While Stieglitz tried half-heartedly to make amends, O’Keeffe was developing internal boundaries to protect herself from the changeable nature of his personality. Earlier that spring, she mused, “I am learning something about myself. I don’t know exactly what it is.”33 Despite Stieglitz’s incessant demands, she was resurrecting some of the skill of caring for herself, as she had done during her early years in Texas, which meant listening to her inner voice. “I am one of the intuitives,” she said. “Don’t think that I really underrate my way of thinking. . . . I have just wits enough to know that if you really sift to the bottom [of] any more reasonable approach to life . . . it really isn’t any more rational than mine.”34
At York Beach, she painted Blue Wave Maine, a view of the sea as a cerulean field broken by a swoosh of bright spume and a dawn light on the horizon. In its feeling of spaciousness, it contrasts with that summer’s Lake George Blue, where the lake seems trapped beneath a sky of foreboding clouds and smudged mountains.
An Art News review claimed that her painting “beckons the eye with promises, only to shut up like a clam when the gaze becomes too inquisitive.”35 Shortly after, O’Keeffe painted her first series of shell paintings in Maine. She said later, “Each shell was a beautiful world in itself.”36
She played with the shells, making different arrangements of still lifes similar to her leaf compositions, with her focus on the shapes and colors. Her most startling compositions from this series are clam shells standing vertically, with their edges facing the viewer. Slightly Open Clam Shell reveals the empty interior; Open Clam Shell reveals less and Closed Clam Shell offers the half-ovals of shell and the line of the seal. All are painted in shades of silver and alabaster.
On closer inspection, it is clear that the open shells showing the seal and foot of the clam contain the same formal components of a vertical line broken at midpoint by a circle, which O’Keeffe used repeatedly in her paintings of corn and flowers as well as in her abstractions.
Although the clams are vulval, they are also cool and repressed. If, as suggested, O’Keeffe’s paintings are self-portraits, these offer evidence of a woman who had shut down. In the open clam shells, the shape reveals a barren chamber. O’Keeffe later said, “I find that I have painted my life—things happening in my life—without knowing.”37
Upon her return to The Hill, she saw that three old farm buildings were being roofed. She painted Lake George Barns in teal, charcoal, and brick under a troubled sky. Walking around the yard, she found a spare stone shingle on the ground and brought it back to her room, placing it next to a clamshell that she’d brought back from Maine. The conjunction of these two unrelated objects startled her. “The white shape of the shell and the grey shape of the weathered shingle were beautiful against the pale grey leaf on the faintly pink-lined pattern of the wallpaper,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Adding the shingle got me painting again.”38
The six pictures called Shell and Old Shingle are studies in textures and neutral tonalities with sprightly green leaves as accents. Despite their realism, they are studies in form and shade. The shingle shoots off the top of the canvas, and small green leaves enter inexplicably from the right side with a little white mound of shell at the base. “They fascinated me so that I forgot what they were except that they were shapes together—singing shapes,” she added.39 Indeed, Shell and Old Shingle VI, which features a sooty arch fading into a pearl background with a sharp dollop of white on onyx, bears no discernible reference to either shingle or shell. She extended the shapes and shades into her landscape painting, Shell and Shingle Series VII. “I did a misty landscape of the mountain across the lake, and the mountain became the shape of the shingle,” she explained.40
During the month that O’Keeffe stayed at York Beach, a chastened Stieglitz admitted that he was “getting much that had gotten tangled up straight within myself.” He added, “Marriage, if it is real, must be based on a wish that each person attain his potentiality, be the thing he might be, as a tree bears its fruit—at the same time realizing the responsibility to the other party.”41
As a couple, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe seemed in good spirits upon their return to the Shelton that November. They moved into a room on the twenty-eighth floor. During the day, the north- and south-facing windows lent an airy, sunny ambience, while at night, the apartment was open to the glittering mosaic of electric lights outside. The east-facing windows offered an unobstructed view of the puffing smokestacks of East River factories and tugboats. In her new home, O’Keeffe finished a pastel of the scene with a subdued sun barely able to cut through the smog and mist. She also painted two oils of the industrial buildings: East River—No. 1 and East River from the Shelton, No. III.
She didn’t bother draping the large windows—she painted the walls in dove gray and, to further neutralize the rooms, put white muslin slipcovers on the furniture that came with their rental. At the Shelton, O’Keeffe first realized her stripped-down life style, her ethos of living in a room “as bare as possible.”
Not everyone was comfortable in such a modern interior. One writer opined,
It might have been a cloister or the reception room of an orphanage, so austere it was, with its cold gray walls, and its white covers over dull upholstery. There was no frivolous pillow, no “hangings.” The only spot of color was a red flower on an easel. There was not an inch of cretonne or a dab of china anywhere. It seemed all windows—windows overlooking housetops, steel framework, chimneys, windows to the east through which the panorama of the river and bridge came flooding.42
On November 19, shortly after moving back into the Shelton, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz attended the opening of the Societé Anonyme’s International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Both artists were featured in the survey of three hundred works that largely concentrated on European modernism since 1920, when the Société Anonyme was conceived by collector Katherine Dreier and artists Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. The show was the debut of Duchamp’s sculpture cum painting The Large Glass, its ambiguous image sandwiched between two window panels. Two weeks after the opening, Stieglitz gave a talk chronicling the history of 291, in which he defended the experimental nature of modern art as a process similar to scientific research, and called for the creation of a museum and permanent collection in New York.
The Intimate Gallery began its second season that December with paintings by Marin. Phillips came up from Washington and bought two watercolors and, after reading McBride’s praise for Marin’s larger watercolor, Back of Bear Mountain, returned to purchase it as well. Works on paper such as watercolors are generally priced lower than oils, but Phillips found that Stieglitz had increased the price of the desired watercolor to six thousand dollars, equivalent to the price of an oil painting. Phillips felt that Stieglitz was taking advantage of him, but he reluctantly paid up. He was furious a few days later to read a New York Times headline stating that he had paid a record price for the Marin. This turned out to be an example of Stieglitz stretching the truth to place a story that would benefit him and his artist.
Feeling that he would be seen as a sucker, Phillips wrote an open letter of correction to The Art News magazine. Stieglitz had “maneoevered operations,” he said. In fact, to make it appear that a Marin watercolor had sold for a record price, Stieglitz had sweetened the deal by charging the collector only one thousand dollars, or half price, for Marin’s Hudson Opposite Bear Mountain and giving him the canvas Sunset, Rockland County, valued at eighteen hundred dollars. In total, Phillips had paid seven thousand dollars for three Marins, which was just about market value.
The Marin show found keen support in Dorothy Stecker Norman. Like O’Keeffe, Beck, or, in earlier years, Agnes Ernst Meyer or Katharine Rhoades, Norman was a young woman in need of direction. Like her predecessors, she would find support for her contrary and independent instincts in Alfred Stieglitz.
Born into a prosperous German Jewish family in Philadelphia, Dorothy Stecker rebelled in subtle w
ays from an early age. As an adolescent, she enrolled herself at Mary C. Wheeler, a boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island, that usually did not accept Jewish applicants. She graduated and, despite her parents’ reservations, went on to attend Smith College. After she was sent home with an attack of appendicitis at the end of her freshman year, her parents refused to let her return. Determined to get an education, she attended the first classes offered at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia, where she was exposed to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings.
In 1924, she was attending a Christmas party in New York when she met her future husband, the Harvard-educated and idealistic Edward Norman, whose wealthy family had had a founding interest in Sears, Roebuck and Co. Edward, too, had a rebellious streak and refused to go into his father’s business. Instead, he worked for the liberal Consumer Cooperative. Their courtship was short, intense, and clouded by the warning from Edward’s parents that their son had a history of mental instability.
With a nineteen-year-old’s certainty that love would conquer all, Dorothy married Edward, then twenty-five, and moved to his home in New York City in 1925. His violent temper and inexperience as a lover quickly dampened Dorothy’s ardor, but she hoped a child might save their marriage. By 1926 she was pregnant, and quit her part-time work for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Burdened with spare time, Norman began touring the New York art galleries. Knowing nothing of Marin, or of Alfred Stieglitz, she found herself captivated by the Cubist watercolors hung on the walls of the shabby little room of the Intimate Gallery. The man who appeared to be proprietor was occupied and she left, but the pictures compelled her to return. Stieglitz was talking, of course, but this time Norman interrupted to ask about purchasing one of the watercolors. “It has been acquired,” he replied coolly.43 Astonished by his apparent disinterest in doing business, she left. Yet she could not forget the Marins.
When she returned a third time, O’Keeffe’s paintings were on view. Norman picked up the Intimate Gallery’s brochure, a pamphlet that made clear that the gallery was dedicated to an Idea, and was the only place where the complete evolution of seven American artists could be studied; that the gallery was not a business. On subsequent visits, Norman hesitated to introduce herself but eavesdropped on Stieglitz’s remarks, writing them down in a little notebook and later including them in her memoirs. She valued aphorisms such as: “We protect one another only by telling each other the truth.” Or, “All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.” Most important for Norman, was Stieglitz’s comment, “No man can be satisfied within himself unless he satisfies the woman he loves.”44 Though she was young and confused Norman knew that her husband was not satisfying her.
Norman was committed to liberal ideals and civil rights, and recognized some semblance of that idealism in Stieglitz’s philosophy. During yet another visit to the gallery, she heard Stieglitz haranguing a young woman who had asked the meaning of a painting: “Do you ask what the wind means? You might as well ask what life means. If an artist could explain his work in words, he wouldn’t have had to create it. And remember, your attitude toward a picture may alter, but the picture itself won’t.”45
Norman considered this to be the first satisfying statement she had heard about modern art. She was eighteen years younger than O’Keeffe, seven years younger than Kitty, and forty years younger than the sixty-two-year-old photographer. Looking at Stieglitz’s finely drawn lips, his bristling gray mustache, his piercing, deep-set eyes, she recalled, “Within a split second an inner music soars.”46
VIII
On January 10, the day before her 1927 exhibition opened at the Intimate Gallery, O’Keeffe wrote to thank Waldo Frank for the article about her in his newly published book Time Exposures, a collection of profiles originally written for The New Yorker under his pseudonym “Search Light.” In a surprisingly candid manner, she confessed her reservations about her upcoming show. “It is too beautiful. . . . I hope the next one will not be beautiful. . . . I would like the next one to be so magnificently vulgar that all the people who have liked what I have been doing would stop speaking to me—My feeling today is that if I could do that I would be a great success to myself.”1
“I do not seem to be crystalizing anything this winter,” she added. “Much is happening—but it doesn’t take shape. . . . I am not clear—am not steady on my feet. . . . I have come to the end of something—and until I am clear there is no reason why I should talk to anyone.”2
Artists often feel conflicted about transitions in style. O’Keeffe’s four previous exhibitions had been greeted with an acclaim that matched her growing prowess as a colorist. Charles Demuth noted her achievements in the brochure: “In her canvases each colour almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself, on forming the first rain-bow.”3 But O’Keeffe danced a strange tango with popularity—when she was praised for her talents as a colorist, she answered with paintings in the hushed tones of respectability.
Her January show was a nearly monotone exhibition—white calla lilies, white shells, white abstractions, white and black flowers, gray shingles and dour skyscrapers. Of the thirty-six paintings on view, only her yellow calla, red cannas, and the red maple leaf offered evidence of her previous passion for high chroma. Always slightly skeptical of her brazen use of color, Stieglitz approved of the elegant neutrals.
In the catalogue essay “A Painter’s Comment,” Oscar Bluemner allied her latest efforts with the immaculate conception. “In this our period of woman’s ascendancy we behold O’Keeffe’s work flowering forth like a manifestation of that feminine causative principle, a painter’s vision new, fascinating, virgin American.”4
Despite its restraint, the exhibition still managed to astonish and titillate. Her full-frontal purple petunias from the previous show seemed tame compared to the Black Iris that nearly covered the wall of the gallery with its fuzzed, darkened open mouth, extended tongue, and arched petals. The black iris was available for about two weeks each spring in the New York flower shops, so O’Keeffe’s choice was not arbitrary. Black Iris is one of the most sexually charged of all of O’Keeffe’s floral pictures. When hung next to the white calla surrounded with roses and the white morning glory open to its yellow center, such pictures were described by Mumford as “one long, loud blast of sex, sex in youth, sex in adolescence, sex in maturity . . . sex bulging, sex tumescent, sex deflated.”5
Mumford compared O’Keeffe’s earlier work with that of Matisse. In the New Republic, he also wrote that her symbolism “touches primarily on the experiences of love and passion,” that she had “found a language for experiences that are otherwise too intimate to be shared.”6
McBride found the palette of neutrals in the shells and shingles to be “intellectual rather than emotional . . . because the processes are concealed. . . . Emotion would not permit such plodding precision.” He added that her method was “French. . . . It means planning the work out in one’s mind completed before beginning upon it.”7
Gratified that he did not view her painting as a biological imperative, O’Keeffe penned a witty note of thanks to the critic: “I am particularly amused and pleased to have the emotional faucet turned off—no matter what other one you turn on. It is grand—And all the ladies who like my things will think they are becoming intellectual—It’s wonderful and the men will think them much safer if my method is French.”8
While O’Keeffe may have suffered some doubts, visitors to the Intimate Gallery that winter did not consider her work “too beautiful,” and the audience for her paintings was expanding. Prone to exaggeration, Stieglitz claimed that nine thousand visitors came in forty-two days, observing the hours of silence that he had imposed from ten in the morning until noon. He said that one woman had offered the price of a Rolls-Royce for the entire Shell and Shingle series. Clara Rossin, daughter of the wealthy Adolph Lewisohn, bought the painting of the black pansy with forget-me-nots; and six of O’Keeffe’s paintings sold for a
total of seventeen thousand dollars. After this exhibition, O’Keeffe was able to support herself and her husband from the sales of her paintings for the rest of her life, an accomplishment that was hardly arbitrary. Contrary to Stieglitz’s claims, O’Keeffe proved willing to cultivate certain patrons. After Rossin purchased her painting, O’Keeffe readily accepted her invitation for an evening at home with Edgar Varèse, and over the next few years, she wrote regular notes to Rossin advising her of where and when her paintings were being exhibited.
At the beginning of the year, O’Keeffe painted another white abstraction, Line and Curve, in which a translucent semicircle in the upper right corner of the picture veils an inky split in a pallid surface. Abstraction Blue is an interpretation of the landscapes of Lake George, but it is presented vertically so that the customary horizon line shoots upward as a ray of light buttressed by steamy mists of azure and ebony.
Many of O’Keeffe’s city pictures from the spring of 1927 also emphasize the properties of light, as in her pastel of the sun shining in patches on the East River and her glowing skyscraper, Radiator Bldg—Night, New York. For O’Keeffe, this painting, in keeping with the 1923 Poster Portraits created by Demuth, served as an emblematic portrait of Stieglitz. The Radiator Building, designed by Raymond Hood, was a dramatic addition to the city in 1924. With its black-clad exterior and gilded crown lit by floodlights at night, it was seen as a triumph of art deco architecture. Of all the buildings in the city, O’Keeffe chose it to represent her husband by changing an important detail. The red neon sign that advertised Scientific American was altered to read “Alfred Stieglitz.” (The scarlet lettering against the black background paid homage to his two favorite colors.)9
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