Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  In this climate of opinion, Duchamp saw the Independents as a chance to subvert authority of all kinds. At his urging, the hanging committee put the letters of the alphabet in a hat and drew to see which would come first—so as not to give priority to names beginning with A, B, or C. (They selected R.) To the Arensberg group, such actions merged their wish to épater the bourgeois with their defiance of the country’s hawkishness.

  Alfred described the show to Georgia: “The hanging alphabetically has worked out well, & in some instances has produced some wonderful results.” Yet he had found no new talent among the nearly 2,500 entries. And while the O room was “distinguished” by Georgia’s drawings, he feared they would not receive the attention they deserved.

  Alfred also described the “row” that erupted over a late submission—a porcelain urinal entitled Fountain. Signed by one R. Mutt, the piece provoked a split in the board of directors, some of whom found it obscene; Duchamp and Arensberg resigned in protest. (The urinal had been submitted by Duchamp to test the society’s zeal for artistic freedom.) Alfred described the object, then enthroned at 291: “Its lines are very fine. I have made a photograph—suggesting a Buddha form—& there is a large Hartley as a background.” He did not let on that Hartley’s canvas, The Warriors, showed helmeted German soldiers: In the current climate, it was as provocative as Mutt’s “sculpture.”

  The object remained at the gallery while Duchamp’s supporters prepared a special issue of their magazine, The Blind Man, featuring Stieglitz’s print and an editorial upholding Mutt’s right to show his work. Only “atavistic minds” would be offended, the editors teased: “To any ‘innocent’ eye how pleasant is its chaste simplicity.” But at a time when irony seemed unpatriotic, few judged such art with innocent eyes.

  Far from the brouhaha, Georgia felt unsettled in her own way. “What’s the use of Art?” she asked Alfred. “It’s queer enough to get excited over it when there is no war—But when there is war.” She worried about the effect of the conflict on her students, some of whom had gone to the Signal Corps headquarters in El Paso. It pained her to watch them enlist: “What’s it all about anyway— I cannot clap and wave a flag.”

  Georgia distracted herself by dallying with her suitors, then amusing Alfred in letters about them. At a party, she danced with both Rector Lester and Ted Reid. A few days later, Kindred Watkins came to say good-bye before enlisting. Despite her fondness for all three, she felt that no one understood her. Alfred replied, “Waving flags. —Isn’t it funny how people are moved by superficial things.”

  On May 14, the end of the term, Georgia left Canyon abruptly. After learning from Alfred that he was about to close 291, she took her savings out of the bank and boarded the train to New York. “It was him I went to see,” she told Anita. “Just had to go…There wasn’t any way out of it.”

  * * *

  . . .

  Alfred was holding forth at the gallery when he sensed someone standing behind him. It was Georgia, who had showed up without letting him know that she was coming. He took in her quiet presence. She was not a conventional beauty, but her natural elegance made her all the more remarkable. He rehung her show, which had already come down, so that she could see it. “When she wants something she makes people give it to her,” he observed. “They feel she is fine and has something other people have not.”

  Alfred attempted to capture this something by taking her picture. The first photographs of what would become the extended Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait show the artist in front of her watercolors, the primness of her tailored black clothes contrasting with the sensuality of her work. During this session, he also photographed her hands in gestures that echo the paintings’ swirls. The tapered fingers he had dreamed about were now captured in black and white. But he could not evaluate his efforts: “I’m so full of you that I can’t tell you how bad they are—or how good,” he said weeks later.

  It was just as difficult for those who saw O’Keeffe’s work to judge it. Henry Tyrrell equated the artist with her creations: “The interesting but little-known personality of the artist…is perhaps the only real key, and even that would not open all the chambers of the haunted palace which is a gifted woman’s heart.” Praising her skill, he said that it had been employed to create a “veiled symbolism for ‘what every woman knows.’ ” From then on, most critics responded with bafflement, even hostility, to O’Keeffe’s work, which seemed alien—outside the norms of mainstream (masculine) art.

  One wonders what O’Keeffe made of Tyrrell’s account of Blue Lines as an allegory of sexual difference: “a man’s and a woman’s [lives] distinct yet indivisibly joined together by mutual attraction.” Perhaps she was having too much fun flirting with members of Alfred’s circle to notice. “I had a wonderful time,” she told Anita, before asking if she knew Strand. Georgia was thunderstruck when he showed her his new prints. A charged look passed between them; she “fell for him.” Soon she was “making Strand photographs for myself in my head.” One afternoon, they strolled up Fifth Avenue with Stieglitz, who sensed the attraction between his protégés.

  Georgia also warmed to Alfred’s friend Henry Gaisman, the inventor of the Autographic camera, for which Eastman Kodak had recently paid the sum of $300,000. On Decoration Day, when Gaisman drove Stieglitz, O’Keeffe, and Strand to Coney Island, the three men vied for her attention. Having told Stieglitz that he was looking for a wife, Gaisman put Georgia beside him in the front. Alfred wrapped her in his cape when the wind came up, while Paul, one may suppose, directed her gaze to the shapes and angles of the amusement park.

  Arthur was not forgotten amid her social whirl. After looking Macmahon over when he came to Georgia’s show, Alfred declared him a fine fellow but incapable of grasping her art. One afternoon, Paul met Arthur when he came to 291 to take Georgia to dinner; she did not let on that she wanted Paul to join them. When Arthur kissed her good-bye at the station, she seemed to have “frozen” toward him, she told Alfred after boarding the train: “Maybe the warmness of all you folks down there made Arthur seem farther away than ever.” Confessing her attraction to both Strand and Gaisman, she asked for the inventor’s address. By then, she felt so “mixed up” that she wished that Alfred could take her in his arms.

  Georgia’s visit had given Alfred a sense of completion just as he was preparing to give up the gallery. Friends were helping take everything down—chief among them Strand, whom he photographed as his partner in destruction. After tearing the burlap off the walls, Alfred took the photograph that conveys his sense of loss, a statue of a woman warrior amid the debris, entitled The Last Days of 291.

  It was the end of an era in many ways. In June, as temperance groups lobbied for a ban on alcohol, Wilson declared his support of the “drys”—a stance sure to lead to prohibition. Having already left the marital bedroom to sleep in his study, Alfred informed Emmy that their dwindling finances would require a move to a smaller apartment. “The wife and I had words,” he told Georgia. Emmy was possessed of “great self-will”; he was “no husband for her.”

  Friends came to mourn with Stieglitz when he settled in a tiny room, which he nicknamed “the Vault,” in the same building. Guido Bruno’s essay “The Passing of ‘291’ ” eulogized Stieglitz’s previous “cubby-hole”: The birthplace of modern art in America, its influence was felt “in every art gallery, in every museum, in every studio, and, perhaps, in every artist’s life.” Strand drafted an homage to his mentor entitled “Photography.” He asked, “Where in any medium has the tremendous energy and potential power of New York been more fully realized than in the purely direct photographs of Stieglitz?” Strand’s essay appeared that summer in Seven Arts, one of the few publications that still voiced antiwar sentiments. But in the aftermath of 291’s glory days, he told Alfred, “Something—somehow—seems missing—the salt is out of things.”

  * * *

  . . .

  The two
men corresponded sporadically over the summer. “It seems impossible to get away from the war,” Paul wrote from Connecticut. “It touches everybody now and everywhere one finds the same resentment and lack of enthusiasm.” Despite Alfred’s pleasure in the vistas at Lake George, he felt too numb to pick up his camera. Alluding to his marriage, he wrote, “Of course the War as a background emphasizes all the weaknesses which I tried to overcome all these years—in which I failed.”

  In this state of mind, Alfred told Georgia that he lived for her letters, the green stamps she habitually used, her looping, spiraling prose. For the time being, his dreams of her made up for what he lacked. He was dwelling in his imagination, where what mattered most—art and “livingness”—converged in thoughts of her.

  In the meantime, Georgia resumed life in Canyon in a state of perplexity about her week in New York. “I felt as I left that I meant a lot to many,” she told Alfred. That day, she began painting the figures lodged in her imagination—vibrant watercolors with the curve-topped vertical shape that first appeared in the charcoals prompted by her feelings for Macmahon. “I guess they are Strand,” she continued; “it’s something I got from him.”

  O’Keeffe continued to work with forms associated with particular people: “Some folks make me see shapes that I have to make—other folks don’t.” After resuming her friendship with Ted Reid, she wondered why its shape did not move her to paint. “There is something so fine—so beautiful—just a very slender streak of it…And it terrifies me…that I may unwittingly break it.” Alfred refrained from observing that he was not one of those who made her see shapes.

  Georgia also began an intimate correspondence with Paul. His prints had astonished her, she told him: “The work—Yes I loved it—and I loved you—I wanted to put my arms round you and kiss you hard—There you were beside me really and the same thing in front of me on paper.” The excitement she felt in his presence had encouraged her. But it was not enough to make Strand photographs in her head. She wanted him with her in Canyon, where she was now seen as downright peculiar.

  “I am the most talked of woman on the faculty,” Georgia told Alfred, then reflected, “if I were different from what I am I’d be artificial.” While Alfred and Paul both reinforced her sense of self, it was Paul’s photographs that inspired new ideas for paintings. Their flattened geometry and tight close-ups began to inform her compositions; she wanted more of his work. In one of four letters to Paul posted that day, she wrote, “I sang you three songs in paint”—adding that it might not be wise to write to him care of 291.

  About the same time, a parcel arrived with Alfred’s portraits of Georgia. She told him, “I love myself as you make me. Maybe it’s you and me that I like.” The next day, she showed his photographs to her students: “They were surprised and astonished too.” Alfred enthused, “I could do thousands of things of you—a life work to express you.”

  While Alfred and Paul vied unwittingly to stir Georgia’s imagination, the final issue of Camera Work, with a review comparing her art to music, let her see that some people understood what she had to say. Georgia thanked Alfred for her copy and for his support: “You—believing in me—that making me believe in myself—has made it possible to be myself.”

  By summer, Georgia was feeling so much herself that she sent Alfred two sets of abstract portraits, the first of Strand, the second of Kindred Watkins. They were like her, Alfred wrote, “Passion under control.” He showed them to Paul without explanation; a few days later, Alfred told Paul that the ones that the young man liked best were, in fact, portraits of himself. Paul blushed, then let on that Georgia had written about sending him something. For the rest of the year, Georgia wrote passionately to both men.

  In July, she was moved to fashion her own likeness. After pondering Alfred’s photographs of her, she began a set of self-portraits, red-toned washes that she painted in the nude from her reflection in a mirror. “I couldn’t get what I wanted any other way,” she told him. Alfred was thrilled by her frank allusions to her body. “I’d like to kiss it from top to bottom,” he wrote. Her words made him wish for “a long, long sleep—entwined.”

  At about the same time, he asked if she could imagine having his child. She replied, “All of me has been yours many times….I’d have no choice if I were near you.” Throughout the summer, they shared sexual fantasies. Georgia confessed that painting in the nude was so exciting that it was hard to sleep. She continued: “I’d like to put my arm round your neck—both arms and feel close to you—my breasts close to you—and feel that you like them.” Alfred’s dreams echoed her own: “A woman lay in my arms….I whispered into her ear: ‘The drawings are for me only—aren’t they.’ ”

  Alfred did not know that Georgia was writing to Paul with a similar sense of excitement. One night in bed, she told Paul that she wanted to go to him, and failing that, to crawl inside the life of Nietzsche he had given her. She liked his essay in Seven Arts, but even more his sharing it with her. Seeing his latest prints in Camera Work had stirred her: “Your songs—that I see here—are sad—very wonderful music.” While they made her aware of his “strengths” and her “weakness,” their gifts were complementary: “I give you something that makes it possible for you to use your strengths.”

  After a night walk in the canyon, Georgia sent Paul a verbal snapshot of her room—the white woodwork, the wallpaper’s silver stripes, the black cloth framed in black—an appeal to his imagination to bring him close to her. But his reluctance to respond in kind was vexing. Although Strand’s letters have not survived, it is clear from her own that she wanted him to make a move. Yet given their status as Alfred’s protégés it would have been treacherous to be more forthcoming. Paul could not pledge his heart to Georgia without jeopardizing his fealty to Alfred.

  In some ways, Georgia’s rapport with Paul replayed her relations with Arthur—to whom she wrote after her return to Canyon: “This spring I’ve been too much loved by many different people.” She told Arthur about her new work, including the nude self-portraits: “You probably wouldn’t like it….It is too much like me—says things that would make you speechless…” It was clear that Arthur’s morality kept him from embracing her art and its deep source in the life of the senses.

  By then, Georgia had resumed her tramps with Ted Reid, whose clean-cut looks may have reminded her of Arthur. (Ted was eight or nine years her junior.) They explored the canyon and watched the moon come up over the plains. Ted made her laugh, she told Alfred: “Living with him would be lots of fun….He is the only person I ever knew who would take me to the tail end of the earth where folks wouldn’t bother me…” In New York, she had put Ted out of her mind, but now, in the landscape they both loved, she admitted, “I seem to like him like I like myself.”

  While Georgia’s responses to the men in her life perplexed her, these erotic stirrings nourished her desire to paint. Her Evening Star series, a group of bold watercolor abstractions, celebrates the heat radiating from the star in fiery circles. Another series, Light Coming on the Plains, reverberates with the shimmer of light glimpsed at dawn. These visions of nature pulse with energy—enacting O’Keeffe’s determination to go on being herself.

  She posted her watercolors to Alfred, who was still in New York. In July, writing from the Vault while soldiers paraded up Fifth Avenue, he told Georgia that Steichen had gone to Washington to work with the Signal Corps. He added, “I must find something to do or I’ll go mad.” When Georgia’s package arrived, he wrote, “I’m glad you followed your own feeling—You always do, that’s what makes you such a wonder.”

  Having her with him in this way had an immediate effect. After months of feeling unequal to the task, he began taking pictures. “Photographing excited me terribly,” he wrote, but it was also tiring. The letter, which includes his reply to one of hers about Ted’s role in her life, continues, “Age makes no difference—yet it does.” What Alfred had to offer was
“a greater consciousness,” which perhaps made up for reduced physical stamina. But seeing her like a flower about to bloom, he gave her his blessing.

  For the rest of the year, Alfred’s affirmation of Georgia’s fluctuating emotions created an ease between them that allowed her to write freely. Taking the high ground, he kept their intimacy alive while taking pleasure in her passing fancies. In this way, he could preside sagely over her enthusiasms while telling himself that she would soon lose interest in men whose lives were unsettled—especially now that the war made everyone’s future more uncertain.

  * * *

  . . .

  When Georgia’s classes ended, she went on vacation with her sister Claudie, who had joined her in Canyon and would enroll at the college that fall. In August, they took the train through New Mexico—“where the nothingness is several sizes larger than in Texas”—to Colorado. Georgia wished that Alfred could join her.

  While she hiked in the mountains and painted watercolors, Paul worried that she had broken off their correspondence. He sought Alfred’s advice, wondering if he had irked her. It was not Paul’s fault, Alfred replied: “She has gone through a very perfect experience—still is in it—& she seems to be very tired from all the work—So letter-writing of all kinds—to anyone—would have been forced—& as you know Canyon does not force….rather an honest silence than a mechanical line.”

  The two men continued to compare notes about “Canyon.” Each kept to himself the upheavals in her emotions, including the confessions she made to both of her feelings for Ted. “I wonder why I don’t marry him today,” she told Alfred. A few days later, she wrote to Paul about the unnamed man who was “like this country.” With this man she walked across the plains to see “big stretches of nothing”; their relationship was impossible, but “that doesn’t phase [sic] him at all.” She added, in an implied contrast to Paul’s caution, “I have never seen anyone with such damnable nerve.”