Full Bloom
Page 28
In mid-November, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe rented a flat of their own on the top floor of a brownstone at 38 East Fifty-eighth Street that O’Keeffe had found. Lee promised his brother one thousand dollars a year—the rest would be paid from the sales of O’Keeffe’s paintings. Despite O’Keeffe’s equivocation over such a committment, their wedding plans had been announced. The deteriorating mental condition of Stieglitz’s daughter influenced their decision.
Kitty had left Craig House in June to spend the summer with her husband and one-year-old son at Sagamore Beach in Massachusetts. By fall, she had relapsed and was moved to the Westchester Division of New York Hospital in White Plains.
Doctors suggested that if O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were to formalize their relationship, it might reduce Kitty’s delusions that her father and mother would be reunited. O’Keeffe confided in her sister Catherine that they married for Kitty’s sake.
Because Stieglitz’s status as a divorcée prevented him from marrying in New York State, the couple traveled to New Jersey on December 8. Marin picked them up from the Weehawken Ferry but it was raining and his car skidded into an iron lamp post. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz then walked in the rain to the hardware store, whose owner, the local justice of the peace, sold them a marriage license.
The wedding took place three days later on December 11, 1924, in the New Jersey office of the Cliffside Park justice of the peace. The ceremony was notable for its lack of ritual. No rings were exchanged, and after reciting the initial vows, O’Keeffe refused to say the words, “love, honor and obey.” There was no reception. Years later, when asked about her marriage, O’Keeffe admitted, “I just know I didn’t want to.” Explaining why she never adopted her husband’s last name, she said, “Why should I take on someone else’s famous name? So when people would say ‘Mrs. Stieglitz,’ I would say ‘Miss O’Keeffe.’”15
Ultimately, the marriage had no effect on Kitty’s recovery: she remained institutionalized as a schizophrenic until her death in 1971. Although Emmy visited weekly, Stieglitz never saw his daughter again. Her husband raised their son, who was sent to Exeter and Harvard and had no direct contact with his famous grandfather.
VI
Stieglitz and O’Keeffe had been married only a few months when, on March 9, 1925, they were caught up in the excitement over the latest gallery opening, Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs & Things, Recent & Never Before Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz. Considered the twentieth anniversary of 291, it was the largest exhibition that Stieglitz would ever mount and was held for two weeks on the top floor of the Anderson Galleries.
McBride compared the opening night reception to a “French vernissage.” “There was an immense buzz of talk of people who were as much interested in each other as in the new pictures, for the Stieglitz premieres do bring out all the chic types in town,” he wrote.1
O’Keeffe was annoyed on opening night. She had spent the last few months hurriedly completing her first urban nightscape, New York with Moon, showing the Chatham Hotel with an iron street lamp in the foreground and the moon behind clouds in the sky. She expected it to be hung with the work of “the Men,” but when she arrived, the painting was not on view. Stieglitz’s first official act as husband had been to censor what she considered to be a good painting. More than fifty years later, she was still irate. “I was furious,” she recalled. She had wanted to compete but Stieglitz hadn’t even put her in the race. She had to rely instead on the power of petunias and corn from the previous summer. Still, these paintings were considered a triumph. “If I stopped to think of what others—authorities—would say,” she said, “I’d not be able to do anything.”2
The catalogue was a curious collection of rambling theory and aphoristic speculation. Sherwood Anderson, who had dedicated his autobiographical novella A Story Teller’s Story to Stieglitz, came up with a prose poem about fatigued Manhattan. The show, he wrote, revealed a “distillation of the clean emotional life of seven real American artists.”
Taken at face value, it was a bizarre description of the group, considering that both Stieglitz and Dove were adulterers; O’Keeffe, until six months before, had been a kept woman; and Hartley and Demuth were notorious for what was considered risqué homosexual decadence.
Anderson himself had left his solid-citizen past with a wife, children, and a job in advertising to live the bohemian life of author. His phrase “clean emotional life” referred to the artists’ willingness to make a break with convention in order to maintain “clean emotions” with regard to themselves.
Additional catalogue essays were contributed by the German sculptor Arnold Ronnebeck, who confessed ambivalence about the relentless capitalism of his adopted country but praised the seven artists for their creative self-discovery, which “means nothing less than the discovery of America’s independent role in the History of Art.”
Dove explained that the pictures were an integral part of their makers and perhaps an integral part of America. More incisive than his brief prose was his collage The Critic, in which a boxy newsprint figure with an empty head and a body composed of a rave review of the realist painter George Luks, bearing an Energex vacuum to clean up the art world, satirizes critic Royal Cortissoz.
In nine lengthy reviews, critics mostly praised Stieglitz for his past and present efforts, with kudos for his most recent photographs of clouds. Predictably, they were divided on the rest of the work in the show. Hartley’s somber and heavy-handed still lifes of herrings and Maine landscapes were dismissed as too Old World. Dove’s assemblages included his portrait of Stieglitz made from a mirror, lens, clock spring, and steel wool. This caused much consternation, though Strand’s photographs of gleaming machine parts were praised, as were the seascapes of Marin, always a darling of the critics.
At the entrance to the gallery, underscoring the clubby familiarity of the Stieglitz circle and baffling most critics, Demuth showed poster portraits of the artists. Each was represented in the advertising format of lettering and symbol. Hung together at the entrance, they literally “advertised” Stieglitz latest venture. O’Keeffe is portrayed as a sanseveria, or snake plant, in a pot on a table. An apple next to the pot is nudged by the phallic end of a gourd resting in coital position below her last name, which is printed upside down and backwards, as one might see it in a camera’s view finder. The apple and gourd represented O’Keeffe and Stieglitz; the two pears resting atop one another in the shade of the pot may have alluded to Demuth’s own sexuality.
Despite the absence of her New York picture, O’Keeffe received better notices than “the men,” even from Cortissoz, who admired her craft.
The critic Helen Appleton Read fawned over O’Keeffe’s giant petunias and “calla lilies, leaf and flower arrangements, alligator pears and abstractions which look like lots of things they may not be intended to mean at all, all painted in her clean, precise manner.” Calling for a fresh appraisal of her work, Read noted, “It is a pity that so much beneath the surface has been read into her painting, and it is true that some of her pictures are possible [sic] of strange double meanings of emotional states. Forewords to her previous shows have only strengthened this idea.”3
The show did not engender unbridled enthusiasm. If anything, there was a critical backlash against the hydra-headed catalogue extolling the superiority of American artists at a time when the Europeans moderns were establishing themselves in New York.
Now that the very artists Stieglitz had been the first to show—Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse—were experiencing healthy sales, it was difficult to convince collectors that his current crop of artists were the home-grown equivalents. Worse, the stress brought on a painful attack of kidney stones, and Stieglitz left O’Keeffe, among others, to direct the gallery. O’Keeffe found it humiliating to sell her own paintings to relatives and friends, let alone those she called the “greasy vulgar people.”4
As O’Keeffe’s art matured, she came to accept that her work was de facto different from that produced by “the men.” Instead of joining them, she increasingly chose to underscore her difference by choosing pretty hues to use in her paintings. When she took on a subject from the realm of “the men”—like the brown shanty or the cityscape—she did so self-consciously.
As an object of art in the modern era, a flower was rife with problematic sentimentality, a subject that too easily coincided with clichés of femininity. In his review of Seven Americans, Edmund Wilson observed that O’Keeffe’s flower paintings have a “peculiarly feminine intensity which . . . seems to manifest itself, as a rule, in such a different way from the masculine.”6
O’Keeffe intensified and objectified her flowers by relying on the unsentimental lens of the camera. She would have seen many examples of the camera’s ability to isolate and enlarge the flower. Steichen’s photograph of an isolated lotus was featured in Vanity Fair in 1923. Around the same time, West Coast photographer Imogen Cunningham began close-up photographs of calla lilies and magnolias that bear an uncanny similarity to O’Keeffe’s paintings. O’Keeffe could have seen this work because Cunningham had met Stieglitz at 291 in 1909. Cunningham admitted the influence of Baron de Meyer’s 1908 photograph of a single lotus floating in a bowl—an image O’Keeffe could easily have seen reproduced in Camera Work.7 More than Stieglitz’s or Strand’s specific photographs, it was the graphic quality of photography that O’Keeffe now drew from, and used in her own paintings of flowers.
Although Stieglitz had experimented with color techniques in photography, he, like most photographers, worked in black and white. Unlike photographers, however, O’Keeffe was first attracted to the flowers for their color. Like Monet, she worked from her garden, planting beds of purple petunias at Lake George in order to devote more time to studying their subtle, radiant hues. She did not start enlarging the blossoms until she began planting her own flowers in the summer of 1924.
It was no coincidence that these big blooms were to be exhibited in her first group show with “the men.” Her petunias were meant to compete in scale and power with the skyscrapers shooting up around New York, a subject photographed by Stieglitz and Strand. As she put it, “If I could paint that flower in a huge scale, then you could not ignore its beauty.”8
On an intuitive level, O’Keeffe comprehended the subversive possibilities in choosing the “feminine” imagery of flowers. It was one of her most valuable insights. “I’m one of the few artists, maybe the only one today, who is willing to talk about my work as pretty,” she said. “I don’t mind it being pretty. I think it’s a shame to discard this word; maybe if we work on it hard enough we can make it fashionable again.”9
She understood that “pretty” was derided for its association with female creativity. Her response was not to discard “prettiness” but to cast off the masculine assumption that categorized “pretty” as inferior. O’Keeffe ascertained that the only true manner by which women could make art as equals was to make art differently, and according to their own sensibilities, experience, and context.
That difference is the battleground on which art history has been reconceived over the last forty years. O’Keeffe’s flowers—even today dismissed by some critics as silly or girly—function as camouflaged depth charges to explode hoary ideas about the hierarchies of genre. Ironically, the ways in which O’Keeffe battled for a language to express her own feelings—the flowers, the pastel colors—were precisely the aesthetic decisions that Stieglitz tried most to impede. “When I started painting big flowers he said, ‘Well, what do you think you are going to do with that.’ He was always nervous until the first notices came in. . . . But still he was interested—more than anyone else.”10
Eventually, O’Keeffe would grow impatient with his interference. “I think I would never have minded Stieglitz being anything he happened to be if he hadn’t kept me so persistently off my track,” she used to sigh.11
Encouraged by the review she’d received, O’Keeffe completed four paintings of dark purple petunias in pairs and trios, as well as solo. None were as large as those painted the previous summer, but their color was more intensely realized, especially in Black and Purple Petunias, with their blooms dipping downward against malachite leaves. She also painted three still lifes of pink and purple petunias in a milk glass on a white cloth, and another of a purple petunia in a narrow green pickle bottle.
A small study of yellow and pink tulips was enlarged as Pink Tulip, an abstract arrangement of arcs of puce with ripples of chartreuse and lemon. The wrinkled yellow squash blossoms from her garden became the subject of three paintings, and she returned to pastel in a large format to render the scalloped edges of yellow snow peas. While she was experimenting with yellow, O’Keeffe painted what is probably the unprecedented combination of a grapefruit with a supine endive.
Finally, after painting dozens of pictures of red cannas, she realized her apotheosis. Measuring two and a half by three feet, Red Canna is an explosion of elongated petals in fiery crimson, topaz, and fuchsia. Still hoping to abide by Stieglitz’s refined tastes, O’Keeffe felt a little guilty over her command of the fanciful. “He had a remarkable color sense, much more subtle than mine,” she said. “Mine was obvious and showy in comparison. I like the spectacular things.”12
In June 1925, at the outset of their vacation on The Hill, O’Keeffe suffered a severe allergic reaction to a smallpox vaccination. The glands around her hips and her legs were swollen to such an extent that she couldn’t walk. Lee ordered her to bed for a month with her legs bound in tight bandages.
O’Keeffe, who was familiar with the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, could hardly miss the ironic parallel with The Yellow Wallpaper. In this short story, a woman’s physician orders her to stay in bed and to avoid any mental or physical stimulation. She may not read, write, or exercise. Her loving husband insists on monitoring the “cure” to the point that the woman quickly loses her sanity. As she lay in her hot room, unable to take solace in long walks, reading, or painting, O’Keeffe may have recalled that this popular short story was based on Gilman’s own experience at the hands of her husband and a physician.
O’Keeffe noted bitterly that Stieglitz “was happiest when I was ill in bed because he knew where I was and what I was doing.”13 Whether this became a self-fulfilling prophecy or resulted from emotional stress, O’Keeffe was seriously ill at least once a year from the time she started living with Stieglitz until the 1930s, when she began spending time away from him. Some of her bouts of illness were self-imposed rest cures to escape from the pressures she tended to internalize. After O’Keeffe started her pilgrimages to New Mexico, her health took a turn for the better.
Despite bouts of kidney colic that summer, Stieglitz was in better shape than O’Keeffe. While his wife lay in bed, he told Beck that he could write some very naughty stories to her “just because naughtiness seems so far removed.” He confessed to dreaming about her, wishing he could photograph her. His thinly concealed desire emerged in remarks like, “My feelings are decidedly upward—Please don’t interpret this naughtily but I suppose upward is upward in every sense!”14
To avoid the problems of vacationing at Lake George, the Strands went to Five Islands, Maine, where they met the sculptor Gaston Lachaise and his wife, Isabelle, who were building a house in Bath. In Maine, they went swimming nude with no interference from the local constable and no sexual tension. Beck sent Stieglitz copies of the photo
graphs she had started to take, which he complimented. Complaining about O’Keeffe, he wrote, “There is a price for everything—even love.”15
Although construction was completed on Leo and Lizzie’s bungalow, their cook continued to prepare elaborate noon and evening meals for the family to enjoy together. Unable to exercise, O’Keeffe eschewed the heavy midday meal to make her own salad of greens and watercress, garlic and onions, with oil and vinegar dressing. She ate quietly, by herself, on the porch looking over the water. By the end of July, just as she was able to start painting, a vicious hailstorm pulverized her subject matter—the flowers and the corn.
A month later, more frustrations arrived for O’Keeffe. Young Sue and Peggy Davidson had been invited to stay without their parents. Instead, their aunt and uncle, Flora and Hugh Straus, came with their two young sons. This invasion of children did not agree with O’Keeffe. When three-year-old Sue held out her hand and said, “How do you do, Aunt Georgia?” she was slapped across the face. O’Keeffe shouted, “Don’t ever call me ‘Aunt.’”16
Rosenfeld spent most of that summer at The Hill trying to write a novel. Alfred Kreymborg, despondent over the fact that his autobiographical book Troubador had received little attention that spring, came with his wife to stay at nearby Dalrymple cottage. Along with Stieglitz, they lamented the disappearance of prominent arts journals like The Seven Arts and Kreymborg’s Broom. Both had gone under from lack of financial support, while the Dial had become a vehicle for established writers. Stieglitz introduced them to another Lake George regular, Samuel Ornitz, who was a literary editor for the Macaulay Company. Ornitz suggested an annual publication featuring the work of less established writers, to be edited by Rosenfeld and Kreymborg along with Lewis Mumford and Van Wyck Brooks. American Caravan, as it was called, was backed by Ornitz and the Macaulay Company. Released in 1927, it was a critical and financial success and included the work of African American writer Jean Toomer (who had also visited Lake George that summer).