 not I—That’s something I never told you before—that’s why I have been fighting so madly for her life—She really doesn’t know me.”13

  Realizing that O’Keeffe was too much of a responsibility for him, Strand urged his mentor to carry on. “The spirit of 291—yes—she is—throu you—now—I don’t see how it can ever really take form in her until you or some man can give her the necessary stability—There is no stability now—just a more or less formless drifting—she is a woman—hysterical—cruel—and yet so lovely—so like you fundamentally if it could only take form in a stability of living.” Strand told Stieglitz to save his energy for her arrival in New York, noting, “You will need all of your vitality for that.”14

  Strand accompanied O’Keeffe and Harris back to the Oaks Ranch in Waring and took it upon himself to mail O’Keeffe’s latest work to New York (her last package of paintings had arrived crushed due to her hasty packaging and frugal dime postage).

  During her months in San Antonio, O’Keeffe was painting watercolors of Hispanic women wearing shawls and long skirts. Her few scenes of people owe little to realism; her subjects’ faces are indistinguishable; and her emphasis is instead on the colorful patterned fabrics wrapped around the women’s bodies. At the same time that O’Keeffe was painting scenes of Hispanic women, she completed a drawing and watercolor of a domestic interior with a bowl of fruit. All of these works have a folk-art aspect that recalls Kandinsky’s wood-block prints of villagers. Just as she had in Canyon and New York, O’Keeffe painted studies of the local architecture, red and blue watercolors of modest houses with emphasis on the picket fence, pergola, or window casings, the repetitive geometric elements so evident in Strand’s photographs.15 Around this same time, O’Keeffe also executed a series of loosely handled watercolors of trees in San Antonio’s large park.

  Once at the ranch house in Waring, isolated from prying eyes, O’Keeffe completed a line drawing and blue watercolor of Harris in the nude, each made with just a few calligraphic sweeps of the pencil or brush.16 They have been cited as evidence of her lesbian relationship with Harris and compared to the erotic Rodin watercolors that O’Keeffe had seen at 291. Spare in the extreme, these studies of Harris are just about the least erotic of O’Keeffe’s work.

  In Canyon the previous year, O’Keeffe had completed a dozen slightly more realized nudes. In each one, a woman is seated cross-legged or demurely turned to one side in a standard pose used in art school life drawing courses. Most of the paintings are executed spontaneously in pink and tan skin tones, with pale blue backgrounds: there is little detail—only one figure has nipples on her breasts—and no attempt to render facial expression. According to art historian Barbara Rose, these watercolors are self-portraits composed in front of a mirror, experiments inspired by Rodin’s watercolors of modern dancer Isadora Duncan. This group of watercolors is O’Keeffe’s only foray into painting the female nude body. Finding the results unsatisfactory, she would spend the rest of her career representing the female form symbolically in landscapes and still lifes.

  Harris allowed Strand to photograph her nude, an allowance that led him to alter his initial opinion of her physical attributes. “Very wonderful,” he enthused to Stieglitz. “You can imagine how free things must be for anything like that to have happened. . . . She is long and slender, very beautiful white skin.”17 A few days later he sent a hastily scrawled note to further tantalize the older photographer: “I am in a state—photographing Leah—nude—body wet, shining in the sunlight . . . Georgia painting Leah . . . wonderful days—yesterday—and today—All of us happy.”18

  After settling in at the ranch, Harris informed Strand that a neighboring rancher named Zoeller had been spying on her and slandering her reputation. She had filed a complaint but wanted Strand to have a talk with him. The beleaguer
ed photographer wrote Stieglitz, “You know this Southern attitude which expects somebody to go and beat up the offender.”19 He was especially reluctant after learning that the neighbors had beaten another interloper only weeks before.

  O’Keeffe regarded Strand’s reticence as cowardice. In their ensuing argument, she learned the extent to which her two friends were discussing her mental and physical health, her finances, and her future.

  Most important, she discovered that Strand had come to see her as Stieglitz’s emissary. Referring to Stieglitz’s habit of speaking through others, she snapped to Strand, “First Elizabeth and now you.”20 Infuriated by these covert arrangements, O’Keeffe also felt romantically betrayed, since her feelings had grown more passionate toward Strand, who had encouraged her attention. He admitted, “She lets me touch her—wants me to—But with me at least . . . no passion—except in a far off—very far off potential . . . all a nightmare.”21

  Humiliated and angry, Strand marched up the road, a gun hidden under his shirt, and forcibly brought Zoeller back to the ranch to apologize for his remarks. In a comedy of errors, by the time the two men arrived, Harris and O’Keeffe had gone shopping. Strand and Zoeller waited together for an hour, until a hand of Zoeller’s rode up to say that one of his horses was bleeding to death. Strand let Zoeller go with instructions to return that afternoon. Incensed, Zoeller went directly to the town of Boerne to file “forced imprisonment” charges against Strand.22