For the first and only time, in 1931 O’Keeffe had two exhibitions at An American Place. Just after Christmas, her harmonic studies of the hills around Alcalde and Abiquiu were shown with her startling pictures of horse and cow skulls floating in space. “Stieglitz . . . likes them much—which surprised me because I had thought them a bit too weird for him,” she said.19
If O’Keeffe was concerned about becoming too commercial, her December show undermined such fears. McBride approved, though he missed the humor of her skull paintings, “I imagine that she saw these ghostly relics merely as elegant shapes charged with solemn mystery . . . part of nature’s marvelous handiwork, to be taken at face value and reverenced for their intrinsic form.”20
Despite critical praise, sales were slow. (The average viewer didn’t want a painting of a cow skull as a Christmas present.) Unperturbed, in an exhibition brochure O’Keeffe explained the latest detour in her art. “I don’t think of their being bones,” she said. “It is my way of saying something about this country which I feel I can say better that way than in trying to reproduce a piece of it. . . . It’s a country that’s very exciting. How can you put down an equivalent of that kind of world?”21
The bones were remotely based upon the Dutch tradition of vanitas painting in which the human skull is a symbol for the transience of life. More relevant to O’Keeffe than vanitas, however, was the influence of the Surrealist movement that was making itself known in New York.
By 1931, many of the European Surrealists were being shown at the Julien Levy Gallery. Levy had opened his Madison Avenue gallery with photogravures borrowed from Stieglitz for the first show. Through Levy, O’Keeffe would have known the work of Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and René Magritte, all of whom painted landscapes dotted with biomorphic shapes,body fragments, even bones.
O’Keeffe had stated her interest in trying to achieve a dreamlike quality in her own art, and New Mexico, abounding as it did in Hispanic and Indian mysticism and empty desert littered with animal skeletons, provided a surreal landscape. Many of her paintings from the thirties and forties have a surreal appearance, though the artist never entertained the restrictive theories proposed in 1925 by arch-Surrealist André Breton.
Just as her early abstractions drew from Symbolism and her skyscraper pictures managed to ride the outer edges of a precisionist movement in painting, so O’Keeffe’s paintings of bones courted the Surrealist interpretation without an actual commitment. In the best sense, O’Keeffe was a stylistic flirt. “What happens is that you pick up ideas here and there,” she said. “If you mention any particular source, it gives that too much emphasis.”22
Art dealer Sidney Janis took O’Keeffe’s surrealism seriously and included her work in his 1942 catalogue of European and American Surrealists, though, oddly, he chose to reproduce her painting of a white barn.
O’Keeffe knew that these pictures represented a fresh direction in her work, and she was conscious of her attempt to replicate the subconscious state. In fact, she specified the difference when she said, “I hadn’t worked on the landscapes at all after I brought them in from outdoors—so that memory or dream thing I do that for me comes nearer reality than my objective kind of work—was quite lacking.”23
O’Keeffe had started on her most challenging body of work, though a painful detour would present itself before she could honor her latest inspiration.
As O’Keeffe looked to the future, Stieglitz was reviewing his past. With Norman’s help, he staged a forty-year retrospective of his photographs. On February 15, 1932, 127 of his exquisite prints, which recorded the changing skyline of New York City, the constant landscape of Lake George, the rolling clouds, and the portraits of his family and friends, were exhibited at The Place.
None of Stieglitz’s photographs were as stunning to the public as the portraits of Norman presented alongside those of O’Keeffe. Pictures of the doe-eyed young socialite were viewed as a deliberate rejection of O’Keeffe. With the tortured logic of the culpable, Stieglitz punished his wife as he had once punished Emmy. He was intimidated by O’Keeffe’s growing self-sufficiency as she generated the bulk of their income and traveled for months at a stretch. Stieglitz now referred to Norman as “Child-Woman,” the term he had once used for O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe herself had grown up.
The portraits of Dorothy Norman were not well received by those who knew the complexity of the situation between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, but Norman was thrilled to have achieved iconic status equal to O’Keeffe. And she soon convinced Stieglitz to accept her as a business partner at the gallery, a position that would allow her to solicit patrons outside of his small group of loyalists. By October, when the gallery’s three-year lease expired, it was renewed in Norman’s name. From then on, a percentage of the artists’ sales went to the Dorothy Norman Rent Fund.24 Norman made herself indispensable.
One afternoon, while Stieglitz went to a performance of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, O’Keeffe was asked to sit in the gallery with the black and white reminders of her past. Despite the pictures of her hated rival, she could not disguise the reverence she still felt for Stieglitz as an artist. She thought that it was “the most beautiful now that it has been at all—the rooms as a whole are more severe—more clear in feeling—and . . . as you walk down the length of each wall and look closely at each print—it is as though a breath is caught.”
Then she added one of the most revealing remarks made during this upsetting time: “I am glad he is showing them but there is something about it all that makes me very sad.”25
That spring, perhaps to compensate for the domestic discord, Stieglitz arranged two exhibitions by couples. Arthur Dove and his second wife Helen Torr showed their paintings together in March, and the Strands were given their only joint show that April. Since the summer of 1929, Norman had harbored an antipathy toward Beck Strand and pitied her husband for putting up with her. Norman’s influence led Stieglitz to see his old flame Beck as wild and profligate, with no sense of self or direction. Her trips to New Mexico were labeled as irresponsible, while O’Keeffe’s were considered therapeutic. Norman felt threatened by the Strands’ influence and considered them to be socially inferior.
In their show, Beck exhibited New Mexican santos and crimson sunsets executed as reverse paintings on glass. Strand included his photographs of New Mexico, Colorado, and the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada. It was his first show in several years and Beck’s debut. Stieglitz offered no help to his old friends in its planning. Strand later recalled, “I hung the show myself, with Rebecca. Stieglitz did not help hang it, not an iota, didn’t say why. It was the strangest exhibition a person could have—no catalogue.”26
Despite the money, time, and effort that the couple had dedicated to Stieglitz for two decades, they were jettisoned: Norman simply didn’t like them.
Strand’s friendship with Stieglitz had always suffered from feelings of professional competition. The nudge from Norman was the final straw, and Stieglitz’s flagrant indifference to the Strands’ exhibition ended their twenty-five-year relationship. After the show, Strand dropped off the key to the gallery he had helped establish and left without saying goodbye. He called the decision “fresh air and personal liberation from something that had become, for me at least, second-rate, corrupt, meaningless.”27
Theater director Harold Clurman, who had little tolerance for Stieglitz’s imperious personality, told Strand, “Your instinct to break away was again a right one. Unless you can be close to Stieglitz without being absorbed by him—as Marin can—he is not healthy. And you could achieve that state only by breaking away first.”28
O’Keeffe comprehended the problem with Strand immediately. “He was one of Alfred’s children and he grew up,” she said.29
Free from Stieglitz’s apolitical view of art, Strand shifted his allegiance to the left-leaning Clurman. He joined the ranks of artists wanting to document social injustice, reverting to the model of his first photography teacher, Lewis Hine, who
had recorded child labor abuse. As Strand started to pursue a fresh path of creative inquiry, his already tenuous connection to his wife frayed, and by the fall, the Strands agreed to go their separate ways.
Beck returned to Taos, where she had fallen in love with Bill James, who ran the old trading post. Strand went to Mexico City to make films about the revolution under Lázaro Cárdenas. Through composer Carlos Chavez, whom he had met at the Luhans, he was appointed chief of photography and cinematography for Mexico’s Secretariat of Education.
After a couple of years of living in Mexico, Strand returned to New York. During the summer of 1935, he went to Moscow with Clurman and returned to make The Plow That Broke the Plains, a film about the Dust Bowl during the Depression. He married, divorced, and married again, and continued making films until 1943. After his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945, he resumed still photography but never regained his relationship with Stieglitz.
Clurman’s view of art as a vehicle for politically relevant messages gained such popularity during the thirties that established members of the previous decade’s avant garde were dismissed as elitist. Stieglitz, who had supported and defended the rights of the most advanced artists, refused to cave in to what he perceived as reactionary aesthetics. Although he initially supported Diego Rivera, he eventually termed his monumental and incendiary murals the “Mexican disease.” Never mind that his own artists were suffering during the Depression and that New Deal projects set up by Franklin D. Roosevelt provided an income for many and helped support women painters like Lee Krasner and Alice Neel.
Although she was uninterested in overtly political art, O’Keeffe longed to work on the public scale of the muralists. In the spring of 1929, she had contacted her journalist friend Blanche Matthias seeking her support for a mural at the World’s Fair to be held in Chicago in 1933. She told her, “I have such a desire to paint something for a particular place—and paint it big.”30
In March of 1937, O’Keeffe eagerly accepted when guest curator Lincoln Kirstein and art dealer Julien Levy invited her—along with sixty-four other artists—to submit proposals for a mural competition: Winners would be shown in the inaugural exhibition of the new Fifty-third Street home of the Museum of Modern Art.
After completing several preparatory drawings of skyline buildings and the view from the East River, O’Keeffe finished her proposal, Manhattan, in just six weeks. The triptych consisted of two panels of skyline imagery flanking a 4 × 7-foot central panel of Cubist skyscrapers in red, white, and blue. Several small flowers float in the atmosphere above the city. (O’Keeffe had rarely experimented with Cubism and may have chosen the style for its popularity among sophisticated urbanites.)
While the show “Murals by American Painters and Photographers” opened to a critical drubbing, O’Keeffe’s piece was praised. Her reputation and her ability to work speedily on a giant scale earned her the desirable commission for a permanent mural in the art deco interior of John D. Rockefeller’s Radio City Music Hall.
Interior designer Donald Deskey thought O’Keeffe’s well-known flowers would be perfect for the powder room. His budget of fifteen hundred dollars was nominal for such a commitment, but the same amount was allotted to each artist working on the project. Anticipating Stieglitz’s resistance, Deskey asked Edith Halpert to negotiate directly with O’Keeffe.
When Stieglitz discovered what he considered a betrayal, he went to Deskey’s office and demanded that O’Keeffe’s fee be increased. Deskey refused to increase her commission and noted that her contract was signed and binding. Stieglitz claimed that O’Keeffe was a “child” and not responsible for her actions, but Deskey held firm. O’Keeffe was worried. “I must admit that experimenting so publicly is a bit precarious in every way,” she confessed. “My kind of work is maybe a bit tender for what it has to stand up to in that kind of world.”31
Instead of traveling to New Mexico in the summer of 1932, she decided to stay in New York, partly to work on the mural project, partly to keep an eye on Stieglitz. “I am divided between my man and a life with him— and something of the outdoors . . . that I know I will never get rid of,” she wrote.32
The mural took on the charged significance of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe’s larger power struggle. These exceedingly stubborn and willful personalities were no longer in the mood to compromise; their relationship was taking on the aspect of full-scale war. Stieglitz prevailed upon a younger generation of writer friends—Ralph Flint, Frederick Ringel, and Cary Ross, all of whom were invited to Lake George that summer—to undermine O’Keeffe’s determination to complete the mural. “No one in my world wants me to do it,” O’Keeffe wrote, “but I want to do it.”33
By July, O’Keeffe’s patience was stretched sheer from all the domestic and professional pressures. In this tense atmosphere, she was not pleased to learn that her sister Catherine Klenert was showing four of her own floral paintings at the Delphic Studios on Fifth Avenue and East-Fifty-seventh Street. Although she used her married name, the floral paintings were strikingly similar to those by her more famous sister.
O’Keeffe had seen some of these paintings the previous fall and written to Klenert: “Your work is so clean and so pure. I dislike the idea of it going to another gallery.” But she went on to explain that Stieglitz would not be able to show it. “The purity of the thing you do makes me so very conscious of the fact that I live in the market place—and I feel the market place marks me quite sorely.”34 Knowing that O’Keeffe now earned thousands of dollars for each flower painting, Klenert probably felt little aversion to the market place.
Alma Reed had opened the Delphic Studios to show the work of her lover, the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco, who had left his wife and moved to New York to be with her. Delphic Studios and An American Place had many overlapping interests. Ansel Adams, having met O’Keeffe in 1929, had brought his portfolio to Stieglitz the previous March. Stieglitz flipped through his photographs and pronounced them as “seen with sensitivity,” but he said that he was not taking on new artists. Delphic Studios wound up showing the work of Adams, Edward Weston, and other photographers, as well as O’Keeffe relatives. When Ida O’Keeffe showed at the Delphic Studios, her painting The Highland Lighthouse, with arcs of radiance from the tower, was reproduced in Art Digest. The article called the O’Keeffe sisters’ maternal grandmother and paternal grandmother “American primitives.” The gallery also showed two of Isabel Dunham Wycoff’s flower pictures from around 1840 and three fruit and flower pictures by Mary Catherine O’Keeffe.
“My sister started a myth about my grandmother painting,” O’Keeffe said, and described a watercolor of a rosebud and another of a plum with two leaves, “a green one and a dead one with a worm hole in it. Now I dont consider that anything of special interest—My sister is very good at making up yarns—Any young lady in boarding school at the time probably would have painted something similar so.”35
As if wanting to prove her superiority, the competitive O’Keeffe completed two extraordinary canvases of the datura. Since the flowers do not grow on the East Coast, she must have worked from her 1931 painting, from photographs, or from memory. Jimson Weed measures 48 × 40 inches, with the creamy bloom facing front and ribbed green leaves in the background. The White Flower, 30 ×40 inches, aims the trumpet-shaped bloom upward, its ribs extending in decorative flourishes. Another version portrays the icy blossom as it begins to disintegrate.
By August, O’Keeffe was ready for a vacation, and asked the twenty-six-year-old Georgia Engelhard to join her in a drive along the St. Lawrence River to the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada. Once again, Strand had provided the impetus for a detour in her work with his bracing photographs of the coastal region.
O’Keeffe was mesmerized by the long white barns in the Gaspé Peninsula. She painted seven canvases of the tidy buildings with rows of dark doors, their tarpaper roofs reflecting the blue of the sky. White Barn, Red Doors features four crimson squares precisely spaced on a white rectan
gle resting upon a sliver of green. All of the pictures are cropped tightly so the landscape is barely visible, lending them a modern feeling of geometric compression.
In Canada, O’Keeffe also painted two pictures of crosses. Cross with Red Heart is a narrow, gray crucifix decorated with a bleeding heart and a crown of thorns and topped with a tiny rooster weathervane. In the background, clouds have broken so that sun falls over the verdant hills. Cross by the Sea, Canada represents a cross made from narrow pieces of wood, with a small picket fence around its base, posted against the watery horizon as protection for fishermen.
“In New Mexico, the crosses interest me because they represent what the Spanish felt about Catholicism—dark, somber—and I painted them that way,” O’Keeffe explained. “On the Gaspe, the cross was Catholicism as the French saw it—gay, witty.”36 She painted a single landscape on this trip, Green Mountains, Canada.
The mountain and sea were also inspiration for Nature Forms—Gaspé. Most likely completed after she returned from the trip, Nature Forms melded her coiling, ornamental abstraction with the mossy greens and aquas of the region.
Since Prohibition was still in force, the two Georgias attempted to smuggle liquor back to The Hill, but U.S. customs confiscated it and fined both women. When Stieglitz found the notice of the fine, after opening O’Keeffe’s mail, he upbraided her for such outlaw conduct. Calmly, she countered that he shouldn’t be opening her mail.
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz returned to the city together on September 24 so she could begin work on the powder room. Reluctantly, Stieglitz agreed to shoot her portrait for the publicity still. But the interior construction was behind schedule and the canvas had not yet been applied to the plaster walls. O’Keeffe returned to Lake George to be alone for the month of October. “My Gawd wont I get Hell if I can’t make a go of it,” she nervously wrote to Beck.37 The powder room walls weren’t ready until November 16, six weeks before the Christmas opening. That week, as Deskey and O’Keeffe stood in the powder room discussing her plans, the canvas began to pull away from the plaster. Painting would have to be postponed.
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