Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Stieglitz considered the summer months to have been some kind of emotional test. He had found support in friends like Kalonyme, Brett, and Strand, and had even confided in his wife’s sister Ida. But all of the details of his summer were to be kept from his wife. “Georgia knows nothing of what has happened. And I shall not be able to tell her. Nor talk of it to anyone. But it is all very fine because a focus within a sharp focus has evolved naturally within me.”49 Stieglitz’s utter inability to be open and honest with O’Keeffe (let alone faithful) would continue to undermine his marriage.

  McBride summarized the feelings of many in their immediate circle of friends when he said, “I buried my head in the sands and refused to hear any more evidence pro and con. I did not wish to be mixed up in the impending calamity.”50

  From Lake George, O’Keeffe wrote to thank Dodge Luhan for the gift of self-knowledge that came as a result of her four months in Taos: she had finally returned to the self that had blossomed years earlier in Texas. She was happy to be with Stieglitz, too. “It is wonderful to be back with my funny little Stieglitz,” she said.51 “I feel like water that has been much tossed about and is quietly, quietly settling and I like it.”52 Years later, as she looked back, O’Keeffe mused, “The relationship was really very good, because it was based on something more than just emotional needs . . . Of course, you do your best to destroy each other without knowing it.”53

  Despite being pleased to see Stieglitz, she was not pleased to read a story about herself by Robert Coates in the July 6 New Yorker. Much of the story was erroneous on account of Stieglitz’s mythologizing and manipulating during her absence. More than a decade had passed since O’Keeffe’s move to New York, and her reputation was based solidly on her own talent. Nonetheless, Coates presented her as an unschooled naif whose world had been entirely transformed by Stieglitz’s experience and sophistication. Despite her early study with Chase and Dow, her knowledge of Kandinsky, 291, and Camera Work, Coates wrote that when Stieglitz showed her drawings by Matisse and Picasso in 1917, “she was amazed to learn that others beside herself were trying to release design from the limitations of realism.” He added, “O’Keeffe, however, has not been able to escape the inference on the part of critics that a great deal of thought goes into the formulation of her paintings. As a matter of fact, the reverse is more nearly true.” O’Keeffe, who had fought so hard to establish her credentials as an artist and an intelligent individual, was besieged once more by old feelings of frustration, being summed up by a man and measured in terms of Stieglitz.54

  The few months in Taos, however, had lent her a fresh inner strength. Stieglitz sensed it, and took out his camera to add to her serial portrait. In these photographs, O’Keeffe is weathered, and her expression is independent, mischievous, and mature. She stands with her treasured car, a symbol of her newly won independence. She had practiced diligently to apply her skills in the big city. “If I am going to drive at all I want to be able to drive anywhere,” she said.55

  Charles Collier, son of John Collier, the commissioner of the Bureau of Indian affairs, drove O’Keeffe’s Model A from New Mexico to New York that fall. (Stieglitz knew Collier from Dodge Luhan’s Greenwich Village salon.) The threesome drove together to York Beach in good spirits. Stieglitz had taken some driving lessons from Lee’s chauffeur, but when he was permitted his turn in the driver’s seat, the Ford “ran away backwards.” Stieglitz grudgingly admitted that the incident might lead to more driving lessons.

  The trio arrived unannounced at the Schaufflers’ house on September 18. Rosenfeld was there, so they stayed for five days, and while there, O’Keeffe happily offered Stieglitz her form of a compliment: “I doubt if anyone at 65 ever set about so grimly and determinedly to rid self of so many idiosyncrasies as you have this summer.”56

  Returning from Maine, O’Keeffe found that her mementos of the Southwest had arrived in a barrel. Stieglitz complained about the charge of sixteen dollars C.O.D., but O’Keeffe ignored him and placed her cow skulls and fabric flowers as decorative vignettes around the farmhouse. Slowly, she incorporated them into her paintings. “My painting is queer but I feel sure it will come in time,” she wrote Brett.57

  Settling into the familiar routines around the farmhouse and Lake George, she took on subjects that Stieglitz had pursued in his photographs. Born of the welcome feelings that arose after returning home from her long trip, Farmhouse Window and Door is painted in shades of gray and black, as in a photograph. The Victorian molding over the door is framed by a window casement that is opaque. There is no view into the house or reflection of the outside world. This detail of domesticity is shut off, as though sealing away her emotional involvement from the farmhouse, the lake, and the Stieglitz family.

  When returning to some earlier themes, O’Keeffe now incorporated a more cheerful palette. Pink Abstraction, a rosy sphere split in two by sharp rods, features ripples of fuchsia, aqua, and yellow. Painting Lake George Barns, she used the light russet tones. Grey and Brown Leaves was somber, but she used magenta and taupe in Oak Leaves, Pink and Grey and chromium yellow and vermilion in a picture of wildly disarrayed oak and hickory leaves, titled My Autumn. Even the old tree is painted in stately ebony with gold accents, Black Maple Trunk—Yellow Leaves.

  Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were at the farmhouse alone when they heard, on October 24, Black Thursday, that the stock market had begun to collapse.

  Stieglitz told Norman, “even we with our small ‘investments’ are seriously affected,”58 but his annual income did not diminish so greatly as did the incomes of those who had invested for high stakes without a protective cushion of savings. With Stieglitz’s perverse disdain for the wealthy, he took moral comfort in the notion that the market correction taught lessons to the profligate and materialistic. At the same time, he mused, “With the smash up in Wall Street, I wonder how many people will be interested in ‘painting’ and ‘photography’ and in what I stand for.”59

  The crash did make a few conservative investors, including O’Keeffe’s brother-in-law Robert Young, much wealthier. In 1928, Young left a position as assistant treasurer of General Motors to pursue stock speculation. Selling short, he made a fortune in the 1929 crash. Two years later, he bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. The Youngs and their daughter Eleanor Jane, who lived in a Park Avenue apartment, leased the Vincent Astor estate in Newport for the summers. They later bought the elaborate “cottage” Fairholm and a mansion in Palm Beach. O’Keeffe’s large canvases were prominently and proudly featured in all of their grand residences.

  On November 7, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe returned to the city for the opening of the new Museum of Modern Art on the twelfth floor of the Hecksher Building on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. Stieglitz was critical of the rich matrons, such as Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Miss Lillie Bliss, and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan, who had funded an institution of modern art without his guidance, and he was hostile toward the museum’s trustees and toward the curator, Alfred Barr Jr., for their obvious interest in European modernism. But his sniping about the infant museum was brought to a halt that November—their second exhibition, Nineteen Living Americans, included O’Keeffe, Marin, and Demuth.

  Ever since the aptly named Intimate Gallery had been scheduled for the wrecking ball, and the inventory put in storage, Paul Strand and Dorothy Norman had pursued a new location with extraordinary dedication. Even when Stieglitz lost confidence, Norman convinced him that he could not give it up. Norman was fiercely determined to replace O’Keeffe as the spirit of the gallery, and therefore needed the gallery to exist.

  “The Room is an admission not of failure but of truth. Not of dilemma, not of compromise, but of a final realization of unashamed truth. . . . And you—you live Stieglitz. I really do love you—like nothing on earth. It is bigger than you can ever know,” she wrote. “And Stieglitz don’t try to hold back—I mean to protect me. . . . Don’t throw me overboard because you fear the boat will sink.”60 She assured him that d
espite her feelings for him, she understood that “the period of adjustment must be borne alone.”

  In an extremely brazen move, Norman had sent Strand to solicit three thousand dollars from her husband to finance the new gallery, to be called An American Place. By late fall, there were pledges totaling sixteen thousand dollars. The Strands had put up twelve hundred each; Jacob Strand and others supplied four thousand; there was additional six thousand from the Stieglitz family and Jacob Dewald.61

  Before the stock market crash, Stieglitz and Strand had looked at the Fuller Building, at 41 East Fifty-seventh Street, where many respected art galleries are housed today, but the landlord was asking a prohibitive seventy-five hundred dollars a year for three rooms. Strand finally found space on the seventh floor of a newly constructed office building at 509 Madison Avenue and Fifty-third Street. Beck had made up with Stieglitz, and the Strands rushed up to Lake George with the news in September. Instead of gratitude, Stieglitz felt a “morbid responsibility,” which brought on “resentments and recriminations.” At the same time, he saw an opportunity. He confided in Norman, “I told OK last night it is my wish to make the ‘young ones’ a real active part of this ‘new’ thing. So the Y.L. is to be of the Staff. She is already of the Room.”62

  Whether driven by genuine reluctance or influenced by his gentlemanly upbringing, Stieglitz offered to release the donors from their obligations in light of the recent stock market crash. But none resigned, and An American Place opened that December in the spacious and modern Suite 1710.

  The main room was some eighteen by thirty feet, with ten-foot-tall ceilings. The walls were painted white, the concrete floor was painted gray, and three large windows on the west wall were shaded to control light. Stieglitz installed bluish bulbs in the ceiling lights because he believed they most approximated daylight. Norman insisted that one small room be converted to a darkroom.

  The name of the gallery was quickly shortened by regulars to “The Place,” and it opened with a show of fifty watercolors by Marin, whose work had gained popularity since the MoMA show. Stieglitz printed a manifesto meant to contrast with their institutional stance. “No formal press reviews, no special invitations, no isms, no theories, no game being played.”63

  X

  One week into 1930, O’Keeffe’s brother Alexius passed away. The gas attacks that he had suffered during the war had so weakened his system, especially his heart, that he was unable to recover from a serious bout of influenza.

  At the time, most of O’Keeffe’s siblings lived nearby. Francis, Anita, and Ida were in Manhattan, and Claudia was in New Jersey. All were shocked by their brother’s sudden death, but O’Keeffe in particular was hit hard, having always considered Alexius a favorite.

  Initially, she was angry, writing her brother’s widow, Betty, “I can promise nothing—a painter’s life is at best precarious—and it costs me a great deal to live. I was sorry to see Alexius marry—I felt it would make trouble for you.”1

  Betty, who was pregnant with their second child, responded to this harsh letter, and O’Keeffe gave in to profound sadness. Demoralized and confused about her future with Stieglitz, she wrote, “I can not even say to myself . . . that the things that have hurt me most have been worth most to me. If I could say that for myself I might feel better about you and your sorrow—but I can’t. A great sorrow is a great experience—a life without it seems a pale and colorless thing to me—but I can not help feeling that a great joy is more to my liking.”2

  In the midst of mourning her brother’s death, O’Keeffe had to organize paintings for her forthcoming exhibition. Due to her ambivalence over her 1929 show, Stieglitz had not planned another. But when she laid out the New Mexico pictures, she felt confident in her work, and Stieglitz concurred. She told Beck, “I patted myself on the back and said to myself, not so bad—guess you’ve won again. It looked so good I called Alfred in to look at it. . . . He curled over in a chair—and looked as pleased and surprised as I felt. . . . Of course I can pick holes in it—but what of that—one can pick holes in anything.”3

  When the show opened at An American Place in February, the room looked like a private memorial for Alexius, with the abstract cloud painting O’Keeffe had painted for him and the four large pictures of wooden crosses from New Mexico. After the loss of her brother, the crosses took on additional import. O’Keeffe, who had attended Catholic school as well as regular mass with her father, had placed the traditional cruciform symbol of Christianity in a mystical landscape. The devotional atmosphere of her show was enhanced by the painting of the church with the cross and the three paintings of Ranchos de Taos Church.

  Transplanting southwestern crucifixes to the jaded East Coast was a tricky business. McBride guardedly praised what he called the “great ‘Parsifal’ cross.” Of her stay with the Luhans, he quipped, “Naturally something would come from such a contact. But not what you would think. Georgia O’Keeffe got religion. What Mabel Dodge got I have not yet heard.”4

  Stieglitz worried that some of the pictures in the show would prove either too daring or too provincial, especially the small paintings of santos like The Wooden Virgin, the porcelain rooster, or the pueblo village. Yet, Seligmann considered her personal reserve to be similar to that of Native Americans, writing, “Something of the aboriginal Indian soul . . . seems to have descended upon O’Keeffe.”5

  The show of twenty-seven pictures also included the symbolic New York, Night. From the north window of her apartment at the Shelton, O’Keeffe could see the Beverly Hotel, an Italianate high-rise with a Mediterranean tile roof and rose window. In 1927, Stieglitz had photographed it in daylight to contrast the historic architectural style with the new skyscrapers being erected in the distance. In New York, Night, O’Keeffe painted a nocturnal view of the same building with an emphasis on the red and yellow mosaic effect of glowing windows and the traffic signals on the avenue below. This gay and romantic view of darkened buildings and bright lights proved to be O’Keeffe’s last cityscape, a fond adieu to Manhattan and its memories. After her 1929 trip to New Mexico, she never again attempted to paint the city.

  Returning to the studio after her show, O’Keeffe painted two nonobjective works of startling simplicity: Black and White depicts a sharp white diagonal piercing the edge of a black oval, like a rocket shooting through the orbit of a planet on its trajectory through gray space. O’Keeffe claimed the painting was a message to a friend who never knew it was for him. Another version of the composition, Black, White and Blue, features a dark blue vertical bar and white aura behind the black oval.

  After the stock market crash, even the early months of the Depression were hard on those employed in fine art. Still, O’Keeffe’s work retained its popularity, and the Cleveland Art Museum bought her painting of the billowing white flower with the golden pistil from New Mexico for four thousand dollars. O’Keeffe told the director that the picture embodied something she had to say about “whiteness.”

  In contrast to O’Keeffe’s success, Dove sold none of the paintings from his April exhibition, so Stieglitz and O’Keeffe purchased several for their own collection and gave him a thousand dollars from the rent fund. Six months later, he was desperate, and wrote to say that he would take anything edible for his paintings. Stieglitz sent Dove a check.

  Since Stieglitz and O’Keeffe considered themselves long-time supporters of liberal causes, they were surprised to find themselves coming under attack from the growing Socialist movement. During the early 1930s, forces in favor of Social Realism—realistic portrayals of noble laborers and oppressive capitalists—were demanding political accountability in the arts.

  In March 1930, O’Keeffe agreed to debate Michael Gold, editor of the populist New Masses. The Brevoort bar in Greenwich Village was packed with true believers and curious idlers as Gold attacked the notion that art could be responsive only to itself. He felt that artists were obliged to depict the conditions of the oppressed. O’Keeffe coolly reminded him that all women were oppre
ssed and that her success was a symbolic victory for all women. Gold was programmatically Marxist, while O’Keeffe, largely inattentive to such theories, adhered to her belief in the individual struggle. “The subject matter of a painting should never obscure its form and color, which are its real thematic contents,” she said. “So I have no difficulty in contending that my paintings of a flower may be just as much a product of this age as a cartoon about the freedom of women—or the working class—or anything else.”6

  She defended her personal struggle:

  I have had to go to men as sources in my painting, because the past has left us so small an inheritance of women’s painting that has widened life. And I would hear men saying, “She is pretty good for a woman; she paints like a man.” That upset me. Before I put brush to canvas, I question, “Is this mine? Is it all intrinsically of myself? Is it influenced by some idea or some photograph of an idea which I have acquired from some man?” . . . I am trying with all my skill to do painting that is all of a woman, as well as all of me.7

  O’Keeffe’s exasperation with Gold’s politics was heightened by the fact that she, at least, had experienced the life of a poorly paid illustrator trying to make ends meet. She had never had the benefit of a government subsidy or a family inheritance; hard work had played a substantial part in her achievement. At the conclusion of the debate, O’Keeffe told Gold, “You know I think you are a nice boy all mixed up by a lot of prejudices, defenses and hatred. . . . We haven’t talked half enough about this. I think I’ll take you to see my show, and then bring you home to Stieglitz and dinner!”8

  Nonetheless, O’Keeffe remained annoyed with Regionalist painters like Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. Of the latter’s murals, she said, “Just the thought of it makes me tired.” She didn’t believe that the terrible conditions of the Depression could be alleviated by their representation in paint or photographs. Instead of joining the ranks of artists who depicted the worthy efforts of the working man or the struggling farmer, a year after her encounter with Gold, O’Keeffe painted a cow’s skull floating upon a field of red, white, and blue. “I knew that America was very rich, very lush,” she said. “Their idea of the American scene struck me as ridiculous. I started painting my skulls around this time.”9