O’Keeffe downplayed the purchase price of the lilies, stressing the years of hard work and many paintings that had preceded this work. “The notion that you can make an artist overnight, that there is nothing but genius, and a dash of temperament in artistic success is a fallacy. . . . [Artists] have to be trained, and in hard school of experience.”24
Apparently, O’Keeffe was not so disturbed by the story of the callas that she developed an aversion to painting them. She probably knew that the fiction perpetuated in the newspapers would motivate certain collectors. The hard school of experience had taught her to capitalize on publicity, no matter how unwanted. Within six months of this incident, O’Keeffe painted a fresh crop of calla lilies. Red backdrops were concocted for a single calla and a pair of callas intertwined as though standing before a leafy altar. The latter, Calla Lilies on Red, was sold to her sister Anita Young. Two more pairs of callas were nestled together with a focus on the interior of the spathe. Two Calla Lilies on Pink remained in the artist’s personal collection. Calla Lilies with Red Anemone was painted on an outsized canvas of 48 × 30 inches. Calla, the interior of a single bloom, and Calla Lily on Grey emphasize the sculptural shape of the flowers.
Still, O’Keeffe had to contend with the presence of Norman, whose obsession with Stieglitz was not slowed by the introduction of his wife. By the middle of April, Norman could not spend more than three days away from him. The day after the article on O’Keeffe and the lilies appeared in the New York Times, Norman wrote to Stieglitz, “I want to incorporate knowing you into my life . . . if you do want any help—I’m just aching to give it. I love what you’re doing. I feel it, and I’d love to help.” He invited her to come to The Room any time, all the time. “With me all people can be themselves—if they so choose,” he wrote.25
Taking him at his word, Norman returned to the gallery daily and began taking notes as Stieglitz answered her many questions. He gave her copies of Camera Work and recounted his tales of working with the pictorialist photographers and European moderns. Although he rarely gave away his work, he made her a gift of one of his first photographs of clouds. “I have communicated with greatest clarity in my Songs of the Sky,” he told her. “In reality my photographs are not of sky, or clouds, but of life. Art is rooted in life and life believes in life.26
(The cloud prints seem to have moved viewers in profound ways. On December 28, Stieglitz gave a similar photograph to Anita Pollitzer as a wedding gift. She had married Elie Charlier Edson, an entertainment publicist in Chicago. She thanked him, saying, “I brought my Cloud in the suitcase. For the first time literally Mr. Steiglitz [sic] I understand why you called it Equivalent. I feel knowing & the clouds have helped me appreciate life.”)27
Since Norman was frequently at The Room, she met other members of the Stieglitz circle, and developed lasting friendships with Marin and the Lachaises. She introduced her husband to Stieglitz and the artists, but Edward could not appreciate or share in her fascination. He was more concerned with issues pertaining to economic and social reform. “It didn’t arouse him the way it did me,” she recalled. “I found that period absolutely riveting. The new music, new art, new poetry, all the arts were being renewed and I found that terrific because it changed life itself.”28
Nor did Norman’s wealthy in-laws understand her obsession. Edward Norman’s parents repeatedly offered her gifts of jewels and furs which she refused. When she asked for money to buy art from Stieglitz, they turned her down. When Norman was given some money as a birthday present from her father-in-law, she promptly bought a small figure of a nude woman by Gaston Lachaise. Her sister-in-law covered it with newspaper. Listening to her earnest if youthful complaints, Madame Lachaise sniffed, “My dear, rest assured that if I were offered an ermine wrap or a Matisse, I’d choose the ermine wrap.”29
Norman’s persistence inevitably paid off with Stieglitz. In 1928, the adoring student conquered her susceptible teacher. One afternoon at the gallery, she confessed, “I love you.” Stieglitz gathered her into his arms and kissed her as she had never been kissed before. Although Stieglitz was old enough to be Norman’s father, her feelings for him were not daughterly. Sixty years after their affair, Norman still considered him the love of her life. She described it in her memoirs: “The love of this sensitive, passionate man arouses me to perfect fulfillment. To have a complete erotic experience again and again is breathtaking, almost frightening in its intensity.”30
Unabashedly, Norman explained her love affair with the elderly Stieglitz. “He was a man of experience,” she said simply. “And most of my friends weren’t experienced in the reality of sex at any level. I don’t know anybody who was more sensitive and who cared about what a woman felt, the way he did. Most men, I think, or young men in America have no tradition of caring about what a woman feels. They are interested in their own feelings. For me, getting to know Stieglitz and having an intimate relationship with him, we went into everything and I felt so sorry for all the young women who had no way of developing. Any young woman would have been fortunate to have Stieglitz as a lover.”31
Asked about the regularity of her sexual relations with Stieglitz, she replied brightly, “As often as possible,” admitting that they made love sometimes several times during the week. Stieglitz was granted Edward’s permission to photograph his wife in the nude. When asked how she managed such a feat, she said, “It was always very complicated.” Edward never asked to see these nudes of his wife.32 His history of instability had progressed to a diagnosis of schizophrenia: his moodiness and violence were followed by bouts of self-reproach and remorse. Either he did not recognize the nature of his wife’s relationship with Stieglitz or he chose to ignore it.
O’Keeffe was not so blind to her husband’s nature. She knew about the frequency of Norman’s visits to the gallery and noticed the way she was getting to know all of her husband’s friends: Rosenfeld and Frank, Dove and Hartley. Everyone knew of Stieglitz’s flirtatious nature and undoubtedly saw the disaster that lay ahead. Elizabeth warned him not to indulge in the “stupidity” that had taken place with Beck, but he took no heed. He simply denied the affair, reminding everyone that Norman was married.
Still feeling drained from her surgery, distressed about the lies around the sale of the lilies, and suspicious about her husband’s affair with a twenty-three-year-old woman, O’Keeffe retreated to York Beach. Sleeping to the sound of waves slapping the beach, she enjoyed the fresh seafood dinners and soon felt like “quite a normal human being.”
“I loved running down the board walk to the ocean—watching the waves come in, spreading over the hard wet beach—the lighthouse steadily bright far over the waves in the evening when it was almost dark,” she recalled.33 She painted the lighthouse as a spot of white on a distant horizon of black, with the white foam of the wave surging along the sandy shore in Wave, Night (were the shape of the wave inverted, it would approximate that of Abstraction—White Hill, a snowy mound against a background of coal black). After only two weeks in Maine, she was annoyed when Stieglitz’s complaints and ailments forced her to return to New York. He had slipped on the floor and wrenched his back, then torn a ligament in his finger. He was unable to help with any of the packing for the summer move to Lake George. All of his close friends were used to hearing his laments, and even the serious ones were treated with a dose of sarcasm. Rosenfeld quipped, “Perhaps with his nervous system, the mere pain of a finger is a happy escape!”34
Now that their income was fairly steady, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz could afford additional staff. Margaret Prosser, a French-Canadian woman who as a teenager had served at Oaklawn, was hired as full-time housekeeper. Her son Frank Prosser Jr., nicknamed Bucky, remembered that as a young boy he regularly ran afoul of the artist. “Mr. Alfred always handled the help with compassion,” he recalled. “Georgia was a different temperament. She didn’t have the finesse.” He was around eight years old when she yelled at him for marking up one of her canvases with crayons. The following
year, he put O’Keeffe’s car keys in his pocket and went out for the day; “I was only a kid, but I remember, when I returned, she slapped me across the face.”35
In addition to the mixed blessing of the Prossers, Lee and Lizzie brought their cook that summer, since their kitchen had been installed at their new home, Red Top.
Confident that Stieglitz had ample care, after two weeks at The Hill O’Keeffe returned to York Beach, where she painted three small still lifes of seashells, including her first spiral-shaped nautilus in white against blue, Shell No. 1. She painted a clam shell with strands of green and brown seaweed and a heart-shaped open mussel, Shell I. The latter looks like nothing so much as an evil valentine, a possible metaphor for what she called her “black-hearted” disposition.
In July, Stieglitz pleaded poor health as an excuse not to accompany O’Keeffe on a long train trip to Madison, Wisconsin. It was her first journey back since her parents had made their ill-fated trip to Williamsburg in 1903. She spent time with her aged aunts, Ollie and Lola, both over eighty, and her sister Catherine, who lived in the small town of Portage. Memories washed over her as she passed the plains, fields, and barns familiar from her childhood.
Catherine drove her sister out to a local farm to paint. “The barn is a very healthy part of me,” O’Keeffe wrote later. “There should be more of it—It is something that I know too—it is my childhood.”36 Red Barn deviates from her previous barn pictures in the vivid persimmon color of the silos, stalls, other buildings under a clouded sky. Here they are shown close together as geometric lines and planes, as in the paintings of Edward Hopper. An extreme example of such composition is evident in Red Barn in Wheatfield, a 9 × 12-inch study that reduces the barn to a red pyramid in a field of gold.
With O’Keeffe away for three weeks, Norman received daily letters in Stieglitz’s unmistakable script. As he pasted newspaper clippings about his wife into scrapbooks, he complained to Norman, “Why do I do this? Merely to see thru’ something begun years ago.”37
Dorothy and Edward Norman had bought a house in Woods Hole, a village on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. After Norman’s father discovered the first letters Stieglitz sent to Woods Hole, he insisted that she burn them. But many more followed, which Norman managed to keep.
Stieglitz wrote to Norman that she was the only woman who understood him completely, and that he was counting the days when they could be together again. “I love you as you will never be loved again,” he told her. “And my love for you will bear fruit. . . .”38
When O’Keeffe returned to New York in August, Stieglitz noted without irony, “Georgia is more satisfied than in years. And that means more than anything to me. She shows it in every way. . . . Maybe I have had seemingly more time for her. I say seemingly for most of my time has been for ‘her’ ever since we have been together.”39 He hoped the warm feelings between them could be transported back to New York.
O’Keeffe’s outlook was less sanguine. Marie Rapp Boursault was in residence again (with the badly behaved “brat” Yvonne), as was Seligmann. Paul Strand was visiting, and O’Keeffe invited Beck, warning, “Don’t imagine there will be anything resembling quiet till the end of September so don’t flatter yourself that you can add much to the disturbance.”40 Over the past year, Beck and O’Keeffe had resurrected their friendship. In a gesture of goodwill, O’Keeffe had arranged for Beck’s pastels to be shown at the Opportunity Gallery in April 1928. Beck continued her warm correspondence with Stieglitz, but O’Keeffe no longer considered her a threat. Still, Beck declined her invitation to Lake George, instead visiting the Lachaises in Maine, where Hartley, Marin, Rosenfeld, and Jean Toomer were spending part of the summer.
That summer O’Keeffe completed a couple of very odd still lifes. Red Pepper, Green Grapes portrays a pepper on its side surrounded by green grapes on a white dish, in the manner of a turkey on platter. Plums in Dish depicts a footed white bowl with a serrated edge containing a mound of black ovals. The dish is viewed slightly below the edge of the brown table on which it rests, lending a sculptural and unreal aspect to the scene. Although both still lifes and seashell paintings were observed objects, O’Keeffe transformed them subtly, moving them from the sphere of representation to that of art, as pure shapes in color on canvas. Often, she began such experiments on a small scale, increasing their size in proportion to her confidence in them. The skunk cabbage that she had painted off and on for years in modest formats was resurrected that summer in a 32 × 17-inch canvas of emerald spires with a burgundy bud at the base.
During this hectic summer at The Hill however, O’Keeffe took on a new flower. In exquisite detail, she made a drawing of the delicate bleeding heart, then completed it as an intimate oil in mauve tones. Bleeding Heart is not one of her most dynamic flower paintings, but it is certainly one of her most blatantly symbolic: she wanted Stieglitz to stop seeing Norman.
During the first week of September, O’Keeffe climbed the Lake George tourist mecca, Mt. Prospect. Stieglitz declined, saying, “My heart has been raising merry hell the last week. . . . ” The following week, he suffered a severe angina attack that confined him to bed for three weeks.
O’Keeffe accepted her caretaking with resigned black humor. Her increasingly dependent husband now required an elaborate and nauseating regimen involving “strained spinach, peas, beans, squash—ground lamb and beef—strained this—five drops of that—a teaspoon in a third of a glass of water—or is it half a glass—pulse this—heart of that—grind the meat four times—two ounces—1 oz.—1⁄2 zwieback—will all those dabs of water make up two qts—is this too hot—that white stuff must be dissolved in cooler water—the liquid mixed with hot—castor oil every 15 minutes and so on—divide those 25—or is it 21 ounces into 5 meals—until the girl who helped me grind and measure and rub the stuff through the 2 sieves actually got hysterical laughing about it.”
She lamented to Florine Stettheimer, “I only wish it had happened some other time of year as this is my best time for painting.”
When O’Keeffe learned that Stettheimer had painted a portrait of Stieglitz, she queried, “He is so many contradictory things that I can’t help wondering what you chose to put down.”41
Stettheimer’s symbolic portrait fully represents Stieglitz’s tumultuous life. It portrays him in black and white to underscore his contributions to photography, wearing his cape and striding purposefully into Room 303. On either side of the canvas are two of his artists: Demuth, identifiable by his cane, and Baron Adolph de Meyer, recognizable from the fur cuff on his coat. Hartley and Strand are symbolically represented, while Dove leafs through a book. O’Keeffe’s profile is etched in white paint behind Stieglitz’s head, next to her name printed vertically and backwards, as it had appeared in Demuth’s poster portrait of her. There are references to the Saratoga racetrack and a view of Lake George copied from one of O’Keeffe’s paintings. Stettheimer told O’Keeffe that any accuracy was relative. “I don’t think I have painted your special Stieglitz—I imagine I tried to do his special Stieglitz—but probably only achieved my special Stieglitz.”42
Despite the many distractions of the summer, O’Keeffe painted two more grand renditions of the poppies. Both titled Red Poppy, one is set against a pale blue ground, the other against pale green and white. Each measures around 30 ×36 inches, but one is painted vertically and the other horizontally, and it is clear that O’Keeffe was playing with the ambiguous orientation she had discovered in her earlier paintings of poppies. She also completed a small study of a red canna in a white glass and a white rosebud on a soft blue ground.
She painted a single tree that fall, a swirl of white branches with golden veils called Last Yellow White Birch. But she returned to her studies of leaves on an expanded scale of 40 × 30 inches in 2 Yellow Leaves—which features two elm leaves atop one another. Anita Young bought Brown and Tan Leaves, a painting of a large beige elm leaf with a medium dark brown leaf standing, as though at attention, and a small dark leaf coming in from th
e right side.
Yellow Leaves with Daisy, a picture of fading and torn golden leaves with a bright young daisy at the base, may have been a more symbolic work, suggesting a May-December relationship. The question remains, whose relationship did it represent?
IX
“It is building step by step against great odds. It is much more difficult to go on now than it was before,” O’Keeffe said. “Every year I have to carry the thing I do enough further so that people are surprised again.”1
She confessed these unguarded remarks to a reporter at a time when her 1929 exhibition of thirty-five paintings, which ran from February 4 to March 17, was eked from her last reserves of creativity. On the back of the announcement sent to McBride, she scrawled, “The encouraging note I want to add is that I hope not to have an exhibition again for a long—long—long time.”2
Along with the calla lilies, cityscapes, and leaves of the previous year, O’Keeffe included an abstract painting of clouds above waves, Abstraction—Alexius, celebrating the birth of her younger brother’s first child, as well as an abstraction of burgundy, gray, and white plumes titled Abstraction No. VI. Yet the bulk of the work shown concentrated on relational compositions such as the cuddling calla lilies on folds of pink or the pair of small brown leaves atop a tan leaf.
The critics did not share O’Keeffe’s reservations. Pemberton called her Calla Lilies on Red “as exciting a painting as anything we have seen this season.” He quoted Hartley as saying that O’Keeffe was able to “catch red at the point where it turns into green.” Although he referred to the yellow hickory leaves with a daisy as her “favorite canvas,” he preferred her painting of the Ritz Tower.
McBride also singled out her callas for praise though he preferred the canvas of white flowers painted a yard wide; he considered the flowers Whitmanesque in their grand, American simplicity.
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