Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  From his first photographs of her, Stieglitz posed O’Keeffe’s hands as arched and open, like claws, sometimes clutching at her bosom. The gestures owe nothing to hand positions from life but incorporate an arcane and private symbolism, adopting the conventions of paintings of female saints and Madonnas during the European Renaissance. In several pictures, O’Keeffe’s eyes look heavenward and she proffers her breast to the viewer as the common theme of virgo lactans, the Virgin Mary shown to be offering sustenance.13 One wonders if Stieglitz was presenting O’Keeffe as sacred Madonna to offset the lewd implications of the other nudes.

  Despite her full-time role as model and muse, O’Keeffe found time to paint a few small canvases that seem to indicate her own satisfaction in this relationship. Three entirely abstract oils, numbers one, three, and four, from Series I, all depict curling and thrusting voluptuous forms in molten shades of vermillion, melon, and turquoise and are indebted to the Symbolist tendrils of earlier watercolors. They also mark a return to oil after a year of working mostly on paper. Her pastel of gold, lime, and tangerine arcs framing cerulean blue, Over Blue, led to a pair of large abstract oil paintings of the same composition, both of which were inspired by her evenings at concerts conducted by Arturo Toscanini and Leo Ornstein.

  Music—Pink and Blue No. 1 wraps tones of ivory and pale pink around an ovoid of celestial blue while Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 surrounds the blue with rose, fuchsia, and violet and the arches are oriented in a manner suggestive of labia, clitoris, and vagina. Around this time, she also completed the frankly erotic Blue Flower, a pastel of the abstracted petals of a peacock-blue flower being pressed open by a glowing, golden pistil.

  Many of these paintings would seem to reveal the physical pleasure she was enjoying with Stieglitz. These two sensual beings had been without regular or sensitive partners for some time. Their early years together were dedicated to the thrill of desire. O’Keeffe’s sensations were rendered as swelling, pulsing, vibrating, and flowing colors. Expressing her most private and pleasant feeling was the plausible, even inevitable subject for her art, as it had been for male artists for centuries. Making visible what had been cloaked in mystique, privileging and owning her sexual pleasure was revolutionary and possibly unprecedented, even in modern art. Emma Goldman and the bohemians of Greenwich Village had advocated free love since before the war, but O’Keeffe was the first woman artist to give it unapologetically lovely form.

  For several weeks, Stieglitz crept into his Madison Avenue apartment late at night after Emmy had gone to bed and slept on a sofa in the study. “The strain is great,” he admitted.14 He was certain of the impending separation from his wife but worried about the impact on his twenty-year-old daughter Kitty. Raised by Emmy and a governess, Kitty’s relationship with her father was quite formal. Nevertheless, she adored him. Stieglitz, on the other hand, did not know what to make of his daughter. Using the first color photographic process to make autochromes, he took pleasant pictures of a well-dressed young girl perched on a park bench in Paris in the early 1900s. Yet, Kitty’s expression remains detached, revealing little of her nature. He received little encouragement from Emmy, who criticized his portraits of their daughter, once saying, “Her underlip sticks out and that curl looks like a sausage.”

  After taking his daughter to camp on July 3, Stieglitz was emboldened to bring O’Keeffe to his apartment. Emmy returned from shopping earlier than expected and found him photographing his new model in her home. Outraged, she delivered an ultimatum. He pleaded innocence, but Emmy wasn’t buying it. Within two hours, Stieglitz had packed his bags and moved into the yellow studio. “We weren’t doing anything,” he protested to Dove. “I was virtually ‘kicked out’ of home, like I was kicked out of the Camera Club ten years ago. The Club wishes me back—Home already ‘regrets.’”15

  The following day, Emmy apologized, but Alfred’s excuse was at the ready. He would not bear such insults to his dignity. “I am very sorry that you should see only my ‘rottenness’—and one side—Sorrier than I can ever make you understand—as I haven’t been able to make you understand for 25 years. I have been ‘guilty’ in your eyes for 25 years—What chance did you ever give me, or yourself, or our so-called ‘home’—and Kitty. . . . I still maintain I’m the only real friend you have. Time will prove it.”16

  Stieglitz’s true feelings are apparent in his note to his secretary. He crowed triumphantly, “I’m out of 1111—In one hour and fifty minutes the job was completed—You never saw such a clean job and the place was left spic and span. Mrs. wasn’t home. So she probably had a great surprise when she turned up. She probably had no idea anyone could act so promptly and quickly and above all not I. . . . I’m really very sorry for Mrs. S. . . . But what can I do? I was certainly patient and persistent.”17

  Stieglitz lied to his indignant brother-in-law, insisting that Strand had gone to Texas to retrieve O’Keeffe “with his own money.” Twenty years of resentment at being forced into his marriage by Obermeyer flooded to the surface. Self-righteously, he complained, “It seems you can’t understand any fine or decent relationship between man and woman.”18

  Stieglitz sent his effects to the studio, including a bed installed next to O’Keeffe’s, decorously separated by a blanket hung on a string drawn across the room. His friend British auctioner Mitchell Kennerley, who owned the nearby Anderson Galleries, stored Stieglitz’s art, photographic equipment, and other items.

  Upon hearing that Stieglitz had moved out of the apartment, his mother intervened and invited the cause of the disturbance to Oaklawn. For Stieglitz, who had spent nearly every summer at the family’s Lake George home since his return from Europe in 1888, it was a highly symbolic summons. He and O’Keeffe obediently made the four-hour train trip. Fred Varnum, the houseman, met them at the station and drove them to Oaklawn, the turreted Victorian house that sat comfortably on twelve acres of oak and pine along the lake. With her hair parted in the middle and drawn back, Hedwig stood forbiddingly on the porch to greet them.

  O’Keeffe’s house in Willamsburg, the grandest she had ever known, was humble in comparison to Oaklawn, one of the fashionable late-nineteenth-century “cottages” erected by the high society of the Gilded Age. As a family proud of its interest in culture and the arts, the Stieglitzes had filled most of Oaklawn’s main rooms with grand, heavily ornamented furniture and somber oil paintings in gold frames. The decor was similar to the interior of Stieglitz’s apartment in the city which O’Keeffe described as full of “horrible atrocities jumbled together.”19

  She was startled by the contrast between his crowded apartment and the spartan interior of 291, which did not have a single chair where a visitor might sit. But Steichen had designed that interior. Stieglitz embraced modernism intellectually, but at heart he remained a nineteenth-century German Romantic. O’Keeffe rationalized that the apartment in the city had been decorated largely according to Emmy’s taste; in the future, she hoped, Stieglitz’s apartments would reflect her own very different sensibility.

  Hedwig was not thrilled with her eldest son’s decision, but she was a practical woman and with a single glance took in his absolute infatuation. No friend of Emmy’s in any case, Hedwig respectfully seated O’Keeffe at her side during meals. The rest of the Stieglitz family honored this and accepted their guest with what grace they could muster.

  But O’Keeffe was astonished by what she saw at Oaklawn. The rambunctious Stieglitz clan were wealthy, self-involved, and voluble. With all of the siblings and spouses and their children and grandchildren, up to twenty people were served meals in the formal dining room. O’Keeffe quickly learned that Stieglitz’s tendency to dominate the conversation was matched by others in the Stieglitz family, who enjoyed loud, argumentative discussions at any opportunity. Hedwig, then seventy-four, bore it all with equanimity, devoted as she was to Alfred, who not only spent summers with her but visited her twice a week in her New York townhouse during the winter.

  Stieglitz’s happiness was
contagious. Flora Straus, one of his nieces, recalled, “They were gloriously, rapturously happy.”20 After luncheon, O’Keeffe would shoot her lover a meaningful look and the couple would hurry upstairs, unbuttoning as they went. “We’d say we were going to have a nap,” she confessed. “Then we’d make love. Afterwards he would take photographs of me.”21

  Stieglitz’s grandniece, Sue Davidson Lowe, who spent twenty-two summers at the lake, observed their passion firsthand. She recalled, “My own recollections are about a twinkly attraction that was obvious. The giggles. You don’t think of them as giggling but they giggled an awful lot. These things are lost in the photographs.”22 Each evening, after dinner, they would row across the lake and watch dusk descending on the mountains and water. No matter how late they were in returning, Hedwig would be pacing the porch with worry. “It didn’t seem to bother him much,” O’Keeffe mused. “She had always been that way.”23

  Far from Emmy and the cares of the city, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe lapsed into carefree denial. She resumed painting in a style far removed from the dead rabbit and copper pot still life that had brought her to Lake George the previous decade. It is likely that she remembered her early aspirations and her crush on Dannenberg, who had gone to Paris without her. In three watercolors, one titled Old Tree, she painted the trunk of a tree as an arabesque of scarlet watercolor with dots of green and yellow. She also painted a watercolor of half a dozen crimson canna lilies.

  Inspired by a forest fire, O’Keeffe painted an oil of a conical mound of orange against a darkened sky. Two subsequent versions feature tangerine plumes against a cerulean sky with white clouds. Untitled, as they were called, all three seem indebted to Red and Green Trees, painted in Virginia two years earlier.

  Stieglitz combined his portraits of O’Keeffe with the most enduring love of his life, Lake George itself. He photographed O’Keeffe next to apple trees, wrapped in an old sweater, sitting on the ground and poised, ready to paint (she holds the Japanese brush recommended by Dow, probably used on the impressionistic red trees). He photographed her as she walked across a meadow, canvas in hand. He documented the O’Keeffe who survived illness and despair to blossom under his care, with regular and abundant food, fresh air, and long walks.

  He developed his negatives in what had been an old greenhouse, where there was a sink with running water, and the light was conveniently blocked out. By no means fancy, the shed was still a step up from the farmhouse bathroom that he had used. O’Keeffe recalled, “There was always much excitement over getting these rooms dark enough to work in.”24

  In early August, Stieglitz wrote unabashedly to Strand, “Just a line to tell you that the days here are the most perfect of my life. . . . The family has been wonderful. O. is perfectly at home. All like her. . . . Everything intensifies our Peace within. I am letting nothing disturb that.25

  Strand, who was spending the summer with his own family at Twin Lakes, Connecticut, was less hopeful: he was coping not only with the loss of a woman he had loved but with diminished attentions from his old friend. Adding to his disillusionment was the news that Elizabeth, with whom he had been flirting, had committed to Davidson. Strand found them “almost hostile in their happiness.”26

  “Except for the occasional brief depressions—I am rather contented. Perhaps because I am still touching the lives of people who are fine—who embody what Life means to me,” Strand wrote. “And yet, I have a feeling of their moving out and away on their own determined roads—roads that mine will no longer parallel except through feeling.”27 Around the end of August, he was drafted into the army. “There was nothing else to look forward to,” he sighed.28

  O’Keeffe asked few questions as the weeks passed. She had no plans for the future. One day, toward the end of summer, Stieglitz asked her what she would choose to do if she could do anything that she wanted for a year. Predictably, she answered that she would paint. After a moment’s thought, he said, “Alright, I’ll manage it for you.”29 With her decision to continue living with Stieglitz—and no promise of marriage—O’Keeffe officially became his mistress.

  Stieglitz approached one of his wealthy friends with an appeal for money to back up this cavalier promise. “Alfred, I’ve heard you’ve left your wife. Is this woman involved?” the patron demanded.30 Earnestly and of course falsely, Stieglitz denied the charge and procured a loan of one thousand dollars—ten times that amount in today’s currency. Stieglitz never minded stretching the truth if he thought it was in service of some larger good, in this case O’Keeffe’s future as an artist. “I already knew I loved her but I also knew I was an old man and I couldn’t take care of a woman and a family,” he said.31

  Had O’Keeffe chosen a less volatile partner, she might have enjoyed a calmer life with domestic rewards like children. Instead, she opted for Stieglitz, who would never give her a child but gave her something that she wanted very badly—her career as an artist. She knew the bargain. Once she remarked candidly that in Stieglitz “something hot, dark, and destructive was hitched to the highest, brightest star.”32

  Stieglitz made this arrangement with O’Keeffe without coming to terms with his wife and daughter. From Camp Kehonka in Alton, New Hampshire, Kitty enjoyed a few days of peace before the arrival of her hysterical mother. “It is all for the best,” she wrote to her father. “Treat the world impersonally and it will do the same to you. Impersonal things don’t hurt.”33

  After Emmy disclosed O’Keeffe’s role in the separation, Kitty could no longer maintain her goal of being “impersonal.” “No matter how much she deserves it, she is alone,” Kitty scolded her father. “The hurt you would have given her at just plain leaving would have been great enough. . . . The fact that you have left her for another is what makes it so very terrible!! . . . You have a right, father dear, to live your own life but do you think you have a right to voluntarily hurt other people by the sharpest weapon possible—by hurting their pride?”34

  Kitty refused to come to Lake George while O’Keeffe was in residence. Emmy deluded herself that the affair would be short-lived. As Kitty tried to convince her mother that Stieglitz was gone for good, Emmy grew more distraught. On August 9, responding to his daughter’s pleas, Stieglitz went to the camp and spent a day in an empty cottage in the woods at the edge of Lake Winnipesaukee. His wife and daughter each spoke her mind. Stieglitz felt that “a miracle actually happened.”35

  The three communicated with one another for the first time. Afterward, Kitty confessed to her father, “Those few hours we three were together mutually understanding one another was the first time I felt that I had a home—not a tangible one but one much more beautiful—a spiritual (one) which no one can take away.”36

  Emmy also felt that the conversation had helped her accept the changes. “I have accustomed myself to become quiet, at least outwardly. To become so inwardly is more difficult,” she told Stieglitz.37 Mother and daughter went to Ogunquit, Maine, and then to Boston to meet Julius Stieglitz’s son, Edward. He would accompany Kitty to Lake George while Emmy played golf in Manchester.

  When Kitty and Edward arrived at Oaklawn, they were shocked to find that O’Keeffe was still in residence. Despite the clarity of his daughter’s letter, the conversation at the camp, and his assurances that O’Keeffe would be gone, Stieglitz somehow believed that Kitty could be won over if only she would meet the splendid young artist. But Kitty coldly informed her father that if his mistress did not leave, she would. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe fled to the city in disgrace. A week later, George Herbert Engelhard, Stieglitz’s brother-in-law, dramatically hand-delivered a letter from Kitty pleading with her father to come spend time with her, alone, before she returned to Smith College at the end of September. She set ground rules for his future conduct. “Words don’t count—Action and Spirit do—a lot.”38

  The guilt-ridden Stieglitz took the four-hour train ride back to the lake for a stay of two days, but the trip was unsuccessful and his daughter returned to Smith exhausted and on the verge
of illness. She opted for the solution to emotional pain so often sought by her father and buried herself in work. Of a generous check from him, she noted in a punitive tone, “money means nothing and what means something isn’t to be had!” Although the college was in quarantine during an outbreak of influenza, Kitty brushed aside the danger. “I have learnt physical suffering is the most endurable.”39

  Paralyzed by the fury of his wife and daughter, Stieglitz told Strand, “Hell has been let loose for us.”40

  Equally disheartening was Stieglitz’s discovery that O’Keeffe played her own games. “I often see what a Merry Dance she must have led you—and others too at times—Fortunately I understand her thoroughly—At times it has been anything but easy.”41 He reassured Strand, “You’d be welcome here—I knew she’d get rid of what had gotten in between—Perhaps we’ll meet you after all—the three of us—with no tension of any kind—but as free humans—friends.”42

  Strand, however, wondered if he hadn’t been played the fool. “Something has certainly died in me—the reality knocked out of everything that was,” he told Stieglitz. “Grateful—it seems funny that you should feel that way about me—It’s been all your doing.”43

  Despite the drama with Stieglitz’s wife and daughter, O’Keeffe demonstrated no hesitation or remorse about her new relationships, and wrote a final letter of resignation to West Texas State Normal College. Ted Reid had married his high school sweetheart Ruby Fowler and enlisted in the Signal Corps of the Air Force.44

  In September, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz returned to the Manhattan studio, the rent for which was subsidized by Lee. One day, a package of O’Keeffe’s work arrived from Texas. Uneasy with the memories reflected in the work, she threw most of it in the trash. That evening, when she and Stieglitz were walking home from dinner, she saw her paintings and drawings blowing around the darkened street. Half a century later, she recalled seeing “a large watercolor of many hollyhocks sticking out of a big wastecan.”45