Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  After describing these sessions in her introduction to Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (1978), O’Keeffe turned to the question of her uncertain future at that time, when she was under contract to return to Canyon. “[Stieglitz] asked me if I could do anything I wanted to do for a year, what would it be. I promptly said I would like to have a year to paint….He thought for a while and then remarked that he thought he could arrange that,” she recalled, understating the enormity of the decision to embrace her new life.

  In the meantime, Alfred informed Paul of Georgia’s progress. The young man now felt “somewhat lost,” Alfred told her. Their absorption in each other excluded him; he was also subject to the draft. Perhaps feeling remorse for having made Paul their go-between, Alfred helped him obtain conscientious objector status after he began work as a laborer on Elizabeth’s new project, a farm on her father’s Westchester estate. But in August, when Paul understood that his feelings for Elizabeth would not be reciprocated with Davidson on the scene, he abandoned farm life, even though it meant having to enlist.

  About this time, Stieglitz took O’Keeffe to Lake George. His mother, who never cared for Emmy, made Georgia feel at home. The family welcomed her, although their noisy self-absorption and the clutter of life at Oaklawn made a painful contrast to their quiet studio. When dinner conversation became too boisterous, Georgia ate on the porch or persuaded Alfred to go rowing. “The days here are the most perfect of my life,” he told Strand. Their happiness was interrupted when Alfred rushed to Kitty’s camp after receiving a letter begging him to explain the situation. He returned to Lake George believing that his talks with Kitty (and Emmy, who was staying nearby) had settled things, that Kitty would accept Georgia after spending September at Oaklawn.

  Before going into the army, Strand wrote Stieglitz to say that he understood the need for readjustments in relationships. Those he cared for were all “moving out and away on their own determined roads—roads that mine will no longer parallel.” He hoped that Alfred and Georgia were now “in the best of health and the oneness of living.”

  Paul’s letter arrived shortly after Alfred’s return to Oaklawn on August 9, a date that became sacred to him as the day when Georgia “gave” him her virginity. For some time, the weather had mirrored his turmoil. The thunder and lightning that day heightened the rapture of his reunion with his beloved, who told him what he already knew: that she was his. “It’s a wonder I didn’t give you a child!” he recalled years later. “You are my woman for all time—You are not like other women—and I am your man for all time….Your virginity is in my trust.”

  The family indulged the couple’s delight in each other, watching them giggle as they bolted up the stairs after lunch to take a nap—their euphemism for lovemaking. Alfred rejoiced to Dove: “Since I saw you I have been living as I never lived before….O’Keeffe is a constant source of wonder.” They were now “one in a real sense.”

  Understandably, they did not share the intimate details of their happiness. Reading their correspondence, one is touched to find the names that they invented for each other’s privates. Georgia’s was “Miss Fluffy” or “Fluffy”; by extension, lovemaking was “fluffing,” a less risqué version of the common term. Alfred’s was the “Little Man” or “The Little Fella,” often abbreviated as “T.L.F.” (While one is tempted to take literally his emphasis on size, his bed partners considered him a highly satisfactory lover.) The sort of erotic playfulness that occurs at the start of love affairs, these endearments would give way to other names—though Alfred would often ask after Fluffy’s welfare. That autumn, their glee kept them entranced with each other.

  Although their passion did not abate, this period of undisturbed happiness was short-lived. In September, when Kitty threw a tantrum about Georgia’s presence at Oaklawn, Georgia and Alfred fled to New York. He returned a few days later to try to make Kitty see his position, but neither was willing to compromise. From then on their relations would be strained. Alfred told Paul that he could not describe the “mess” at Oaklawn except to say that everyone was suffering. But he was grateful to Paul for his help in recent months and thought that Georgia’s “queer feeling” about Paul had dissipated: “Perhaps we’ll meet soon after all the three of us—with no tensions.” Paul replied to this backhanded apology: “Grateful—it seems funny that you should feel that way about me—It’s been all your doing.”

  After Kitty’s departure at the end of September, the couple spent the next month painting, photographing, and making love. Alfred photographed Georgia out-of-doors, her long fingers stroking the bark of a tree, seated matter-of-factly on the ground to paint, or staring at him while wrapped in his black loden cape. Indoors, she posed for a set of nudes that crop her torso from the swell of the breasts to the thighs, accentuating the dark mat of her pubic hair. (O’Keeffe reproduced the most explicit of these in Portrait.) He also photographed her gracefully gesturing hands as emblems of the woman whose novel ways of expressing the natural world amazed him.

  Georgia’s return to oils that fall adapted the poetics of photography into several innovative compositions. In Music, Pink and Blue, No. 1, an apparently pure abstraction based on a segment of a shell, waves of color ripple out from their source in the large blue shape at the center to suggest corporeal forms. The more representational portraits of red canna lilies also begun at this time adapt the use of the close-up to bring the viewer into the flower’s folds. While Georgia was having difficulty in mastering oils, Alfred told Paul, her best paintings were displays of “Loveliness—Savage Force—Frankness—The Woman.”

  Over the next months, as Strand sought Stieglitz’s help in his attempt to be transferred to the Signal Corps’ School of Photography, his letters became conciliatory. It pained him to read of the “hell” that Alfred and Georgia had gone through: “I am…sharing this thing with you as far as that is possible.” With this letter, which asks Alfred to intervene on his behalf, Paul included a copy of his Signal Corps application, which lists “Alfred Stieglitz, Photographer” as the first of the well-known citizens who would recommend him. Before Alfred got around to complying with this request, Paul was sent to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for a course of studies leading to accreditation as an X-ray technician.

  Alfred encouraged Paul’s engagement in his new life. “I hope you’ll be kept away from N.Y. for a while yet for your own good,” he wrote in November. Manhattan had gone mad when news of an armistice produced wild celebrations before proving to be a hoax. “I knew that the people had no conception what ‘Peace’ would actually bring….That ‘Victory’ meant a probable Breadline…It made one shudder to think of what’s probably coming to so many blind ones & to many of us who see.” Georgia’s health was much improved, he added. “Some day I hope you & she will be at ease again with each other.”

  A week after the actual armistice, Alfred began printing the scores of portraits he had taken since Georgia’s arrival in New York. He had to be satisfied with palladium paper but hoped that the end of the war would mean that platinum, which he preferred, would again be available. The alternative, gelatin silver, he told Paul, “would not do at all for the things I have done. My negatives are ‘queer.’ ” (He did not explain that he was experimenting with processes to evoke the luminosity of flesh tones.) But he had made “a few prints which, when finished, will sing the high C.” Alfred continued: “G. whenever she looks at the proofs falls in love with herself. Or rather her Selves.” The letter ends, “Demobilization has begun in earnest—I wonder what is to happen to you.”

  * * *

  . . .

  Alfred’s fears about demobilization proved to be prescient. That winter, the economy slid into recession as factories that had worked overtime to make war matériel closed, and countless veterans were unable to find jobs. In these circumstances, Strand’s work as an X-ray technician gave him stability while exposing him to a different kind of photography.
Medical service convinced him that art and science were “closely related when they are both creative and impersonal.” The impersonality of the operating room appealed to him: “I could more easily be a surgeon than a nurse because ideas interest me more than the routines of bringing people back to health.”

  Ironically, Strand found himself in need of nursing when he was hospitalized at the end of the year. What had seemed like a case of the influenza sweeping through U.S. military installations that winter proved to be pneumonia. From his sickbed, he expressed the hope of seeing Stieglitz and New York again: “I need the livingness and stimulus….I’m hungry for something that might be called beautiful.” A few weeks later, when the Strands came to Minnesota to be with him, his mother contracted pneumonia and died in the same hospital. Paul felt “almost like a murderer.” Following her death, he took a month’s leave to join Alfred and Georgia.

  The many visitors who had flocked to their Fifty-ninth Street studio to see Alfred’s prints and Georgia’s oils agreed that their work was “unlike anything they [had] ever seen.” While one can imagine the awkwardness of his reunion with the couple, Paul was stunned by the boldness of their art, and Alfred was glad to have him on the spot to help with the selection of some of his Portrait prints for an exhibition at the Young Women’s Hebrew Association in March, their first public showing.

  “Your photographs and her work are part of me,” Strand wrote to Stieglitz when he returned to duty. “I don’t have to close my eyes to see the ones that hit me hard. I am seeing the grey painting and the very pale portrait—they seem somehow related.” (While he did not say how, he no doubt sensed the intimacy that had inspired them.) After a month in New York, Paul could barely tolerate his “stupid life” in Minnesota. Distractions like burlesque shows and “dope” were unrewarding: “I haven’t met a soul that I want to see twice, or a woman I want to touch.”

  That spring, as fears of a conspiracy or even a Bolshevist-style revolution were trumpeted in the press, Alfred was perturbed by art-world politics—in particular, the efforts of his former friend Clarence White, who still practiced the kind of pictorialism that he had once pursued. And the recent construction of a neoclassical Arch of Triumph in front of the Flatiron Building for a victory parade disgusted him. “It all reminds me of Nero fiddling while Rome was burning. The arch is the limit—The poor Flatiron.”

  Paul’s letters allude to the concerns of the day, including the anarchist plot uncovered in April when the authorities learned of threats to such figures as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (who hired J. Edgar Hoover to investigate). On June 2, 1919, the day that eight large bombs went off in as many cities, Paul informed Alfred that the Minnesota summer put him in mind of the year before with Georgia and Leah: “Made me think of them often and all that has happened between.” While photography seemed “pretty far away,” he wanted to believe that “something exists in the world besides Bolshevism and the League of Nations.”

  Alfred and Georgia were taking refuge in art, a friend wrote to Paul a few days after the bombings. “They have found a little island of safety in their work—The rest of the world goes chasing soap bubbles, reading newspapers and other fiction, making love and finding it is an illusion, cursing Wilson, Republicans and Bolshevists.” Yet Alfred fretted about the future: “Is it a madness to produce as we are producing—& living as we are living—in the centre [sic] of the maddest city—that ever happened.” He and Georgia decamped to Lake George for their last summer at Oaklawn: The old house would be sold that year, leaving the Stieglitz family farm on the hill and a stretch of lakefront, where they would remain until November.

  “As I print you come to my mind frequently,” Alfred told Paul after his return to Manhattan. They corresponded about the fine points of papers, whether the texture of palladium could be improved by waxing the surface, the technique that Strand favored. Stieglitz experimented with different versions of each image until he was satisfied; his perfectionism had an influence on O’Keeffe’s way of working. Their relationship was “of mutual benefit all the time.” He added, “It would be great if it could be arranged to have you here later in the season.”

  In the meantime, Strand resumed his role as defender of the faith. After receiving an offer to join White’s group, the Pictorial Photographers of America, he composed a scathing letter of rejection, which he copied and sent to Alfred. Strand was not in sympathy with the group’s aims: Photography had to be “an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing to me. This quality I find only in the work of…Charles Sheeler…and Alfred Stieglitz.” Pleased with Strand’s critique, Stieglitz told him that he had begun to think of reclaiming his leadership role—for photography’s sake.

  To escape the heat Strand repaired to a lakeside camp in Quebec, where he thought of Georgia and Alfred. He could picture her at the nightly dances, and he looked forward to seeing Alfred’s new prints. After a cordial exchange of letters, Alfred invited Paul to stop at Oaklawn on his way home. It would have taken considerable aplomb not to feel like a third wheel, given the couple’s mutual absorption, especially since the “relatedness” of their work that Paul sensed in the spring had become even more pronounced.

  Alfred praised Georgia’s new oils, including Inside Red Canna, the large close-up that offered a “bee’s-eye view” of its subject, and Red and Orange Streak, a semiabstract rainbow arcing across the night sky. Alfred’s aesthetic—close cropping, shallow depth of field, using the edge of the picture as a framing device—had begun to influence her compositions, and his portraits of her inspired some of her paintings, most notably an untitled self-portrait that reclaims his image of her breasts and torso. Both were finding sources of refreshment in their happiness. When Paul went back to New York, Alfred wrote, “I’m glad we had you with us.”

  * * *

  . . .

  Since Paul’s induction into the army, he had often told Alfred of his loneliness. His letters describe the few people of his own age whom he met, especially the “girls.” At the camp in Quebec, he spent time with some Ethical Culture graduates and three young women, a librarian, a social worker, and an orthopedic therapist, none of whom inspired a wish for continued closeness. In October, a few weeks after his return to New York, he was surprised to find an attentive listener in the “very pretty girl” he met at a party given by Alfred’s collector friend Jacob Dewald. That evening, they chatted, played tunes on the pianola, and looked at the paintings on the walls. “The good looking young lady liked the Marin and ‘hated’ the Benton—it was funny—and funny being there.”

  We may assume that the “good looking young lady” was Rebecca Salsbury. She would have been invited to the party because of the Dewald family’s ties to ECS, from which the vivacious young woman had graduated three years after Strand. They may already have seen each other at alumni events, in which Rebecca took an active part. A leader during her school years, she had opinions about many things, including art and politics. What was more, her long dark hair, oval face, and lithe form gave her a resemblance to Georgia.

  Though it was unclear in which branch of the arts Rebecca might excel, she, too, had artistic ambitions. At ECS, she had enjoyed gymnastics while also writing theatricals, plays, and poems; in recent years, she had composed songs with her brother, resulting in the publication of their Book of Children’s Songs. In the spirit of ECS’s emphasis on civic-mindedness, she also wrote a pro-Wilson play, At the World Peace Table, and collaborated with William Allen of the Institute for Public Service on Liberty the Giant Killer, a book that drew the lessons of the war for children. Rebecca illustrated these moralizing tales with stick figures meant to inspire readers to paint their own pictures or enact their favorite story.

  After graduation, Rebecca had trained as a kindergarten teacher at the ECS Normal School, taking courses in art, nature study, and educational theory. In her ad
dress as valedictorian, she recalled the day that she heard two waifs singing her songs in a tenement courtyard and her dream of “little children…singing all over the world.” But her first teaching experience, at a charity kindergarten, did not live up to this vision. Disillusioned, she resigned from her job, learned to type, and became a medical secretary—a career that proved no more stimulating. When she and Paul met, Rebecca was at loose ends, she later told him, “swinging crazily along, perhaps missing the important things.”

  On meeting her, new acquaintances learned that her ideas had been shaped by her reverence for her father and her glamorous upbringing in the days of his successful business venture, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Though short in stature, Nate Salsbury loomed larger in Rebecca’s imagination than his flamboyant partner, William F. Cody, at the time one of the best-known Americans in the world. Salsbury always claimed that as manager of the show for twenty years it was he, not Cody, who had molded its enactment of the country’s westward expansion. Over time, Salsbury acquired a great many shares in the show; his death in 1902 burnished his family’s image of him as the mastermind behind one of the best-known cultural phenomena of the day.

  While a recent history of the Wild West Show calls Salsbury’s claims “self-aggrandizing,” it is true that during his partnership with Cody, what had been a ragtag rodeo became the polished production that toured European capitals and attracted patrons like Pope Leo XIII and Queen Victoria. Rebecca grew up listening to Nate’s stories about taking the cast of cowboys, Indians, horses, and cattle to England and staging both public presentations and private performances for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. On the show’s return to London in 1891, when Rebecca and her fraternal twin, Rachel, were born, Salsbury told journalists that the pageant illustrated the actual making of the West. Thousands of Europeans embraced the spectacle; Nate’s children saw him as a statesman without portfolio.