Full Bloom
Page 66
54. Ibid. p. 266.
55. Robinson, A Life, p. 265.
56. Barbara Haskell, Charles Demuth (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1987), p. 21.
57. Ibid.
58. Exhibition brochure, Anderson Galleries, Mar. 3–16, 1924.
Chapter V
1. GOK to SA, June 11, 1924, cited in Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, pp. 177–78.
2. Ibid.
3. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
4. AS to RSS, June 19, 1924, ASA, YCAL.
5. AS to RSS, July 25, 1924, ASA, YCAL.
6. RSS to AS, Sept. 9, 1924, ASA, YCAL.
7. AS to RSS, Sept. 5, 1924, ASA, YCAL.
8. RSS to AS, Sept. 9, 1924, ASA, YCAL.
9. AS to RSS, Oct. 3, 1924, ASA, YCAL.
10. GOK to SA, Feb. 11, 1924, cited in Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 176.
11. Carol Taylor, “Lady Dynamo,” New York World-Telegram, March 31, 1945.
12. AS to RSS, July 11, 1925, ASA, YCAL.
13. GOK TO SA, Nov. 11?, 1924, ASA, YCAL.
14. GOK to SA, Oct. 1924, ASA, YCAL.
15. Seiberling, “Horizons.”
Chapter VI
1. Henry McBride, “The Stieglitz Group at Anderson’s,” New York Sun, March 14, 1925, cited in Lynes, Critics, p. 225.
2. GOK to SA, Oct. 1924, ASA, YCAL.
3. Helen Appleton Read, “News and Views on Current Art: Alfred Stieglitz Presents 7 Americans,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Mar. 15, 1925, cited in Lynes, Critics, p. 232.
4. AS to SA, June 12, 1924, quoted by Lisle, Portrait, p. 139.
5. Todd Webb, Looking Back: Memoirs and Photographs (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), p. 184.
6. Edmund Wilson, “The Stieglitz Exhibition,” New Republic 42, Mar. 18, 1925, cited in Lynes, Critics, p. 99.
7. Richard Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), pp. 9, 21.
8. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
9. Kuh, The Artist’s Voice, p. 194.
10. Seiberling, “Horizons.”
11. GOK to MDL, July 1929, YCAL.
12. Seiberling, “Horizons.”
13. Lowe, Stieglitz, p. 323.
14. AS to RSS, July 11, 1925, ASA, YCAL.
15. AS to RSS, July 22, 1925, ASA, YCAL.
16. Lowe, Stieglitz, p. 225.
17. AS to Ida O’Keeffe, Sept. 18, 1925, ASA, YCAL.
18. Dow, Composition, p. 23.
19. Seligmann, Stieglitz Talking, p. 73.
20. Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum, ed. Naef, pp. 76–84.
21. AS to ESD, Aug. 18, 1918, cited in Robinson, A Life, p. 221.
22. AS to SA, Dec. 9, 1925, ASA, YCAL, cited by Greenough and Hamilton, “Georgia O’Keeffe and the Intimate Gallery,” Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings, p. 214.
23. Blanche Matthias, “Stieglitz Showing Seven Americans,” Chicago Evening Post, Magazine of the Art World, March 2, 1926.
24. Pollitzer, “That’s Georgia,” cited in Lovingly, Georgia, p. 294.
25. Frances O’Brien, “Americans We Like: Georgia O’Keeffe,” The Nation, Oct. 12, 1927.
26. Seligmann, Stieglitz Talking, p. 73.
27. GOK To Ida O’Keeffe, Nov.–Dec. 1926, YCAL.
Chapter VII
1. Lisle, Portrait, p. 155.
2. Matthias, “Stieglitz Showing Seven Americans.”
3. Lisle, Portrait, p. 158.
4. Georgia O’Keeffe, “Stieglitz: His Pictures Collected Him,” New York Times Magazine, December 11, 1949.
5. O’Keeffe, A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz.
6. Seiberling, “Horizons.”
7. Seligmann, “291: A Vision Through Photography,” in America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait, edited by Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Norman, Paul Rosenfeld, and Harold Rugg (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1934), p. 113.
8. AS to SA, Dec. 9, 1925, NL, ASA, YCAL.
9. O’Keeffe, Fifty Recent Paintings, exhibition brochure, Intimate Gallery, New York, Feb. 11–Apr. 3, 1926.
10. Murdock Pemberton, “The Art Galleries: The Great Wall of Manhattan, or New York Live for New Yorkers,” The New Yorker, Mar. 13, 1926, cited by Lynes, Critics, p. 251.
11. Henry McBride, “Modern Art,” Dial, May 1926, cited by Lynes, Critics, p. 252.
12. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
13. Matthias, “Stieglitz Showing Seven Americans.”
14. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
15. See Anna C. Chave, “Who Will Paint New York?” From the Faraway Nearby, p. 74.
16. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of the Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), p. 6.
17. GOK to MDL, 1925, cited in Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 180.
18. Mabel Dodge Luhan, “The Art of Georgia O’Keeffe,” n.d., cited by Lynes, Critics, p. 102.
19. GOK to Blanche Matthias, Mar. 1926, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 183.
20. Matthias, “Stieglitz Showing Seven Americans.”
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. O’Brien, “Americans.” O’Brien’s feature story on O’Keeffe asserted that not only had the artist never been to Europe, “she has no ambition to go there.” She had been “untainted by theories, by cultural traditions.” Such opinions, fed to others by Stieglitz, helped reinforce the myth that O’Keeffe was tuned into pure spiritual energy, uncluttered by theory or education. See Lynes, Critics, p. 133.
26. GOK to BM, Feb. 1926, YCAL.
27. AS to ESD, Aug. 7, 1926, ASA, YCAL.
28. Ibid.
29. Suzan Campbell, “Rebecca Strand James in New Mexico,” MFA thesis, University of New Mexico, 1991.
30. Louis Kalonyme, “Arts Spring Flowers: Notable Paintings in New York Present Exhibitions,” Arts and Decoration 24, Apr. 1926.
31. Seiberling, “Horizons.”
32. AS to Herbert J. Seligmann, 1926, ASA, YCAL.
33. GOK to Blanche Matthias, Feb. 1926, ASA, YCAL.
34. GOK to Waldo Frank, Summer 1926, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 184.
35. “Exhibitions in New York: Georgia O’Keeffe, Intimate Gallery,” The Art News, Feb. 13, 1926, cited by Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 486.
36. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Seligmann, Stieglitz Talking, p. 84.
42. O’Brien, “Americans.”
43. Dorothy Norman, Encounters: A Memoir (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), p. 54.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
Chapter VIII
1. GOK to Waldo Frank, Jan. 10, 1927, YCAL, cited in Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 185.
2. Ibid.
3. Charles Demuth, exhibition brochure, Georgia O’Keeffe Paintings, 1926, Jan 11–Feb. 27, 1927, Intimate Gallery, New York, n.p.
4. Oscar Bluemner, “A Painter’s Comment,” exhibition brochure, Georgia O’Keeffe Paintings, 1926, Jan. 11–Feb. 27, 1927, Intimate Gallery, New York, n.p.
5. Mumford, Findings and Keepings (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1975), pp. 355–56.
6. Mumford, “O’Keefe [sic] and Matisse,” New Republic, Mar. 2, 1927, cited in Lynes, Critics, p. 265.
7. McBride, “Georgia O’Keefe’s [sic] Work Shown: Fellow Painters of Little Group Become Fairly Lyrical Over It,” New York Sun, Jan. 15, 1927, cited in Lynes, Critics, p. 25.
8. GOK to HMB, 1927, YCAL.
9. Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 154.
10. Frederick Creighton Wellman, aka C. Kay Scott, to GOK, July 21, 1927, cited in
Lynes, Critics, p. 273.
11. GOK to AP, 1927, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 275.
12. Seiberling, “Horizons.”
13. Ibid.
14. O’Brien, “Americans.”
15. Tomkins, Notes.
16. McBride, “Georgia O’Keefe’s [sic] Recent Work: Her Annual Display at the Intimate Gallery Now Open to the Public,” New York Sun, Jan. 14, 1928, cited in Lynes, Critics, p. 274.
17. HMB to GOK, May 20, 1928, YCAL.
18. Tomkins, Notes.
19. Stieglitz, letter to the editor, The Art News, Apr. 1928.
20. B. Vladimir Berman, “She Painted the Lily and Got $25,000 and Fame for Doing It!” New York Evening Graphic, May 12, 1928.
21. Mitchell Kennerley letter, YCAL, published for the first time in this biography.
22. Mitchell Kennerley to AS, Sept. 2, 1928, YCAL.
23. Lillian Sabine, “Record Price for Living Artist: Canvases of Georgia O’Keeffe Were Kept in Storage for Three Years until Market Was Right for Them,” Brooklyn Sunday Eagle Magazine, May 27, 1928.
24. Ibid. Stieglitz annotated a checklist with prices for her paintings: Red Barn, Wisconsin, 1928, $4,000, Hickory Leaves with White Daisy, 1928, $1,200, East River with White and Pink Dish, 1929 pastel, $4,000, Green Corn, No. I, 1924, $2,000.
25. Norman, Encounters, p. 59.
26. Ibid.
27. AP to AS, Dec. 29, 1928, ASA, YCAL.
28. Author’s interview with Dorothy Norman, Apr. 2, 1987, New York City. Norman invited me to have tea at her Bauhaus-style residence, designed by Paul Lescaze, on the Upper East Side. Dozens of watercolors by Marin and photographs by Stieglitz, purchases or gifts, lined her elegant living room walls. Her first purchase, the Lachaise nude, rested on a table. Then eighty-two, Dorothy was dressed in the Indian silk robes that reflected her passion for Hindu culture. Shells and stones and feathers were arranged on tables. She gave me permission to read her correspondence with Stieglitz at Yale’s Beinecke Library.
29. Norman, Encounters, p. 62.
30. Ibid., p. 73.
31. Author’s interview with Norman, Apr. 2, 1987.
32. Ibid. The semi-nude photographs of Norman are in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and have never been exhibited. I was able to see them in 1999.
33. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
34. Paul Rosenfeld to GOK, Sept. 9, 1928, YCAL.
35. Author’s interview with Frank Prosser Jr., known as “Bucky,” July 4, 1988, Lake George, N.Y. After Stieglitz’s death, Margaret Prosser chose not to go to New Mexico to work for O’Keeffe. Instead, she worked for the Seward Johnsons at their homes in Oldwick, N.J., and Chatham, Mass. After her memory began to fail, she went back to work for Dr. Lee Stieglitz in the mid-1960s, passing away in 1969.
36. GOK to Mitchell Kennerley, Jan. 20, 1929, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 187.
37. AS to Dorothy Norman, July 31, 1928. Norman donated the letters to the Beinecke Library at Yale University. These letters, which have never been published, led to my conclusion that they had a passionate and sexual relationship.
38. Norman, Encounters, p. 73.
39. AS to ESD, Sept. 6, 1928, ASA, YCAL.
40. GOK to RSS, Aug., 21, 1928, ASA, YCAL.
41. GOK to Florine Stettheimer, Sept. 21, 1928, YCAL.
42. Florine Stettheimer to GOK, n.d., prob. 1928, YCAL.
Chapter IX
1. Sabine, “Record Price for Living Artist.”
2. GOK to HMB, Feb. 1929, YCAL, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 188.
3. Dorothy Lefferts Moore, “The Exhibitions in New York,” The Arts, 15 Mar. 1929, cited by Lynes, Critics, p. 300.
4. Edwin Alden Jewell, “Georgia O’Keeffe,” New York Times, Feb. 10, 1929, cited in Lynes, Critics, p. 296.
5. Tomkins, Notes.
6. GOK to Mitchell Kennerley, 1929, Mitchell Kennerley Papers, New York Public Library.
7. O’Keeffe, A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz.
8. GOK to Waldo Frank, Jan. 10, 1927, YCAL.
9. Campbell, “In the Shadow of the Sun,” p. 198.
10. RSS to PS, May 11, 1929, PSC, CCP.
11. GOK to HMB, Summer 1929, cited in Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 189.
12. Tomkins, Notes.
13. Campbell, “In the Shadow of the Sun,” p. 221.
14. Mabel Dodge Luhan, “Georgia O’Keeffe in Taos,” Creative Art 8 (June 1931).
15. Eisler, American Romance, p. 390.
16. Patten and Cardona-Hine, Miss O’Keeffe, p. 89.
17. Tomkins, Notes.
18. This analysis of O’Keeffe and St. Mawr is drawn from Udall in Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo, p. 76.
19. Campbell, “In the Shadow of the Sun,” p. 230.
20. Lisle, Portrait, p. 222.
21. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
22. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe; see also, Udall, Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo, pp. 64, 135. For more complete analysis, see Sandra D’Emilio and Suzan Campbell, Spirit and Vision: Images of Ranchos de Taos Church (Sante Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1987), pp. 6–16.
23. Luhan, “O’Keeffe in Taos.”
24. RSS to PS, June 19, 1929, PSC, CCP, cited by Campbell, “In the Shadow of the Sun,” p. 238.
25. MDL to Marion Sherky, June 30, 1929, YCAL.
26. MDL to GOK, from Buffalo General Hospital, June 21, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
27. MDL to GOK, from Buffalo General Hospital, June 27, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
28. GOK to MDL, Summer 1929, YCAL.
29. MDL to GOK, July 5, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
30. Tomkins, Notes.
31. MDL to GOK, June 27, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
32. GOK to MDL, Summer 1929, ASA, YCAL.
33. AS to RSS, July 21, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
34. AS to ESD, July 2, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
35. AS to RSS, May 17, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
36. Lisle, Portrait, p. 217.
37. AS to Sadakichi Hartmann, Nov. 22, 1930, ASA, YCAL.
38. AS to ESD, July 22, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
39. AS to ESD, July 29, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
40. GOK to MDL, Summer 1929, YCAL.
41. AS to MDL, July 21, 1929, YCAL.
42. MDL to GOK, July 23, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
43. GOK to RSS, Aug. 24, 1929, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 193.
44. Dorothy Norman to AS, Aug. 1929, ASA, YCAL.
45. AS to ESD, Aug. 18, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
46. Dorothy Norman to AS, Aug. 1929, n.d., ASA, YCAL.
47. AS to Dorothy Norman, Aug. 22, 1929, YCAL.
48. AS to Elizabeth and Donald Davidson, Sept. 2, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
49. AS to ESD, Aug. 25, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
50. HMB to GOK, Sept. 27, 1929, ASA, YCAL.
51. GOK to MDL Sept. 1929?, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 196.
52. GOK to Florine Stettheimer, Oct. 7, 1929, YCAL.
53. Tomkins, Notes.
54. This point is made explicit by Lynes in Critics, p. 303.
55. GOK to Dorothy Brett, Fall 1929, YCAL.
56. AS to Dorothy Norman, Sept. 30, 1929, YCAL.
57. GOK to Dorothy Brett, Fall 1929?, YCAL.
58. AS to Dorothy Norman, Oct. 21, 1929, YCAL.
59. Ibid.
60. Dorothy Norman to AS, n.d., prob. Oct. 1929, ASA, YCAL.
61. Eisler, American Romance, p. 408.
62. AS to Dorothy Norman, Aug. 22, 1929, YCAL.
63. Stieglitz, An American Place brochure, 1929, n.p.
Chapter X
1. GOK to Betty O’Keeffe, Jan. 14, 1930, collection June O’Keeffe Sebring, Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. Many thanks to June Sebring, who shared the letters O’Keeffe sent her mother, Betty.
2. GOK to Betty O’Keeffe, Jan. 24. 1930, collection June O’Keeffe Sebring, Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. In the end, O’Keeffe helped Alexius’s children. She paid for the spe
cial education of Robert O’Keeffe (who, at age seven, had a serious speech defect) at the Hill and Young boarding school in Los Angeles. Robert was able to finish school and attend UCLA but died at age twenty-one. O’Keeffe also paid for June’s Bates Method eye exercises when she was in college.
3. GOK to RSS, Nov. 5, 1929, YCAL.
4. Henry McBride, “The Sign of the Cross,” New York Sun, Feb. 8, 1930.
5. Herbert J. Seligmann, quoted by Eldredge, Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern, p. 180.
6. Gladys Oaks, “Radical Writer and Woman Artist Clash on Propaganda and Its Uses,” New York World, Mar. 16, 1930.
7. Ibid.
8. Tomkins, “The Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty Fine.”
9. Tomkins, Notes. Reiterated in her autobiography as “I thought to myself, ‘I’ll make it an American painting.’ ”
10. GOK to Dorothy Brett, Apr. 1930?, YCAL.
11. Tomkins, Notes.
12. MDL to GOK, Jan. 22, 1930, YCAL.
13. GOK to MDL, 1930, YCAL.
14. Wagner, Three Women, p. 70.
15. Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades (New York: Dover, 1931), p. 244.
16. Ansel Adams, Letters and Images: 1916–1984, edited by Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman (New York: Little, Brown with New York Graphic Society, 1988), p. 56.
17. Tomkins, Notes.
18. Ibid.
19. GOK to RSS, Sept. 4, 1930, YCAL.
20. O’Keeffe wrote this description on the back of a photograph of this painting, in Lynes, O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, p. 450.
21. Campbell, “The Art of Rebecca James,” p. 250.
22. AS to ESD, Aug. 22, 1930, ASA, YCAL.
23. GOK to RSS, Sept. 4, 1930, YCAL.
24. GOK to Dorothy Brett, Fall 1930?, YCAL.
25. GOK to RSS, Sept. 4, 1930, YCAL.
26. Ibid.
27. Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 266, 272.
28. GOK to Dorothy Brett, Oct. 12?, 1930, YCAL.
29. GOK to Dorothy Brett, Apr. 1931, YCAL.
Chapter XI
1. Dorothy Norman to GOK, Feb. 13, 1931, YCAL, published for the first time.
2. Thanks to author Eve Babitz for this observation.
3. Norman, Encounters, p. 102.
4. GOK to RSS, Oct. 6, 1931, YCAL. That summer, a drunken brawl followed Witter Bynner’s amateur production of Cake, a satire of the antics at Mabeltown.