Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  In March, the Intimate Gallery was given over to “X,” the slot reserved for guests. Gaston Lachaise showed his voluptuous figurative sculpture, including an alabaster bust of O’Keeffe. Instead of buying this portrait of his wife, Stieglitz acquired Lachaise’s more inviting torso of a recumbent woman.

  The Lachaise exhibition brought Dorothy Norman, in the early stages of pregnancy, back to the gallery, where she found Stieglitz alone. She mentioned having had dinner with the Strands and inquired about his photographic technique. Art critic Louis Kalonyme, who had dropped by the gallery, listened to her anecdote with apparent scorn, but Stieglitz was charmed by her naïveté. He brought out some old issues of Camera Work and photographs from his series of Equivalents. Viewing the pictures of clouds, she realized that they were like no art that she had ever seen. This would be her last visit to the gallery for many months, however: she and her husband went to spend the summer at their Cape Cod house, where their daughter, Nancy, was born.

  After packing up their apartment and putting things in storage at the gallery, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe headed for Lake George. Once settled, Stieglitz adopted a regimen of rowing more than three hours at a stretch, and O’Keeffe threw herself into organizing the cleaning and painting of the farmhouse, planting the garden, weeding, and watering.

  But her feeling of well-being was brief, as she suffered an attack of rheumatism in her right hand that prevented her from painting. And an unusual lump in her breast was bothering her.

  When Lee arrived, he was alarmed by O’Keeffe’s symptoms. In the middle of August, she was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where the lump was removed. It turned out to be a benign tumor. Her first experience of undergoing anesthesia had such an impact that she attempted to portray the sensation in Black Abstraction. An aureole of infinite black surrounds a pinpoint of light, the last thing that she saw before becoming unconscious. At the base of the picture is the vague shape of a bent arm.

  A forty-year-old, childless woman with an elderly husband, O’Keeffe had experienced her first brush with mortality. It was a glancing blow, but it succeeding in getting her attention and resetting her priorities: her need for freedom, time, and space for work. The operation left her depressed, so much so that she forgot the survey of her work being held that summer at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She was reminded when artist Frederick Creighton Wellman wrote her a letter of appreciation on July 27. After complimenting her “fearless clarity of vision,” he said, “You have wide movements of color forms which give me a sense of that peace-in-intensity which I have sought in my own life and work. . . . You do what is your own and that . . . is significant to painting and to our time.”10 The effusive letter, signed with the pseudonym of C. Kay Scott, was presented in its entirety in the catalogue for her 1928 show.

  After she recovered from the surgery, O’Keeffe warmed up with a few painting exercises: modest still lifes of grapes on white plates, a pink daisy with an iris, a yellow peach wrapped in white tissue paper, and Peach And Glass—a vibrant fruit placed on a clear dish with white glass. Dark Iris is a long green stem topped with a helmet of gray and black.

  O’Keeffe was reviewing what she had learned from Dow about working in series and the placement of the object in space. When she recovered fully, she dedicated herself to the calla lilies. Undoubtedly thinking about the tall, narrow format of Japanese ink painting, she completed a 42 ×16-inch canvas of two yellow flowers called Yellow Calla. A single yellow calla was painted with its distinctive wing-shaped leaf. A diminutive close-up of the yellow cup surrounded by swirls of green, Yellow Calla Lily—No. 3, was given to her sister Ida. She gave her husband the up-close view of an ivory calla against a black ground, Calla Lily for Alfred. She returned to the white palette in a grand version of the flower against a background of gray and white fabric: White Calla Lily.

  As she had with the callas, O’Keeffe proceeded serially with roses. White Rose with Larkspur No. 1 and White Rose with Larkspur No. 2 both explore the relationships between each delicately shaded petal in ivory and baby blue. White Rose—Abstraction with Pink loses the form of the flower in swirls of blush and pearl. Abstraction White Rose dissolves into a whirlpool of cream and black. (Another painting, known as White Rose Abstraction, appears to be a source of energy surging around a tiny bulb and was later retitled Electric Light.)

  Returning to the format of 36×30 inches, O’Keeffe painted exquisite individual flowers in the summer of 1927. Red Cannas features petals that fill the canvas, a devilish companion to the angelic White Pansy, which features ice-colored petals surrounded by tiny flowers of pale blue. Purple Petunias is an eruption of royal color accented by veils of fiery red. A pair of highly detailed charcoal drawings and two tiny oil studies of pink and scarlet poppies led to the slightly large Oriental Poppies, a pair of ruby and citrine blooms huddled so closely together that it is impossible to discern top from bottom, an effect that allowed for the painting to be exhibited vertically or horizontally.

  On a more moderate scale, Dark Iris No. 2 enlarges and abstracts the ruffled edge of the petals and the mysterious dark center of the flower. The forms are further abstracted in a sensual pastel, Dark Iris No. III, which was bought by Rosenfeld. O’Keeffe used pastel to execute her delicate Pink Sweet Peas.

  As usual, various members of the Stieglitz family and their friends were in more or less constant residence at The Hill. Rosenfeld was extolling the glories of his trip to Taos. Resignedly, O’Keeffe wrote, “It rains and rains—so that when it stops—one has a mania to spend all ones times turning the house hold goods such as mattresses and pillows and blankets in the little sun that stingily shows its face.”11 Of two landscapes that she painted, The Red Hills with Sun appears to yearn for the heat and hues of the Southwest.

  In September, O’Keeffe found friendship in the younger generation: Georgia Engelhard, Selma’s son William Schubart, his wife Dorothy, and their daughter, seven-year-old Diana Schubart. One night, they all hid in The Shanty for a clandestine drinking session—Stieglitz did not drink and disapproved of it. An intoxicated O’Keeffe led them to steal the plaster bust of Judith—an object of pride in the Victorian decor of Oaklawn—and bury it so effectively that it was never found. According to Diana, it was O’Keeffe’s idea. “There was a fuss about it,” said O’Keeffe. “But it’s still underground.”12

  Later that fall, O’Keeffe did a little unauthorized remodeling. “I took the roof off part of the porch to give Stieglitz more light for his work, and it caused an uproar,” she recalled.13 Over the years, she steadfastly applied her own aesthetic to the musty interiors of The Hill until the farmhouse walls were painted her signature light gray and all shades and curtains had been stripped from the windows.

  After the family and visitors had returned to the city, O’Keeffe wanted to stay at the farmhouse alone to continue painting. She finished two small studies of skunk cabbage, a tiny abstract oil based on seaweed, a chaotic portrait of a tree with jagged red leaves titled Red Maple, and two paintings of burgundy and tan leaves, Autumn Leaf II and Large Dark Red Leaves on White.

  The first week of November Stieglitz and O’Keeffe returned to the Shelton, where they took an apartment on the thirtieth floor with windows offering views in four directions. In all, they had spent only seventeen days alone that summer. “If only people were trees, I might like them better,” she complained.14

  Painter Gifford Beal, with the backing of patrons, opened the nonprofit Opportunity Gallery that fall in the Art Center, at 65 East Fifty-sixth Street. O’Keeffe’s former teacher Alon Bement acted as director, and artists were invited to be guest curators. O’Keeffe joined a group she once would have seen as mentors—Walter Pach, John Sloan, Rockwell Kent, and Robert Henri—along with Demuth and Allen Lewis, to select work for an exhibition. Opening in mid-December, the show included paintings by O’Keeffe’s sister Ida, who had been working diligently for the past two years, and Helen Torr, who had married Dove. McBride reviewed the show favorably in the Sun, p
rivately telling O’Keeffe that he liked her sister’s things best.

  Still cross with Stieglitz over the disclosure of the prices he’d paid, Duncan Phillips boycotted the Marin show in November and had planned on staying away from Dove’s show in December. Anticipating disaster, Stieglitz invited Phillips to the gallery only to be told that a visit was “out of the question” unless Stieglitz apologized. On Christmas day, the wily Stieglitz wrote that he would apologize if he knew what he had done. Phillips finally let the matter drop, and purchased Dove’s assemblage of sand, cloth, and wood on metal called Huntington Harbor. But Phillips was not an avid fan of the new work and wrote to Dove warning him to stick to painting.

  The birth of her daughter Nancy did not cause Dorothy Norman to forget about Stieglitz, and in November she returned to The Room. This time, Stieglitz’s conversation with her went beyond the purely professional. With the shocking candor that women seemed to find irresistible in him, Stieglitz asked about Norman’s marriage, her sexual relationship with her husband, and whether she had enough milk to nurse her new baby before brushing his finger against the tip of her breast.

  Norman was seduced by the daringness of his remarks and this gesture. Fifty years later, an indignant O’Keeffe recalled, “She was one of those people, who adored Stieglitz, and I am sorry to say he was very foolish about her.”15

  As Stieglitz warmed to his latest infatuation, O’Keeffe was sent back to the hospital. Instead of celebrating New Year’s Eve, she underwent an operation on December 30 to remove another lump from her breast. Once again, the cyst turned out to be benign, but more tissue had to be removed and her recovery was painfully slow.

  Just before her breast surgery, O’Keeffe began painting East River No. 1, the view from their apartment, Room 3003 on the thirtieth floor of the Shelton. The industrial buildings are, as they had been in previous versions of the scene, silhouetted against the near bank of the river, with the far band shrouded in steam and smoke from the factories. This version, however, presents the sun in a halo of light, casting pronounced beams of white onto the river, where they become vibrant orange reflections. This is a more transcendental interpretation of what O’Keeffe had previously represented as a sour and unpromising scene, possibly revealing the artist’s relief at surviving both tumors and surgery.

  After the surgery, O’Keeffe was in too much pain to attend the January 9 opening of her exhibition. Among the forty-one paintings, her powerful black and white abstractions and gray views of the East River were balanced by the scintillating color of her flowers.

  Critics seem baffled as to how O’Keeffe could keep up with the challenge of presenting a top-notch body of work year after year. Citing her western fantasy of the red hills, her crinoline rose abstraction, and her views of the Shelton, McBride opined that she was better suited than most “to this open progress toward fame. She seems to be unflustered by talk, to be unaware of much of the talk, and to pursue her way in calmness toward the ideal she clearly indicated for herself at the beginning of her career.”16

  Always amused by McBride, O’Keeffe penned a thank-you note and enclosed two hundred dollars. McBride chose to see this as an innocent act, rather than a bribe, and rejected her donation. “It was noble and beautiful of you to do it, my dear O’Keeffe, but I’m not sure it was noble of me to accept. . . . Also, I insist I’m not really hard-up and have about all that is good for me to have.”17

  Her show remained up through the end of February and garnered a review in Henry Luce’s recently launched weekly news magazine, Time. The unidentified writer reviewing the show found the paintings pleasant, if difficult to write about, while noting with surprise that O’Keeffe did not own a fur coat.

  By the middle of February, O’Keeffe had recuperated sufficiently to be brought to her show, wearing a plain black cloth coat. It was there that she first met Dorothy Norman. “I never did like her, from the very beginning,” she said later. “She had a lot of money. . . . I think if it hadn’t been for the money, he would never have noticed her.”18

  O’Keeffe, of all people, knew that Stieglitz did not crave money; he craved unwavering devotion. O’Keeffe’s devotion was clearly wavering.

  Stieglitz made the introduction to O’Keeffe by way of Norman’s involvement with the Civil Liberties Union. In an attempt to put this interloper in her place, O’Keeffe questioned why she wouldn’t support the efforts of the Woman’s Party and stop all this other “nonsense.” Norman coolly replied, “Other causes interest me more.” Although she was a dedicated supporter of liberal causes, and aided Margaret Sanger in the founding of the Planned Parenthood Association, Norman did not ally herself with feminism as a cause, and openly disapproved of O’Keeffe’s unwillingness to be called “Mrs. Stieglitz.” Though she did not purchase anything at the show, after meeting O’Keeffe, Norman pointedly made a generous donation of one hundred dollars to the gallery’s rent fund. She also borrowed Stieglitz’s camera and under his guidance took the installation photographs that document the show.

  Murdock Pemberton had written in The New Yorker that O’Keeffe’s views of the East River were composed in “three tones of gray and yet we have seen thousands of pictures that did not contain one tenth the color.” Encouraged by such praise, she reprised the subject on a 30 × 48-inch canvas, East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel, a scene photographed by Stieglitz in 1926. Eliminating the mists of earlier pictures, she detailed the rooftops, smokestacks, and the boats powering along the river, with a clear view of the buildings on the opposite bank. A smaller version of the scene was titled River, New York. She also painted Ritz Tower, a black edifice tapering at the top, with golden windows, streams of clouds, and a moon in the night sky.

  While O’Keeffe was painting the city, Stieglitz was working on a novel scheme to promote his wife’s work. Two months after her exhibition closed, he sent a letter to the editor of The Art News announcing that six of her calla lily panels from 1923 had been acquired by a wealthy collector, who chose to remain anonymous, and were being shipped to his home in France. “She is receiving—don’t faint—$25,000 for them,” he wrote. “I can hardly grasp it all. Still I hate to see two of the panels lost to the U.S.” Without a trace of irony, he added, “Many youngsters . . . used to play hookey from school in order to come to The Room to see the O’Keeffe lilies. They went so far as to suggest to the Fathers to acquire them for the church!”19

  It could hardly have been a coincidence that the same day this letter was sent the New York Times ran a small story on the sale. Twenty-five thousand dollars was a hefty sum, approximately two hundred thousand dollars today, and could have purchased as many as twelve of O’Keeffe’s paintings, according to prices for the 1928 exhibition. The only comparable sale of an American artist’s work at that time was the sale of thirty-two John Sloan paintings to an unknown collector for forty-one thousand dollars.

  The sale soon made its way to the headlines of the tabloid press. The New York Evening Graphic published O’Keeffe’s photograph alongside the headline “She Painted the Lily and Got $25,000 and Fame for Doing It.” Expressing astonishment at the unfashionably long skirts worn by the artist, the writer exclaimed, “Not a rouged, cigarette smoking, bob-haired, orange-smocked Bohemian but a prim ex-country schoolmistress who actually does her hair up in a knot is the art sensation of 1928!”20

  The anonymous buyer turned out to be Mitchell Kennerley.

  A document in Stieglitz’s handwriting, dated April 9, 1928, and signed by Kennerley and O’Keeffe, stated that the gallerist bought from the artist four small pictures of calla lilies, two oils, and two pastels for five thousand dollars and two larger oils of calla lilies for twenty thousand dollars, to be paid in quarterly installments. The agreement concluded with the ominous warning: “Georgia O’Keeffe will not give to anyone soever name of purchaser until released by Mitchell Kennerley. Mitchell Kennerley agrees not to sell or allow paintings to be sold during his lifetime.”21

  Ultimately Kenne
rley assumed that his wealthy lover, Margery Durant Campbell Daniel, daughter of the former president of General Motors, William C. Durant, would pay for the lily pictures upon receiving her divorce in Reno. Kennerley himself was getting divorced and was plagued by outstanding debts. In January, he had been forced to sell the Anderson Galleries to Cortland Field Bishop, the owner of the American Art Association. Kennerley was kept on as Anderson Galleries president, and the lease was held in his name. He hoped to solve his financial worries via matrimony, then either buy the galleries back from Bishop or retire to his native England.

  From the Sherry-Netherland apartment that Kennerley shared with Daniel, nearly five months after the panels were said to be in France, Kennerley wrote Stieglitz, “The lilies are in this room except for the two [Daniel] brings from Reno. . . . She wrote me about them. They gave her so much.”22

  Apparently neither the lilies nor Kennerley gave Daniel enough—she called off the marriage and the purchase. Possibly, she realized that the prices had been hiked, and that twenty-five thousand dollars was double the going rate for a group of O’Keeffe’s paintings. A year later, Daniel married a man described by the New York Daily Mirror as “younger and handsomer” than Kennerley, who went bankrupt in 1930 and returned to Europe, far from his creditors. Quietly, he made payments on the pictures until 1931, when he had to return the two large lilies and the painting of hickory leaves to Stieglitz.

  Stieglitz had engineered so much advance publicity that, even after Daniel’s refusal, the hoax had to be perpetuated and camouflaged. O’Keeffe was deluged with requests for interviews from reporters and was forced to defend this travesty to the Brooklyn Sunday Eagle’s Lillian Sabine, who noted that O’Keeffe was barely cordial, didn’t smile, and brushed aside questions with the comment, “Oh, that doesn’t make any difference.” Asked whether the story about the twenty-five thousand dollars was true, O’Keeffe replied, “Oh, yes, that’s true. But the story sounds as though I had just been painting a little while.”23