Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  It was at about this time, when Rebecca saw Paul’s portrait series as a kind of mirror, that she began using his nickname—“Beck,” a snappier version of her given name—and decided to try painting. Since the spring, she had daydreamed that she, too, might explore new fields of expression. Her rapport with Paul helped her form an idea of herself as someone who not only posed for the up-and-coming photographer but might, with his support, become an artist. That this view of their relations echoed the rapport of Alfred and Georgia was not lost on her. Soon she was experimenting with graphic black-and-white compositions that looked distinctly modern. “I owe you so much for having started me,” she told Paul, “whether I do anything or not.”

  Strand stopped at Lake George that fall to show Stieglitz his new work, including the portraits of Beck. After a summer in the family farmhouse, now known as “the Hill,” Alfred and Georgia did not miss Oaklawn. For the past two years, she and Davidson had been cultivating the wizened apple trees that abounded on their land. To Alfred, the orchard’s rebirth symbolized his vision of a homegrown modernism: His portrait of Georgia holding a branch laden with fruit all but proclaimed her artistic fecundity as a native product. With the help of the Davidsons and other guests, Waldo Frank and Margaret Naumberg, she renovated a shed to use as a studio—an undertaking Alfred found so impressive that he photographed the women nailing shingles on the roof in their bloomers. He took few photographs of Georgia, despite her radiant health; two portraits of Naumberg suggest that he may have preferred Margaret’s reflective mien and soulful eyes.

  Alfred spent much of his time printing recent work while Georgia put the finishing touches on the shed. It distressed him to learn that the “shanty” (Georgia’s name for it) was her studio and not the shared space he had imagined. When the heat became unbearable, she painted there in the nude. These hours of solitude allowed her to start a new series—oil paintings of apples, which took on lives of their own. While Alfred liked to compare his artists to apple trees (the soil gave their art its zest), O’Keeffe’s paintings hint that she saw the fruit as a way to depict human relationships. It is not far-fetched to see her need for privacy in (Untitled) Apple and White Dish, in which a solitary apple sits alone on its china pedestal. Similarly, the two rounded forms in Apples—No. 1 may stand for Alfred and herself, and the grouped shapes in three related compositions called Apple Family for the dynamics in the crowded household from which she retreated to paint these placid models.

  Alfred Stieglitz, Elizabeth Davidson and Georgia O’Keeffe. On the roof of O’Keeffe’s shanty, Lake George

  During Paul’s visit to the Hill, he let Alfred know that Beck was not only keen to work with him as his model but had herself begun to paint. “When we return she ought to see more of Georgia’s work,” Alfred wrote after Paul’s visit. “It may be helpful—a clarifier. —I wonder what she will finally decide to do—that is what course she will feel she must follow.” Glad to learn that Beck was also a typist, Alfred asked if she took shorthand. (She did.)

  Alfred did not let on that Paul’s portraits of Beck had caused him some unease. Several of his own prints, the “nearlys,” were not quite right, he confessed to Seligmann: “I am getting to hate ‘nearlys’ more & more. —And the more nearly to the IT—the more I hate that nearly.—It’s like an incomplete erection.” He worried that a lack of virility was apparent in his prints, especially now that he was preparing for his first exhibition since 1913, at the Anderson Galleries. (The equation of formal rigor with the artist’s potency was a recurrent trope in the Stieglitz group’s discourse. Sherwood Anderson would write, “I have quite definitely come to the conclusion that there is in the world a thing one thinks of as maleness that is represented by such men as Alfred Stieglitz. It has something to do with the craftsman’s love of his tools [sic] and his materials.”)

  By October, Alfred had overcome his concern about the “nearlys.” He had been thinking about Paul, he wrote: “The girl—your work….I hope life in N.Y. with you is more agreeable than you anticipated made so by your friend. —There is nothing more stimulating than a fine interchange between male & female.” He could see that some of his own prints were “corkers.” His recent portraits of Rosenfeld and Frank sought to honor their commitment to American art: He photographed Rosenfeld with a typewriter and four books chosen to emphasize their significance (among them, Our America), and Frank on the porch, peeling apples onto a manuscript, as if infusing it with sap. When Paul expressed his admiration for Frank’s likeness, Alfred promised to take one of him, since Paul’s technical advice had been crucial to his success with this new kind of portraiture.

  On November 2, as a fierce gale blew across the lake, Alfred reacted to the news of Harding’s landslide victory by stoking the fire and waiting out the storm. Finding the embers still glowing the next day made him feel “Master of the situation,” he told Paul, though he added, “Let’s hope it wasn’t an accident.” Whatever happened in the larger world, the important thing was finding the energy to start a new project, “pitching in & making a beginning.”

  In the meantime, Paul took over the room that had been his father’s, since it had the right kind of light to use as a studio. When he and Beck continued their portrait sessions out-of-doors, she found it hard to stay still during the long exposures. “Movement is everywhere,” Paul wrote to Alfred, “but I learned something—in fact there has been more of that I think than actual results.” Beck tried to defuse the situation with humor, teasing Paul about the need for “asbestos underwear.” They had made a start, he told Alfred, “a fine companionship…a chance to work together.”

  Judging by Beck’s letters from Long Branch, where she went to practice painting in December, their companionship meant even more to her. After buying a worker’s flannel shirt, she felt dressed for the part, although due to the weather, she had to wear her fur coat over this outfit. Paul would laugh at her efforts, she thought, yet her usual tensions had vanished after a few days on her own. It was exciting to layer paint in broad strokes on the canvas; she had hoped to do a nude self-portrait, but it was too cold.

  Beck wanted Paul to know that, following his lead, she was trying to see things in their own right. “I have been thinking about what you said about your need for sharpness—acidity,” she wrote. “I love that hardness in you—for it means no beating around the bush and no assuming of other people’s values.” She ascribed the change in herself to their rapport: “Strength seems to flow from you to me, from me to you and back again, like fine music. I realize it so much more when I get away and find myself dissociated from everybody but myself and you.”

  * * *

  . . .

  Georgia and Alfred returned to New York at the end of the year to take up residence in his brother Leopold’s brownstone on East Sixty-fifth Street, where they would have separate studios and a salon in which to receive friends. In the new year, members of the group went into high gear to publicize his upcoming retrospective. Rosenfeld let him know that he would return the favor Stieglitz had shown him by taking his portrait for an article about the exhibition for Scofield Thayer’s new magazine, The Dial; Henry McBride, who thought that the show would attract the old 291 crowd, said that he would join them at the opening. Strand had recently written an essay entitled “Alfred Stieglitz and a Machine” but had not found a taker. It was privately printed for distribution at the show, which opened on February 7.

  The gallery filled up quickly, despite the driving rain. McBride noted, “There is such a thing as loyalty in America, Alfred Stieglitz is now thinking, or ought to be thinking, for all of his old friends and disciples and many new ones turned out on Sunday and Monday afternoons to see his life work…and tell him how much they had missed him.” Alfred’s favorites—Marin, de Zayas, Hartley, Walkowitz, Rosenfeld, and Strand—watched admiringly as he held forth nonstop. To those who asked if he planned to start a new gallery, he replied, “Why shou
ld I?…I have my own work to do.” Of his work as a whole, he said, “These are moments consciously recorded by me. There is a specific way of approaching life and letting life be life.”

  At the time, Georgia did not comment on the 145 “moments” comprising Alfred’s retrospective. His photographs were all “spiritually significant,” she wrote the following year: “I can return to them day after day…with always a feeling of wonder and excitement akin to that aroused in me by the Chinese, the Egyptians, Negro Art, Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Seurat, etcetera.” They should be taken for what they were—proof of his artistic vision and “spiritual faith in human beings.” When crowds at the gallery gathered in front of a particular nude, O’Keeffe may have thought that they shared her belief in its spiritual significance. While she was perhaps naïve about the awed response to the nude pictures of herself, she could not have anticipated the rhetoric of those critics who had been primed by Stieglitz to discuss these pictures in his own language.

  The photographer was one of “the great affirmers of life,” Rosenfeld wrote. “He has felt the life in every portion of the body of women,” he continued, “the navel, the mons veneris, the armpits, the bones underneath the skin.” Cataloging the body parts on the walls, Rosenfeld praised Stieglitz’s ability to “pour out his energy with gusto” into each of them, his camera’s enactment of a “grand double movement” of “penetration” and “release.” Similarly, Lewis Mumford declared, “It was his manly sense of the realities of sex, developing out of his own renewed ecstasy in love, that resulted in some of Stieglitz’s best photographs. In a part by part revelation of a woman’s body…Stieglitz achieved the exact visual equivalent of the report of the hand or the face as it travels over the body of the beloved.”

  It was one thing to regard photographs of oneself as art objects and quite another to learn that the revelation of one’s body would be taken as evidence of the photographer’s “love of the world.” Coming from months of solitude at the lake, where she had reflected on relationships in her Apple Family series, O’Keeffe felt exposed once this kind of language began appearing in print. Becoming a newspaper personality (as McBride would write) not for her own work but because of the scandal ignited by Alfred’s was not the kind of attention she desired. And she must have felt doubly betrayed once she understood that Alfred had orchestrated publicity for the show in terms guaranteed to kindle the prurient interest of the public.

  When visitors picked up copies of Strand’s essay as they strolled around the gallery, O’Keeffe may have hoped that his focus on the nature of photography would deflect attention from herself. “Stieglitz had accepted the machine, found in it something that was part of himself,” Strand wrote, with greater feeling for his mentor’s kinship with the camera than Rosenfeld or Mumford. Yet the familiar rhetoric surfaced in Strand’s account of the masculine as objective and the feminine as its opposite, as in his praise for the way that Stieglitz’s portraits, “whether they objectify faces or hands, the torso of a woman, or the torso of a tree suggest the beginning of a penetration of the scientific spirit into plastic media.”

  One wonders if Beck, a modern woman in the making and a careful reader of literary texts, detected the echoes of this rhetoric in Paul’s essay. Early in their acquaintance, she warned him against following too closely in Alfred’s footsteps, yet she took pleasure in her role as his muse in a project inspired by Alfred’s ongoing portrait of Georgia. Meeting Georgia on the walls as she walked around the gallery was a revelation of the kind of woman Beck hoped to become: one whose lack of inhibitions had made possible new ways of affirming the “reality” of which Paul spoke, through the use of the camera.

  At this point, unaware of Paul’s ties to Georgia, Beck’s admiration for her was undimmed. She would have agreed with McBride’s look back at this volatile time, just before the new administration’s embrace of normalcy: “O’Keeffe is what they probably will be calling in a few years a B.F., since all of her inhibitions seem to have been removed before the Freudian recommendations were preached upon this side of the ocean.” If the Stieglitz retrospective proved how much his circle missed him, it also launched O’Keeffe’s reputation as the woman who “became free without the aid of Freud.”

  * * *

  . . .

  Despite Beck’s wish to shed her inhibitions (to be Beck rather than Rebecca), it was impossible to do so while living with her mother. While attempting to balance the roles of modernist muse and dutiful daughter, she had a great deal to hide. Mrs. Salsbury would have been outraged to learn that she was having an affair with an irregularly employed photographer and taking as her model an artist who lived with her married impresario. On holiday with her mother in the spring, Beck told Paul that she had torn up her latest painting, and that she had devoured Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (another group favorite) but regretted its heroine’s abandonment of her dreams. What kept her going, she told him, was the memory of “your beautiful loving, our beautiful loving, so quiet and turbulent.”

  But it was disappointing to learn that her own turbulence had spoiled the results of their last portrait session. “I raged when you wrote that I had moved again—that must be conquered,” she wrote, telling Paul not to be “too patient” with her. She offered her services in a different role, as sounding board and typist once he could start writing a book on photography based on his articles—an offer meant to enhance his reliance on her while propping up his self-esteem. “It will be different even from whatever Stieglitz might write,” she noted.

  It would not have been obvious to readers of Strand’s criticism that he lacked self-confidence. Like Rosenfeld, Frank, and Seligmann, he contributed essays to periodicals that, in their view, paid insufficient attention to the kind of art they favored. He argued that the camera, though a machine, could convey the texture of modern life, and in the hands of a man like Stieglitz, photography was anything but mechanical. “Alfred Stieglitz and a Machine” was scheduled to appear in France and Germany; his review of a watercolor exhibit that omitted O’Keeffe ran in The Arts; his defense of Marin’s Americanness appeared in Art Review. Beck thought that Paul’s way with words could result in a book that confirmed both his expertise and his acuity.

  To maintain some degree of independence, she went on typing records for two New York doctors, an occupation that got her out of the house and left her mind free for other pursuits. But Beck’s salary was insufficient to cover items like fine clothes or holidays, for which her mother provided funds when it suited her. Nor were Paul’s prospects encouraging. He felt like a monkey jumping from one perch to another, he told Alfred that summer, when he was looking for work in the new field of advertising. He had met with an agency to discuss the use of the slow-motion camera to analyze athletic form. But lacking the funds for the specialized camera, he felt blocked: “When you need other folks before you can do a thing you must expect to be blocked, I suppose.”

  Strand was also trying to find an outlet for the scenic filmed the year before with Sheeler. Entitled New York the Magnificent, it ran for a week in July at the Rialto Theatre. The program began with a newsreel; the scenic, sandwiched between an Oriental dance and an aria from Aïda, came before The Mystery Road, a feature film about an English earl’s affair with a French peasant. Their movie earned positive reviews, including one that deemed it “more interesting than the feature,” but Paul despaired of finding a distributor, especially after learning that local newsreel companies were documenting the city in a naturalistic style more apt to meet with success than their film’s distanced approach. (While some called their scenic groundbreaking in its alternation between modernism and romanticism, its depiction of faceless crowds was at odds with the tender intertitles from Walt Whitman’s “Mannahatta,” for which it was later named.)

  Paul and Beck were enjoying the summer even though they were not often together. Anxious to cultivate Alfred’s approval of them as a couple, Paul told him that she swam as
well as he did, described their culinary efforts (Paul offered to make Welsh rarebit for Alfred and Georgia), and praised a painting of Beck’s that hung on his wall opposite work by Marin and Dove: “It…lives very well for me with the other things despite its limitations.” Alfred gave them his blessing. Recalling their last time together, he wrote, “You and Beck both looked very fit that evening, Beck particularly. She seemed much ‘improved,’ in many ways. Freed.” He invited Beck to spend her holiday at the lake, but he worried about Georgia’s eyes—the strong summer light had made it impossible for her to paint.

  At the end of the summer, Paul informed Alfred of the death of his uncle Nathaniel Myers, the family benefactor, and mentioned the bequest he intended for Paul despite his belief that men should look after themselves. Alfred replied, “I dare not express the hope that you might be given the chance to marry.” Paul replied that nothing had changed, as it would take time for the will to go through probate. “I am heir to what is known as a ‘nest egg’ and in that I was lucky,” he added, in that Myers’s other nephews received nothing.

  In the meantime, Paul felt blocked. His slow-motion-study project had come to nothing, and while de Zayas planned to take the scenic to Paris, their hopes for a commercial run had not met with success. What made him happy was Alfred’s willingness to include Beck in their circle. “I showed her your letter,” he wrote. “She has been fine—strong and yet amazingly naive in some things….But we are working it out together so far and what more can we ask.”