Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  “O’Keeffe became hysterical and left in tears,” Deskey said. “The next day, Stieglitz telephoned to say that she had had a nervous breakdown, was confined to a sanitorium and hence would be unable to fulfill her contract.”38

  Stieglitz maintained that Radio City Music Hall had not fulfilled its obligation to provide a working surface in time to complete the project and therefore O’Keeffe was released from her contract. Doubtless fatigued by their domestic drama, Deskey called on Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the Japanese American artist known for his paintings of giant flowers, to complete the mural, which is still in place today.

  O’Keeffe took to her bed with chest pains and difficulty breathing. Lee diagnosed it as shock. After a few days, she went to Lake George, where she attempted to prepare paintings for her December 10 show. Returning to New York, O’Keeffe suffered insomnia, headaches and crying jags. While she lay recuperating at the Shelton, visited daily by Lee, Stieglitz continued to see Norman at An American Place.

  O’Keeffe couldn’t stop crying, let alone sleep or eat. On December 21, she was moved to her sister Anita Young’s apartment on Park Avenue. Stieglitz was barred from visiting.

  Lee diagnosed early menopause, and Stieglitz insisted that O’Keeffe’s condition was the result of a heart ailment. In a way, he was right. O’Keeffe’s heart was broken.

  XII

  Instead of attending the dazzling opening of Radio City Music Hall on February 1, 1933, O’Keeffe was admitted to Doctors Hospital, a private institution on East Eighty-fifth Street. At this clinic for the rehabilitation of well-to-do patients with psychiatric disorders, doctors prescribed rest cures for nervous breakdowns or alcoholic binges. Out of Lee Stieglitz’s care, O’Keeffe’s symptoms were diagnosed as “psychoneurosis.”

  For the next two months, the woman who liked nothing better than taking long walks in the great outdoors was confined to a small room with a window overlooking the East River. Her doctor, Edward B. Janks, instructed Stieglitz not to visit. “It’s all pretty terrible,” Stieglitz confessed.1 He could scarcely help but compare O’Keeffe’s breakdown to his daughter’s, whose nervous condition had left her confined to Craig House.

  After four weeks of hospitalization, Stieglitz was permitted one ten-minute visit per week. Relying on his courtship ploy from some fifteen years earlier, he brought photographs of her January exhibition of twenty-three pictures made between 1927 and 1932, Paintings—New & Some Old. One wall was hung with her jimson weed flower, a long white barn, and the painting of the Gaspé cross with the bleeding heart. Norman had photographed the pastel of the bleeding heart flower that hung on its own wall, isolated from the rest of the paintings.

  O’Keeffe had little enthusiasm for this show. For years, she had used her work to stave off feelings of despair. Now it seemed that it had been to no avail.

  Hearing of her “illness,” the friendly critics rallied to O’Keeffe’s side. McBride called her art a “soul reflection,” and complimented her barns and her gray crosses. “It seems not to have much to do with painting as such. It seems to be wished upon the canvas. . . . The mechanics have been so successfully concealed.”2

  Ralph Flint felt that the new work “should serve to persuade the town that there is an artist in our midst who cannot be put down merely as a glorifier of lilies or apostle of the cross.”3

  Certainly, there were numerous paintings in the key of white: white barns, white jimson weeds, white callas, white shells, and white-on-white abstractions. The effect was marmoreal and chaste compared to the iris, petunias, and jack-in-the-pulpits of previous years. O’Keeffe summarized this direction in her work when describing her picture of the fabric blossom, White Flower, New Mexico, as “something I have to say about White—quite different from what White has been meaning to me. . . . maybe in terms of paint color I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.”4

  White had attracted the artist known for her unparalleled talent as a colorist. According to the art historian Sharyn R. Udall, around this time an Eastern mystical text, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, was reissued, with a commentary by Carl Jung, who wrote that the Anima found within the Golden Flower was written with the characters for “white,” which are the same for “demon” and for “white ghost,” who belongs to the lower, earth-bound soul, the yin principle, and is therefore feminine. The sky, by contrast, holds the yang principle and is masculine. Significantly, Native American lore of New Mexico upholds the same notions.5

  O’Keeffe, who so identified with nature, had to be fascinated by these symbolic meanings of “white,” which contrasted with Stieglitz’s insistence that her “whiteness” signified purity. O’Keeffe preferred the role of earth goddess to saint.

  But, in the early years of the Depression, even prosperous art patrons wanted cheering up, and whiteness wasn’t the ticket. Not a single work from the exhibit sold. Stieglitz extended the show to March 15, and during the last week, he brought O’Keeffe twice to the gallery.

  While O’Keeffe was in the hospital, she learned of further competition from her own sister. On February 27, Catherine Klenert’s solo show of flower paintings opened at the Delphic Studios. The O’Keeffe reputation brought collectors and reviewers to Klenert’s show, and they remarked upon the stylistic debt to her famous sibling. “There is, as might be anticipated, a remarkable color sense,” noted one reviewer, but “Georgia remains supreme.”6 O’Keeffe was enraged by her sister’s insensitivity. Although Klenert claimed not to have known of Georgia’s illness, she received a sizzling letter from her older sister. The sisters did not write or talk for four years afterward, and the chastised Klenert gave up painting forever.

  As if O’Keeffe had not suffered enough, An American Place published a volume of Norman’s poetry, titled Dualities, several weeks after Klenert’s show. After his friends at Viking had declined to publish Norman’s poems, Stieglitz had pursued the undertaking himself, including his own photographs of the author in the first thirty of the four hundred numbered copies. Among the many poems, Norman had written one cryptically titled “O’Keeffe—Neo-Primitive Iconographer.”

  After her release from the hospital, O’Keeffe was hardly prepared to return to Stieglitz. On March 25, her friend Marjorie Content and her teenaged daughter Sue Loeb picked her up at the hospital, and the three boarded a Matson oceanliner to Bermuda. They stayed at Torwood, a house owned by Marie Garland, west of Cambridge Beaches. In short order, O’Keeffe’s nerves were being soothed by long walks on pink sand beaches warmed by balmy breezes.

  Content had plenty of experience in recovery from failed marriages. Then separated from her third husband, she had been married in the teens and twenties to Harold Loeb, heir to a banking fortune, who, with Alfred Kreymborg, published the literary journal Broom. Content had two children with Loeb. After their divorce, she designed costumes for avant garde theater and ran a small bookstore in Greenwich Village. More recently, during the summers, she had been photographing the Taos Pueblo for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where she met O’Keeffe.

  After Content and her daughter returned to New York, O’Keeffe stayed on, bicycling and climbing rocks until she was exhausted and had to remain in bed for three days. Two months passed before she was ready to head back to New York.

  Before her departure for Bermuda, Roosevelt had made his inaugural address: “This Nation asks for action, and action now.” His emergency banking bill was passed unchanged in thirty-eight minutes, and the banks reopened four days later with deposits exceeding withdrawals. Within the next one hundred days, Roosevelt put in place a program to employ the jobless, support crop prices, repeal Prohibition, insure bank deposits, and stabilize the economy.

  Still, art sales were slow and, in O’Keeffe’s absence, Stieglitz decided to cut his overhead by removing his inventory from storage. Zoler was commanded to build shelves and racks in the smallest of three rooms at An American Place,
and, with the help of Norman and her new assistant, Cary Ross, the paintings, sculptures, and photographs were transported to the gallery. In the process, Stieglitz began to question why he should keep more than four hundred photographs that he had acquired during the years of editing Camera Notes and Camera Work. He had spent some fifteen thousand dollars buying and storing them, but he had since rejected pictorialism, and was no longer friendly with most of the photographers. He threatened to throw them away, and though he refused to call the Metropolitan Museum of Art directly, he told his plan to his friend Carl Zigrosser, director of the Weyhe Gallery. Zigrosser then quickly contacted the Metropolitan’s curator of prints, William Ivins, whose assistant went to the gallery and was told the museum could have the prints if they picked them up within twenty-four hours. The Metropolitan sent a truck the next day, though Stieglitz kept favorite works by J. Craig Annan, Julia Margaret Cameron, F. H. Evans, Hill and Adamson, Steichen and Strand. He kept the portraits of Kitty but gave away all pictures of Emmy.7

  O’Keeffe returned to New York on May 19 and, since the doctor forbade travel to New Mexico, the next morning she took the train to Lake George with an attentive Stieglitz at her side. He promptly returned to the city and became vexed to learn that in his absence, the Post-Impressionist painter Henri Matisse, whom he had shown more than twenty years earlier, was in New York and had stopped by with the philosopher John Dewey. Matisse had been installing a mural at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia.

  At Lake George, O’Keeffe lay in the sun and let Margaret Prosser, the housekeeper, bring her meals until her weight rose to an unprecedented one hundred forty-two pounds. When her own underwear no longer fit, she started wearing Stieglitz’s undershorts. Contrary to her usual sunrise schedule, she slept until ten in the morning; then she drove in her Ford V-8 roadster—which replaced the old Model A—to a place where her daily walk wouldn’t be too demanding. “I seem to have such a strange kind of weakness that I can’t explain even to myself,” she said. “It is as though a very important part of me that I know no words for is so weak that it almost keeps all the rest of me from functioning.”8

  O’Keeffe was suffering from clinical depression. Unable to access her anger against Stieglitz for his infidelity and abuse, she was turning her feelings inward.

  On June 20, Stieglitz returned to Lake George to stay. It was the first time they had been together for any length of time in almost two years. Contrite, he tried to be on his best behavior. When O’Keeffe adopted a stray white kitten and named it Long Tail, his first reaction was irritation, but he quickly relented after she broke down in tears.

  A few days later, he wrote to Dove, “Georgia’s condition is pathetic. I’m certainly far beyond my depths. . . . I see no light of any kind. I dare not hope nor dare I despair.—At times I feel like a murderer. There is Kitty. Now there is Georgia.”9

  Stieglitz postponed visitors until August, when Louis Kalonyme and the devoted Davidsons arrived for a two-week stay. A visit from Julius Stieglitz’s son, Edward, seemed to cheer O’Keeffe, who no longer required the maximum dose of nerve-calming medicine prescribed at Doctors Hospital to cope with family members.

  O’Keeffe was not sketching, let alone painting. “I do not work. I seem to have nothing worth saying. I guess I’m well-enough to work if I wanted to but I can’t get myself to want to. It is a horrid way to be. Nothing to say. Of course everyone is in that way most if the time but they don’t take time to think about it. I’ve been thinking too long.”10

  When Ansel Adams wrote to request the loan of prints and paintings for the gallery he’d opened in San Francisco, Stieglitz responded dramatically that O’Keeffe was not painting and might never paint again. He couldn’t let her pictures travel.

  In November, the Strands’ divorce became official. O’Keeffe’s advice to Beck sounded as though she were talking to herself: “Try not to take it too seriously—or maybe I mean take it more seriously—imagine it is years from now—and in the meantime don’t do anything foolish,” she wrote. “Only time will make you feel better—and don’t talk about it to people if you don’t want to. Why should you be expected to explain your personal life to anyone—it is rather difficult even to explain it to oneself.”

  She added, “It just seems that what is going to hit us hit you first.”11

  It was not until late November that O’Keeffe came to New York. She saw the Marin retrospective at The Place and lunched with Strand. She took in the Brancusi show at Brummer Gallery and the first half of a concert with Rosenfeld. She visited Florine Stettheimer, Marcel Duchamp, and Charles Demuth. “The principle things about it all for me were that I could again walk the street a little without fear of losing my mind,” she said.12 She also met with Jean Toomer, who was in circumstances as lost and grim as her own.

  Since his last visit to Lake George in 1925, Toomer had been living in Chicago, writing about the teachings of Gurdjieff, and conducting “awareness sessions.” In 1931, he had fallen in love with the writer Margery Latimer, who described him as “beautiful looking, his skin so dark and smooth and gleaming.”13 Latimer, who lived in Portage, Wisconsin, was friends with Georgia’s sister Catherine Klenert and had written favorably about her show at the Milwaukee Institute of Art.

  After Latimer became pregnant, she married Toomer and they honeymooned at the Luhans’ ranch in Taos and in Carmel. They settled into their Chicago apartment at the outset of 1932. Their baby was born at home with a midwife, not uncommon at that time, but during the birth, Latimer hemorrhaged and died.

  In November of 1933, Toomer came to New York to see the publishers who had been consistently rejecting his tracts on Gurdjieff and to collect the letters of his late wife. O’Keeffe had been one of her regular correspondents. When Toomer arrived at the Shelton to pick up the letters their mutual attraction was immediate.

  Immaculately dressed, Toomer had high cheekbones and a cleft chin. He reminded O’Keeffe of her younger brother Alexius. (Klenert later met Toomer and was impressed as well by the resemblance.) O’Keeffe quickly invited him to spend Christmas with her at the farmhouse at Lake George.

  During the first ten days of his December visit, O’Keeffe was in bed with a cold. Toomer calmly pursued his writing in the guest bedroom. After she recovered, they took drives on the frozen lake and frolicked in the snow. At night, he read from his book on the spiritual teachings of Gurdjieff. He told Stieglitz, who was in New York, how O’Keeffe seemed to have changed and come into a condition of “aliveness.” Two days before Christmas, Stieglitz joined them. Taking Toomer aside, Stieglitz warned him of O’Keeffe’s unstable condition. After Christmas, Stieglitz returned to the city. Alone in the farmhouse, surrounded by white skies and snow, O’Keeffe and Toomer gave in to a rare intimacy.

  On New Year’s Day 1934, Stieglitz celebrated his seventieth birthday with Norman. O’Keeffe did not bother going back to the city. She was reeling from the effect of days and nights spent with Toomer. He had left for Chicago on New Year’s Eve without stopping in New York to say goodbye to his friend Stieglitz.

  O’Keeffe immediately wrote to Toomer in words that were passionate, even desperate, in their yearning for intimacy. “I like knowing the feel of your maleness,” she told him. “I wish so hotly to feel you hold me very very tight and warm to you.”14

  Only forty-six years old, O’Keeffe was sexually and emotionally estranged from Stieglitz. Her feelings of betrayal, his age, and their combined health problems had thwarted intimate relations for months if not years. Although there is no proof that O’Keeffe and Toomer became lovers, her letters to him go beyond the boundaries of friendship.

  They also reveal her ambivalence. “I want you—sometimes terribly,” she confessed. “But I like it that I am quite apart from you . . . for now I need it that way.”15

  Reverting to the pattern of her immature relationships with Strand and Macmahon, O’Keeffe admitted to Toomer that she was worried about his ability to commit. After declaring
her interest, she pulled back. She couldn’t bear the feelings of vulnerability. “My center does not come from my mind,” she confessed. “It feels in me like a plot of warm moist well-tilled earth with the sun shining hot on it. . . . I would rather feel it starkly empty than let anything be planted that can not be tended to the fullest possibility of its growth.”16

  O’Keeffe was worried that Toomer was too self-involved to cultivate the needs of a fellow artist. She told him, “Maybe the quality that we have in common is relentlessness—maybe the thing that attracts me to you separates me from you.”17

  No matter how ill-suited their long-term relationship might have been, it seems certain that Toomer moved O’Keeffe sexually. A week after Toomer left, she made her first painting in a year and a half. Barn with Snow is a cozy depiction of the Lake George farm buildings, in teal, in gray, and in brick, their roofs and the ground covered in snow.

  Since O’Keeffe had no new work, on January 29 Stieglitz mounted a survey of forty-four of her paintings completed between 1915 and 1927. Among the abstractions, birch trees, clam shells, and jack-in-the-pulpits, O’Keeffe insisted upon one last-minute addition: a “tree portrait” of Toomer that she had executed when they first met in 1925. “The feeling that a person gives me that I can not say in words comes in colors and shapes,” she wrote him. “I never told you—or anyone else—but there is a painting I made from something of you the first time you were here—I hunted for it and hung it. . . . Makes me feel strangely raw and torn.”18