Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  With so many new flower pictures in the show, O’Keeffe defended them in a gallery brochure: “Everyone has many associations with a flower,” she wrote. “You put out your hand to touch it, or lean forward to smell it, or maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking, or give it to someone to please them. But one rarely takes the time to really see a flower. I have painted what each flower is to me and I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I see.”9

  Stieglitz hardly needed to work his magic on these paintings. After he had extended the show until April 3, Murdock Pemberton reviewed it for a second time in The New Yorker: “Psychiatrists have been sending their patients up to see O’Keeffe’s canvases. . . . They limp to the shrine of Saint Georgia and they fly away on the wings of the libido.”10

  McBride, who also reviewed the show twice, applauded O’Keeffe’s technique but doubted that he comprehended her deepest meaning. Such arcana must be reserved for women. “I do not feel the occult element in them that all the ladies insist is there,” he wrote in the Dial. “There were more feminine shrieks and screams in the vicinity of O’Keefe’s [sic] work this year than ever before.”11

  If her flowers proffered anima incarnate, animus appeared in O’Keeffe’s painting New York with Moon, in which highrises from Forty-seventh Street are silhouetted against a dusky sky; clouds embrace the moon, whose luminescence is echoed in the halation around a streetlamp. This painting—one that Stieglitz had rejected the year before—sold the first day of her show for twelve hundred dollars. O’Keeffe was exultant with her vindication.

  After moving into the Shelton, O’Keeffe painted dozens of skyscrapers, knowing that these works confronted the assumption that, as a woman, she should cleave to her connections with nature. “I had never lived up so high before and was so excited that I began talking about trying to paint New York,” she said. “Of course, I was told that it was an impossible idea—even the men hadn’t done too well with it.”12

  By day, skyscrapers tower in dim ocher against a steely sky, as in Shelton Hotel, N.Y., No. 1 or the canyon of towering buildings obliterating all but a narrow patch of sky in A Street. City Night is a similarly claustrophobic composition, but the buildings are ebony against a navy blue sky; the moon struggles to shine at the lowest part of the scene. The geometry of the skyscrapers and street grids is fully abstracted in a white painting called New York—Night and a painting of white and gray angles and planes, Abstraction. As she explained, “One can’t paint New York as it is but as it is felt.”13

  O’Keeffe could scarcely help being affected by the city photographs taken by Stieglitz and Strand, unpopulated and viewed from above, and the precisionist painting style that was then gaining popularity. But her emphasis was less on the progressive nature of modernist architecture than on the ways in which light reflected off of the glass and stone surfaces, the kaleidoscopic color of glowing windows, traffic signals, and neon signs. The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. portrays her building towering upward as a glowing, heavenly retreat surrounded by rays of sun shooting out from behind a bank of clouds.

  She said that she envisioned the complete picture in her mind before applying brush to canvas. “I went out one morning to look at it before I started to work and there was the optical illusion of a bite out of one side of the tower made by the sun, with sunspots against the building and the sky,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I made that painting beginning at the upper left and went off at the lower right without going back.” She destroyed several other versions of the picture because they were not as good. “I don’t start until I’m almost entirely clear. It’s a waste of time and paint. With that Shelton, I was amazed I could do it.”14

  Anyone would be amazed, but it is probable that O’Keeffe worked from a photograph. Since her studio was in the Shelton, and she painted largely from life, she could have been using a photograph for reference, if not for copying an exact likeness. Lens distortion would have accounted for the precipitously cropped angle of her skyscraper and the halation rings around the sun. Fearful of being further associated with Stieglitz’s influence, she never admitted using photographs as sources. McBride called it “one of the best skyscraper paintings that I have seen anywhere.”15

  Heartened, perhaps, that reviewers like Helen Appleton Read were calling for less personal interpretations of her art, O’Keeffe wondered whether women writers wouldn’t offer better understanding of her paintings. Unfortunately, the first woman she chose for the task was Mabel Dodge Luhan.

  Stieglitz had known Mabel Dodge from her infamous soirees in Greenwich Village during the years after the Armory Show. After her torrid love affair with the writer and Bolshevik John Reed, Dodge moved to Taos in 1923 with a painter, Maurice Sterne, her third husband. Within a year, she had fallen in love with an Indian from the Taos pueblo named Antonio Lujan. She divorced Sterne and arranged Lujan’s divorce from his Indian wife. After marrying for the fourth time, she had her new husband’s name anglicized to Tony Luhan. Inspired by what she considered the superior spiritual state of the simple Indian life, she commissioned an adobe mansion on acreage bordering the pueblo lands as a retreat for her elevated metaphysical pursuits. She embraced her conversion to “a new world that replaced all the ways I had known with others, more strange and terrible and sweet than any I had ever been able to imagine.”16 During the summers, the discipline that such evolved duties required grew tiresome, and she invited artists, writers, and philosophers to visit. Among the first to accept her hospitality were the Bloomsbury circle refugees D. H. Lawrence, his German wife, Frieda, and their constant sidekick, the Honorable Lady Dorothy Brett, a painter.

  At this stage of her wide-ranging career, Dodge Luhan wrote articles and essays for both popular and avant-garde magazines. Taken by a story that she had written about the actress Katharine Cornell, O’Keeffe contacted her. Although O’Keeffe rarely asked for help, she reached out to Dodge Luhan in the belief that the eccentric arts patron “could write something . . . that the men can’t. . . . A woman who has lived many things and who sees lines and colors as an expression of living—might say something that a man can’t—I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.”17

  The heiress penned a sharp-eyed, though unflattering, essay. In it, she targeted Stieglitz for exhibiting O’Keeffe’s paintings as trophies of his sexual renewal. “This woman’s sex, Stieglitz, it becomes yours on these canvases,” she wrote. She called him a “showman” who exalted O’Keeffe’s paintings in the “name of art.” Dodge Luhan also reduced O’Keeffe to a “filthy spectacle of frustration.” She wrote, “O’Keeffe externalizes the frustration of her true being out on to canvases which, receiving her outpouring sexual juices . . . permits her to walk this earth with the cleansed, purgated look of fulfilled life!”18

  In her essay, Dodge Luhan prodded an area of increasing sensitivity to O’Keeffe—the ways in which Stieglitz controlled her life, and the interpretation of her art. For a decade, Stieglitz had determined when and in what circumstances she would show her work, who would buy it, and to some extent, the subject and medium of her paintings. Her gestures of rebellion were still modest—paintings of flowers and New York skyscrapers that sold despite his reservations. For the most part, she remained grateful and devoted to Stieglitz, describing herself as a little plant that he had “watered and weeded and dug around.”19

  Undeterred by her sour experience with Dodge Luhan, O’Keeffe made herself available for an interview with Blanche Matthias, a woman her own age and a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post. Matthias defended O’Keeffe’s simplicity as “profoundly feminine” and therefore incomprehensible to the male art critics who employed psychoanalytic theory to explain the content and form of the paintings.

  “Many men here in New York think women can’t be artists but we can see and feel and work as they can,” O’Keeffe complained to Matthias. “Our struggle is not confined to one phase of life. . . . Perhaps some day a new name wi
ll be coined for us and so allow men to enjoy a property right to the word art, but I hope we shall have a healthier and stronger title than Expressionists allotted to us by our nomenclators.”20

  O’Keeffe objected to the label “expressionism” and felt that it was insufficiently intellectual. Although she recognized that her paintings derived from emotional states, she knew they had conceptual underpinnings. “I am not an exponent of Expressionism. . . . I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking.”21

  Matthias was able to detail a crucial aspect of O’Keeffe’s success when she wrote, “One feels that she always finds time for work, because work is more important to her than the nonwork which the Greeks called leisure. She tries for more than her potentiality. To the many excuses produced by women on the difficulty of having a career, O’Keeffe snorted, ‘Too much complaining and too little work.’”22

  As her fame increased and women’s fashion underwent radical changes in the 1920s, most writers were fascinated by O’Keeffe’s eccentric appearance. Eight years after moving to sophisticated Manhattan, she was resolute in her adherence to simple, long black caftan-like dresses and flat shoes. Matthias wrote, “She moves in one piece. Her black clothes have no suggestion of waist line. From the delicately poised head to the small stout shoes is a rhythm unbroken by any form of hampering. Delicate, sensitive, exquisitely beautiful, with the candor of a child in her unafraid eyes and the trained mind of an intuitive women.”23

  O’Keeffe refused to wear ornaments in her hair, which she pulled back in a bun and often covered with a scarf. She never wore make-up, and it seems that all of her decorative impulses were channeled into her art. Yet her severe style was as carefully considered as every other aspect of her behavior. It was meant to counteract remarks by critics like George Moore, who contended that women always painted in evening dress, or Waldo Frank, who called O’Keeffe “a glorified American peasant. . . full of loamy hungers of the flesh.”

  Compared to that of earlier articles, O’Keeffe was ecstatic about Matthias’s perspective. Calling it “one of the best things that have been done on me,” she befriended the writer and corresponded with her for the next fifty years. Stieglitz kept copies of the article in the gallery to give to interested parties. No doubt he was gratified by O’Keeffe’s remark: “He has never had time to realize his own greatness, because he is always spending himself for others.”24

  In February, while her show was on in New York, O’Keeffe took the train to Washington, D.C., to visit the Phillips Memorial Collection, the first modern art museum in America.

  Founder Duncan Phillips was the grandson of the founder of Pittsburgh’s Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. After graduating from Yale in 1908, he traveled abroad, where he began collecting works by the Impressionists, including Renoir’s uplifting revelry of dressy beauties, The Boating Party. By 1912, he was active in the American Federation of Arts and writing about art for a few magazines. His taste still tended to be conservative, and he attacked the Armory Show as “quite stupefying in its vulgarity.”

  After losing both his father and brother to the 1918 influenza epidemic, Phillips established the Phillips Memorial Gallery in what had been his mother’s brick mansion near Dupont Circle. The renovated galleries opened in 1921 to show a collection that included works by Honoré Daumier, Henri Fantin-Latour, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Whistler, and five members of The Eight. That year, he married Marjorie Acker, an amateur painter who challenged her husband’s reticence about early-twentieth-century modern art. Phillips soon became one of Stieglitz’s best patrons, though he was less committed to the work of O’Keeffe than to Dove and Marin.

  Nonetheless, two of her paintings, My Shanty and Pattern of Leaves, were in the Exhibition of Paintings by Eleven Americans, which also included work by her former classmate Eugene Speicher. What a sweet victory for O’Keeffe, who remembered only too clearly her modeling episode at the Art Students League, when Speicher had told her that she had little hope of ever having a career as an artist.

  The following day, thanks to Anita Pollitzer, she spoke to an audience of five hundred at the National Women’s Party dinner held at the Mayflower Hotel. It was her first visit to the nation’s capital, and during her speech, she stressed the difficulties women faced in gaining professional acceptance. She spoke of the need to earn one’s own living, rather than depend upon men, a point similarly stressed by Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and other liberated voices of the time. The following year, an article in The Nation recaptured some of her speech. The reporter noted that O’Keeffe “believes ardently in woman as individual—an individual not merely with rights and privileges of man but, what is to her more important, with the same responsibilities. And chief among these is the responsibility of self-realization.”25

  Fresh from this triumph, O’Keeffe came down with a stomach ailment and retreated to New York. From her bed, she wrote to Matthias, “With the excitement my food doesn’t like me—for days.”26

  As the first season at the Intimate Gallery came to a close that spring, Stieglitz rejoiced that the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art had come to see his photographs, the Phillips Gallery had bought two Marins, and a housewife from Brooklyn who had paid a thousand dollars for a New York scene by Marin now wanted a painting by O’Keeffe. Settled at The Hill, he wrote to the Davidsons, “It is a new experience to have us begin Lake George with relative health and peace.”27

  As though tempting fate with such optimism, Stieglitz suffered another kidney stone attack and was rushed back to New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital for treatment. He grumbled about the financial as well as physical setbacks of illness. “It is criminal for one in our class to be sick. . . . Facts seem to become bills. . . . And one isn’t rich enough not to pay them.”28

  After his recovery, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz returned to The Hill. Lee and Lizzie were traveling in Europe, but sent their cook to take care of them. The usual visitors, the Strands and Rosenfeld, were in Taos visiting Dodge Luhan. Beck sent enticing words about New Mexico: “I am ever so well . . . and serene as never before.”29

  There were days of swimming and long walks. O’Keeffe painted The Old Maple, emphasizing the trunk’s wrinkled, sooty bark and knot holes with little evidence of branches or leaves. The Red Maple, on the other hand, exploded the star-shaped leaves into bursts of scarlet and ash.

  The critical response to O’Keeffe’s flower paintings that spring moved her to return to the callas, but this time she shed the modesty of their previous incarnations. In Yellow Calla, the spadix points impertinently out of the petals like a prong. L.K. White Calla and Roses treats the calla as swirls of white bedding around an erect yellow spadix and surrounded by carnelian roses. The dramatic and sexually evocative canvas was dedicated to critic Louis Kalonyme, who had written that spring in Arts and Decoration, “The world she paints is maternal, its swelling hills and rolling valleys are pregnant with beauty born of a primeval sun. These sun’s ray points piercing the human forms of the earth give birth to singing flowers, which are fragrant chalices of a distilled golden radiance. Though there are greater painters, no one in America can paint the living quality of flowers and branches and leaves as Georgia O’Keeffe does.”30

  Other astonishing florals emerged that summer. In Canna Red and Orange, she looked more deeply into the center of the flower so that the vermilion petals are washed with rivulets of tangerine and lemon. In Pink Tulip, too, she executed the center of the flower with the petals rising in arcs of rose and chartreuse. She also abstracted the tulip as one leaf and one petal as simple bands of color. The first of many paintings of poppies shows the fuzzy centers of two flowers surrounded by ruby petals. With pastel she rendered the delicate edges of white sweet peas.

  After a few false starts, painting a white and then a purple iris, she took on the rare black iris. The first picture was fairly straightforward, in lavender tones. The second, however, was an abstract, small study of a white ruffle before a raisin-colored c
ircle. In the third version, Black Iris, great silver petals embrace the onyx and burgundy mouth on a canvas measuring 36 × 30 inches.

  The dark-and-light leitmotif continued in a picture of lilies, White Flowers, and in a star-shaped blossom placed before a jet altar, Autumn Leaf with White Flower. On a narrow, vertical canvas, an inky pansy seems to be suspended from a strand of white forget-me-nots. Two paintings of a white morning glory rest atop a black petunia on a white ground. Another painting, White Flower, fills the entire canvas with the view to the center of the morning glory and only a hint of the coal-colored petunia at the base.

  O’Keeffe was no longer simply enlarging the flowers, she was painting their secret, hidden centers and their sexual organs.

  At the beginning of August, Ida arrived at Lake George, followed by journalist Frances O’Brien and Eva Herrmann, the daughter of Alfred’s boyhood friend Sime Herrmann. O’Keeffe started rising before dawn for a two-hour walk; she stopped eating and within two weeks had lost fifteen pounds. The first group left, but two days later Lee and Lizzie returned from Europe and arrived with the Davidson girls. O’Keeffe bolted for Maine’s York Beach: “I was hard on that family,” she complained, “but they were hard on me.”31

  The rift may have been caused by the crowds of guests, or by the fact that Stieglitz’s nephew was offered The Hill for his August honeymoon. Possibly, too, another of Stieglitz’s photo sessions with the Davidson girls had gone beyond the bounds of good taste. He also photographed O’Brien and Hermann in the nude and in several different poses.

  Stieglitz guiltily warned Seligmann, “Please don’t mention it to anyone—either her going or her being run down.”32 He made the enormous concession of following her to Maine to beg forgiveness. But O’Keeffe would not return for another month. Alone, Stieglitz felt himself to be a “mess.” To alleviate anxiety, he threw himself into a manic state of printing his photographs.