Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  “Is it that you would not be soft in front of me? And it was the softness in you that I wanted to greet?” she asked. “All I wanted to say was I love the thing that preoccupies you and what you do with it,” she added. Norman blundered on, saying that she wanted to penetrate the shell that O’Keeffe used to protect herself.

  “I would say that you are preoccupied with the relationship of any two living forces which feel the necessity of merging with one another in order that they may attain fulfillment and you put down this life in terms of exactly why they never will merge. You are moved by their desire, and by the forces beyond their desire which make their meeting impossible. . . .” Then she cautioned, “There is only one God and only one Art.”

  Norman proceeded to analyze O’Keeffe’s work as a cosmic distillation of humankind’s yearning for the object of its desire, which is forever unattainable. “What you paint is the moment which is so sad that one cannot stand it, and so beautiful in its greatness beyond desire that one stands it and bows down before it, affirming it. . . . You are an artist—you are beautiful and so I love you. . . . If you do not . . . want to hear, it will make a perfect picture of one straight line approaching another—truly—and then the other line shooting off at a tangent.”1

  There is no record of O’Keeffe’s response to this letter. She must have shuddered at its impertinence, especially the way in which Norman seemed to be channeling Stieglitz’s own convoluted and moralistic writing style.2 Yet O’Keeffe, who often destroyed letters that she found compromising or offensive, kept Norman’s letter for the rest of her life.

  Spending each day in the gallery with Norman, Stieglitz was moved to attempt another serial portrait. His photographs of Norman reveal a soft-skinned young woman with round, dark eyes and a concerned expression. Over the next decade, he would make well over one hundred portraits of her, including many partial nudes taken of her in bed.

  The sixty-seven-year-old photographer no longer kept secret his admiration for his twenty-seven-year-old lover. He praised her accomplishments in front of friends, staff at the Lake George house, even O’Keeffe herself. The Y.L. was perfect in so many ways, but there was one missing component. Norman was not an artist. Stieglitz started to remedy that by giving her classes in photography, using his Graflex, and then buying her a camera of her own. Although she had photographed the occasional gallery installation with her inexpensive Kodak, Stieglitz taught her the craft and vision of fine art photography, reiterating his dictum, “Each time I photograph it is as though for the first time. Each time I photograph I make love.”3 Norman followed his advice and began taking pictures of Stieglitz.

  This time, O’Keeffe decided to fight back by seducing Stieglitz in her own way. For the first time in six years, she posed for him in the nude. He photographed her reclining and headless torso, unclothed, from the front and the rear. Her slim buttocks and thighs are cropped from waist to knees, emphasizing the eroticism of pure form. She must have forced herself back to the role of model knowing that, if she didn’t, Norman undoubtedly would.

  O’Keeffe did not waver from painting, however, and completed Green Gray Abstraction, based on her 1924 compositions of the vertical oval bisected by the center slit. The oval is a muddy gray with ripples of olive, ocher, and pewter running along either side.

  Despite the fact that her marriage was becoming unbearable, she could not bring herself to leave. Not wanting her to leave, Stieglitz kept her busy organizing the hundreds of paintings that were in storage. As he occasionally did, he sent some pieces to be sold by Edith Gregor Halpert.

  Halpert’s Downtown Gallery on West Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village showed folk art along with the work of Max Weber, Charles Sheeler, and Stuart Davis. When Charles Daniel closed his gallery in 1932, Halpert took on his artists, as she would eventually take on Stieglitz’s. (One of Halpert’s best clients was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who bought hundreds of pieces for the Museum of Modern Art.)

  In April 1931, O’Keeffe left for New Mexico, two months earlier than in previous years, returning to Alcalde, where she rented a cottage on the H & M Ranch from Garland. The Strands dropped by for a few days before heading off to Taos, and O’Keeffe teased, “Give Mabel a sharp catty remark if you can think of one.”4

  O’Keeffe knew that she required solitude. In the shadows of the violet Jemez Mountains, on broad gold and red plains, under a generous azure sky, she felt as though a tight metal band had been removed from her chest. The frantic, unpredictable nature of life lived at the whim of her unreliable husband was replaced by a serenity that recalled her unencumbered days in Amarillo and Canyon.

  The view from Garland’s ranch inspired Back of Marie’s No. 4, in which the green of cottonwoods along the river gives way to russet hills and onyx mountains. A tighter focus on the shapes of the mountains is titled Near Abiquiu, New Mexico. Of the mountains, O’Keeffe observed, “The reddish sand hills with the dark mesas behind them. It seems as though no matter how far you walked you could never get into those dark hills, although I walked great distances. . . . I was painting what I saw, as best I could.5 O’Keeffe also painted two small oils of an old adobe church. Another Church, New Mexico concentrates on the open door leading to the courtyard, where a tomb topped with a cross can be seen. She executed a small study of the church entirely in shades of white.

  Although she had a car, she indulged in hours of walking, taking a respite from the heat and dust by dunking herself in streams. “I’ve always liked to walk. I think I’ve taken a bath in every brook from Abiquiu to Española. Irrigation ditches are fine for bathing too,” she reported. “They’re just wide enough to lie down in.”6

  Another friend, Paul Jones, welcomed her back to New Mexico with a green and yellow kachina, an effigy of a nature deity made by the Pueblo tribe. O’Keeffe was sufficiently taken with the creature to paint a full-length study as well as a circular portrait of the doll’s head, which she framed in the cast-off chrome rim of an automobile headlight and called Paul’s Kachina. She told McBride that the kachinas possessed “a curious kind of live stillness.” She was impelled over the years to produce half a dozen “portraits” of them in paint and pencil.

  In a way, O’Keeffe was making “art about art,” drawing on Native American motifs as Hartley had done nearly twenty years earlier. Aside from the quirkly charm of their feathered tops and patterned body decoration, the kachinas symbolically represented the Native American gods of earth, sun, and rain. They resonated with her conviction that nature deserves reverence.

  Aside from these occasional visits with friends, O’Keeffe spent ten weeks largely on her own. In May, she drove through the northwestern part of the state and came across Plaza Blanca, the site the called “The White Place,” which later became the subject of many paintings.

  In June, she arrived in Taos and stayed for two weeks at what had come to be called “Mabeltown” before moving on to the nearby El Chamiso Lodge. During the day, O’Keeffe drove her Model A Ford across the high desert floor and up the remote mountainsides. She found that by removing the front passenger seat and turning the driver’s seat around, she had a makeshift easel. While seated in the back, even her 30 × 40-inch canvases would fit because of the car’s high top.

  This discovery led O’Keeffe to pursue plein-air landscape painting with fresh fervor, returning to watercolor for the first time since she had moved in with Stieglitz. Two untitled studies of the Taos landscape prove that during the last decade, she hadn’t lost her touch in limning the essence of a scene in just a few strokes. She also did an oil of mesquite bushes on the plains, Taos, New Mexico, and a picture of smooth angles and plains of copper, Bear Lake.

  South of Taos, she came upon the outskirts of Abiquiu. The cliffs rising up from the plateau were the colors of persimmon, banana, and cream. Compared to the gray hills of Alcalde or the ominous, jagged mountains of Taos, Abiquiu offered bizarre rock formations isolated in space. “It was the shapes that fascinated me, the shapes of the hi
lls,” she later recalled.7 “I think I never had a better time painting—and never worked more steadily and never loved the country more.”8 The Mountains, New Mexico fills the canvas with bulging heaps of the fiery clay dotted with tiny groves of sage green.

  Before coming to New Mexico in 1929, O’Keeffe had been mulling over the impact of the previous year’s exhibition. “I knew I must get back to some of my own ways or quit—it was mostly all dead for me,” she said.9 New Mexico changed any thought of quitting: It was here that O’Keeffe underwent a lasting transformation as an artist.

  In New York, she had proven that she could make paintings to sell and pay the rent, but consequently she had lost touch with the intensely personal and internal satisfaction that must accompany all serious art. Lawrence called New Mexico the “new continent of the soul.” It was there that O’Keeffe renewed her pursuit of personal meaning, though it may have been veiled from her immediate consciousness.

  The most personal picture that lodged itself in O’Keeffe’s mind the summer of 1931 was not the landscape but what covered it—the skulls and bones of animals strewn about the gritty desert floor. Thigh Bone with Black Stripe, which was the first of the series, is posed like a fossilized odalisque on her striped Navajo rug. Although the shadow cast by the bone indicates that it was conceived horizontally, O’Keeffe hung it vertically, confusing the way it is perceived. Her drawing of a jawbone led to a painting of the subject, Jawbone and Fungus.

  The bones, however, did not capture O’Keeffe’s imagination as completely as the skulls, which she began composing still lifes of in her New York studio that fall. Working from a bleached cranium that she had found at the Lawrence ranch, she completed first a drawing and then a painting of Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose. The odd choice of subjects occurred somewhat arbitrarily when O’Keeffe was rooting through her collection of cloth flowers. “You could buy artificial flowers in all the little towns . . . they were beautiful things, so simple, made from cloth. The pink rose was one of them. I had painted the skull before, and I remember standing in the apartment in New York thinking I had better do something with it before it gets beaten up. Just then, someone rang the doorbell.”10

  As she recalled elsewhere, “As I went to answer the door, I stuck a pink rose in the eye socket of a horse’s skull. And when I came back the rose in the eye looked pretty fine, so I thought I would just go on with that.”11

  O’Keeffe’s apparent insouciance reveals the light touch that she was bringing to these pictures. Shortly after Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose, she painted Horse’s Skull on Blue. Placing a cloth flower on the skull like a little hat, she painted Horse’s Skull with White Rose. In Cow’s Skull with White Calico Roses, she repeated the composition with flowers stuck behind the horn and under the nose of the cow’s skull. Like the grinning skeletons that donned sombreros around the Day of the Dead in New Mexico, these animal death heads appear to be staring out of the canvas with a sort of jaunty, gallows humor.

  While completing the picture of a bleached cow’s skull on a black pole against a sienna background, O’Keeffe mentally reviewed the shifting political realities of the New York art world. She decided to repeat the composition but with a background of azure folded into snowy white and buttressed on both sides with stripes of bright crimson. Cow’s Skull, Red, White and Blue is a startingly emblematic painting. Although the skull is considerably deteriorated around the snout, the brow above the eyes is creamy white and smooth. The entire skull is cracked down the center, a detail that was based less on observation than it was on O’Keeffe’s personal convictions. She was making an American painting that meant something to her.

  As I was working I thought of the city men I had been seeing in the East. They talked so often of writing the Great American Novel—the Great American Play—the Great American Poetry.

  People wanted to “do” the American scene. I had gone back and forth across the country several times by then, and some of the current ideas about the American scene struck me as pretty ridiculous. To them, the American scene was a dilapidated house with a broken-down buckboard out front and a horse that looked like a skeleton. I knew America was very rich, very lush. Well, I started painting my skulls around this time. . . . I had lived in the cattle country—Amarillo was the crossroads of cattle shipping, and you could see the cattle coming in across the range for days at a time. For goodness’ sake, I thought, the people who talk about the American scene don’t know anything about it. So, in a way, that cow’s skull was my joke on the American scene, and it gave me pleasure to make it in red, white, and blue.12

  Stieglitz exhibited Cow’s Skull, Red, White and Blue but found no ready buyer. O’Keeffe kept the painting until 1952, when, considering it to be one of her more significant works, she donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  By 1931, O’Keeffe was driving herself to create a body of work that had nothing in common with Stieglitz or his photography. For the sake of sales, she did essay a few flower paintings, including an artificial blossom in the restricted grisaille palette, White Calico Flower. More important, she painted Jimson Weed 3, the first of many versions of the fragrant white datura flowers that bloom abundantly in the desert.

  In the art history of flora, O’Keeffe seems to be the first artist to have made the poisonous flower the subject of a still life painting. She had not realized the green- and lilac-centered flowers were poisonous when she saw them carpeting the tough ground around Dodge Luhan’s Taos home. “The Jimson Weed blooms in the cool of the evening—one moonlight night at the Ranch I counted one hundred and twenty-five flowers,” she recalled. “The flowers die in the heat of the day. . . . When I think of the delicate fragrance of the flowers, I almost feel the coolness and sweetness of the evening.”13

  Stieglitz could afford to be magnanimous about O’Keeffe’s travels, since he had made covert plans of his own. Although he could not be bothered to travel anywhere with O’Keeffe, on July 7 he left Lake George for a holiday at Penzance, the Normans’ new house on Cape Cod overlooking the harbor.

  “Stieglitz is eager for me to be with him at Lake George and see where he lives, photographs and prints in the summer,” Norman wrote.14 Yet Norman felt she could not leave her children, so Stieglitz came to her. Traveling together, they went to Boston for two days to see the Museum of Fine Arts and meet Ananda Coomaraswamy, the curator who had been responsible for getting a selection of Stieglitz’s photographs accepted by the museum. Stieglitz made his last Equivalents that summer.

  While Edward Norman pursued other interests, Stieglitz photographed Norman nude in a field of daisies. Enthralled, he felt, “It was a wonderful day. . . . All of nature, above all the sky, seemed to be singing.” He begged Norman to call him “Alfred,” and, as she spoke the name, he marveled at her face being transformed by love.

  Norman and Stieglitz seem to have been unaware of the pain they were causing their respective spouses, insisting instead that their “love” nourished their marriages. “I want to hurt or tear apart nothing,” Norman wrote. “Nor does Stieglitz. One day he says to me, surprisingly on the verge of tears: ‘Never get divorced.’”15

  Norman recalled Stieglitz as a man of contradictions. “He was perhaps the most possessive person I have ever known yet, the greatness of what he expressed was in terms of how people must be non-possessive.”16

  In the third week of July O’Keeffe returned from New Mexico to an uneasy truce with her husband. She soon wondered why she had come back at all.

  On a hot and humid day in Lake George the two Davidson girls and their cousins peered into the window of The Shanty and caught O’Keeffe painting in the nude. Furious at this intrusion, O’Keeffe chased after them, shouting warnings and waving a paintbrush in the air. She regarded them as annoyance incarnate, but the little girls were impressed. One remembered, “She was as magnificent and awesome as a goddess.”17

  In late August an exasperated O’Keeffe fled to York Beach with Kalonyme, who wanted to visit Marin on
his Maine island. The critic and his wife, Angna Enters, were friends with both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz and sympathetic to the difficulties they were facing.

  In Maine, O’Keeffe drew the inside of a conch shell, followed by a pastel of its luminous lavender surface, and finally Shell on Red, the glowing white and lilac shape on a crimson background as an oil painting.

  When O’Keeffe returned from Maine, Stieglitz left for Woods Hole to see Norman.

  In the fall, O’Keeffe refused to return with Stieglitz to New York. She remained at the farmhouse and, without asking anyone’s opinion, knocked out the wall of a closet to enlarge her bedroom, painted the floor dark green, and covered it with her black and white striped Navajo rug. The tension with her husband affected O’Keeffe’s output. Her pastel of pink roses with larkspur and her small oil of a fuzzy red cockscomb seem halfhearted, while Dark and Lavender Leaves, a tiny oak leaf atop a heart-shaped elm leaf with worn edges, returned to the symbolism of her earlier pictures.

  Out of respect for Marin, O’Keeffe went to the city to hang his October show at An American Place. Afterward, she promptly returned to Lake George, alone.

  In November, around the time of her forty-fourth birthday, O’Keeffe drove into the city to have her paintings framed. At the Shelton, she came upon Stieglitz with Norman. Stieglitz had been bringing her to their apartment, and photographing her nude and in bed. Far from contrite, Stieglitz coldly forbade his wife to show up unannounced in the future.

  But Alfred was not the only Stieglitz with a domestic crisis. Lee’s mistress of the past forty years, Amanda Liebman Hoff, insisted that he seek a divorce since her husband had died the previous year. Although Lee had fallen in love with a third woman, he capitulated to Amanda’s pressure. Long the victim of Lee’s anger and degradation, Lizzie agreed to the divorce on the condition that she be allowed to keep their Lake George home, Red Top. Lee’s decision chilled O’Keeffe, who felt her known world with Stieglitz to be crumbling. She told Beck, “Makes me feel that my grandfather that I never saw will rise out of his grave and start flirting with my daughter that I never had.”18