Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  However—we need not go into that. But I do wish to say that if for any reason you wish to change your mind feel assured that it will be alright with me—For myself I feel no need of showing. As I sit out here in my dry lonely country I feel even less need for all those things that go with the city. . . . When I say that for myself I do not need what showing at the Museum means—I should add that I think that what I have done is something rather unique in my time and that I am one of the few who gives our country any voice of its own—I claim no credit—it is only that I have seen with my own eye and that I couldn’t help seeing with my own eye—It may not be painting but it is something—and even if it is not something I do not feel bothered—I do not know why I am so indifferent.5

  O’Keeffe was struggling to come to terms with the ways in which her painting had been influenced by Stieglitz’s role in her life. Certainly, she had revived his career by posing nude for him. But what had his role in her work been? In reviewing her fifty-seven paintings from 1915 to 1945, the gigantic flowers, the New York cityscapes and New Mexico landscapes, the pillowy mountains and floating bones, O’Keeffe could observe times when she had pulled back. She had painted to please Stieglitz rather than to please herself. Only the early abstractions, painted before she began living with Stieglitz, were truly her own. Yes, she had continued with arrangements of hue and form that straddled the controversial line between abstraction and representation. But could she have gone further? This is what she asked herself, especially as she thought about the recent abstract paintings of the Black Place.

  McBride tentatively broached the issue in his review. He thought that O’Keeffe’s inclination toward abstraction was something that “being 100 percent American, she has never dared yield. Were she abstract she’d lose her public, and as she has a considerable public, naturally she hates to do that.”6

  Honored by a 1947 exhibition at Knoedler Galleries with a Lincoln Kirstein catalogue essay chronicling his achievements, McBride continued writing criticism until 1955. Yet he was unprepared for the juggernaut of Abstract Expressionism about to tear through the international art world. His position of power was being usurped by younger, more strident voices. The opinions of Clement Greenberg asserted the primacy of abstraction in postwar American art. Unforgiving of any artist unwilling to wholly surrender to the primacy of pure paint on canvas, Greenberg dismissed O’Keeffe’s retrospective in The Nation: “The deftness and precision of her brush . . . exert a certain inevitable charm. . . . Otherwise her art has very little inherent value.” O’Keeffe’s painting, he continued, “has less to do with art than with private worship and the embellishment of private fetishes with secret and arbitrary meanings.”7 He even slammed MoMA for dignifying “this arty manifestation” with a retrospective.

  From a contemporary perspective, “private fetishes” and “secret . . . meanings” could be construed as compliments. But Greenberg’s views would dominate for the next two decades with praise only for the practioners of nonobjective painting and sculpture. Symbolic abstraction was anathema. Worse, Greenberg would argue that Abstract Expressionism was the first authentic American art, despite its roots in European Surrealism. To gird his position, Greenberg turned his back on the accomplishments of An American Place and the work of Marin, Dove, Hartley, and O’Keeffe. It would take decades for art historians to rebuild support for those artists who had been the first generation that conscientiously set out to create an authentic American art.

  Stieglitz penned Greenberg an angry rebuttal; O’Keeffe paid no attention at all. As usual, she read McBride’s review and, at Stieglitz’s insistence, the review by James Thrall Soby in the Saturday Review. Soby praised the very qualities that Greenberg had discounted: “Sometimes her painting seems an art of psychic confession, an inner recital of symbolic language, like the murmur of acolytes. . . . Hers is a world of exceptional intensity: bones and flowers, hills and the city. . . . She created this world; it was not there before; and there is nothing like it anywhere.”8

  While she was in New York, O’Keeffe used Mary Callery’s studio, and guidance, to complete her first sculpture in almost thirty years. Callery helped her work in clay to model an uncoiling spiral of circles within circles.

  On June 6, O’Keeffe flew to Albuquerque to avoid attending a party given by the Newhalls for photographer Cartier-Bresson where Norman was sure to be. Before leaving, O’Keeffe walked through her exhibition with Stieglitz. (The pictures were hung on pristine neutral walls, a method of presentation that they had pioneered at the Intimate Gallery and An American Place.) It was a good time for Stieglitz and O’Keeffe to be together; they could recall the photography sessions, the times of rowing together on Lake George, and walks around the Shelton. They could laugh at Stieglitz’s disparaging remarks about the first flowers, the very paintings that had brought them financial security. A certain healing had taken place. It must have been difficult to leave.

  Around that time, O’Keeffe made a pastel of two black stones lying in a cordate shape. She called the picture My Heart, explaining, “I thought they looked hard.”9

  When O’Keeffe arrived at Ghost Ranch a few weeks later, she found his letters. “How beautiful your pictures are at the Modern. . . . Oh Georgia—we are a team,” he wrote in his slanting, emphatic script. “You need what ‘Your Place’ will give you. Yes you need that sorely. And I’ll be with you, Cape and all. And you’ll be with me here.”10

  Once in her New Mexico studio, O’Keeffe completed a small canvas of a blue oval on a background of red and white, Pelvis Series XX. It is completely abstract, apart from its referential title.

  In her painting of blond deer horns, rectangular shapes are disconnected from their mammalian source. Three branches are rendered as loose sprays of lemon cascading along an ivory trunk in Yellow Cottonwoods. Focusing closely on fissures between the gold and ivory towers, O’Keeffe painted a 36 × 30-inch canvas, Part of the Cliff. Unwilling to relinquish her beloved landscape as a subject, O’Keeffe found opportunities for pure painting within its parameters.

  In late December of 1945, O’Keeffe finally concluded protracted negotiations with the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe to purchase the Abiquiu hacienda. Despite the fact that Chabot now lived with and worked for Wheelwright, O’Keeffe appealed to her to facilitate the renovation of the crumbling ruin. Still devoted to the artist, Chabot accepted the job. She turned out to be brilliantly qualified. She read architectural and agricultural journals, conscripted every available laborer, and acquired construction materials despite statewide shortages. The postwar building boom had caused inflation in land and construction costs, but Chabot was shrewd. When she didn’t like the price quoted for aspen poles, she took a crew into the mountains and cut them herself. She sent several letters a week to O’Keeffe in New York, but due to the preparations for her retrospective, O’Keeffe didn’t have time for the project. She told Chabot to trust her eye. For her part, it seems Chabot felt gratified by the opportunity to complete something of value that would endure.

  The rooms were built around a courtyard. O’Keeffe’s studio and bedroom were housed in the former barn, with large windows installed to look out over the Chama River valley and the road below. Using traditional Hispanic building methods—thick and thin beams of wood, called vigas and latillas, to support the ceilings—the walls were built of adobe bricks made on the premises and smoothed into shape by local women.

  After O’Keeffe left for New Mexico, Stieglitz went around the apartment and found little notes she had left for him. Lake George did not beckon. He was tired and preferred spending part of each day at the gallery, where he might be visited by Webb or the Newhalls. In late June, before leaving for Woods Hole, Norman brought Cartier-Bresson to the gallery to meet the pioneer of American photography. Afterwards, with the help of an assistant, Stieglitz took down the last show of works by Dove, leaving the walls blank.

  On July 5, Webb stopped by the gallery and found Stieglitz in a lively mood. He produced a f
ew of his early photographs; gazing at them, Webb said, “I might well throw my camera away.”11

  The next day, the Newhalls stopped by with a chocolate ice cream cone. In the back of the gallery, Stieglitz lay on his cot complaining of chest pains but asked that they read to him from Soby’s glowing review of O’Keeffe’s show. Stieglitz’s housekeeper stopped by to escort him back to the apartment, but he refused. When Nancy returned in the late afternoon, he was asleep in his office with the shades drawn.

  Stieglitz’s doctor called O’Keeffe to say that she should think of returning to New York. But there had been many similar messages in the past. She called Donald Davidson and asked him to spend the night with Stieglitz at the apartment. The next day, Stieglitz wrote O’Keeffe to say that he was better. “Nearly all right. Nothing for you to worry about.” He was sitting in her room, writing her letters. “Kiss—another kiss.”12

  After staying home for a few days, Stieglitz felt better. The morning of July 10, Davidson left the apartment early and Stieglitz spent the morning writing letters at O’Keeffe’s desk.

  When his gallery assistant, Andrew Droth, arrived at noon, he found Stieglitz lying unconscious on the floor of the hallway between his and O’Keeffe’s bedrooms. His pen had rolled from his hand and lay beside him. He had suffered a massive stroke. He was taken by ambulance to Doctors Hospital, but he never regained consciousness.

  O’Keeffe was shopping in Española when the news reached her the following day. Without stopping to change out of her red cotton dress and scuffed work shoes, O’Keeffe went straight to Albuquerque to take a plane to New York. Mary Callery picked her up at the airport and took her to the hospital, and O’Keeffe was able to be with Stieglitz on Friday. Stieglitz died at 1:30 in the morning on Saturday, July 13.

  Norman had also been called by Callery. She rushed back from Woods Hole and saw Stieglitz in a coma before he passed away. Afterward, Callery invited Norman and Rodakiewicz back to her apartment for dinner. After, O’Keeffe arrived from New Mexico, Norman did not return to the hospital.

  O’Keeffe ordered an unlined coffin and a plain white sheet delivered to a funeral home on Madison Avenue and Eightieth Street. Since the New York Times obituary on Sunday had stated that no funeral service was planned by the family, only about twenty people came to pay their respects. At Stieglitz’s request, there was no eulogy or music and few flowers. Norman later recalled, “I always thought that I would want just that but it was awful.”13 She rode in the hearse with Lee Stieglitz. At the funeral home, she was one of those who went up to see the body in the casket upon the bier. O’Keeffe ignored her completely, but Flora Straus, Stieglitz’s niece, told her, “We never worried about Al because we knew you were there, caring.”14

  Strand told the Newhalls, who were out of town, that O’Keeffe had been “strained but under control” while Norman was “utterly shattered, weeping.” Afterward, Norman went to dinner with Harold Clurman. O’Keeffe sought solace from Steichen. Although Steichen and his wife Dana had arrived late, Steichen, in Scandinavian custom, placed a bow of evergreen cut from what he called “Alfred’s tree” at his Connecticut farm. After the viewing, O’Keeffe rode alone in the limousine to oversee the proceedings at Fresh Pond Crematory in Maspeth, Queens.

  Toward the end of July, McAlpin drove O’Keeffe to Lake George, where she and Elizabeth Davidson buried Stieglitz’s ashes under the roots of a tree near the shore. “I put him where he could hear the water,” O’Keeffe said. Despite the insistent requests of Stieglitz family members, O’Keeffe refused to reveal the location of his ashes. Even when Lee wanted to install a water pump and did not want to disturb his brother’s remains, she refused.

  The day after the funeral, O’Keeffe demanded “absolute control” of An American Place. She was going back to New Mexico and told Norman she had until fall to remove her things. From then on, O’Keeffe would manage the rent fund. O’Keeffe informed Norman that Stieglitz had let her handle it “only because he and all his family liked making things difficult.” She concluded by saying that she thought Norman’s relationship with Stieglitz had been “absolutely disgusting.”15

  After returning to Ghost Ranch on October 1, O’Keeffe alternated between states of grief and relief. She again painted a picture of red hills and sky but added a last, hidden portrait of Stieglitz. A Black Bird with Snow-Covered Red Hills depicts a stylized crow, alluding to Stieglitz’s nickname “Old Crow Feather,” soaring across in the bright air between two white mounds. “One morning the world was covered in snow,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It became another painting . . . a black bird flying, always there, always going away.”16 She also did a drawing and two paintings of branchless, leafless tree trunks banked in snow, looking as naked and vulnerable as human limbs.

  She also visited the Abiquiu house and approved the remarkable work done by Chabot. The patio and door in the courtyard captivated O’Keeffe, even as the house was under construction, and she completed two highly detailed drawings of the patio door. In The Patio I is a painting of the same scene in shades of light gold and dark brown.

  But tension remained between the women. O’Keeffe returned to New York on December 1 and continued sorting through Stieglitz’s affairs. She sent Chabot the final payment of $l,600. Chabot had never discussed her fees with O’Keeffe and often maintained that the project was a labor of love. Nonetheless, she was incensed to be paid what she considered an insignificant sum for nine months’ work. She wondered if that was all she was worth to the artist. She returned the check to O’Keeffe with a note saying, “What I am doing for you at Abiquiu is a thing that is well paid or not paid at all.”17

  O’Keeffe sent the check back to her saying that it seemed adequate to her, especially as she had made additional provisions for Chabot in her will. (If she ever made such an accommodation, it was no longer in the will when O’Keeffe passed away forty years later.) She also agreed to talk about it with Chabot in the future and did not want her to be underpaid. Chabot cashed the check, apologized for any misunderstanding, and continued to work on the Abiquiu house.

  Instead of joining any of the Stieglitz clan for the holidays, O’Keeffe spent Christmas at Esther Johnson’s New Jersey estate.

  Meanwhile, at a party given by the Newhalls, Norman bought three prints from Webb. Then she asked if he would photograph An American Place: the nail holes, the blank white walls. “I can’t do it as I don’t have any feeling for it,” Webb said. “As far as I am concerned, Stieglitz was the Place.”18

  Book Three

  BEING 1947–1986

  And there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there under one’s feet but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and morning cloud. Even the mountains were more and hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in was the sky, the sky.

  WILLA CATHER, Death Comes for the Archbishop

  I

  No matter how long it is expected, the brute force of death defies comprehension. It took five years for O’Keeffe to process the various stages of acceptance, though she didn’t linger in denial.

  Initially she felt anger, with Stieglitz and, especially, with Norman. She never forgave the woman who ingratiated herself as Stieglitz’s lover and partner. In fact, in the process of settling Stieglitz’s affairs, in 1949 she gave the so-called key set of sixteen hundred Stieglitz photographs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She included multiple versions of the same image printed by Stieglitz in silver, platinum, and palladium papers. (Stieglitz only considered a picture finished after he had mounted it, so all of the photographs are on their original, archival white or ivory boards.) Stieglitz had confided to Nancy Newhall that O’Keeffe would probably destroy her nude portraits. Instead, she chose the finest example of each for this maste
r set. However, she included only nineteen of more than one hundred and fifty photographs that Stieglitz took of Dorothy Norman.

  Norman realized that O’Keeffe was trying to erase her from history, and, over the next fifty years, she went to extraordinary lengths to prevent that from happening.

  Stieglitz had composed a short will in 1937 that named O’Keeffe his sole heir and executor. Norman said that Stieglitz later altered his will to name her as executor. “I was in the will for a while and O’Keeffe objected,” she recalled bitterly. “Stieglitz told me that he had to take me out of the will. In one will, he left it to me to carry out his wishes. In fact, O’Keeffe apportioned them according to her wishes. At that point, I realized the way things were and I couldn’t be involved and feel sorry because it was fated to be that way.”1

  Learning that Norman had been added to Stieglitz’s will only fueled O’Keeffe’s fury. But she experienced a profound sadness as well. The magnitude of her grief brought up feelings that had been dormant since the death of her father. To fight off these unwelcome emotions, she embarked on a frenetic schedule of activity. She treated the past as a mess to be tidied up so that she could begin her new life in earnest. Rather grumpily, she recalled the years spent resolving Stieglitz’s estate: “So I worked hard—hard as no one should work unless it is on something of their own.”2

  O’Keeffe may not have perceived Stieglitz’s estate as her own, but his death left her a rich woman, with $148,000 in cash and stocks. The difficulty came in the distribution of Stieglitz’s 850 works of art, thousands of photographs, and 50,000 letters to various institutions. Halpert, of the Downtown Gallery, provided appraisals totaling $64,425. (This low estimate must have been made to avoid taxes.)