Harris and O’Keeffe returned just as the sheriff rode up to arrest Strand. Harris leapt to his defense, chronicling her complaints against Zoeller, who was fetched to explain his side of the story. With the sheriff’s intervention, both sides apologized, withdrew their complaints, and the farce drew to a close. Strand was pleased with his bravery and recounted the event as though he’d been the star in a William Hart western. “You see a city-bred person is up against it to know just how to act when they run into a situation like this,” he bragged.23
Meanwhile, Stieglitz found himself in a situation unlike any he’d imagined. Like Strand, he feared he wasn’t up to the challenge of O’Keeffe. “I must be lacking in something not to be able to solve so simple a problem—the cause is the same cause that has made me a ‘failure’ all along the line—The lacking ability of being ‘practical’ in the world sense—Rest—a simple home—peace of mind—whoever can give her that will give her what she needs above all things.”24
Trying to puzzle it out, he walked five to six hours a night around Central Park and along the avenues with his friend Emil Zoler. One day, he found comfort in watching a Red Cross parade of hundreds of young girls dressed in white uniforms marching in perfect alignment. “The air of great white spirit,” he sighed.
He frankly revealed his tortured state in his letters to Strand:
It’s so difficult to say “yes,”—even more difficult to say “no”—and to keep quiet—cowardice. . . . I had hoped she would write. . . . It might have helped me come to a decision—But undoubtedly, for that reason, nothing came. What a queer mixture we all are. . . . Sometimes I feel I’m going out of my mind. . . . I don’t know how to act—act so that I can give others what I know they need.25
Apparently his soul-searching on paper had some galvanizing effect. He wrote Strand, “I don’t know what made me do it but I have just sent a wire.”26
Stieglitz’s formal invitation to O’Keeffe to come to New York provided her exit line. She told Strand that living alone with Harris robbed her of a certain strength and vitality. She was concerned, too, about catching tuberculosis, though the doctor had reassured her that Harris was not contagious. Strand was thoroughly relieved to be going home.
Peace and quiet enveloped the house. After two idyllic days, Strand drove Harris, O’Keeffe, and three girlfriends to the largely German community of Frederickburg to see the simple old stone and white-washed houses. “The most extraordinary simplicity of structure and powerful forms,” Strand wrote Stieglitz. “Georgia wanted to live there. . . . Very bare, very lovely.”27
As Strand and O’Keeffe readied to return to New York, their discussions took on a franker tone. It appears that O’Keeffe still hoped to elicit a commitment from Strand. She wondered if he really wanted her to come to New York, and hoped that they might stay together out west. In a rash moment, he capitulated to her urging. “I . . . told her—simply because I thought it—felt it and meant it—that if she wanted it—I would take care of her as long as she wanted it—a job anywhere she wanted to be—without expecting anything in return except the joy of doing it,” he told Stieglitz. “Perhaps naive—but I could do it if it were to be—But it isn’t—which I knew long ago. Still I felt it was only fair to say it and to tell you that it has been said.”28
Despite her strong feelings for him, O’Keeffe accepted that Strand was unable to support a relationship. On their last night in San Antonio, they went dancing, and Strand expressed surprise at O’Keeffe’s talent.
Three years earlier Strand had been charmed by the opulent Hotel Monte Leone in New Orleans, where he arranged rooms for the first evening of their long journey. But O’Keeffe’s uncertainty about the future clouded her ability to enjoy the hotel or the city. As the train hurtled northeast and she tried to absorb the life-changing circumstances of the past three weeks, she relapsed into illness. From Charlotte, North Carolina, Strand wired Stieglitz with the date and time of their arrival.
Book Two
BECOMING 1918–1946
I feel that a real living form is the natural result of the individual’s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown—where it has experienced something—felt something—it has not understood—and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown—known.
GEORGIA O’KEEFE to Sherwood Anderson, 1925
I
One could hardly overstate the desperate circumstances of O’Keeffe’s life during the first half of 1918. Since her mother’s death and her father’s abandonment, she had been haunted by feelings of loneliness and loss. She had sought solace from Macmahon and Reid, only to be hurt by both of them. She had dangled herself before Strand only to be faced with his inability to commit. She was physically debilitated from the months of fighting influenza and borderline tuberculosis. O’Keeffe arrived in New York City broke, rejected, and uncertain of her future.
Considering her unstable family and love life, Stieglitz appeared to be the very rock of security. O’Keeffe knew that he had provided abundant support for a community of artists. She did not know, however, of his reluctance to commit to his own wife and child.
On Sunday, June 9, at around 7:30 in the morning, Strand and O’Keeffe arrived at Grand Central Station, where they were met by Stieglitz. Even though her health had improved in San Antonio, O’Keeffe had grown feverish during the journey and was coughing badly. Stieglitz rushed her to his niece Elizabeth’s studio at 114 East Fifty-ninth Street. For the next few weeks, O’Keeffe spent entire days in bed, nursed by Stieglitz, his brother Lee, and Elizabeth. There was cause for concern—the flu epidemic of 1918 claimed millions of lives, including that of their mutual acquaintance Randolphe Bourne.
Famously hypochondriacal, Stieglitz believed that O’Keeffe might die, and she, long feeling the strain of life, let herself be cushioned and pampered by the fifty-four-year-old man. For the thirty-one-year-old O’Keeffe, Stieglitz must have seemed like the father who loved her as a little girl, before circumstances damaged his ability to care for his family.
Strand’s role in the complicated transaction was forgotten in all the commotion over O’Keeffe’s illness. Stieglitz barely had time for him; he was busy throwing all of his obsessive energies into his newest project. He confessed with surprising candor to Elizabeth, “I never realized that what she is could actually exist—absolute Truth—Clarity of Vision to the Highest Degree.”1
O’Keeffe’s frail condition appealed to Stieglitz’s fundamentally Victorian view of women as fragile and dependent. Having come of age during the late nineteenth century, he was subject to conservative values, despite his simultaneous intellectual endorsement of most modern principles, including the rights of women. This was but one of many contrary personality traits O’Keeffe had yet to discover.
Every day, the solicitous Stieglitz arrived at Elizabeth’s studio: two sparsely furnished rooms on the top floor of a brownstone a few blocks from her father’s large home on Sixty-fifth Street. O’Keeffe moved her bed under the skylight so she could see the stars at night, even though they were pale imitations of the West’s brilliant constellations.
With its north-facing skylight and south-facing windows, the main room was an ideal studio, except for the distracting lemon-yellow walls and orange floor. This interior had been inspired by Elizabeth’s infatuation with the Oaklawn gardener Donald Davidson, whom she called “Mr. Flower.”
In a typically Stieglitzean quid pro quo, Elizabeth acted as midwife in the affair between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe. In exchange, Uncle Al kept mum about her relationship with Davidson, knowing that his prudent brother could scarcely approve their union. A middle-aged Scottish aristocrat, divorced and the father of a grown son, Davidson was devoting himself to spiritual, rather than commercial, pursuits. Their age difference alone would have caused Lee some alarm—Davidson was forty and Elizabeth twenty-two. The scheme succeeded; Elizabeth married Davidson the following year.
During their first months
together, Stieglitz’s bent for cosmic coincidence found constant reinforcement. He learned that O’Keeffe was the subject of the Eugene Speicher portrait that he had selected during the 1908 contest at Amitola, and he attributed special significance to his adolescent infatuation with a young girl who wore a black dress trimmed with a white collar, precisely the sort of dress often worn by O’Keeffe.
Owing to a combination of physical exhaustion and shame, O’Keeffe at first avoided contacting friends from her earlier years in New York. She was, after all, being cared for by an older married man. Although open marriage and sexual liberation had been prevalent among the Greenwich Village set during the last decade, O’Keeffe had never identified with those artists, and instead of rebelling against her midwestern background, she saw its conservative tendency as a source of strength. She knew about the social stigma of being the other woman, especially having run afoul of the mores of Canyon.
After a few weeks O’Keeffe had recuperated, and her friends who came to visit her could be caught unawares. When Susan Young Wilson came up from Chatham, she was invited to breakfast with the proviso that she bring her own egg. She arrived in time to meet Stieglitz and watched, astonished, as her friend lovingly bundled him up in his cape and sent him off to “the vault.” “Isn’t he just wonderful?” exclaimed the usually reserved artist. Young asked when they had married, for which O’Keeffe briskly replied, “Oh, let’s not talk about that.”2
After her younger brother Alexius visited the studio that fall, he promptly wrote to their sister Catherine that he “didn’t think much of the way Georgia was living.”3 O’Keeffe’s older brother Francis, an architect, was anti-Semitic and, therefore, anti-Stieglitz. Though he lived in New York until the early 1920’s, she rarely saw him.
Despite the disapproval of her siblings, however, O’Keeffe found compensation in being Stieglitz’s darling. It was warm and isolated in the yellow studio, and she soon lulled herself into a state of happy dependence. By the beginning of July, Stieglitz was captivated. “It’s all intensely beautiful,” he wrote.4
Vainly attempting to camouflage his concern as professional, Stieglitz began introducing O’Keeffe to his friends. A surprising number of them rallied around him, probably due to Emmy’s long-standing disinterest in his career. Intellectuals and artists contributed their modest knowledge of domestic affairs. Arthur Dove sent fresh eggs from his Westport, Connecticut, farm. Stieglitz delightedly told Dove that O’Keeffe was “more extraordinary than even I believed. In fact I don’t believe there has ever been anything like her. Mind and feeling very clear—spontaneous—and uncannily beautiful—absolutely living every pulse-beat.”5
Shortly after the move into Elizabeth’s studio Stieglitz and O’Keeffe became lovers. Given her passion for Strand only weeks before, one can only wonder about this sudden transfer of affection. It is likely that she hadn’t expected such a development but that the time spent recovering in bed had escalated their level of intimacy. And, unlike the young men that she had dated over the last three years, Stieglitz was not threatened by her commitment to her art or her changeable personality: he was genuinely thrilled to be seen as her savior, rescuing her from the inhospitable wilds of Texas.
Despite a flirtatious nature, Stieglitz was not a roué. He had observed his own father’s dalliance with the parlor maid and his mother’s subsequent humiliation, and he remained conflicted about the notion of infidelity. He was witness, too, to the unhappiness that the unfaithful Lee, who had been having an affair for decades, had brought upon his wife Lizzie.
Three years earlier, he had fallen in love with the statuesque beauty Katharine Rhoades but was unable to make a commitment to leave his marriage. He was determined not to lose such an opportunity again.
In order to justify taking a lover, Stieglitz had to construct a view of O’Keeffe that would excuse his behavior. Theirs was to be a spiritual union. During three years of correspondence, with little contact, he had fabricated her as his ideal of Woman: a receptacle for his beliefs about purity and intuitive goodness. It was this creation that he described in a poem that he wrote for her: “A Portrait—1918.”
Stieglitz’s passion for O’Keeffe also led him to compose a portrait in photographs. During the first two years of their relationship, he took more than two hundred pictures of her as a collective “portrait.”
Since 1915, he had been photographing the artists and writers in his circle. His view camera used 8 × 10-inch glass plates that required exposures of three to four minutes, and subjects were required to sit absolutely still for an hour to avoid blurring the image. Despite such limitations, Stieglitz believed that this elapsed time revealed a more truthful evocation of character. He also believed that a portrait should comprise many photographs, as in his attempted serial portrait of his daughter or of his patient and pretty secretary, Marie Rapp Boursault, whom he photographed more than a dozen of times.
He had taken his first photographs of O’Keeffe’s face and hands the summer before, on June 4, 1917, when she visited 291 to see her second exhibition. Two of these had been forwarded to Canyon. “In my excitement at such pictures of myself I took them to school and held them up for my class to see,” she said. “They were surprised and astonished too. Nothing like that had come into our world before.”6
Although O’Keeffe had been photographed before, she had not been envisioned by an artist. The Georgia O’Keeffe in these first pictures appears demure and a little bemused, with traces of dimples in her cheeks. “You see, I’d never known what I looked like or thought about it much,” she said. “I was amazed to find my face was lean and structured. I’d always thought it was round.”7 She added, “I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality. I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say—in paint.”8
When the light was fullest in Elizabeth’s studio, Stieglitz mounted his view camera on his rickety tripod, covered in a worn black cloth, to photograph O’Keeffe. He used a soiled white umbrella to cast light into the shadowy areas. He developed the prints in the smaller, second room, where he stored his equipment. “My hands had always been admired since I was a little girl—but I never thought much about it,” O’Keeffe recalled. “He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow—in many different positions.”9
Stieglitz sought an unblinking, intimate photographic record of O’Keeffe’s entire body. Initially, O’Keeffe was baffled, even detached from the process. “I was photographed with a kind of heat and excitement,” she recalled, “and in a way wondered what it was all about.10
“When I make a photograph, I make love,” Stieglitz said. And this was certainly true of his portraits of O’Keeffe, which depart dramatically from his portraits of male friends or, for that matter, Emmy and Kitty. With their tight focus and cropped close-ups, it’s clear that their composition was influenced by the work of Strand, though Stieglitz would never have admitted as much.
Throughout the hot and humid month of June, O’Keeffe appears to have lounged around the studio in a sheer white kimono that easily slid off her frame. The three- to four-minute exposures may account for O’Keeffe’s perpetually dazed expressions in these photographs. Alternatively, this glazed look might have been a result of their lively sessions of intercourse: Stieglitz photographed her seated or reclining, her robe open, breasts revealed, appearing languid, drained, a thin veil of perspiration barely visible upon her upper lip and her cheekbones.
The poses that Stieglitz chose to photograph O’Keeffe in were influenced by his dedicated study of erotica. He had amassed a collection of some ninety thousand photographs, “mostly of actresses,” as a student in Berlin, where there was a large pornography industry. Since those student days, he had remained compulsively fascinated by sex. He collected books on sexuality by Havelock Ellis, no doubt as a means of compensating for the sexually constrained life he led with his wife. In stark comparison to Emmy, who reneged on a prenuptial pro
mise to let Stieglitz photograph her nude, O’Keeffe must have seemed incredibly liberated to him.
An admirer of Rodin’s erotica, Stieglitz knew that the great sculptor had his nude models dance provocatively before him to provide inspiration. He had dedicated a special issue of Camera Work to Rodin, who later sent him a lively drawing of a woman with her legs akimbo, revealing the vertical line of the vulva, her hands cupping her breasts.
The tropes of pornography can be seen in certain photographs of O’Keeffe wearing nothing but a black straw boater.11 Since she never admitted to collaborating, it seems that Stieglitz set up the poses. She was photographed with her hair flowing long and dark around her shoulders, with arms raised against a background of her charcoal drawings with their own suggestive, molten shapes. Another time, Stieglitz focused tightly so that her breasts, belly, pubic mound, and thighs appear as a massive torso. In others, her buttocks fill the entire frame, without legs or body. O’Keeffe was petite and small boned, with short legs and a long waist. Yet Stieglitz’s photographs can lend the impression of classical and perfect proportions or the sense that she is a hefty Amazon. Since her face is only shown in the clothed photographs, there is little evidence of her personality, but a clear sense of Stieglitz’s vision.
The photographs that he took between 1918 and 1921 invented a role for O’Keeffe as surely as Pygmalion conceived Galatea. Stieglitz was the country’s most famous photographer and one of the most influential personalities in the New York art world. She was a schoolteacher from Texas. She became the willing object of his gaze and he concocted a woman who matched his idealization of femininity as signified by passivity, beauty, illness, and tragedy. In Stieglitz’s portraits, O’Keeffe is rarely smiling. She appears mysterious, marmoreal, and unavailable despite her nakedness. For the rest of her life, she would pose as Stieglitz posed her, continuing to assert her serious, remote countenance to photographers. Stieglitz noted, “Whenever she looks at the proofs, she falls in love with herself—Or rather her Selves—There are very many.”12
Full Bloom Page 18
