Georgia won the first round by leaving the room she had been assigned in a colleague’s home, where the decor—pink roses—oppressed her. She took refuge in “the only place…where the walls wouldn’t drive you to drink” before settling in the dormer room of a bungalow owned by the school’s registrar. After her request to paint the woodwork black was denied, she placed a length of black cloth in a frame and hung it on the wall.
The new teacher’s preference for black mystified the women of Canyon. “Her clothing was all like men’s clothing,” a student recalled; “she didn’t believe in lace, or jabots…or ruffles.” Black made you look slender, O’Keeffe explained, and floral patterns made you seem large; her low-heeled shoes allowed her to stride with ease across the plains. Despite her queer clothes, the men of Canyon were not immune to the charm of her pale oval face and black waves of hair pinned at the nape of her neck. (Would-be suitors took her for one of those modern women who were said to be easy.) Keeping her opinions to herself, she took comfort in her correspondence and the magazines she received, The New Republic (a gift from Arthur) and The Forerunner, which called for equality between the sexes and the reform of women’s dress.
Georgia’s letters abound in comments contrasting the vastness of her surroundings with the small-mindedness of the town. “The Plains sends you greetings,” she told Alfred. “It’s a great privilege to be given the opportunity to look into a soul like yours,” he replied. “I feel it roaming through space.” Both looked to nature to express their intimate thoughts. She went outside to read his “sunny letter”; she thanked him for giving her “the quiet dark night.”
But Georgia worried that in revealing so much to Alfred, she was betraying her bond with Arthur. She confessed her pique that rather than visit her in September, Arthur had stayed in New York to work on the “stupid” city charter. “I could so easily forget him out here,” she told Alfred. Two days later, she wrote that she had been wrong to call his work “stupid”; Alfred replied that while her words had made him smile, he was glad she had changed her mind. As for himself, he said tactfully, “I am not writing as a man to a woman…for me you exist primarily as a spirit—as in your work.—And I exist for you as ‘Understanding.’ ”
Meanwhile, invigorated by his time at Lake George, Alfred returned to photography. In September, he took snapshots of himself and Abraham Walkowitz and some frisky views of another guest, Ellen Koeniger, whose wet bathing suit clung to her curves as she dived and swam in the lake. “Photographing always gets my nerves agoing,” he told Georgia. “The Lake has been so marvelous,” he added. “You have received some of its intensity filtered through me.” Hearing about his work moved her to write that she could still “see” his portrait of Hartley: “I remember the shapes in it in such a curious way—and never distinctly enough to be able to put them down.” But New York was too distant to see clearly: “There isn’t any such place—Anita says there is—but I don’t believe it.”
What O’Keeffe saw in her mind’s eye were the shapes of her surroundings, the plains that came to the edge of town and the striated canyon that opened up twelve miles to the east. “I wish you could see the landscapes I painted,” she told Anita, adding, “My landscapes are always funny and these are not exceptions—Slits in nothingness…” That autumn, she returned from descents into the chasm to translate her elation into watercolors, including a set of Specials in the fiery hues that made up her new palette. “The plains are very wonderful now—like green gold and yellow gold and red gold—in patches—and the distance blue and pink and lavender strips and spots.”
Like the canyon, the boundless land and sky offered new visions. The plains seemed like an ocean, especially at night. “It is absurd the way I love this country…and the SKY—Anita you have never seen SKY.” It felt blissful to open to the elements, explosions of color at sunset, the radiant night sky. Of the memorable night stroll that inspired the watercolor series entitled Evening Star, she recalled, “I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star.” On occasion, she became one with the landscape: “I think all the world has turned into what I’m seeing.”
While Georgia yearned to share her new life with Arthur, she sensed that it might be difficult to enter into this contemplative state with the object of her affections present. On her return from a brilliant sunset, she told him that “it would have been nice to be by you…but maybe the loneness…gave me a chance to see more and know more than I saw.” Still, there were times when finding her “loneness” hard to bear, she said things that gave him pause. In October, she told him about her correspondence with Stieglitz and said that the emotions stirred by his letters made her yearn for Arthur.
Increasingly exchanges with Alfred offered the nourishment that Georgia craved. Just as Anita had been her sounding board the year before, Alfred provided emotional sustenance. They wrote to each other of the “humbug” of those around them—Alfred’s family, the residents of Canyon. In response to her rapturous letters about the plains, he told her how thrilling it was to immerse himself in the autumn landscape. In October, Alfred sent his favorite book, Goethe’s Faust. She replied, “It will interest me immensely—because you like it so much.” Reading it in the shade of the tumbleweeds, she continued: “I was nearer to you than I have ever been to anyone.” A few days later, she received the latest issue of Camera Work with his inscription, “To Georgia O’Keeffe this first copy is dedicated by one who loves intensely all that’s genuine.”
Soon after Alfred’s return to Manhattan, he broached a subject that was on his mind—his wish to have more of her “children.” To that end he sent her a check for one hundred dollars: “No one will ever want some of them as badly as I want them—not to own—but to hold & look at.” He took it as a mark of their closeness when she wrote him that she could not accept payment—because the drawings had been made for Arthur. Then, admitting that she had imagined having Arthur’s child, a subject that she had not yet broached to the prospective father, she wrote, “I can’t imagine wanting a little boy that would be mine and anybody else’s.”
A few days later, Georgia realized that her emotions were in knots. Having revealed so much of herself to Alfred, she yearned for him “in a curious way—it’s a mixture of the way I’ve wanted my mother at times—but not just that—it’s the man too.” He replied, “I’m glad you feel about me as you do. —And I understand the mother feeling. —You & I—our kind—we really never grow up.”
For the rest of the year, Alfred cared for Georgia’s work as tenderly as if it were her person. He hung Blue Lines at 291 in a show of his favorites and told her where each of the works was placed. “I have to smile at my blue self hanging on the wall beside Marin,” Georgia replied, “looking over at Walkowitz and Wright and Hartley.” To give her more to smile about, Alfred quoted two distinguished visitors’ reactions: Mina Loy liked her work “immensely”; Marcel Duchamp pronounced it “very fine.” In the new year, he placed another of her drawings, Self-Expression (one of the Specials, retitled) at the People’s Art Guild, along with work by Marin, Picasso, and Picabia.
While Stieglitz worked to establish O’Keeffe’s name in New York, she busied herself with preparations for a talk on Cubism for her colleagues. To this end, he bombarded her with books on modernism (Clive Bell’s Art, Willard Wright’s Creative Will, Arthur Eddy’s Cubists and Post-Impressionism); to share his thoughts on the subject, he sent more copies of Camera Work. Stirred by the images in the latest issue, she wrote, “I love the snow and I love Strand’s New York.” Still, feeling ambivalent about Stieglitz’s remarks on her charcoals’ “psychoanalytic” value, she struck a devil-may-care pose—“Write a whole book about me if you want to”—before breaking through her defensiveness to confess, “I’m getting to like you so tremendously that it some times scares me.”
Their exchanges grew more intimate over the course of the winter. Alfred daydreamed about
Georgia in her bed and wrote to her from his own. Georgia kept his letters by her side: “I wanted you when the yellow light came in…just to be quiet by you while the sky turned from yellow to cold white moonlight.” He described the solace he found at night in his bath, where he repaired to read her letters: “It’s like dope—the heat…the sense of water—the nakedness—the aloneness,” a means to calm himself but also to rouse his imagination.
Both turned to the language of dreams to express their deepening bond. Alfred dreamed one night that he was sitting beside Georgia while she slept: “I could see your face on the pillow—& I saw your hand moving towards something—in its sleep—it touched my hand.” She replied that on that same night she had taken a book to bed, then set it aside: “I put out my hand to touch it—It was something I liked….I thought to tell you—but didn’t—probably wouldn’t have if you hadn’t told me of your dream.”
Georgia read and reread Alfred’s prose piece “One Hour’s Sleep—Three Dreams,” in the first issue of 291. “I’d get it out and read it again tonight,” she wrote: “I know it—still I want to read it.” (Dream three starts well—“The Woman and I were alone in a room. She told me a Love Story”—but ends badly: She stabs him in the heart.) A few days later, Alfred related a reverie about a man and a woman walking in the mountains: “The snow as bed—the sky as cover!!” He added, “If I could only see you in that room of yours…see you falling asleep.”
In the same way, their daydreams echoed each other’s. Aroused by the memory of Georgia’s hands, Alfred longed to touch them. They sometimes “make people say funny things,” she replied, mentioning an art student who had studied her long fingers before declaring them the reason that he liked her. She added, “I never think of the looks of them—it’s always wanting to use them—touch with them—feel with them.” After these provocative words, she concluded by saying, “I’ve written you enough for one day.”
Georgia’s tales of flirtations let Alfred know that she appreciated her own powers of attraction. By the end of the year, she was feeling “sixty miles an hour”—a pace not matched by a new suitor, an attorney. It amused her to tell Alfred that she had been “out for contrariness” on a moonlight drive to the canyon, where she rebuffed the man’s advances. “He wanted to touch me because I was a woman—I distinctly did not want to be touched because he wasn’t a particular man.” A few lines later, she imagined Alfred looking at the scene: “You would have had a good time on the back seat.”
Georgia took pleasure in sharing Alfred’s fantasies but worried that she was not smart enough to understand Faust. “No one in the world has succeeded,” he replied, then asked teasingly, “Why should a little girl?—You are a great little girl—with a heart big enough to hold the sky in it.” Reading about her escapades, he saw her as “a sort of wild natural woman,” or at times, his soul mate. Alfred gave her “a curious kind of balance,” Georgia told him in the new year, when she was feeling like “the little girl again after being the wondering woman.” The letter ends, “I’d like to be rocked to sleep close to somebody— Goodnight.”
Over the months that saw the elaboration of these fantasies, their letters sparked the rush of creative energy that may arise when one is deeply known by another. It is said that O’Keeffe’s 1916 watercolor series Train at Night in the Desert pays tribute to Stieglitz’s The Hand of Man, which she had already seen in two issues of Camera Work. The shape of the train moving toward the viewer under billows of smoke would have been in her mind on the dawn walk that inspired this series: “A train was coming way off—just a light with a trail of smoke—white—I walked toward it—The sun and the train got to me at the same time,” she told him. Then she added, “I thought of you.”
By return Alfred expressed his pleasure at her depiction of the scene and her “thinking” it to him: “You saw the big black locomotive coming towards you—the smoke—& the sun broke forth—shooting its rays deep into your being! —And I was with you!!” To continue this charged conversation, he sent another Camera Work with his photographs. They were like him, she replied: “You are really here—a lot of you—not all of you—I wouldn’t have known you without the letters.”
CHAPTER 5
Passion Under Control
1916–1918
An apprehensive note entered Alfred’s correspondence toward the end of 1916, when the stock market began to seesaw. If the country’s precarious neutrality gave way to war, he informed Georgia, the only positive effect he foresaw was that “some terrible common suffering” might open Americans’ eyes. In the meantime, he worried about plans to start rationing—including the grain needed to produce beer, the source of his wife’s income. “A wealthy Emmy was bad enough,” a biographer writes; “a poor one was out of the question….Alfred finally began to think seriously of leaving her.”
In the new year, he also began to think of giving up 291. “If there is war it would be madness to load myself up with a lease—It has been mad all along but then something was gained by others & myself throughout that madness.” Too low-spirited to pick up his camera, he took comfort in Georgia’s art, although, she, equally unsettled, had not painted for some time and feared that she would have to leave her job because of her opinions.
She also doubted the strength of her ties to Arthur. After sending him a long letter, she wished she could get it back: “It will give his Scotchness an awful jolt….Some things I’ve been wanting to tell him for a long time…” (These included her realization the previous spring that she had wanted to have his child.) Did Arthur plan to marry her? Alfred asked. Did he want her to become “a toned-down free soul?” He understood her wish that he be “less New Republic–like,” but gave no advice.
Georgia also expressed her concern for the gallery: “Knowing that 291 is—is one of the things that makes life worth living.” In February, she sent him her recent work—more Specials, the Palo Duro landscapes, the Train at Night series, and drawings of a friend sleeping, which Alfred took to be self-portraits. Her daring made him feel cowardly by comparison. Still, bucked up by Georgia’s “tornado of letting go,” he could face the throngs who came to 291 fearing that it might not survive: “If I have to give up the little place your work will be on the walls when I close it up.”
While Alfred contemplated the gallery’s demise, Georgia alternated between distress at being called a rebel and pride in her nonconformism. “I’ve said some scandalous (according to some folks) things in class this week….would the sober ones of the place think me off my track.” By then, the sober ones were taking note of her outings with her student Ted Reid, who kept her company on hikes and adopted her ideas about art as an expression of life—which were making him question his engagement to a local girl.
At the same time, Georgia was flirting with other men. She told Alfred of her attraction to Rector Lester, a married attorney, and to Willard Austin, who often drove from Amarillo to see her. In the spring, she kindled such strong emotions in Kindred Watkins, another married man, that he declared his wish to be with her “right or wrong.” Alfred did not comment on her coquettishness, a tactic that allowed her to express her contradictory urges while feeling understood. As a reader of The Masses, Georgia was familiar with its arguments for free love, even though she did not wish to act on them. (All available evidence makes it likely that she remained a virgin.)
Meanwhile, after the sinking of the liner Housatonic, President Wilson severed relations with Germany. In March, the government revealed the kaiser’s attempt to enlist Mexico’s support in the event of war with the United States, in exchange for which Mexico would receive Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Congress doubled the size of the army; newspapers denounced the dissemination of enemy propaganda in journals like The Masses. Those who did not support the war were deemed subversives.
In this context, the “art game” struck Alfred as so much nonsense, he told Georgia after a trip to Philadelphia to jud
ge the annual photography exhibit at Wanamaker’s department store. Combining his pacifism with his artistic credentials, he convinced the jury to give first prize to Paul Strand’s Wall Street—the picture, to those of a radical bent, that identified the forces behind America’s rush to war.
By then, tensions in the country at large were playing out in plans for the next big art event, the Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition at New York’s Grand Central Palace. In March, Stieglitz took refuge at the home of Walter Arensberg, the society’s director, where opposition to the war was taken for granted. The Arensberg salon, which included artists like Duchamp and Mina Loy, was “very informal,” Alfred told Georgia. Of their plans for the show, he wrote, “It is going to be right.—Chaos.” Each artist could show two pieces; Duchamp insisted that work be hung in alphabetical order. Alfred submitted two of Georgia’s charcoals, which he renamed Expressions—a title that asserted his role as “co-owner.”
At the same time, Stieglitz was readying his next show, “Exhibition of Recent Work—Oils, Water-colors, Charcoal Drawings, Sculpture—By Georgia O’Keeffe of Canyon, Texas,” to run from April 3 to May 14. After hanging her work, he took pictures to show her how it looked. “There is a religious feeling pervading the rooms,” he wrote, “an unspeakable fineness.” Her exhibition affirmed the meaning of life on the very day that Wilson asked Congress to declare war. But by April 6, when Wilson announced that the United States had joined the Allies, the patriotic throngs marching up Fifth Avenue took no notice of what was happening at 291.
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