Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  When he returned to San Francisco and to a Monkey Block studio in 1912, he had developed a new identity as painter and muralist. The great Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, celebrating the Panama Canal and the rebirth of San Francisco, included Dixon’s work alongside that of French Impressionists and eastern realists, and he sold several paintings to museums and collectors. With paint and brush, his forms simplified and his work grew more modernist—more abstract, with an economical vocabulary of emotion created by sharper lines and contrasts.18 Just a few years later, this sensibility would influence Lange’s photography.

  The return to California did not help his marriage. He continued to cope with Lillian’s depression and drinking by absenting himself, and the trips, often now for mural commissions, probably made her more desperate. Meanwhile his asthma worsened and he grew increasingly depressed, as Lillian—now drinking even wood alcohol and Listerine—grew more violent and disruptive. In January 1916 he tried to have her arrested and committed to a hospital—“Attempt to arouse L by arresting her; tragic mistake”—and she responded by trying to shoot him with his own Colt .45. So he left for good, holing up in his studio and at the Bohemian Club, where women were not admitted and Lillian could not get at him.19 In 1917 he persuaded Lillian to file a divorce suit.20 She agreed to seek treatment for herself and place seven-year-old Constance in a convent boarding school.

  The breakup produced not a release but a collapse for Dixon. “Consie remains with Lillian; conditions very bad—treadmill existence; Sophie returns; the end. Complete misery and despair—verge of insanity.” Depression, asthma, and inflammatory rheumatism intensified his despondency over the ruin of the West he loved: “ ‘finished by Henry Ford, the movies, dude ranches, and show business.’ ”21 A series of girlfriends tried to nurse him back to health.

  4.2. CONSTANCE (CONSIE) DIXON, CIRCA 1920

  He managed to take Consie with him on a trip in the early fall of 1917 to Montana to paint Glacier National Park and Blackfeet Indians, on a commission from the Great Northern Railroad. It was bliss for Consie: “While my father painted, I played with the Indian kids. . . . We children had a play tepee made for us out of Gold Medal flour sacks. . . .” Consie was unconsolable when sent back to the convent. “I wanted to stay and become an Indian,” she said.22 Soon Maynard and Lillian agreed to put Consie in the North Berkeley Outdoor School as a boarder, and her parents saw her on alternate weekends. She loved being in his studio, which was filled with Indian blankets, baskets, hatchets, and other artifacts and smelled of paint, turpentine, and the kinnickinnick that he loved to smoke. But on the whole, she recalled, “Daddy-o . . . just tagged me along while he visited his friends.”23 Needing money for the school and for alimony, he took a job with the leading advertising agency of the West, Foster and Kleiser, where Roi Partridge also worked.

  SO WHEN DOROTHEA came into his life in 1919, he was just climbing out of a deep hole, operating well beneath his best levels of confidence and energy. Their courtship relieved and reenergized him.24 Maynard brought Dorothea both urban and rural adventure. They spent many weekends on outings to Marin County and other places accessible by ferry—neither of them had a car or could drive—what he called the “real” California. They hiked, picnicked, and camped out, and Dorothea did these things easily, her energy and stamina unhindered by her bad leg—the only thing she could never do was run. She loved these jaunts, and it is hardly surprising that a person so visual would rapidly learn to love this entirely new landscape. “I did not know the earth,” she wrote, “had never known a plant aside from a rubber plant. Now I am me who has explored the country, been involved in deserts, Mtns., plains, prairies, Mtn meadows, granite slopes.”25 (She would become an avid gardener.) If she still harbored plans to continue the round-the-world trip, she easily put them aside.

  It is conceivable that this was Dorothea’s first fully sexual love affair, that her New York City relationships had been “chaste,” although this is not likely. Officially, they lived apart—she with Fronsie in a lodging house on Sutter Street, he in his studio at 728 Montgomery.26 But they began staying together nights as well, and, of course, socialized in the evenings, after work. She met the approval of the guys at the center table and became a regular part of the group, enjoying the wine and talk and the Tom and Jerry cocktails in wintertime. Dorothea would never be intimidated for long. Furthermore, it was not as if Maynard was introducing a naïve, straitlaced girlfriend to a bohemian life; Dorothea was already part of their countercultural world.

  To Dorothea, Maynard was irresistible: a lean cowboy with piercing blue eyes and elegant hands and fingers, graceful and irreverent, surrounded by a group of other dazzling artists. Her photographs of his delicate hands reveal their feminine beauty, too, another side of his allure. He was confident, worldly, somewhat famous—and an older man. Dorothea’s close friend Imogen Cunningham, in her typical no-minced-words approach, denounced the relationship because of their twenty-year age difference, but Dorothea, of course, ignored her.

  Dorothea had created herself as a stunningly attractive woman. She had big blue-green eyes and a lovely figure. She dressed with care but with eccentricity, her main concern being to stand out. She might wear jeans at work, but never outside. She still covered her leg with pants or a long skirt and had to wear “comfortable” shoes, as the unfashionable ones were called. Yet she was enough in control of her lameness that she asked Imogen and Roi to join her in learning ballroom dancing.27

  Maynard assimilated Dorothea into his Indian romance. He wrote her poetry, such as this verse:

  4.3. DOROTHEA LANGE, 1920, by Edward Weston

  And there where they came shyly, brown and barefoot,

  down the steep trail to the deep-walled spring,

  dipping up green water with their earthen jars,

  so do you come now to my waiting heart

  bringing the sacred vessel of your love

  to receive the ancient liquid of our life.28

  Such a misreading of Dorothea could only mean that Maynard was in love with a fantasy, an Indian maiden—no doubt a recurrent fantasy, now reawakened by Dorothea. She almost certainly did not grasp this, and in any case was absolutely smitten by him. Speaking toward the end of her life, she appreciated him still: “Maynard was restaurant man, a raconteur, a striking personality, graceful, had style, wit, and originality. Much of the wit was defensive. Women loved him. He was no Philanderer, but not monogamous. He was tender to little children. Knew what was true. Loved to tease. . . . never completely at home in the city . . . But coming in from a sketch trip after having worked furiously and walked miles, paint box on back, he was himself. He was a thoughtful husband, loved his little boys.”29 We can see in this recollection how attractive she had found him in 1919, how much she loved him in years after, and how the decades of separation from him had erased or at least subdued her memories of his faults.

  They announced their engagement at a tea in her studio in January 1920. Friends were invited, and Maynard was such a prominent figure that newspapers covered it on the arts pages. “Believing that an artist should seek marital happiness with one whose temperament and ideas are the same, Miss Dorothea Lange, 24, portrait photographer and artist, yesterday announced her engagement . . .” Then followed the misinformation that “she graduated from the art school of Columbia University.”30 Dorothea herself might well have been responsible for the claim—she fibbed about her father, naming him on the marriage license as George Warren.31

  5

  Working Mother in Bohemia

  The wedding was simple and unconventional. They married on March 21, 1920, in her studio, its French doors open to the lovely little “Spanish court.” She decorated with branches from flowering peach and hazel trees and lighted candles. They spoke their vows in front of the large fireplace, with a minister from the People’s Liberal Church officiating. No one stood in place of Dorothea’s father to give her away. It was a community event, not a family one
—only friends attended. Fronsie was her attendant and Roi Partridge was Maynard’s. There is no record of whether her mother had been invited, or whether Joan had longed for a proper white wedding in their church in Hoboken, where she might sing. If there was any doubt that Dorothea had become a bohemian, the wedding answered it.

  Dorothea and Maynard were a dashing couple, bohemian royalty: he all in black, including a black cape and a black Stetson, and carrying a carved sword-cane (a cane that contained a stiletto); Dorothea in her current favorite color, emerald green, with a beret set asymmetrically on her bobbed hair. Dinner invitations multiplied.1 An artist friend, Lucien Labaudt, designed some clothing for her, and sometimes she wore a Fortuny gown, an Isadora Duncan–inspired long dress made from one piece of pleated silk (a splurge, but Italian designer Mariano Fortuny was noted for making high fashion affordable).2

  They took a four-day honeymoon (no record of where) and then moved into a rented cottage at 1080 Broadway, near Jones Street. These cottages, thrown up after the earthquake, were meant as temporary quarters, but people continued to live in them for decades. They called theirs “The Little House on the Hill.”3 Maynard’s brother, Harry St. John Dixon, who became a noted art metalworker, lived in an adjoining cottage with his wife and child. The home would “carry out all the artistic ideals of these two well-known artists,” a reporter wrote, Dorothea having explained how she planned to decorate it. A small headline announced BRIDE KEEPS IDENTITY.4

  5.1. DORRIE ASLEEP, 1920s, by Maynard Dixon

  There was no question about that: She already had a public identity as a portrait photographer. She loved her work. She was an excellent businesswoman. In contrast to her friend Imogen Cunningham, who was so good-hearted that she often allowed customers to pay her with items she had no use for, Dorothea “set her prices, told you in advance what they were, and collected payment systematically,” one of her clients recalled.5 At this time, however, Dorothea and Imogen were not practicing the same vocation: Cunningham was an art photographer, exhibited throughout the country, who did some additional work for customers to earn money. Lange insisted, in interviews of decades later, that she wanted only to fill a need, to please her customers.6 Yet at the time, in 1920, she had told a reporter that she was “portrait photographer and artist.”

  There is a contradiction here, but one we need not try to resolve. Identities are frequently contradictory, and that of an ambitious woman in 1920 was particularly inconsistent, even paradoxical. Lange loved photography, relished being a figure of consequence in a community she admired, enjoyed earning her own money. Yet her unacknowledged aspirations leaked out, creating tension between her bohemian free spirits and independent business, and her plan to become a traditional wife and mother. She intended to make their home elegant, orderly, and modern, to cook tasty meals (she got her mother to send her recipes), to raise gifted children. She indulged in a common rescue fantasy: She would be a good wife to Maynard, unlike Lillian. She did not expect him to do women’s work. They would become a proudly bohemian but nevertheless model family. Maynard wanted this too, but he was also expecting a mother for his unhappy daughter, about whom he felt so much sadness and guilt. This does not mean that his attraction to Dorothea was insincere, but that good-mother was part of his fantasy of what she was like.

  Besides, she adored him and knew he was becoming a great painter. The market for both photography and art looked good. So it was no sacrifice at all for her to support Maynard in devoting more time to painting, and he did, first reducing his hours at Foster and Kleiser, then quitting altogether. It eased her mind that in becoming the chief breadwinner, she was, ironically, moving closer to the womanhood and wifehood that she thought appropriate—subordinating herself to his more important career. It was satisfying also because it gave her work a higher purpose—advancing art. He felt wonderful. Dorothea gave him not only more time for painting but also a sturdy reliability and peace, along with her charm and savoir faire. “D’s help and confidence. . . . Life in ‘Little House’—the garden; breakfast on porch; neighbors,” he wrote about his new life.7

  To get to the “little house” you climbed one of San Francisco’s almost-vertical stairways. The couple cut a window into the east wall of the one-room cottage to bring in views of the garden, with its marigolds, geraniums, nasturtiums, and shasta daisies, and they installed a fireplace. They furnished the cottage with cheap old stuff that Dorothea painted—the floor and a chiffonier deep indigo blue; everything else yellow or orange—and she dyed the cheesecloth curtains yellow. Consie Dixon remembered it as “a valiant attempt to fight off S.F.’s dim, gray fogs.”8 The thirty-dollar-per-month rent was all they could afford, because they were paying alimony to Lillian and boarding school costs for Consie, as well as paying off Dorothea’s remaining debt to her investors.

  The years of their marriage became the time of Maynard’s best work and maximum productivity; in their first five years together he painted 140 canvases and sold over 70. He was soon the best-known West Coast muralist. Through murals he moved away from the Impressionism and Postimpressionism of his early painting toward a modernist style. (In this respect he influenced Dorothea and she him: they both developed a fondness for a low horizon line, bold shapes, and simple, stable compositional structures.)9 His images became less representational and more symbolic—of a West whose loss he mourned. Critics were enthusiastic. In 1924, he won first place in a Los Angeles salon of western art. His buyers included the same cultural elite—the Gerstles, Kahns, Rabinowitzes, Elkuses, Walters—that patronized Lange’s studio.10 Their two careers worked synergistically—Dorothea’s studio introduced buyers to his work, and marriage to Maynard increased her prestige.

  Dorothea encouraged Maynard to try new ventures. When she learned that he had invented Indian tales for Consie, illustrating them with spontaneous sketches, she suggested turning them into a children’s book. This became Injun Babies, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1923. A reader seeing the title today might tense up, expecting racist, trivializing, conventionalizing drawings and stories, but that is not what is there. The use of the word Injun is obnoxious today, but the protagonists of the seven stories are active, resourceful kids who get in and out of various fixes, often aided by kind animals with magical powers. The children have wonderfully witty, punning names: A-Wáy-She-Go, He-Wánts-Tu-Kwit, No-Páh-No-Mah, O-Só-Sti-Ki.

  The fact that Dorothea worked long hours made them more compatible. She did not begrudge him his time in the studio, with friends, or on painting trips. On their joint outings she began photographing outside in natural light. She visited him on some of his solitary trips—“night under stars,” he jotted down. In 1921, her mother, with her new husband, George Bowly, came out to meet Maynard, who took the whole extended family, including Consie, on a mule-train painting trip over the High Sierra, through the Owens Valley, and into the Panamint and Inyo mountains. “Glacial meadows and camp fires; C’s [Consie’s] delight and Wuz’s terror [at the steep gorges.]” In a romantic, soft-edged photograph from that trip, Dorothea, seen in profile, is beautiful and happy, seated on the ground and surrounded by high grass. Maynard, standing at her side, is looking determinedly ahead; she is lost in reverie. Of another trip, Maynard wrote, “Great thunderstorm. D’s delight.”

  The Coppa’s crowd, now including more photographers, partied a lot. A gag photograph taken by Maynard at a “crazy party” of photographers in Dorothea’s studio—a symbolic family portrait—shows Edward Weston standing on one side, Anne Brigman on the other, as the mother and father, holding Dorothea’s camera, which is wrapped in its focusing cloth to represent a baby. The other “kids” are sitting or lying on the floor—Dorothea, Imogen, Roi Partridge, Johan Hagemeyer, Roger Sturtevant (Dorothea’s assistant at the time), and Ansel Adams.11 Prohibition did little to change their recreational habits; in fact, it was so unpopular in San Francisco that the City Board of Supervisors actually ordered the police not to enforce it.

  Domestic s
tability did not, however, erase Maynard’s irritability about the crowding and commercialization of the West. The more he painted, the more he mourned the spoiling of natural wilderness. He associated this adulteration of nature with modernism: “. . . art today is full of hokum. . . .” His most common denunciatory term was hypocrisy. Modernist “ ‘self-expression’ is just an alibi for idiocy.” He felt his own newly simplified style to be integrated, anchored in his personal vision, the “outcome of his inner integrity.”12 By contrast, many other painters appeared to him trendy, painting only for the market. This is, of course, what many artists and intellectuals mean by “selling out,” and although the distinction between that and managing to make a living can be fuzzy, nevertheless the distinction is often felt passionately. He saw fashionableness infect collectors and curators as well, a group that included, of course, the portrait customers who supported Dorothea, Consie, Lillian, and himself. Maynard’s identity was built around being plainspoken, honest, even vulgar in exposing cant and pretension, and he was quite willing to offend in order to speak the truth. Dorothea had been wowed by his earthy refusal to conform to good manners, and she always respected it, but it would soon become troublesome.

  INTO THIS FLUID, easygoing life, an angry intruder arrived. Now ten years old, Consie Dixon had lived the first decade of her life with a mother who loved her but was unable to provide minimally adequate parenting, and Maynard considered it essential to bring her to his new home. We know Consie’s experience only from her recollections of fifty years later, but even if only a fragment of the experiences she recounted were true, hers had been a wretched childhood. Her earliest memory was of standing in her crib, rattling the bars and crying, while her parents screamed at each other in the kitchen. Then she would hear her father run down the stairs and slam the door, going off to spend the night at the Bohemian Club. She felt that neither parent wanted her. From as far back as she could remember, Consie knew her mother as frequently hysterical, drunk, and unable to construct a stable life. Maynard and his friends identified the problem exclusively with Lillian’s drinking—he called her “his dipsomaniac wife”—while Consie, years later, believed that an underlying mental illness led to Lillian’s drinking.