Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  When O’Keeffe and Stieglitz began corresponding a year later, she wrote that the rooms themselves had inspired her: “I went in a year ago after you had stripped them—and I just thought things on them.” By then, the works embodying her thoughts—the charcoal drawings she called Specials—had been on display at 291 for six weeks. Stieglitz wanted one for himself. He could have the lot, she replied: “They are all as much yours as mine.”

  Stieglitz liked to tell the tale of his first meeting with O’Keeffe as a turning point. A century later, his discovery of the artist who became his protégée, muse, and wife has become a legend. The story begins on January 1, 1916, his fifty-second birthday. That evening, when Anita showed up at 291 with a mailing tube containing Georgia’s charcoals, she found him in low spirits. “Feeling more dead than alive,” he recalled, he looked at a drawing: “I studied the second and the third, exclaiming, ‘Finally a woman on paper. A woman gives herself.’ ”

  That night, Anita re-created the scene in a letter to Georgia, who was teaching art at Columbia College, a Methodist women’s school in South Carolina. Stieglitz declared, “She’s an unusual woman—She’s broad minded, She’s bigger than most women, but she’s got the sensitive emotion—I’d know she was a woman—Look at that line.” Anita was to tell Georgia that he said her drawings were “the purest, finest, sincerest things” that had come to 291 for some time.

  Women were as capable of creative expression as men, Stieglitz believed, but he had been waiting to meet one whose “line” pulsed with sensuality. What did he see in O’Keeffe’s Specials that made him claim them as emblems of “Woman unafraid”? They spoke to him in the black, gray, and silvery tones of photography, but in another medium. Her line embodied the tactility he revered; her swirls gave off a sense of movement. “Do you like my music,” Georgia asked Anita when she sent her the drawings. “What I wanted to express was a feeling like wonderful music gives me.”

  To Stieglitz, O’Keeffe’s abstractions conjured up “Music—Voices—Singing—Water” along with tides of erotic feeling. At a time when Freudianism held sway in progressive circles, it was inevitable that her biomorphic shapes would be seen as sexual symbols and her Specials as feminine—although they gestured beyond conventional notions of “male” and “female.” They came alive, Stieglitz wrote, because he saw her in them. He added, “They are as if I saw a part of myself.”

  * * *

  . . .

  O’Keeffe was astounded to receive these words from Stieglitz. A meeting of the minds seemed unlikely for many reasons—the age difference (she was twenty-eight; he was fifty-two), the disparity in reputations (she was unknown; he was the impresario of modern art), their temperaments (she loved the outdoors; he was a city person), their cosmopolitanism or lack thereof (she had never left the United States). But it was O’Keeffe’s Americanness that attracted Stieglitz at a time when he was on the lookout for innovative art that was homegrown. Coming upon her work a few months after his embrace of Strand, he thought of her as his protégé’s female counterpart.

  Born in 1887 on a farm in Wisconsin to second-generation immigrants who would produce seven children (she was the eldest of five girls), Georgia had not always been able to explore her passion for art. As a girl, she learned sewing, cookery, and how to keep a kitchen garden, and for a year she attended a Catholic boarding school where the sister who taught art inspired her to think of herself as an artist. (The nuns’ habits also gave her an appreciation of black and white as a neat color scheme for an independent woman.)

  After the family’s move to Williamsburg, Virginia, they supported Georgia’s studies at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905–1906) and the New York Art Students League (1907–1908) despite their straitened circumstances. When their finances became precarious, she worked in Chicago as a commercial artist—drawing designs for embroidery and illustrations for advertisements. On her return to Virginia, she found her parents living apart, her mother, sisters, and brothers having moved to Charlottesville. For the next two years, she abandoned art and took a series of jobs to help support the family.

  Rufus W. Holsinger, Miss Georgia O’Keeffe, 1915

  In time, O’Keeffe obtained a position teaching art at a school for girls in Chatham, Virginia—an experience that showed her that a schoolmarm’s life might offer a single woman a way to maintain her independence. At the end of the term, she had no alternative but to return to Charlottesville: Her mother, who was making ends meet by running a boardinghouse, had contracted tuberculosis. At twenty-five, Georgia was resigned to a future as a talented spinster working in obscurity.

  The following year, she enrolled in the University of Virginia’s summer art program, where she was introduced to the ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow. Her instructor, Alon Bement, explained Dow’s belief that harmonious design mattered more than representation—an approach in sympathy with both the lingering Art Nouveau aesthetic and the antimimetic stance of modernism. Bement hired her as his assistant for the next four summers and recommended her for a teaching job in Amarillo, Texas—“something I’d wanted to do all my life. The Wild West, you see,” she said years later. She taught there until 1914, when she enrolled at Columbia to complete the prerequisites for a teaching certificate.

  For the next year, Georgia lived in New York in a four-dollar-a-week room while studying under Dow, the head of the art department. She and Anita supplemented classes with trips to the galleries—the Montross, to see Dow’s oils of the Grand Canyon, and 291. “I didn’t understand some of the things he showed, but it was a new wave, I knew that. It showed you how you could make up your mind about what to paint.”

  After leaving New York that fall to take up her teaching job in Columbia, South Carolina, she poured her enthusiasm for the “new wave” into her classes. To keep in touch with progressive ways of thinking, she subscribed to The Masses, Camera Work, and 291—the next best thing to visiting the gallery, she told Anita. “Then I hurried down to 291 and saw our friend Stieglitz….It does me good to breathe his air for a little while,” Anita replied. After hearing about Georgia’s exile in South Carolina, Stieglitz said, “When she gets her money—she’ll do Art with it—& if she’ll get anywhere—it’s worth going to Hell to get there.” His remarks made Georgia laugh: “I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something—anything I have done—than anyone else I know of.”

  Reading the women’s correspondence over these months, one sees that their reverence for Stieglitz did not keep Georgia from telling Anita what she wanted and Anita from coming forward as her agent. “Little did I dream that one day she would bring to me drawings that would mean so much to 291,” Stieglitz told O’Keeffe. “Nor did you dream when you did them that they would—or could—ever mean so much to anyone…”

  * * *

  . . .

  What the drawings meant to Georgia was another matter. Judging by her letters from Columbia, the time spent working on them unsettled her. “I made a crazy thing last week,” she told Anita, “like I was feeling—keenly alive—but not much point to it all—Something wonderful about it all—but it looks lost—I am lost you know.”

  At other times, she was overcome with a sense of plenitude. “Anita—do you feel like flowers sometimes?” she asked in a letter describing the riot of colors in the vases placed around her room. Still, she worried about how her latest work might be perceived: “I am afraid people won’t understand and…afraid they will.” Then she turned to the cause of her concern: Arthur Macmahon, a young political science instructor from Columbia University whom she had met when both were teaching at the University of Virginia’s summer school. They had hiked and camped in the Smoky Mountains with some like-minded students. Arthur shared her love of nature and liked to discuss ideas current in liberal circles.

  Georgia O’Keeffe, No. 12 Special, 1916

  Since then, Arthur, a man of strict moral principles, had written to her of
ten and sent books to stoke her interest in progressive thought—including Floyd Dell’s Women as World Builders and Life and Youth, by his friend Randolph Bourne. Sensing the reserve beneath Arthur’s liberalism, Georgia worried that her eagerness might strike him as forward, even “crazy”—a word that recurs in her letters. Troubled by her emotions, she told Anita that she was closer to being in love than she wanted to be, a state of affairs that muddied her sense of herself. Anita replied that art offered the means to express what one felt: “We’re trying to live…on paper what we’re living in our hearts and heads.”

  In November, Arthur took a train to South Carolina to spend Thanksgiving with Georgia. They planned more “tramps” in May, when they would share a cabin in the Carolina mountains with his family. The prospect of their reunion moved her to complete the drawings that said on paper what she could not put into words, such as her “crazy” urges. Resisting her wish to spend Christmas with him in New York, she summoned up the capacity for self-control that would often conflict with her emotions: “I want to love as hard as I can and I can’t let myself.”

  But Georgia could not help letting Arthur know that he moved her: “I said something to you in charcoal,” she told him in the new year. A few days before, after learning of Stieglitz’s response to her Specials, Georgia told Anita they were “essentially a woman’s feeling.” Their surging forms implied strong desires: “There are things we want to say—but saying them is pretty nervy.” By then, Georgia could no longer bear her surroundings. “Columbia is a nightmare to me—everything here is deliciously stupid” compared with New York, which held the attractions of 291 and Arthur.

  A job offer to be head of the art department at West Texas State Normal College offered a solution. If O’Keeffe would complete the training she had begun at Teachers College, she could start in the fall of 1916 in Canyon, twenty miles south of Amarillo—where, she told Anita, “there is something wonderful about the bigness and the lonelyness and the windyness of it all.” But she hesitated because of Arthur. “I want to go—and I don’t want to go….Arthur says he will go out soon but the darn fool puts ‘soon’ a long way off.”

  In February, after months of restricting her palette to black and white, O’Keeffe began to think in color. Turning to watercolor was like finding her way in the dark. She was cheered by random events—an amusing talk on suffrage by a senator from Colorado, the yellow jonquils, a jazzy “rag” that made her “want to tell all the Methodists to go to Hell.” At the end of the month, she quit her job, accepted the Texas offer, and went to New York to complete her certificate.

  That spring, she and Arthur were often together. She took him to see new work at the galleries; he introduced her to his mother; their plan to spend May in the mountains may have been revived. Anita’s cousin Aline Pollitzer, with whom she boarded, believed that the young man proposed to Georgia but was rejected. He was, she felt, too straitlaced to share her ardor or her passion for art. Aline admired everything about Georgia—her self-possession, her art, her tailored garments (which she made herself), her lack of interest in other people’s opinions. But she could not understand her feelings for Macmahon.

  Perhaps still wishing to say things to him, Georgia drew more Specials, whose embryonic spirals reveal an awareness of inner landscapes. Over the next few months, working in deep blue watercolors, she created a series of works consisting of pared-down vertical strokes. In one of these, an elegant abstraction called Blue Lines X, two strokes stand in the center of the composition, one straight, the other bent like an arm. While many critics (following Stieglitz) would see these lines as emblematic of the sexes, this series can be seen as equivalents of mental states—O’Keeffe’s way of “living on paper.”

  That spring, she also went to 291. It’s tempting to think of O’Keeffe gazing at the exhibition of Strand’s photographs in March but impossible to know if she saw them. Put off by Hartley’s highly charged oils the following month, she was nonetheless drawn to Stieglitz’s portrait of the artist in a dark hat and white muffler. Stieglitz hoped to display her work but had not yet decided when to do so. In the crush at the gallery, they were never alone.

  Meanwhile, Stieglitz hung the Specials in the back room for his own enjoyment. His new finds, Strand and O’Keeffe, had come to 291 just when he was looking for the next generation of kindred spirits. Both embodied in their art an original take on abstraction; at the same time, they seemed to demonstrate ideas about sexual difference to which he subscribed. If Strand’s work conveyed a masculine rigor, O’Keeffe’s, Sarah Greenough writes, was “expressive not simply of her femininity, but more generally the physical, emotional and even spiritual components of what it meant to be a woman.”

  In May, Stieglitz decided to exhibit the drawings in which he took such pleasure. On learning that her charcoals were on display at 291, O’Keeffe stormed into the gallery, demanding that he take them down. Stieglitz told her, “You have no more right to withhold those pictures…than to withdraw a child from the world.” When he asked if she knew where they came from, she retorted, “Do you think I’m a idiot?” He took her to lunch; she consented to leave the drawings where they were.

  For the next six weeks, ten of her Specials remained at the gallery. No doubt primed by Stieglitz, Henry Tyrrell’s review in The Christian Science Monitor introduced the rhetoric that would prevail in future critiques: “Miss O’Keeffe looks within herself and draws with unconscious naïveté what purports to be the innermost unfolding of a girl’s being, like the germinating of a flower.” Stieglitz developed the theme in his notes for the next Camera Work: “‘291’ had never before seen a woman express herself so frankly on paper.” He also ran an appreciation of “the woman pictures” by a writer who had been “startled into admiration of the self-knowledge in them.”

  O’Keeffe was too distressed to take note of these reviews when they appeared. Her mother died on May 2, and she went to Charlottesville to be with her family. On the train, she poured out her feelings to Arthur: “I wish you would love me very very much for the next few days.” Her grief took the form of extreme fatigue: “I have spent most of the time in bed,” she told Anita. “I get so tired that I almost feel crazy.” Toward the end of June, she told Arthur that she loved him: “Love is great to give—You may give as little in return as you want to—or none at all.”

  At about the time that Georgia was giving her love to Arthur, she resumed a lively correspondence with her new patron—an exchange that would come to include the twenty-five thousand pages of letters that document the evolution of their relationship: Stieglitz’s roles as patron, protector, and confessor; O’Keeffe’s shift from protégée to muse to trusted and trusting friend, then lover and wife. Reading this record of their rapport is like listening to a conversation that moves from tactful expressions of sympathy through reassurances of support to a love affair conducted in the language of artistic exchange.

  When Stieglitz expressed sympathy for her loss, she thanked him for allowing her to speak freely. Soon she felt able to write to him about Arthur: “Those drawings you have had to grow some way—The man who made me make them—I might better say—that I made them to…seems to be part of everything I know.” She added, “His life is planned—and he didn’t put a woman in the plan—and I have not planned—and need the thing I like— You understand?” Stieglitz did. Wondering if the other man “saw” the drawings as he did, he said that men were “just plain stupid.” O’Keeffe replied with a defense of men in general (“I think they are all right”) and the unnamed one in particular (“I like him because he is rare—feels and thinks too”).

  From then on, as she recovered her balance, Stieglitz took care to emphasize his detachment. “My only value is that you can talk to me—anytime,” he insisted. “I know it’s a wonderful comforting restful feeling to feel that there is someone always ready—to understand!” He hit the right note. “I think letters with such humanness in them
have never come to me before,” O’Keeffe replied. When the show closed in July, Stieglitz appointed himself the guardian of her drawings. He would have some framed: “I can’t bear the thought that they might be soiled—rubbed—for they are not fixed.” O’Keeffe replied, “I don’t care what you do with them….You are a much better keeper than I am.” By then, her health had improved so much that she had gone mountain climbing in the moonlight.

  In his role as keeper, Stieglitz sent her his photographs of the newly framed charcoals. “Will the pictures lose any of their freedom?” he asked, teasing Georgia about her own. Her reply blends spirited reports of rock climbing with a playful address to its recipient: “You will probably laugh when I tell you that I like your photographs of my drawings much better than I do the drawings.” By then, Georgia had started a set of watercolors—landscapes inspired by the mountains, and abstractions with plumelike shapes in tones recalling the Blue Lines series begun in New York.

  Before leaving for Texas, she posted a roll of watercolors to Alfred, who teased her by return mail: “You are a careless mother to send your children that way—not even registered!” Then he assured her that her work was “intact,” in fact, “safely in my hands,” while she made her way west across the country.

  * * *

  . . .

  Canyon was a new town, founded some twenty-five years before O’Keeffe moved there in September 1916. Plunked down in the Panhandle, it took its name from the nearby Palo Duro Canyon. The limitless plains surrounding the town seemed familiar—not disorienting, as in 1912, when O’Keeffe went to teach in Amarillo. But the “educators” who met her on her first day were so narrow-minded that she wanted to “go to you and the Lake,” she told Alfred, then added, “but—there is really more exhilaration in the fight here than there could possibly be in leaving it before it’s begun.”