At York Beach, O’Keeffe exulted, “I own the ocean.”30 She reveled in her free time and the open sea. She returned to the wild colors of Pink Moon Over Water, a serene seascape using the uplifting hues of her earlier abstraction Pink Moon and Blue Lines. In both palette and spirit, the painting is quite a contrast to her only other landscape of that summer, Storm Cloud, Lake George, a roiling, threatening painting of approaching rainclouds in black, gray, and copper. O’Keeffe painted a tiny, somber study of the polyps and branches of seaweed, and a larger, yellow and orange abstraction of the shapes.31
She showed them to Stieglitz when she returned at the end of September, but he was unenthusiastic. After surmising what had gone on in her absence, she and Beck got into a heated argument over the issue of whether women should wear pants, as Beck did. O’Keeffe declared that she disapproved of women wearing pants and rarely wore them herself. Beck, in a fury returned to New York. Stieglitz attempted to mollify both women—a role to which he was accustomed.
Beck’s thank-you note for her stay was addressed only to Stieglitz. She referred to her stay as a time of “infinite pleasure and real suffering.”32 O’Keeffe confronted Stieglitz, who decided that his “days of adolescence” were over and the relationship was reestablished.
By the fall of 1923, despite an optimistic prognosis, Kitty had still not improved: she stared at a photograph calling for her father. She was sent to Dr. Frederick Tilney, one of the more respected neurologists in the city, who insisted that she be watched by his own day and night nurses so he could receive regular reports of her progress.
Coincidentally, Beck’s new job in the city was as secretary to neurologist Tilney. She was working in the office when Kitty and Milton came for a visit. Beck had never met Stieglitz’s daughter and didn’t realize until after the couple had left that it was Kitty. Breaching her employer’s confidentiality, she offered to share Kitty’s medical files with Stieglitz, who brusquely refused. He did not want to know.
Tilney was known for court testimonies that often resulted in the institutionalization of family members. He diagnosed Kitty with dementia praecox, what is now called schizophrenia. Per Tilney’s recommendation, Kitty was sent to Craig House, a luxurious private sanitarium in Beacon, New York, where patients lived in Victorian cottages with a private nurse. Costing a minimum of one hundred and fifty dollars a week (the cost was split between the Obermeyers and the Stieglitzes), Craig House offered gardens, swimming pools, stables, and a golf course—but no psychiatric care. Kitty was so upset by Stieglitz’s visits that he was asked not to come.
Stieglitz insisted that Kitty’s illness was due to her mother’s instability, noting “I know the mother can’t ‘help’ being what she is—yet it is a thousand pities she didn’t have a tiny bit of ‘sense.’”33 His family did not openly question what responsibility he should bear.
In early November, O’Keeffe’s sister Ida visited Lake George for two weeks. Relieved to have a fresh diversion, Stieglitz flirted, teased, and photographed Ida. Stieglitz thought her naive, but appreciated her ready laughter and her help with chores, which allowed O’Keeffe to get back to painting in an upstairs room at the farmhouse. After Ida returned to the city, Stieglitz sent her copious letters signed “Old Crow Feather,” the risqué implication made more emphatic when he added, “Ever jabbed into that reddest of round red apples.”34 He even photographed the feather in the apple.
After Ida’s visit, Stieglitz pursued his photographs of clouds with the Graflex. “It’s all hellishly difficult. . . . I sometimes wonder is it all worth while—all that effort—tearing oneself to pieces to satisfy some damned feeling inside oneself.”35 Rosenfeld thought so. When he visited to rewrite an article on Stieglitz and saw the cloud pictures, he ordered a set for one thousand dollars, to be paid over time.
By the end of November, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe had forgotten about their squabbles. “Staying here alone on the hill—just the two of us—was quite a wrench for him but I didn’t say a word. I pretended not to notice it. . . . It didn’t bother me a bit—and after the first night he seemed not to bother either,” O’Keeffe wrote. “He keeps the kitchen fire going with an air of great wisdom and pride.”36
Stieglitz wandered around with holes in the elbows of his shirt and the seat of his trousers, his collar unbuttoned, shoe laces dangling, and vest worn inside out, but O’Keeffe thought fondly, “He’s perfectly unconscious of how funny it is.”37
At the end of the month, they were snowed in by a blizzard. Stieglitz had been waiting for such an occasion and spent hours tramping around out of doors. “Maddeningly beautiful,” he observed. They walked through the huge drifts and warmed themselves at home by the fire. “Georgia was never happier,” he told Beck.38
In the fall, O’Keeffe concentrated on the still lifes that she had assayed the previous year, including those of the leaves. She painted two oils of emerald oak leaves, followed by three canvases dedicated to the many shades of scarlet and umber, titled Four Dark Red Oak Leaves.
She returned, as well, to the avocado, intrigued by its shape. She kept one until it turned light brown and became so hard she could shake it and hear the seed rattle. A year later, in 1923, she copied it as a somber ovoid sitting on a white cloth.
When Alligator Pear was printed in the Dial, she felt that it was a demonstration of her best instincts. “I have always considered that it was one of the times when I did what I really intended to do,” she said. “One isn’t always able to do that.”39 The next pastel, Alligator Pears, is an abstraction of the round, ebony form pierced by a bottle-green triangle and surrounded by white folds. It was sold to Strand, whose photographs had inspired such complex simplicity. She then painted six oils of avocados in sets of two, some green, some black, and nestled against white cloth or green drapery. Rosenfeld purchased a painting of green avocados on green cloth, Demuth bought the dark avocados on a white cloth.
O’Keeffe continued to select odd subjects for her still lifes and to represent them in new, unique ways. For example, when Claudia came to visit the previous year, Stieglitz photographed her reclining topless, holding an African mask over her breasts. O’Keeffe painted the same wooden mask—the face of a woman with a topknot carved by the Ivory Coast Baule—exhibited at 291 in 1914. As Stieglitz had done, she painted the mask lying on its back, but she placed a shimmering red and gold apple beside it.
But apples had lost their dominance in O’Keeffe’s still lifes. She had turned instead to pears, figs, even an eggplant, all of which share the mammary shape of the avocado. In her painting of a single black fig, the fruit is isolated against white cloth, while the eggplant lay upon a round white dish. In two paintings, a red pear stands erect while the black fig lies down in front as though resting. She employed the same composition with a pair of green figs. With three golden pears on a gray cloth, one pear is always recumbent. The same composition occurs with two red pears and a fig lying at their base. Of the forty-two pictures O’Keeffe completed in 1923, seventeen comprised these stark still lifes. As Marjorie P. Balge-Crozier points out, “She recognized, as have most modern artists, that the work of art is an object in itself, a thing apart from that which is represented.”40
Shortly after their return to the city in early 1924, Stieglitz arranged a show for Marin at the gallery of his friend N. E. Montross, but the dealer fell ill. The show went on, with Stieglitz at the helm, his first regular presence in a gallery since 1918. After he managed to sell one of the artist’s watercolors for the inflated price of fifteen hundred dollars, he announced that he’d done it “just to show that an idealist sometimes can beat the practical man at his own game.”41
Riding high from this success, in March he staged a show of O’Keeffe’s paintings in the large room of the Anderson Galleries, adding a show of his own photographs of clouds in the two smaller rooms.
Still smarting from the reviews of last year’s show, O’Keeffe selected what she thought would be the most conservative of her recent pa
intings: the small pictures of avocados, pears, and figs, the sunflowers, the watercolors of red cannas, pictures of enlarged leaves, her newest pictures of white birches with yellow leaves, the seaweed and seascapes from York Beach, and the stormy and starlit views of Lake George.
The show also included two stunning abstract paintings. Grey Line with Lavender and Yellow features a narrow dove slit in the center of a rose and pearl canvas. Grey Line with Black, Blue and Yellow opens the central slit to reveal lush folds of lavender, pink, blue, and yellow. Even the most determinedly neutral viewer could not help but recall the critics’ comments about the artist’s effulgent and quivering sensibilities. Perhaps Stieglitz insisted on adding them; perhaps O’Keeffe was testing her audience.
The same gray folds appear as background in her painting of Calla Lily—Tall Glass—No. 1, which was hung next to her abstract Pink Moon and Blue Lines. Placed side by side, the vertically divided canvases, each with a round shape in the center, effectively echoed one another.
Although she had painted a couple of red cannas the previous year, the white callas had taken over O’Keeffe’s imagination. Two stood in narrow glass vases, one was painted against a red background, and four were painted as close-ups. Undoubtedly O’Keeffe knew the overtly phallic calla lilies painted by both Hartley and Demuth during the 1918 summer they spent in Bermuda. She softened any comparison to their work by swaddling the golden scepters of her flowers in ample milky cones.
O’Keeffe was worried about the reception to her winter show. Less than a month before the opening, she wired Sherwood Anderson to ask him to write her catalogue essay, explaining, “My work this year is very much on the ground—there will be only two abstract things—or three at the most—all the rest is objective—as objective as I can make it. . . . I suppose the reason I got down to an effort to be objective is that I didn’t like the interpretations of my other things.”42 The “other things” were her abstractions. She sought Anderson’s support to buffer the erotic suggestions of her art. And she wanted her name spelled correctly. (The majority of the reviews of her 1923 show, including Strand’s, had spelled her name O’Keefe.)
Anderson diplomatically excused himself from the chore, pleading a case of the flu. His decision not to write the catalogue copy may have been subtle revenge. O’Keeffe confessed, “I made some unpleasant remarks about Weinsberg [sic], Ohio, which I never could get through completely. He said he always had a picture of me around because I reminded him of his mother.”43
In the absence of Anderson’s contribution, Stieglitz reprinted the 1923 review by McBride and one by Alan Burroughs, who had compared O’Keeffe’s work to Cézanne’s and Monet’s and, at the same time, dismissed it as “guesswork.” A relatively neutral review by the New York Herald-Tribune’s conservative critic Royal Cortissoz was reprinted in the catalogue. Cortissoz griped about abstraction as an overrated fad: “There is much pretty talk amongst modernists about the virtues of ‘abstract’ art. The painting itself, as on this occasion, leads nowhere,” he wrote.44
Although O’Keeffe was eager to find reviewers who did not harp on sensuality, femininity, or Freud, her attempts to manipulate critical reception were unsuccessful. In most cases, O’Keeffe’s paintings were reviewed alongside Stieglitz’s photographs. As usual, Stieglitz and his work were described in reverential terms, and several writers continued to credit him as the force behind O’Keeffe’s career. While his photographs, apart from the portraits of O’Keeffe, were analyzed in formal terms, her paintings were discussed largely as an expression of her gender. Remarking on her still life paintings, one reviewer wrote, “Psychoanalysts tell us that fruits and flowers when painted by women are an unconscious expression of their desire for children. Perhaps they are right.”45
The critics based their remarks as much on what had already been printed, and hyped by Stieglitz, as they did on their own interpretations of the work. One reviewer described the still lifes and landscapes as “intimate, some of them almost unbearably so; fruit and leaves and sky and hills nestle to one another.”46Others read her avocados as breasts (correctly, as it turned out) and her apples as symbols of abundance and fertility.
A former classmate from the Art Students League, Helen Appleton Read, had become art critic for the Brooklyn Eagle. Her article describing the changes in the girl she remembered as “Patsy” further underscored the critics’ suggestions.
She is no longer curly haired and boyish but an ascetic, almost saintly appearing, woman with dead-white skin, fine delicate features and black hair severely drawn back from her forehead. Saintly, yes, but not nun-like, for O’Keeffe gives one the feeling that beneath her calm poise there is something that is intensely, burningly alive, and that she is not only possessed of the most delicate sensibilities but is also capable of great and violent emotions.47
Read suggested that her paintings “are in some way an expression on canvas of an intense emotional life which has not been able to express itself through the channels of life.”48
Around the time of O’Keeffe’s 1924 show, Rosenfeld’s Port of New York was published with the revised version of his Dial article. In it, Rosenfeld praised O’Keeffe’s gifts as a colorist, adding, “What men have always wanted to know, and women to hide, this girl sets forth. Essence of womanhood impregnates color and mass, giving proof of the truthfulness of a life.”49
As he had the year before, Paul Strand published a perceptive analysis of O’Keeffe’s work. The July issue of Playboy, then a magazine of satire and the arts unrelated to Hugh Hefner’s centerfold monthly, featured a welcome antidote. Strand wrote that her art was ineluctably the product of being a woman but not of her sexuality. “The line, the form or the color could not have derived from a man’s consciousness or experience of life,” he observed. He challenged the paradigm established by Rosenfeld by examining her work in terms of color and line made by a woman who was determined to create her own visual language. He compared her movement between abstraction and representation to Picasso and daringly stated that even Matisse had not achieved her use of color. Indeed, Strand assigned O’Keeffe the stature of politically and socially evolved women like Carrie Nation and Emma Goldman. He rejected Hartley’s association of O’Keeffe with the nineteenth-century Impressionists Cassatt and Morisot, whose work, in his mind, was dominated by the style of their male peers. O’Keeffe’s style was her own. “Her work is not derivative in the sense of being either reminiscent or imitative of the work of anyone,” he wrote. “Here in America, no other woman has so created a deeply personal language.”50
Strand, who had been the recipient of her letters of daunting intimacy, wrote in glowing terms of O’Keeffe’s use of the intuitive and the unconscious, qualities that were valued, among most of Stieglitz’s circle, over intellect. But Strand did not link her intuition solely to her sex. Upon reading his review, Beck remarked, “It’s much nicer than the lady it’s written about.”51 O’Keeffe, being oversensitive about any connection between her gender and her art, took exception to Strand’s review, and an argument ensued. The baffled Strand felt that he was being punished for his efforts. Beck seized upon this opportunity to criticize O’Keeffe. She wrote to her husband that O’Keeffe “somehow doesn’t exist anymore for me as far as all her personal problems & attributes are concerned & it will require an effort when looking at her paintings to keep personal antagonism away. I don’t like the things she has done this summer at all. The color is precious & fussy.”52
As the reviews of her show appeared in sundry newspapers and magazines, O’Keeffe wrote a telling letter to her sister Catherine Klenert in Portage, Wisconsin. Catherine had just given birth to a baby girl, also named Catherine, and was comfortably married to a local banker, Ray Klenert. “Your way of living is nice to have,” O’Keeffe wrote. “I like to feel that at least one member of the family lived what might be called a normal life.” Referring to Ida, Anita, and Claudia, who all lived in New York at that time, “No one in New York can even approach being
a normal human being so that wipes out four of us at one swoop.”53
Catherine, however, might have been chafing at her so-called normal life. Impressed by her sister’s growing success, she solicited advice about pursuing commercial art. As both of their maternal grandmothers had been amateur artists, it is not surprising that three of the five sisters would have a talent for painting. But O’Keeffe discouraged her younger sister, warning her that commercial art “is a prostitution of some really creative phase of Art.”
“I feel you can’t know much of anything about commercial Art,” she added. “You are not mixed in with the hash of the world like I am—You can be glad that you will probably even die without its meaning much of anything to you. You see I tried commercial Art—fashions—I was a failure. . . . And I tried doing other foolish forms of commercial Art—I could make a living at it . . . but it wasn’t worth the price.”54
Stieglitz supported this opinion. When John Marin’s father suggested his son do commercial work to pay the bills, Stieglitz told him, “That, sir, is like suggesting that your daughter be a virgin in the mornings and a prostitute in the afternoons.”55
Nonetheless, O’Keeffe had dabbled in commercial art by contributing illustrations to Vanity Fair, and she continued to take on lucrative commercial commissions in the years to come. It seems that she simply wanted to remain the only successful artist in the O’Keeffe family.
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