At the time, in Riverside Park and Central Park, there were Hoovervilles, cities of homeless families squatting in housing made of packing boxes and scrap metal named for Herbert Hoover—the president who denounced the notion of the dole yet seemed incapable of bringing back prosperity. In 1931, it was reported that twenty thousand Americans had committed suicide, far more than the number who killed themselves after the crash of 1929. The Stieglitzes’ fortune, though modest, was secure. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were protected from the suffering of the common man.
From their apartment high above the city, Stieglitz did not join the legions of photographers documenting people in despair and ruin from the Depression. Instead, he photographed the changing skyline, as he had done since 1915, when he took pictures from the windows of 291. His earlier, nostalgic photographs documented old brownstones in the process of being cleared away to make room for new skyscrapers or horse-drawn trolleys being replaced by streetcars. The 1930 photographs concentrated on the forbidding cranes and scaffolding signaling the inexorable erection of the metropolis and the rooftops of great luxury hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria, the Pierre, and the construction of Rockefeller Center.
In April, still disturbed by her brother’s death, attacks from outspoken Leftists, and ongoing concerns about her husband and Norman, O’Keeffe opted for a few weeks away from New York. She went to Maine where “each day is a different soft color—.”
In Maine, O’Keeffe spent the first two hours of the day walking along the beach, collecting her shells and stones, and returning to paint what she called “queer little centerless paintings.” Once again, she was fascinated by the clam shells. She painted the inside of one shell so that the edges of the calcium surface ran off the edge of the canvas. In both Clam Shell and Inside Clam Shell, her focus lay on the cracks and ridges, which she rendered in various shades of off-white.
In the evenings, O’Keeffe lay on the floor staring into a crackling fire. “Looking into it makes me feel almost as satisfied and quiet as lying out naked in the Taos sun,” she sighed. “And so it goes—for a heartless wretch like me.”10
O’Keeffe’s odd self-appraisal as heartless wretch cuts to the core of her conflict. Throughout her correspondence, she expresses little bitterness toward Stieglitz and constant recriminations toward herself as being self-interested, independent, and inadequately concerned with Stieglitz’s needs. It is as though the incisively modern woman who confronted Gold in debate was fighting with an old conviction that she must behave according to the traditional role of wife, whose needs remain subservient to her husband’s.
Despite her husband’s adultery, O’Keeffe felt guilty about her sojourns to solitude. As she told Dodge Luhan, “I feel I have two jobs—my own work—and helping him to function in his way.”11 Yet she wanted to accept Dodge Luhan’s invitation to return to Taos that summer.
In her inimitable manner, Dodge Luhan had apologized for accusing O’Keeffe of having an affair with Luhan. “I can’t imagine how you can go on holding a resentful attitude for years!” she wrote. “I told you I was jealous of you once—and that I was sorry I acted as I did—isn’t that clear?”12 When Stieglitz gave O’Keeffe his blessing for the trip west, she was relieved. “It is almost as though Stieglitz makes me a present of myself in the way he feels about it,” she sighed.13 Clearly, she felt torn between her need to spend time alone and her desire to watch over him, especially with Norman’s growing presence at the gallery.
Before leaving, O’Keeffe opened the house at Lake George in May. Georgia Engelhard came up to help and to seek advice. She had dropped out of Vassar a year before graduating, in 1926, to pursue painting. With the Depression eroding her family’s finances, she was forced to give up her studio. As they planted the garden together, the younger woman confessed her doubts. Having painted alongside O’Keeffe as a teenager, Engelhard had picked up a style similar to O’Keeffe’s but couldn’t find expression of her own. But the older artist had fought too hard to hone her own technique to offer much in the way of guidance to her young protégé.
O’Keeffe was concentrating on completing paintings of apple blossoms. A small oil sketch and two large canvases, both titled Apple Blossoms, are covered with the pale pink flowers and green leaves. O’Keeffe also completed her last painting of calla lilies, a group of white funnels clustered together. In White Iris, she renders the open mouth and tongue of the flower in tender shades of pink, yellow, and lavender. Lake George Early Moonrise shows the familiar scene of lake, wood, and mountain vibrant with spring greens.
Walking in the woods near The Shanty, O’Keeffe came across dark purple and emerald clusters of wild jack-in-the-pulpits. As if tasting the proverbial Proustian madeleine, she suddenly remembered the despised high school in Madison and the teacher who used a jack-in-the-pulpit for the first assignment on drawing from nature. The startling clarity of the recollection moved O’Keeffe to produce a series of six paintings. The first three are realistically rendered, with the flower erect before an altar of leaves. The fourth features a blue-black spadix backlit with white light as though struck by divine inspiration. The fifth is a study of curving leaves with their strange shades of red, grape, and jade on a 48 × 30-inch canvas. The last is a tall, narrow view of the darkened spadix vibrating against a thin aubergine spathe, executed at such proximity that the flower itself has disappeared. When Dove saw the final picture that December, he joked with Stieglitz, “The bursting of a phallic symbol into white light may be the thing we all need.”14
O’Keeffe’s serial painting of the phallic and upstanding jacks derives from the photographic technique of focusing closer and tighter in each progressive shot. “I have a one-track mind,” she said, explaining her method of painting through serial representation to abstraction. In addition, she had sought out a series of flowers that could not be said to refer to female genitalia.
In his 1934 essay “The Age of Light,” Surrealist photographer Man Ray wrote, “An effort impelled by desire must also have an automatic or subconcious energy to aid its realization. The reserves of this energy within us are limitless if we will draw on them without a sense of shame or of propriety.”
Often, O’Keeffe’s paintings were rooted in desire, and though executed without shame, she remained embarrassed by comments that referred to their sexual sources. Despite her fond feelings for Mumford, she was discomfited when he called her “the poet of womanhood in all its phases: the search for the lover, the reception of the lover, the longing for the child, the shrinkage and blackness of the emotions when the erotic thread has been lost, the sudden effulgence of feeling, as if the stars had begun to flower, which comes through sexual fulfillment in love: all these elements are the subjects of her painting. . . . she has invented a language, and has conveyed directly and chastely in paint experiences for which language conveys only obscenities.”15
The pulsing jack-in-the-pulpits were called a “Love note painting for Alfred.” Knowing that she could not be as young or as rich as her competitor, O’Keeffe’s art was her trump card. Her paintings spoke to Stieglitz and seduced him in ways that Norman could not. Leaving them in his care, on June 17 O’Keeffe left for Taos.
Despite her high hopes, O’Keeffe found Taos less amusing than the previous year. Initially, she stayed at the Luhans and took her meals in town, but she soon moved to the historic Sagebrush Inn. The Strands, Marin, and Ansel Adams came to stay at Los Gallos. O’Keeffe joined them on drives to Santa Fe, stopping along the way to shoot at tin cans. Adams said he found O’Keeffe “not as frigid as last year.”16
Dodge Luhan was insulted that O’Keeffe wouldn’t stay at Los Gallos, so the artist agreed to visit on the evenings that she was not too tired from painting. The first night that she expressed interest, however, Dodge Luhan said, “You can’t come. Tony’s invited the peyote singers here and we have too many people.” When Luhan came in the Cadillac to pick her up, O’Keeffe informed him that she had been uninvited by Mabel. Luhan was loyal to O’Keeff
e. He retorted, “‘I go to lot of trouble, get peyote singers. She no invite my friend, I not go.’ He sat there all evening, rocking in the corner.”17 Fifty years later, O’Keeffe recalled this incident with obvious relish.
O’Keeffe later chuckled, “I enjoyed worrying her, I must admit. One of my favorite ways to worry her would be to leave her house after a party and pretend I’d forgotten to say goodbye to Tony, and then come back and say good bye to Tony.”18
Dodge Luhan loved a good argument. O’Keeffe stayed above the fray, but Dodge Luhan squabbled incessantly with her friends Brett and Frieda. After D. H. Lawrence died in 1930, Frieda returned to Taos with her husband’s ashes. She was so worried that either Dodge Luhan or Brett would steal them that she had them mixed with cement and built a memorial to Lawrence that still stands at Kiowa Ranch. Furious about her decision, Dodge Luhan and Brett boycotted the memorial service.
By the end of summer, O’Keeffe concluded that Taos society was too incestuous for her taste. She described the town as “so beautiful—and so poisonous—the only way to live in it is to strictly mind your own business . . . most of the human side of it isn’t worth thinking about.”19
The landscape was captivating. She returned to the Ranchos Church and completed two more paintings of the rear wall as well one of the front, with church towers and white crosses, Ranchos Church, Front. She painted Church Steeple, a white cross on a bell tower against an ultramarine sky. Abstraction, a painting of silvery angles, perhaps the edges of seaweed or agave plants, was sold to the Boston heiress Mary Wheelwright, who owned a ranch in New Mexico.
Around Taos, O’Keeffe made drawings of the pine-covered mountains, which she translated into paintings. Taos Mountain, New Mexico is hatched with planes of slate, sage, and pink, with mesquite scrub in the foreground, while Hills Before Taos is blanketed in soft green. But these paintings’ color schemes may have been too reminiscent of Lake George, and O’Keeffe drove further than she had the previous year to discover a natural palette that rivaled anything in her imagination.
Driving south to Alcalde, she found smooth, gray hills dotted with bits of scrub. New Mexico Landscape and Sandhills and three other paintings of the same subject isolate the hill on the canvas with a sliver of blue sky at the top. Grey Hills Painted Red covers the rolling, copper mounds with shadows from clouds. Sandhills with Blue River is an elongated composition, 36 × 16 inches, of pink-tinged, barren hills fronted by a tiny pool of blue reflecting the thin line of sky.
O’Keeffe visited Alcalde’s H & M Ranch, owned by Marie Tudor Garland, one of the wealthy easterners who had settled in New Mexico. A Radcliffe-educated Bostonian, she was married to filmmaker and photographer Henwar Rodakiewicz. The couple had befriended O’Keeffe on their sojourn to the Grand Canyon two years earlier. A poet and painter, Garland had written about the spiritual life in her Hindu Mind Training of 1917 and The Winged Spirit of 1918. O’Keeffe found Garland, who pursued living simply and in tune with nature, a sympathetic character.
The H & M Ranch was surrounded by different landscape: The red and gray wrinkled hills are set against the background of azure and ebony snow capped mountains in Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico and Out Back of Marie’s I. O’Keeffe painted three more versions of that landscape, as well as a watercolor, contrasting the red rock against the black. Dark Mesa with Pink Sky so pleased her that she wrote, “This is a very good one. The mountain is a very dark rich green—Hills have earth red in them—sky pale pink.”20
Traveling north past Española, towards Abiquiu, she found hills that came to sharp points at the top, which she painted in light gray in New Mexico Landscape. She drew a sketch of similar hilltops, then painted them in tones of tan and brown in Toward Abiquiu, N.M. Discovering the outskirts of the red rock area, she painted Red Hills Beyond Abiquiu, filling the canvas with masses of deep russet tones.
Returning to Taos, O’Keeffe painted the mountains behind Dodge Luhan’s house in Rust Red Hills. Another trip to Bear Lake inspired a picture of burgundy hills against an orange sky and a black lake, Mountain at Bear Lake—Taos, and another rendition of the silvery trunk of the dead tree against a nocturnal forest, Bear Lake, New Mexico.
O’Keeffe’s enthusiasm can be measured directly against her output. Over the course of three months, finishing approximately two paintings a week, she completed twenty-two paintings of the landscape, as well as more than a dozen pictures of churches, crosses, and flowers.
In addition to her paintings, she filled sketchbooks with drawings of iris, lily of the valley, callas, and freesia, each precisely and carefully detailed in pencil and sometimes touched up with watercolor. Although some were done at Lake George, she completed many large flower paintings, including vertical and horizontal versions of a frontal hollyhock blossom, Black Flower and Blue Larkspur and Black Hollyhock Blue Larkspur. She copied a fabric flower for the luscious White Calico Rose. (Stieglitz had ridiculed O’Keeffe the previous summer about spending more time enjoying herself than painting. He let her go to New Mexico this summer with the proviso that she return with more paintings. He told her to get “100% or more out of her opportunity.”)21
By the end of August, Stieglitz admitted, “Am ready for her coming—am also ready in case she postpones the returning. I’m ready for almost anything.”22 He kept himself busy perfecting his miniature golf game, beating his previous record by three points. He read Santayana and the Bible. Using older negatives, he made new prints and sent them to the Davidsons.
On September 4, O’Keeffe returned to Lake George. “Such a whirl wind of coming and going Stieglitzes you never saw—The last got off this morning—Tho there is a rumor of the fair Selma returning from Canada with many small bottles tucked in her belt.”23
The usual atmosphere at The Hill was heightened by housekeeper Margaret Prosser’s drunken husband, Frank. O’Keeffe was leery of his unpredictability. She prepared herself. “I’ll not have a drunken man disturb my world, and keep my boots on so that in case he comes I can jump over the front porch rail and run—and that way I feel safe,” she said.24
For O’Keeffe, there was only one reason to return to Lake George: “Whenever I come back to Stieglitz, I always marvel to see how nice he is. . . . There is something about being with Stieglitz that makes up for landscape.”25
Stieglitz, who now considered himself a veteran of air travel, introduced O’Keeffe to this fresh perspective on the landscape. After taking her up in a plane, she admitted, “It is quite a sight from the sky—I sat in a cold sweat—he perfectly unconcerned—He is pretty smart.”26
Stieglitz made portraits of his wife using the artifacts that she had shipped back from New Mexico. In four pictures, she is wrapped in a white-and-black-striped Navajo blanket, at times staring into the distance. In others, she is posed in the window of The Shanty holding up a cow skull. Stieglitz made three photographs of the horse skull caressed by her hands. They are affectionate documents of O’Keeffe’s latest concerns—which Stieglitz viewed as eccentric. Little did he realize that she would pursue painting the bleached bones for the next twenty-five years. She thought the bones were “as beautiful as anything I know.”27
Despite these gestures of mutual affection, their problem—Stieglitz’s affair with Norman—had not been resolved.
By the fall of 1930, Norman was pregnant with her second child, and Stieglitz made no attempt to conceal his concern for her welfare, suffering sympathy cramps and openly wondering if the child could be his. In early October, the forbearing Edward Norman wired him that his wife had given birth to Andrew Edward Norman and was doing beautifully. Stieglitz immediately went to New York to visit Norman, returning to Lake George for a week with O’Keeffe before the start of the gallery season.
Although Stieglitz continued to maintain that Norman was merely a patron, O’Keeffe no longer considered their relationship a dalliance. It was a love affair, and a painful, irrefutable fact. She confessed to Brett, “The vision ahead may seem a bit bleak but my feeling
about life is a curious kind of triumphant feeling about—seeing it bleak—knowing it so—and walking into it fearlessly because one has no choice—enjoying one’s consciousness.”28 She enjoined Brett, who was grieving Lawrence’s death, to take solace the only way she knew how. “You had better dig into the work,” O’Keeffe wrote. “It is all that is, really.”29
XI
Despite her new maternal responsibilities, Norman soon returned to her position at the helm of An American Place, where she renegotiated the lease, paid the bills, and maintained the correspondence. Stieglitz still managed sales. Each month, O’Keeffe made an appearance at the gallery, but only to hang the shows.
The title of her own January 18 exhibition, “Recent Paintings: New Mexico New York, Etc. Etc.,” focused on O’Keeffe’s travels. Her jack-in-the-pulpits made a powerful impression as a series, but she chose not to hang them together, interspersing them instead among the sharp light and dark abstractions and the landscapes of rolling red hills and black mountains. The most realistic of the jack paintings was hung between two landscapes of the gray hills near Alcalde. Two vertical paintings of dead gray trees flanked her horizontal picture of Bear Lake.
On February 13, near the closing date of the show, Norman wrote O’Keeffe an astonishing letter. Perhaps the letter was meant to establish some sort of rapprochement, but it could only have caused further irritation. Norman began by confessing that she had long wanted to write to O’Keeffe but that “something has always gotten in the way.”
Full Bloom Page 37
