“This job business is certainly a queer one—Gosh!” Stieglitz responded, disingenuously. The house was not available, but she would certainly be welcome to use their beach and canoe.
In September, “Beck,” as she was nicknamed, came to Lake George and stayed at The Pines, a nearby hotel. It was her first separation from Strand since their marriage, and she wrote to him daily of her undying love.
Soon after her arrival, Beck was invited to go skinny-dipping with O’Keeffe. Stieglitz photographed the two women in the icy water. Afterward, Beck was invited to The Hill daily, for tea, meals and, especially, more swimming.
Inevitably, Stieglitz abandoned his uncooperative clouds to photograph Beck alone while O’Keeffe was painting in The Shanty. Beck divulged these photo sessions to her husband: “A lovely relationship has developed between us and we have lots of fun gamboling about.”35
News of unclothed young women on the Stieglitz’s beach had made the rounds of Lake George gossip. At the end of September, Strand was filming horse races at the track in nearby Saratoga and took the train up to Lake George to spend the weekend with his wife. When the Strands went skinny dipping, they found themselves confronted by an officer with a citation. Stieglitz accepted the blame and paid the fine of ten dollars for each of them.
Although they seemed quite innocent at first, Stieglitz’s photographs reveal his frank desire. They are more erotic than his photographs of O’Keeffe, perhaps due to the willingness of the model. In one instance, she is posed on tiptoe and bent forward to accentuate the taut muscles of her hips and thighs. In one photograph in which she is half-submerged in the cold lake water, she strokes one goose-fleshed breast to make the nipple erect. Stieglitz explained that he was trying to prove to Strand that Beck was a “more pliant and vital model” than O’Keeffe.
Not wanting to resume her role as nude model, O’Keeffe looked the other way during these photo sessions. When Stieglitz showed her his prints of the nude Beck, she replied, “Aren’t they beautiful?”36 Her comment reveals that she genuinely perceived the photographs as works of art, somehow unconnected to their provocative model and aroused lover. She viewed the photographs of her nude self similarly, as aesthetic accomplishments largely unrelated to their sexual content. Nonetheless, she certainly had not forgotten Stieglitz’s dictum, “When I make a photograph, I make love.”
After the October departure of the larger Stieglitz family, the Strands came to stay at The Hill. Strand and Stieglitz took turns photographing Beck lying in bed on the sleeping porch. Both Strands were so in awe of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe that they began emulating their style and their art. Strand had been impressed by Stieglitz’s serial portrait of O’Keeffe and began a similar enterprise. He made portraits of Beck with her straight hair pulled back and wearing no make-up: she looked startlingly like O’Keeffe. But if Strand photographed Beck in the nude the prints did not survive. He left that to his friend Stieglitz.
Yet, when Stieglitz discovered Strand photographing the Lake George hills and the old horse buggy, he snapped that Strand was trespassing on what he considered to be a “part of his life.” Strand obediently desisted without retorting that Stieglitz had been trespassing on a large part of his wife.
Despite Strand’s utter devotion, Stieglitz was jealous of his youth, energy, and talent. One evening during their stay, Stieglitz asked O’Keeffe to read aloud the article on photography that she had been coerced into writing for Manuscripts. Although she praised Strand’s work, O’Keeffe was even more enthusiastic about the work of the photographer and painter Charles Sheeler, with whom Strand had had a falling out after their collaboration on the twelve-minute film Manhatta.37
Considered to be the first American avant garde film, it looks like a sequence of slowly moving photographs of the skyscrapers and waterfront of lower Manhattan, intertitled with excerpts from Walt Whitman’s 1888 poem Mannahatta. Strand felt that his contribution to the project was not appreciated. Even though Strand continued to enjoy a secondary career as a cinematographer, while Sheeler never again picked up a movie camera, he continued to nurse his wounded feelings. Having slaved all summer on behalf of Manuscripts, Strand was hurt by O’Keeffe’s endorsement of his enemy. He left in a huff the next morning.
Beck, however, stayed at the farmhouse for twelve more days, an act that furthered Strand’s sense of betrayal despite Beck’s reassuring claim that Strand’s photographs of her in bed were better than Stieglitz’s.
When she returned to the city, Beck was depressed by her menial job: compared to her exotic artist friends, she felt unfulfilled and insecure. Stieglitz lavished praise on her, telling her that she was a superior model to O’Keeffe, and sending his photograph of Beck lying unclothed in bed. Beck attempted to defuse the situation by telling Stieglitz that she and her husband had a good laugh over it.
Despite his infatuation with her as a model, Stieglitz was less supportive of Beck’s intellectual abilities. After encouraging her to submit her own views on photography to Manuscripts, he rejected her manuscript, claiming that it posed a conflict of interest since her husband was the editor. She confronted him in a bitter and hurt letter but to no avail. Manuscripts was published without her article.
Stieglitz soothed Beck’s feelings by printing more photographs of her in the nude telling her, “I haven’t felt so pleased in a long while.”38 “Paul will be glad too when he sees the results. They are entirely different from his things of you. Perhaps they will clarify some things.”39
Toward the beginning of November, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz rowed onto the glacial lake. He made five large-format photographs of her with exposures of 110 seconds. She did not move at all. He attributed her improved performance to the good example set by his “ideal model.”
Before returning to the city, Stieglitz spent hours with his bare hands in icy water and acid to finish palladium prints of his cloud pictures. His first title, Music: A Sequence of Ten Photographs, was changed to Clouds in Ten Movements. The series was a direct response to O’Keeffe’s abstract paintings—featuring wavy and puffy forms in pastel colors—which had been inspired by music.
An analogue for his shifting feelings, Stieglitz felt that these photographs were the embodiment of harmony between music and abstraction. Visually they were to approximate the moody compositions of Swiss-born modern composer Ernest Bloch. He hoped that Bloch, who became a United States citizen in 1924 and was celebrated for his “epic rhapsody” titled America, would see the photographs and exclaim “Music! Man, why that is music!” In a most likely apocryphal account, when Stieglitz met the composer and asked him to view his photographs of clouds, he claimed that Bloch responded with those exact words.
Because the view camera was difficult to aim upward, being heavy and mounted on a tripod, most of those photographs included the hills or lake at the low horizon. During the summer of 1923, Stieglitz would switch to his 4 × 5-inch Graflex, which he pointed directly at the sky, eliminating any reference to the earth. From 1923 to 1925, Stieglitz maintained the photographs’ reference to music by calling them Songs of the Sky.
Hedwig had died of her second stroke on November 21. Stieglitz’s photographs of clouds, taken after her death, might be seen as metaphors of transcendence.
Stieglitz had been sending his mother letters every two weeks and he had gone to the city in mid-October for her seventy-eighth birthday party. Her death rocked him to his core. Confronted with mortality, he became freshly aware of being twenty-four years older than O’Keeffe.
While she digested the opinions about Stieglitz’s portraits of her, O’Keeffe was slow to regain her creative momentum. She lost weight after the nerve-racking criticism and she was in no hurry to get back in the studio. Instead, she spent time cooking or helping Stieglitz spot and mount prints. “I insist she paint,” he told Beck. “Says I’m a worse slave driver than ever. Well, I don’t mind if I am. The results quite worth while, a few wonders.”40
But O’Keeffe felt that “the men didn�
�t think much of what I was doing.” When they were discussing Cézanne and the plastic quality of his form and color, she felt alienated. “I was an outsider. My color and form were not acceptable. It had nothing to do with Cézanne or anyone else. I didn’t understand what they were talking about.”41 In the fall of 1922, she decided to answer the men with a painting.
Walking through the pasture past the juniper bushes, O’Keeffe noticed how shabby and brown The Shanty looked in the morning light. She thought, “I can paint one of those dismal-colored paintings like the men. I think for fun I will try—all low-toned and dreary with the tree beside the door.”42
Her suspicions proved correct. The men did approve. When My Shanty was shown the following year, collector Duncan Phillips bought it. “Among the artists at that time it was disgraceful to think of anything pretty,” O’Keeffe noted. “People felt that painting had to have a sort of dirty look. I felt I could make a dirty painting too, so I did.”43
After completing My Shanty, O’Keeffe painted many dismal-colored canvases including the reddish brown Ends of Barns as well as an oil of the barns’ peaked rooflines. Many low-toned paintings of landscapes and leaves would follow. Ultimately, O’Keeffe believed that she had played a trick on “the men” and they had fallen for it.
Some of O’Keeffe’s landscapes from earlier that year, the summer of 1922, were often painted in muted tones. The half-dozen oils of Lake George are bisected where the opposite coast and a low ridge of mountains meet at the horizon line.44 In two paintings, tree tops rim the lower edge, while in two others, gray clouds ripple the silver skies. A whimsical piece, Starlight Night, Lake George, is dotted with round pinpoints of light, and the folds of dark water reflect the somber-toned mountain. Two yellow buoy lights wink from the distance. In Lake George, the mountain is reflected in the mirror of water so that both sides of the bisected composition are nearly identical. This compositional trope, seen in the seaweed pictures of York Beach and the coppery abstraction of a stream, is one that O’Keeffe would explore thoroughly over the next few years.
A similar effect is employed in Pond in the Woods, Lake George. From the center of the mountain and lake format, a large black hole erupts with rings of muddy brown and mossy green. This pastel generated two others that concentrate on the spiraling circle of the pond in swirling verdant tones.
For the first time since moving to New York, O’Keeffe was experimenting in pastel. Abstract pastel swirls of salmon, rose, white, and ivy on linen were titled Pink and Green. The curving lines reappear in three loose studies of foamy white waves on jade water, as well as a navy-blue sea study based on her memories of York Beach. Each of two pastels, A Storm and Lightning at Sea, centers on a bolt of lightning; the works recall similar studies executed in Texas. Sun Water Maine, a pastel of broad ocean waves and a pale green sun ringed with circles of yellow and white, recalls her Evening Star watercolors. She finished at least eleven pastels that summer, hinting, perhaps, at a yearning for experimentation; possibly these works were the expression of reminiscences of her freer years in Canyon and South Carolina.
O’Keeffe had finished two modest watercolors of canna leaves the previous year but she returned to oil to complete her first large paintings of leaves—a subject rarely represented in art. Art historian Marjorie P. Balge-Crozier has observed, “Leaves by themselves do not turn up in the history of still-life painting until O’Keeffe elevates them to that privileged position.”45 In four different paintings, Purple Leaves, Autumn, Dark Leaves, and Leaves Under Water, she groups oak leaves in shades of lavender, crimson, celadon, and ocher, respectively. Green Leaves offers a soothing arrangement of fan-shaped leaves with branches and berries. Carefully displayed, they owe little to direct observation from nature. Instead, these paintings of isolated leaves, unconnected to their branches, derive from O’Keeffe’s training with Dow. As she recalled, one of his exercises “was to take a maple leaf and fit it into a seven-inch square in various ways. Of course, when I got to North Texas there was nothing like a leaf to use.”46
O’Keeffe must have been looking for unpredictable still life subjects that summer, for she also took on the unlikely skunk cabbage: a pulpy plant with curling leaves that emits a repellent odor when it is walked on. But in O’Keeffe’s careful hand, this humble plant is presented in a spectacular and sculptural arrangement of bent and erect shapes, of deep purple and emerald green backed by swirls of orange and yellow. The sketches for these paintings were probably completed when she visited Alma Morganthau Wertheim in Cos Cob that year; the collector purchased the last of the three paintings, Skunk Cabbage.
O’Keeffe also returned to the crimson cannas that had captured her attention two years earlier, adding two more oils to the series, and to the vibrant mandarin, chrome, and brown abstract studies of tree-tops from the previous year in Maple and Cedar, Lake George and Red Maple.
Taken together, in their eccentricity and daring, the 1922 paintings and pastels prove that, after years of accepting the judgments of Stieglitz and his circle of friends, O’Keeffe was regaining her sense of being her own best critic. She returned to a practice from her year in South Carolina, setting out her work and making her decisions before showing it to anyone else, including Stieglitz. “I make up my own mind about it—how good or bad or indifferent it is,” she observed. “After that the critics can write what they please. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.”47
In the October issue of Vanity Fair, Rosenfeld wrote a lengthy article, the first several pages of which praised extravagantly O’Keeffe’s work in terms of technique and color. O’Keeffe had returned to the basics of what she had learned from Dow. There was nothing in her series of barns, leaves, flowers, land, or seascapes remotely connected to the distaff.
Nonetheless, Rosenfeld could not resist opining that the
essence of very womanhood permeates her pictures. . . . It is female, this art, only as is the person of a woman when dense, quivering, endless life is felt through her body; when long tresses exhale the aromatic warmth of unknown primeval submarine forests. . . . She is one of those persons of the hour who, like Lawrence, for instance, show[s] an insight into the facts of life of an order well-nigh intenser than we have known. . . . [One of] the forerunners of a more biologically evolved humanity.48
Attempting to counteract Rosenfeld’s claim that she was the female version of the notorious novelist, O’Keeffe took pains to meet with a journalist from the New York Sun and present herself as an educated professional rather than a force of nature. In her straightforward manner, O’Keeffe explained to the journalist that her painting was based on the fundamentals of composition. She patiently explained that her art was the product of her training with Dow, who insisted that “Art . . . consisted of putting the right thing in the right place,” she said. “It gave me new inspiration.”49
The Sun article exposed O’Keeffe’s paintings to a larger readership than the Dial. The journalist had presented a straightforward account of the artist through first-hand impressions. Nevertheless, she also borrowed from Rosenfeld’s article, referring to O’Keeffe’s pictures as “permeated by the very essence of womanhood.”
Exasperated by this muddled attempt to clarify her artistic intentions, O’Keeffe decided to write about herself for the December issue of Manuscripts. Using the example of Stieglitz’s introduction to his 1921 show, she outlined her education, her professors, and her teaching experience in a painstaking effort to establish credentials that would stand independent of her status as a woman. She declared, “I have not been in Europe. I prefer to live in a room as bare as possible. I have been much photographed. I paint because color is a significant language to me.”50
IV
O’Keeffe’s plainspoken manifesto for Manuscripts was a mere rehearsal for the full-dress performance of her views during her exhibition two months later at the Anderson Galleries. In the small catalogue for her first solo show in six yea
rs, she described the frustrations she felt as a woman and as an artist:
I grew up pretty much as everybody else grows up and one day seven years ago found myself saying to myself—I can’t live where I want to—I can’t go where I want to—I can’t do what I want to—I can’t even say what I want to—. School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself—that was nobody’s business but my own. So these paintings and drawings happened and many others that are not here.—I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way—things that I had not words for. Some of the wise men say it is not painting, some of them say it is. Art or not art—they disagree.1
O’Keeffe had come to understand that her art was an expression of physical, emotional, and mental states that were fundamentally different from those of men. The words intuitive and emotional, while accurate, were inevitably linked to her gender and took on what were considered undesirable connotations by society at large. In this statement, O’Keeffe presented herself as a pragmatic and rational figure in an attempt to counteract Stieglitz’s emphasis on the emotional and sensual nature of her work.
But Stieglitz was well aware that sex sells. Despite O’Keeffe’s growing reservations about Hartley’s opinions, he reprinted his remarks about her “shameless documents” in effect contradicting her own writing. His promotion strategies included hijacking her identity for the show’s title, Alfred Stieglitz Presents One Hundred Pictures: Oils, Watercolors, Pastels, Drawings by Georgia O’Keeffe, American.
O’Keeffe’s large and small pictures hung in neat modern frames above the wainscoting of each gallery. The show brought together her organic charcoals from Columbia, watercolor landscapes and nudes from Canyon, abstract oil paintings completed after her move to Manhattan, and still lifes of leaves, fruit, and flowers produced during summers at Lake George. Instead of a progression or separate bodies of work, all of the paintings and drawings appeared to be unified by a singularity of vision.
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