Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Working indoors, O’Keeffe painted a large, dim arrangement of sweeping folds of gray with highlights of red and gold. Perhaps her eyestrain led her to call it Blind I, though the title was later changed to Abstraction. She picked up on the theme of the previous year and, after making a bold charcoal preparatory drawing, completed three paintings of alligator pears, or avocados, in a basket on a white doily and pink tablecloth. The arched brown handle of the basket cradles the bright green fruit, and though the first painting is traditional, the subsequent two are radically simplified into sculptural shapes and charged colors.

  When Lee arrived with his entourage of Davidson grandchildren, nursemaids, chauffeur, and cook, Stieglitz told him of O’Keeffe’s eyestrain. Lee insisted that she take castor oil, but that provided little improvement. In August, she visited an opthamologist in Manhattan.

  She returned to Oaklawn, but it was only after most of the Stieglitz family had gone back to New York that fall that O’Keeffe’s eyes mysteriously improved.

  In Lake George with White Birch, ghostly branches with bright yellow leaves are juxtaposed with plumed olive tree limbs and set before a magenta hillside. In her Cedar and Red Maple, Lake George the sienna tree is placed before ranges of mahogany and brown hills. Abstraction of Stream is a somber pastel of a dark, meandering line between swollen muddy banks. She also painted brilliant canvases like Trees in Autumn, ablaze with rhythmic patterns of scarlet oak, yellow aspens, and green pines against violet hills.

  Blue and Green Music is the dark and dramatic companion to her earlier music paintings, with sharp angles of black and hunter green piercing soft wavy lines of celadon and ice-blue. Hung with Music—Pink and Blue No. 1 and No. 2, they can be interpreted as masculine and feminine counterparts of a musical experience. In 1923, Herbert Seligmann wrote that her paintings, “are rendering the effects of musical composition, which is more often visualized as a sort of architecture; Miss O’Keeffe is one of the few to have rendered its equivalent in painting with complete conviction of reality.”14

  O’Keeffe wrote to Dove about the preparation of her canvas with “white lead til it was really smooth—it was like I imagine learning to roller skate would be.”15 These startlingly white backgrounds, which offer the effect of captured light and which she took pains to perfect, contributed to her paintings’ luminescent glow.

  She used this technique on the first of several paintings of a small, white house with a weathervane on top and a flagpole in front. In Little House and The Red Barns, the buildings are portrayed as box structures with peaked roofs. Both pictures are almost naive in their execution, with clouds and trees rendered as solid, singular shapes. While O’Keeffe was working on this series, Stieglitz began photographing the same barns as well as the rambling clapboard farmhouse.

  O’Keeffe and Stieglitz continued to share the subject of apples as well, a pure American icon laden with Old Testament sexual drama. O’Keeffe completed Apple Family 3, which displays five apples on a white cloth. Stieglitz responded with a picturing of her standing next to a branch of the apple tree.

  O’Keeffe briefly moved on from the apples to complete an untitled painting of green and brown pears huddled together on a white plate rendered on the back of one of Edward Stieglitz’s discarded canvases.

  But the apple remained her preferred subject. She placed a single fruit at the top of a rimmed dish in Red Apple on Blue Plate. Apple on Tray features a golden orb at the edge of a black plate on a livid ground, while Red Apple Black Plate contains a cropped dish and enlarged fruit. The following year, O’Keeffe painted a solitary green apple lodged at the top of a black plate on a white field. Another version cropped most of the plate to leave just a black curve against white ground with an accent of green fruit. She also completed a pastel of a pink apple on a white napkin and an oil of a dark purple apple on a napkin with a few grapes. O’Keeffe explained, “Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.”16

  Like the Apple Family pictures, these isolated apples seem to operate as symbolic self-portraits. In their graphic simplicity, they recall Strand’s photographs, specifically his 1916 photograph Jug and Fruit, or Orange and Jug on Porch. Strand’s reduction of the familiar to elemental shapes, the asymmetrical composition, and, most important, the enlargement and the cropping, these were lessons learned from his photographs. Strand’s visit the previous summer may have jogged O’Keeffe’s memory and contributed to her ability to subtract extraneous detail and hone an abstraction to the point where it attained a quality of objecthood quite apart from what it represented.

  After the family departed, O’Keeffe reluctantly allowed Stieglitz to photograph her again. She wasn’t entirely pleased with his latest efforts. She told Elizabeth that one portrait made her look “a bit like a sore-eyed good old New Foundland [sic] dog.” Her nude posturings grew less languorous and suggestive after 1921. Many of the photographs were taken on the fly.

  Using a hand-held Graflex designed for high-speed work, Stieglitz photographed O’Keeffe drying her naked body after a swim in the lake. Her hands clutching a white towel over one breast, her eyes narrowed against the sun, her hair swaddled in a bathing cap; it is as though she were caught off guard by the click of the shutter. In another she is midstride, carrying a painting and smiling in a casual and relaxed manner. She is dressed for work in a white smock, with a raggedy sweater thrown over her shoulder. Stieglitz said such snapshots were of “no account.” Yet, he admitted, “They take time in spite of their no-accountness.”17

  In September, Rosenfeld wrote from Westport with the news that Dove, who tended to drink heavily, was “on the waterwagon.” Rosenfeld had visited his neighbor artist Florence Cane and seen one of O’Keeffe’s paintings, prompting him to write, “It is like a new form of language and when Dove said he was as interested in what you were doing as he was in what Picasso was about, I seemed for a minute to understand him.”18

  Rosenfeld’s words were welcome, but Hartley’s essay still disturbed O’Keeffe. Rosenfeld wrote that he appreciated her paintings of “hard, tart clean” apples, reassuring her, “I think I am beginning to understand what you are and what you stand for and what you have suffered and what you do suffer.”19

  Having spent months with Stieglitz and O’Keeffe at Lake George and in New York, Rosenfeld more than any other critic knew O’Keeffe’s progress as an artist. Yet, that December, when the Dial published his article “American Painting,” he called O’Keeffe’s painting “gloriously female.”

  Her great painful and ecstatic climaxes make us at last to know something the man has always wanted to know. For here, in this painting, there is registered the manner of perception anchored in the constitution of the woman. The organs that differentiate the sex speak. Women, one would judge, always feel, when they feel strongly, through the womb. For this is the new innocence that is exhibited. . . . The entire body is seen noble and divine with love. There is no flesh that cannot become the seat of a god. There is no appetite that cannot burst forth in flowers and electric colours.”20

  Although The Black Spot was reproduced and her work was discussed in the context of Marin, Dove, and Hartley, Stieglitz’s rhetoric had warmed Rosenfeld’s writing on the themes of sexual appetite and transcendent nature. Perhaps Stieglitz had shared the details of his revived love life with his friend. In any case, Stieglitz was acutely aware that he was getting credit for O’Keeffe’s climaxes.

  Stieglitz’s own prints often underscored the sexual implications of his and O’Keeffe’s dynamic, as when he photographed her plaster figurine of 1915, with its rather phallic appearance, in front of the seemingly vulval opening of her 1918 painting Music—Pink and Blue No. 1. In another photograph, of her hands sewing, her middle digit, capped with silver thimble, is pointed toward the open circular shape made by the thumb and finger of the opposite hand, while inserting a needle into black cloth. The double entendre of
these images, even without the nudity, was like an off-color joke enjoyed by Stieglitz’s small circle of friends.

  In June, Stieglitz had read Rosenfeld’s manuscript and recognized the bomb within its pearly shell. He wrote to Seligmann, “I’d greatly regret if the essay did not appear. . . . First of all it would start a controversy in the art world which would be beneficial from every point of view.”21

  Since his first Photo-Secession exhibition in 1902, Stieglitz had honed his impresario’s gift for staging a sensational event and manipulating the media. Without a gallery of his own for five years, he was unusually dependent on orchestrating the response to those few artists he represented.

  Meanwhile, O’Keeffe confessed her unease about the critics’ suggestive prose to Hutchins Hapgood. Hapgood and his wife, Neith Boyce, both writers, conducted one of Greenwich Village’s most notoriously open marriages. Hapgood, who wrote a column for the New York Globe, tried to reassure her that Rosenfeld and Hartley were only writing about themselves. For decades afterward, his advice would be the hapless O’Keeffe’s primary recourse in deflecting questions and comments about the sexuality in her work. “When people read erotic symbols into my paintings,” she would intone, “they’re really talking about their own affairs.”22

  Unnerved by the discrepancy between her view of herself and the sensational accounts, O’Keeffe tentatively complained to a few trusted friends. When Kennerley gave her a scrapbook of clippings, she mused, “They make me seem like some strange unearthly sort of creature floating in the air breathing in clouds for nourishment. When the truth is that I like beefsteak and like it rare at that.”23

  O’Keeffe was, however, endlessly pragmatic. Six months after Rosenfeld’s essay, she wrote to a friend in a very different tone, more like a schoolgirl reciting the lessons of Professor Stieglitz:

  I don’t like publicity. It embarises me. . . . Most people buy more through their ears than their eyes—one must be written about and talked about or the people who buy through their ears think your work is no good—and won’t buy and one must sell to live—so one must be written about and talked about whether one likes it or not—it always seems they say such stupid things.24

  “A queer feeling of being invaded,” as confessed to Kennerley, had been replaced by recognition of the value of such tactics. Referring to the painting published in the Dial, she admitted, “I was so pleased to have ‘the boys’ publish my work. It was then that I thought maybe I could make my living as a painter.”25

  As of February 1922, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were no longer the new couple in their circle. After a year of courtship, Paul Strand married Rebecca Salsbury, who also had attended the Ethical Culture School some fifteen years earlier. Strand’s friends could not help being taken aback by the remarkable physical resemblance between his new wife and the object of his earlier infatuation, Georgia O’Keeffe.

  Rebecca was the product of an unconventional upbringing, having traveled as a child with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a “mixture of circus, menagerie, and melodrama” that was created and managed by her father, Nate Salsbury. At thirty-one, she was comely and sassy and, at that time, longed to get married. Her twin sister, Rachel, had married well, and Rebecca longed to leave the home of her domineering mother, Rachel Salsbury, who had been widowed since 1902.

  Devoted to her husband to the point of effacing her own needs, Rebecca moved into Strand’s family home on West Seventieth Street. The couple lived there for years, scraping by on Rebecca’s job as secretary to a string of successful doctors while Strand developed his career as a photographer and cinematographer. Her faith in Strand’s destiny as an artist may be measured by the fact that she gave him the money to buy a costly Akeley movie camera.26

  Stieglitz called Rebecca a “live wire,” and within six months of the Strands’ wedding their frequent fights were notorious. Rebecca confessed, “I enjoy a good fight and so long as we are well, we’ll go to it with a loving spirit and plenty of guts.”27 Stieglitz reassured her that they were well suited, “even if you have to bat each other into shape—so as to bring about a more complete fit.”28

  Stieglitz’s instincts as promoter had been aroused by the Hartley auction, and he persuaded Kennerley to donate galleries for another joint venture. On February 23, the Anderson Galleries presented an Artists’ Derby offering nearly two hundred paintings by more than forty American artists. Despite Stieglitz’s claims that it would be “a great sporting event in the art world,” sales were disappointing. O’Keeffe wound up as the principal beneficiary. Her small canvas of a gray barn netted the highest price paid: four hundred dollars.

  Capitalizing on his resurrected career and the fact that so many of his young supporters were writers, Stieglitz decided to launch a new magazine of fiction, satire, and essays called Manuscripts. O’Keeffe designed the cover, an Art Nouveau lettering of the acronym MSS; Rosenfeld and Seligmann were elected as editors. Strand was asked to edit the December issue, dedicated to the question “Can a Photograph Have the Significance of Art?”

  In the late spring, inspired by a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hans Memling’s idealized portrait of patron Tommaso Portinari, Stieglitz decided to shoot new portraits of Demuth, Marin, Dove, Frank, and Rosenfeld. He focused closely and intently on the face. When Rosenfeld saw his, he felt “as though everybody who saw the pictures would know all about me.”29 Demuth, who was struggling to survive diabetes, looked so ill in the photograph that he wondered if there was any point in trying to get better.

  Meanwhile, the seeds of curiosity planted by Stieglitz had germinated, and more and more articles were being written about O’Keeffe. In July 1922, Vanity Fair published Stieglitz’s portrait of her wearing a fetching black boater, along with photographs of five other artists—Margarite Zorach, Ilonka Karasz, Lydia Gibson, Eyre de Lanaux, and Florence Cane—none of whom ever gained anything like the recognition accorded O’Keeffe. Titled “The Female of the Species Achieves a New Deadliness,” the brief article praised O’Keeffe’s “new freedom of expression inspired by such men as Stieglitz” and described her art as a “revelation of the very essence of woman as Life Giver.”30

  Stieglitz and O’Keeffe moved to Lake George in June, but there was no spirit of vacation. When he wasn’t printing, Stieglitz was photographing or engrossed in the Manuscripts project. When he was too tired to print, he read from J. K. Huysmans’s À Rebours, a nineteenth-century Symbolist novel of the protagonist’s retirement to the country and his extreme attempt to gratify all his most complex aesthetic sensations. All of Stieglitz’s frantic activity was meant to distract him from his mother’s failing health and fears about his own waning income. With two German nurses with her around the clock, Hedwig’s medical expenses were draining.

  Stieglitz was similarly upset over his relationship with his daughter, who had not invited him to her June wedding to Milton Sprague Stearns. Stearns, a Harvard graduate and a successful importer of hides, had been in love with Kitty since their first summer together at camp. Even though the groom’s parents did not attend the Unitarian ceremony, Stieglitz felt that his exclusion from the ceremony was to be expected. “A sinner like myself has no rights to anything,” he said.”31

  O’Keeffe, meanwhile, remained reluctant to pose in the nude. Stieglitz found some consolation in his fifteen-year-old niece, Georgia Engelhard, whom he jokingly referred to as Georgia Minor. The aging photographer posed his naked, adolescent niece clutching an armful of apples to her breasts to resemble a nymph bearing symbols of fertility.

  After protests from his sister Agnes and her husband George Engelhard, Stieglitz abandoned the nude studies and angled his bulky camera skyward. He stood near the farmhouse and watched as the nimbus and cumulus approached, rolled over the hills, and quickly sailed off across the lake. Although less likely to get him into hot water with the family, those fleeting subjects often were as uncooperative as his temperamental models. He complained, “Diff
icult to get the combination of light rightness—cloud rightness—(shape and place)—and stillness of leaves.”32

  The Strands could not avail themselves of the invitation to Lake George, since they had to be available for work. Using the new motion picture camera, Paul was documenting thoroughbred horse races and polo and football matches. Stieglitz encouraged Strand, simultaneously gaining perverse consolation in his opinion that a true artist never deigned to perform commercial work to make ends meet.

  One weekend at the beginning of August, the Strands escaped the hot city for a visit to Rosenfeld’s Westport home. They reported happily that the guest room was furnished with O’Keeffe’s paintings of apples, a blue mountain, a canna lily, and The Black Spot, and while there were rooms devoted to Hartley and Marin, Stieglitz’s photographs held pride of place in the living room.

  Initially Rebecca challenged her husband, “Aren’t you absorbing too much of Stieglitz? Don’t envy him. You have enough personality of your own not to envy anybody.”33 Soon, though, she was an acolyte and praised Stieglitz for instilling in her husband the “spirit of 291.” She later credited him, not Strand, for introducing her to a world of artists and ideas, saying “after that first talk [with Stieglitz] I . . . finally left the gold and brocade parlour [of my home], never again to be quite the same person.”34

  Rebecca became one of Stieglitz’s most intimate correspondents, writing to him in flippant, even coarse, language and offering to take down the details of his life story for posterity. In her spare time at work, she copied all the articles for Manuscripts and added her own editorial suggestions. She complained that her husband had to work but that vacation time was scheduled in September. Could she come to Lake George? Alone?