What Georgia wanted was a wholehearted companion to share her joy in what she saw on the vast plains or in the high mountains. Yet she valued Paul’s work. One artist to another, she described the colors of the peak that she had painted and teased him about which of her beaux she wanted at her side. She said that she liked his new prints, especially Geometric Backyards, a New York scene whose lofty vantage point enhanced the diagonals of the clotheslines; she wondered what he would find to do in Colorado.
Toward the end of her holiday, Georgia told Paul that having dismissed her suitors from her thoughts, she now felt “gloriously free.” Though some might call her fickle, “with me it’s more a feeling of master of myself.” In the same letter, she included a fable about a chestnut tree whose inherent strength caused it to tower above its companions, thereby producing “fuller, richer fruit.” True to its nature, it kept on growing, “immovable, straight up into the light”—rather like herself.
Paul then told Alfred that he had finally heard from Georgia—“one of the finer parts in this delicate thread of what has been for me a perfect relationship.” (It may have seemed perfect because it was conducted long-distance, Georgia’s scrawls stretching like fine wires across the distance between them.) He said that he had been writing poems but didn’t let on that they were for her. Paul hoped to see her new work but had little else to look forward to in his alienation from “all the sentiments and feelings upon which the mind of the country is centered.”
Both men returned to New York, to find that few in progressive circles felt able to contest the growing pro-war sentiment. Stieglitz went daily to the Vault, where Strand, Marin, Hartley, and Walkowitz gathered, along with some like-minded artists and writers—Charles Sheeler, Arthur Dove, Herbert Seligmann, Paul Rosenfeld, and Waldo Frank. Yet even there, Alfred felt “devoid of ideas—devoid of dreams.”
It was obvious that the 291 spirit could not survive. That month, Seven Arts ceased publication after its backer withdrew support because of its antiwar stand. Alfred’s home life was in shreds. After a row with Emmy, he decamped to his niece Elizabeth’s studio on East Fifty-ninth Street, which he had been using as a darkroom, and encouraged Elizabeth to correspond with Georgia. Strand kept him company there until late at night, he wrote on October 23, in a letter that reads like a declaration of independence from marriage. (Stieglitz went home after a few nights in the studio.)
About this time, Paul was composing a tribute to the gallery. “What was 291?” he began, echoing the 1914 contributions to Camera Work. “Was it a spiritual idea? Was it a Man? Or was it a place?…291 was none of these things because it was all of them.” But it was no longer possible to imagine an artists’ collective unsullied by commercialism. Although Stieglitz had devoted himself to “guarding the idea from the twisting power of money….It was the people themselves who killed 291,” Strand claimed. “With that rupture, one of the most vital and significant experiments, not only in American life, but in the world life of today, came to an end.”
Paul sent Georgia a copy of his essay along with his latest poems. She replied warmly, “I love you like I did the day you showed me your work—Love you both armsful—Or is it what you say that I love.” But she ended on an ironic note: “Isn’t our little mutual admiration tendency amusing.” Paul’s tribute, she told Alfred, “made me feel just like his work made me feel….But what is the war going to do to him.” With no like-minded companions nearby, she felt “as alone as though I were the only person in Texas.”
Moreover, she had stopped painting. On her return to Canyon, she found the atmosphere changed. The town was intensely patriotic; her students, including Ted, were all enlisting. Her ambivalence about her role deepened. “I’ve been wondering what living is for,” she told Alfred. “Painting seems such a sickly part of the world—Outdoors is wonderful—I want to take hold of all of it with my hand.”
But the man with whom she had embraced the plains was being pressured to stop seeing her. Surprised to meet Ted with his former fiancée, she supposed that he had gone back to her because their own relationship was hopeless—not realizing that Ted had been told by school authorities that he would not graduate if he didn’t stop seeing Georgia. (It is likely that Ted was also trying to protect what was left of her reputation.)
Georgia expressed her dismay to Paul. She could not paint “because everything seems so mixed up.” On November 15 (her thirtieth birthday), she wrote that after seeing Ted off at the station she understood her feelings for him: “We meet equally—on equal ground.” But she had to let him go. Then she added, “you pull me in spite of myself.” When Paul made it clear that he could not join her, she became impatient; “he seems to be getting too old too soon,” she complained to Alfred.
In December, Georgia turned her mind to the vexations of Canyon. Asked to report to the art faculty on a recent trip to the army camp at Waco, where she had talked with the soldiers (including her brother and Ted Reid), she erupted into “an explosion I’ve been growing to all my life.” Art as taught at the college “was rotten because it has no relation to life.”
Putting her thoughts into practice, she had protested against the sale of anti-German Christmas cards. She also planned to voice her opposition to the pro-war hysteria in a watercolor of a starless American flag in a dark sky. What she had in mind, she told Alfred, “wasn’t the flag at all—it just happened to take flag shape.” Despite “the futility of everything,” she felt more sure of herself. Pondering what Alfred meant to her, she continued: “It’s like father, mother, brother, sister, best man and woman friend, all mixed up in one.” He replied, “I’m glad to know that I am all the things you say I am to you—quite a family in one person!”
Georgia’s health worsened after a cold became an infection, while Alfred’s paternal role was uppermost in his mind. On December 28—four days before turning fifty-four—he contemplated the age difference between himself and the “children,” Paul and Georgia: “I know what you are to him—what he feels—better than he knows it.” Might she not think of Paul as the man to give her a child? But by then, Georgia was sure that she and Paul were “cut out of altogether different kinds of stuff.”
Georgia O’Keeffe letter to Alfred Stieglitz, December 3, 1917
During this exchange of letters, Georgia consulted doctors in Amarillo, who prescribed extended rest in a warm climate. Alfred feared that she had one of the strains of influenza that were racing across the country. “I’d like to be buried way out on the plains,” she wrote. “Did you ever see an old gray rag…flapping in the wind on a wire clothesline”—like her American flag. She took medical leave in February, and with her friend Leah Harris, who was recovering from tuberculosis, she went to San Antonio to recuperate.
Over the next months, Alfred and Paul shared their concern for her. After Paul showed his mentor a letter from Georgia that scolded him for not enlisting, Alfred wrote, “He sat there like a little boy….I had to laugh when he said: ‘How much you & she are alike.’ ” Alfred became distraught when Georgia told him that another doctor despaired for her: He begged to know the details of her treatment. In March, telegrams flew back and forth from New York to San Antonio as Alfred and his niece proposed different scenarios for Georgia’s care, including bringing her to Manhattan to live in Elizabeth’s studio.
Georgia’s spirits improved when she and Leah moved to a farm in Waring, fifty miles from San Antonio. She wrote infrequently to Paul but continued her correspondence with Alfred, recounting her pleasure in rural life and her sense that Alfred mattered more to her than anyone. But after she told him that the man who lived down the road had banged on their door one night (he left when Leah brandished a gun), Alfred determined to protect his “little girl” from danger and, if possible, persuade her to come to New York.
Alfred Stieglitz letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, June 13, 1918
The obvious person for that jo
b was Paul. His loyalty to Alfred and his eagerness where Georgia was concerned were well known, and he had his own reasons to want a change of scene. That spring, he developed a crush on Elizabeth, Alfred’s niece and confidante. But Elizabeth was in love with Donald Davidson, an art student whom she installed in the bosom of the family by persuading Alfred to hire him as the Stieglitzes’ gardener. Strand embarked in early May to meet Georgia in San Antonio, the trip funded by Stieglitz.
After he settled in a rooming house near Georgia’s, they strolled around town together. She painted Mexican women in their shawls; he took their portraits along with hers. She was “just like a child,” Paul told Alfred, “very beautiful…very much mixed up.” He sent his assessment two days later: Georgia needed an income, not for its own sake, but for “stability of living.” If Paul had money of his own, he would support her. “But I haven’t,” he continued. “You and she ought to have the chance of finding out what can be done.” He added, “I love her very much—You know my feelings for you.”
Georgia’s feelings for Paul turned to exasperation after their return to Waring, when he expected her and Leah to look after him. He was “the most helpless, slow, unseeing creature I ever saw,” she told Alfred. “You have spoiled him,” she added, “his mother has spoiled him and I guess above all he has spoiled himself.” Moreover, his veneration for Alfred annoyed her: “You are such a perfect god to him.” She, Paul, and Leah made a shaky trio, their relations complicatedly “three cornered.”
This unstable situation became more confused after Georgia allowed Paul to touch her. He had put his arms around her, but there had been “no passion,” he informed Alfred, then promised, “It won’t happen again.” By then, Georgia had received Alfred’s cable urging her to come to New York and a letter explaining that he had sent Paul to free her of any illusions about his suitability as a partner: “I can write now all this—a couple of weeks ago it would have been absurd.” Two days later, he told Paul that he would provide the resources for her “if she wants to come—really wants to—feels the necessity—and feels that she can stand the trip physically—all else would arrange itself.”
At the end of May, the three-cornered arrangement in Waring stabilized enough for Paul to describe it in terms that must have stirred his mentor. “I am in a state—photographing Leah—nude—body wet, shining in the sunlight….Georgia painting Leah….All of us happy.” A few days later, they drove to see the stone houses in a nearby town: “The most extraordinary simplicity of structure…Georgia wanted to live there.” Still vacillating about the future, she asked Paul to stay with her in the West; he offered to support her “without expecting anything in return.” After relating this exchange, he mused, “I could do it—if it were to be—But it isn’t—which I knew long ago.”
By then, Georgia knew that she could neither return to Canyon nor take Paul seriously, although she would allow him to escort her to New York. On June 3, she telegraphed Alfred to say that they would leave that night: “If I had let anybody or anything get in my way I wouldn’t be going. It has to be this way. I don’t know why. I don’t know anything.”
CHAPTER 6
Squaring the Circle
1918–1920
Georgia was feverish when Alfred met their train at Grand Central Station, and he and Paul rushed her to Elizabeth’s studio. She spent the next weeks in bed in the smaller of the two rooms, until she could move to a spot beneath the main room’s skylight. The pale yellow walls and orange floor made it hard to think about painting there. “But it was exciting,” she recalled. “It made me feel good and I liked it.”
Alfred devoted himself to her. His brother Leopold, a doctor, examined her and prescribed bed rest. Alfred spent each day at the studio, thrilled to be the guardian of his dream woman, whose frail health made her dependent on him. For two years, their courtship had been epistolary. Now they could resume their communion face-to-face. “We have talked over practically everything,” he told Elizabeth. “Into one week we have compressed years.”
Although Alfred had never gone near a stove, he learned to cook eggs, and he made sure that Georgia had every comfort, including art by Rodin and Marin on the walls. He wrote to her every night from his apartment. Their closeness, he thought, had its source in the purity of her nature: “I have nothing to do with it except reflect yourself back to yourself.” Georgia replied, “I’ve been lying here listening for you in the dark—My face feels so hot—Aching for you way down to my fingers’ ends….The woman you are making seems to have gone far beyond me.”
It was a great relief to accept his protection after months of uncertainty. Soon, despite the heat, Georgia felt well enough to start painting, once again in the nude. Awed by her ease in moving from dress to undress, Alfred told Elizabeth that their rapport was “intensely beautiful—at times nearly unbearably so.” To Dove, he exulted, “These last 10 days have been very full ones—possibly the fullest I have had in my life.”
Their rapport was charged with tension once Georgia felt well enough to pose for him. Given the ardor of these early photographs, many assume that they became lovers soon after her arrival. While it is difficult to imagine them not yielding to their passion, newly released correspondence shows that this was not the case; the excitement palpable in these portraits of O’Keeffe owes as much to the frustration of their desires. Taking into account Alfred’s status as a married man, his fears for her health and possible pregnancy, and his sense that he should wait until she “gave” herself, one can understand that even such ardent souls might agree to the deferral of their desires.
During this time, Stieglitz took possession of his beloved with his camera. In one group of portraits, O’Keeffe (clothed) poses in front of No. 15 Special, a drawing that held an almost spiritual meaning for Stieglitz. Her white collar, dark jacket, and hat form a prim disguise, one that enhances the gravity of her expression. In a related group, the same dark hat contrasts comically with her nightdress while echoing the Art Nouveau swirls of No. 12 Special behind her, positing a likeness between the woman and her art.
Writing to Georgia late one night, Alfred touched on his wish to photograph her in the nude. The subject had come up in conversation with Paul, he explained, when the young man mentioned that she had declined to do so for him: “He said: I think she’d pose nude for you—& I said: Perhaps she would.” He was gleeful on learning that “no man on earth has ever been given such gifts—so consciously—so willingly—naturally.”
Portrait sessions continued until the end of June. In a series of poses that illustrate Alfred’s wish for Georgia to see herself as he did, she let down her hair and loosened her kimono to reveal her breasts. Standing before No. 15 Special, she gazes at the camera unabashedly or takes her breasts in her hands as if weighing their contours (perhaps a gesture derived from Rodin’s drawings). “I’ll make you fall in love with yourself,” Alfred wrote, then added that he could hear her “telling me what I must not do” until she was ready.
Their impassioned discovery of each other was interrupted in July when Alfred took Kitty to summer camp in New Hampshire. After his return, he brought Georgia to his apartment to continue portrait sessions in his dressing room. Emmy walked in on them unexpectedly and ordered him to stop seeing the self-possessed young woman. He refused, packed his bags, and joined her at Elizabeth’s studio. While it was the opportunity he had been waiting for, it was painful to admit that after twenty-five years of marriage he and Emmy shared little except their love of their daughter.
For a time, Alfred and Georgia slept side by side, with a blanket over a clothesline between them, an arrangement that intensified the charged atmosphere. He kept his camera on a rickety tripod with the black cloth under which he disappeared when the time was right. It was understood that they would be in the studio whenever the light was best for picture taking.
Much has been written about these sessions over the next two years, when mo
st of the extended Portrait was taken. Was Stieglitz in control, or was O’Keeffe an equal partner in the portrayal of “the woman [he] was making”? Do these deeply felt images belong among O’Keeffe’s works as well as Stieglitz’s? Should we see in them an “ongoing exchange of observation and solicitation (hers as well as his), provocation and response (his as well as hers)”? Or as a biographer puts it, as the evidence of a subtle collaboration—“an intricate psychological pas de deux”?
As Georgia gained the confidence to respond to Alfred’s suggestions, she invented poses that drew on her experience as an artist. Yet to claim her as the Portrait’s coauthor is to ignore her account, decades later, of Stieglitz’s staging the scene. “He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow—in many different positions. I was asked to move my hands in many different ways—also my head—and I had to turn this way and that. There were nudes that might have been of several different people—sitting—standing—even standing upon the radiator against the window….In a way [I] wondered what it was all about.”
Still, since O’Keeffe had painted nudes of herself and friends, “wondering what it was all about” sounds less than candid: Her remarks reflect the stance of the austere figure she cut in later years. In 1918, when Stieglitz was the best-known photographer in America, it was not surprising that she yielded to his suggestions or that he cajoled her into enacting his fantasies. There was also a certain playfulness in their rapport. O’Keeffe teased Stieglitz about using the radiator as a prop. It amused her that this rudimentary pedestal allowed him to photograph her against the curtain in the nude sequence that turns her into a classical torso or an Isadoraesque dancer—pictures marked by the fin de siècle aesthetic shared by both.
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