Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  The next day, Alfred photographed Beck cavorting in the lake with Georgia Minor. Given her namesake’s reluctance to take time away from painting to pose, he had made few pictures of her over the summer. A few days later, Alfred and Georgia invited Beck to join them in another favored pastime, swimming in the nude, which was new to her. Alfred would take advantage of Beck’s fondness for the practice to photograph her voluptuous form, but for the time being he confined himself to head shots, including two of her posed against a pile of hay, which offered a bristly contrast to her smooth cheeks and profile.

  Over the next weeks, Beck found ways to hold her own. When oil and watercolor proved too difficult, she turned to another medium, words. After typing the bulk of the contributions to the MSS. photography issue, including Georgia’s, she made suggestions, which were adopted; at Alfred’s prompting, she began jotting down thoughts on her own life in photography. She also took notes on Alfred’s reminiscences. Envisioning herself as his Boswell, she asked Paul to bring steno pads when he came to the lake for the weekend. She added, “We could try some nudes out-of-doors—if you want to—we would be free around here.” But his visit was too brief for picture taking.

  After Paul went home, Beck accepted Alfred’s invitation to move to the farmhouse and agreed to daily photo shoots during her swims: “A lovely relationship has developed between us and we have lots of fun gamboling about,” she told Paul. She did not mention their deepening intimacy, such as Alfred’s awareness of her pain during her menstrual cycle, of which she spoke openly in her new life as a free spirit. Bathing naked most mornings, she enjoyed herself as much as Alfred during these sessions: “another grandie swim—& Stieglitz made some more snaps, of me in the nudelet.”

  Stieglitz’s snapshots of Beck in the nude tell a story that is open to more than one interpretation. In some, she grins up at him from the water as if they are in cahoots; in others, her curvaceous form emerges from the lake mottled with droplets—evocations of the cold water on her skin. Judging by the shots of Beck cradling her ample breasts, she understood his desire for women to seem complicitous in the “taking” of their likeness. Stieglitz would always appreciate how easily she gave herself to his camera and to his fantasies. Years later, he said that he had taken these shots “to prove to Paul that in Becky…he had a much more pliant and vital model than the…rather fragile O’Keeffe.”

  Whatever his motives at the time, sheer enjoyment of their rapport suffuses these photographs. In one, Beck’s breasts seem to float on the lake like water lilies, Alfred thought; another depicts her legs and buttocks as if her derriere were offering itself to the gaze. Beck wrote enthusiastically to Paul: “Some of them—a nude of me in the water, is a beauty and some of the others fine too. He takes quite a different slant at me from you.” Perhaps she hoped that Paul would be moved to take a more vigorous “slant” once he had seen his mentor’s work.

  Alfred Stieglitz, Rebecca and Paul Strand, c. 1922

  Paul joined Beck at the Hill in October after the Stieglitz family’s departure. Relations between the two couples were cordial. After a neighbor who had watched Alfred’s sessions at the lake with Beck made a complaint, a plainclothes policeman began staking out the site. Ironically, the Strands were nabbed when they went skinny-dipping at Alfred’s urging and Paul photographed Beck in the nude. Alfred paid the fine—ten dollars each—in acknowledgment of his responsibility. After Paul’s return to New York, Beck asked him not to mention the incident, “because it can be made unpleasant or a charming story, depending on how it is done….You aren’t always as gay about things as I am.”

  Paul had angered Alfred by photographing on the Hill, which was his turf, and doing so “like one possessed—shooting right & left—forward & backward—upward & downward & in directions not yet named.” What Paul felt about Alfred’s pictures of Beck went unrecorded, although he did photograph the two of them as they swam together, clothed. Nor did it help matters when Alfred asked Georgia to read aloud her essay for Paul’s issue of MSS. just before his departure. She acknowledged Paul’s contribution to photography “in that he has bewildered the observer into considering shapes, in an obvious manner, for their own inherent value” but reserved her praise for Sheeler, whose photographs, she thought, were “of equal importance” to his paintings.

  In the exchange that followed, Paul let them know that his feelings were hurt. Beck took his part out of “irritation,” she told him, “intensified by G’s tenacity in not listening to you.” Alfred hoped that the experience had caused only temporary heartache. Their taking time to listen to Georgia, he wrote, had been “important for all of us—including Beck if she feels she is part of your work.” (Alfred claimed that criticism could be constructive even when it caused distress.) But the incident cast a shadow on their relations. For the rest of the year, Paul concentrated on his subjects, chief among them the elegantly configured Akeley.

  Beck tried to smooth things over by assuring Paul that Alfred held his work in high esteem, and, in the same letter, sending him a check drawn from her dress allowance. Although motion-picture jobs were now coming his way, his still photography should not suffer, she thought. What was needed was a step in the direction she outlined, portraits of influential men like Alfred. Meanwhile, Paul must take care to avoid trouble by developing his latest portraits of her, including a shot of her thighs and groin emphasizing the dark triangle of her pubic hair, at his home studio rather than at the club.

  Beck’s last weeks at the lake were idyllic. By then a valued member of the household, she spent her time transcribing Alfred’s reminiscences and typing contributions to MSS. while working on her own. She read and commented on Rosenfeld’s essay about Georgia for Vanity Fair, which was to serve as advance notice for O’Keeffe’s January show. After praising her technique, it rehearsed the rhetoric about her work as outpourings of her womb, implying that its force derived from her conjoining of male and female energies: “She is one of those persons of the hour who, like [D. H.] Lawrence, show an insight into the facts of life of an order well-nigh intenser than we have known.” When Alfred informed Rosenfeld of Beck’s fear that readers would take his words as evidence of his feelings, the critic replied, “I am sorry for Georgia’s sake, for it will keep people from seeing why I really wrote my piece. People are all so foolishly personal.”

  Alfred took more portraits of Beck, including one that revealed some habitual distress, before turning to his new obsession—pictures of clouds that to his mind were equivalents of the emotional states evoked by music. (He would first call them Songs of the Sky and then later Equivalents.)

  Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe and Rebecca Strand, 1922

  Georgia completed her apple series and painted more autumnal landscapes. Looking at her studio one day, she decided to portray it in “one of those dismal-colored paintings like the men”—the result, My Shanty, recalls Hartley’s dark-toned palette. Beck understood the joke implicit in depicting the shack in hues sure to make “the men” pay attention. But when Georgia hung her oils on the farmhouse walls, they made such an impression that Beck wondered why she kept trying to paint. “I really can’t do it,” she confessed to Paul; “I am not an artist.”

  Her medium, it appeared, was friendship. Beck and Georgia went rowing together and walked around the lake to pick branches of bittersweet (once dried, the orange berries would brighten the New York winter). She did domestic chores, such as making flannel slippers for Georgia, who appreciated her skills as a seamstress—and took every opportunity to go on outings with “Jink” or “Jinkie” (“Georginka” shortened to its diminutives). Impishly augmenting Beck’s place in their trio, Alfred took to calling her “Beckalina.” But Georgia, whose self-containment Beck admired, did not indulge in pet names. Georgia was “a great gal to be with,” Beck told Alfred after leaving the lake. “It was fine to wander & romp with you, for a brief interval, along the clear dee
p stream of your kind of living.”

  * * *

  . . .

  But it was difficult to maintain this kind of living in New York. Beck went back to work preparing reports on topics like childhood narcolepsy and encephalitis for Walter Kraus, a prominent neurologist, whose office was on West Seventy-fifth Street. (His interest in Jewish genealogy established a kinship between Beck’s mother’s family and his own.) In her spare time, she typed the remaining contributions to the MSS. photography issue. Using the Akeley, Paul pursued the varied opportunities that came his way: a one-reel slapstick comedy, a tonsillectomy, more medical films, commencement exercises at Princeton, polo matches, and horse races—the latter a subject he described with enthusiasm to Alfred.

  It was satisfying to receive the November issue of Broom with Paul’s “Photography and the New God” and five reproductions of his work. His essay, a defense of the art, argued that the true significance of the camera had arisen in America, where the machine had become god. Photographers should humanize this mechanical deity by using it to capture the profound sense of passing moments. Seen in this light, the concept of portraiture became “that of a record of innumerable elusive and constantly changing states of being.” He added, “This is as true of all objects as of the human object.”

  At about this time, Alfred told Beck that he had printed some “howling” good portraits of her. “Georgia says several are additions & says: ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’…Perhaps the prints will tell you a few things not so clear to you now.” Repeating his praise in a letter to Paul, he said that these prints, which he would eventually count among his favorites, would surprise both of them. With Beck he had been “able to complete the circle.” In another letter to Beck, Alfred hinted that Paul was less able than he to capture her emotions. “How you’ll like them as ‘Portraits’ I don’t know. —As prints, as photographs, everyone will have to like them….They are entirely different from [Paul’s] things of you.”

  Alfred’s glee put Beck in an awkward position. She was glad to know that along with Georgia she was one of his “Immovables”—the muses he praised as “a new order of beings brought into the world by photography.” At the same time, she wanted to support Paul’s wish to make an extended portrait of her. They tried a new approach, with Beck in bed, resting her head on a pillow. Judging by the prints, which suggest that she was naked, she felt more receptive to Paul’s latest attempts, having absorbed Alfred’s praise of their way of working. At this point, she could relax into a rapport that had so far eluded her as Paul’s “human object.” Yet despite the intimacy of their mise-en-scène, his portraits of Beck seem posed.

  Alfred wrote that he missed her: “It does seem as if you ought to be coming downstairs in those trousers of yours and get busy on dish washing.” Georgia had finally hit her stride. She was going flat out to be ready for her January opening at the Anderson Galleries; Alfred was putting in long days in preparation for his show in April. He told Beck that she had been a “corking” helper and asked if she had finished her piece for the MSS. special issue. By November, after typing the last contributions, she was ready to concentrate on her own. She would be one of the few female contributors, along with Alfred’s niece Elizabeth, the novelist Evelyn Scott, and Georgia.

  Unlike Georgia’s piece, which set out her artistic credentials, Beck’s presented a woman whose life in photography had been shaped by men. First came her father, identified as “Owner of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” Since childhood she had been surrounded by images: “Indians, cowboys, buffaloes, arenas, Bill Cody on horseback, Bill Cody on foot, Bill Cody in his tent”—authentic records of American history. Then, as a secretary, she had kept records with a different kind of imagery—“hemiplegics, diplegics, paraplegics, hysterics, neurotics…fear, pain, destruction, death.” Her marriage to Strand came next. She listed his subjects and equipment (“crockery, machines, pipes, carburetors…oil ball bearings, cameras, tripods”), then his words to her as his model (“Oh hell! you MOVED AGAIN! The best portrait I’ve made. DAMN!”). His photographs, she concluded, were “not things just looked at, but SEEN.”

  Alfred replied that he liked parts one and two of her piece but found part three “not quite clear” despite its echoes of his preoccupation with “seeing.” While it was disheartening to read his response, it was worse to be told that her work would not be included in the special issue because she was not among the “Elect,” the group of artists whose contributions she had typed: To make an exception for the editor’s wife would do a disservice to Paul. With a characteristic lack of empathy, Alfred added, “You don’t mind my stating exactly as I feel.”

  His letter left no room for Beck to say that she did mind being left out of the project to which she had devoted herself. “It is difficult for me to say anything about MSS and the thing I sent you,” she replied. “You once said that you felt I would have something to say about photography as I was so much mixed up with it….Perhaps I misunderstood.” Moreover, she had written about Paul objectively rather than to “puff” his work. Feeling shut out by the very person who urged her to express her feelings, she felt “embarrassed at saying anything.”

  A week later, Hedwig Stieglitz suffered a massive stroke. Alfred and Georgia rushed to New York a few days before her death. He dealt with his grief by busying himself with the MSS. special issue, which would include some thirty statements by personalities as diverse as Sherwood Anderson, Charlie Chaplin, Hutchins Hapgood, Waldo Frank, Marcel Duchamp, John Marin, Carl Sandburg, and O’Keeffe. “Thanks for the Giving,” Alfred wrote awkwardly in a note to Beck. “I hope the Strands Paul & Beck enjoyed MSS. —It’s attracting attention.” He looked forward to seeing them again and expressed the hope that Beck’s “mean week” (her period) had come to an end, as if partly aware of the pain he had caused her.

  Beck tried to repair the breach by revising her essay. The new draft closed with a section about what she had learned from Alfred—including his remarks on his cloud pictures (“I watched the sky for 9000 years to get that particular sky”) and, more generally, the goals of photography. “Life, its direction faced, seen, insisted upon” was what he hoped to portray—“a way of looking at things, at people, at the world…with no prejudice against life, no resentment, freeness, a fine freeness, making the heart beat wildly.”

  Alfred allowed that the new version was an improvement, but he did not comment on Beck’s identification with his battles on behalf of “seeing.” He closed with a wish for the new year: “May the kindly stars lead you into all the good things.” Then, stepping back from their usual intimacy, he signed, “As ever ‘291.’ ” The circle of friendship was unbroken, but it had to be maintained on his terms.

  CHAPTER 9

  Kinds of Living

  1923

  That winter, crowds flocked to the Anderson Galleries to see the new show, whose catalog was entitled Alfred Stieglitz Presents One Hundred Pictures, Oils, Water-colors, Pastels, Drawings, by Georgia O’Keeffe, American. Friends noted that Stieglitz’s title emphasized his role. McBride wrote waggishly, “He is responsible for the O’Keeffe exhibition…Miss O’Keeffe says so herself, and it is reasonably sure that he is responsible for Miss O’Keeffe, the artist.”

  Georgia took the opportunity to explain herself to a sympathetic woman journalist. After recounting the outlines of her art training, she said boldly, “I made up my mind to forget all that I had been taught, and to paint exactly as I felt.” This approach did not preclude a mastery of technique, the journalist noted: “She paints apples, and the texture of their skins is reproduced so perfectly that one is almost tempted to take a bite.” Yet O’Keeffe could also be introspective, she continued, quoting Rosenfeld on her work’s “feminine” nature. O’Keeffe was no doubt displeased to see Rosenfeld’s thoughts about her in an interview intended to highlight her craft. Yet the piece was timed to give maximal exposure.

  Alfred Stieglitz
, O’Keeffe Exhibition, Anderson Galleries, 1923

  Starting on January 29, some five hundred people showed up each day of the exhibition; numerous publications sent reviewers. To those who had first seen O’Keeffe’s work at 291, the change of venue was striking: It was now being shown in the grand manner. But the gallery’s red plush walls reminded some of her appearance there two years before in Stieglitz’s portraits of her, which seemed to hover like palimpsests beneath the surface of her paintings.

  One day, studying O’Keeffe’s oils, Marcel Duchamp asked why she had not included a self-portrait. O’Keeffe laughed, perhaps reflecting that for those who knew how to see, her still lifes served this purpose. Also, the sale of My Shanty to the collector Duncan Phillips confirmed her hunch that using the dismal hues favored by “the men” would pay off. Twenty of her paintings sold—to Stieglitz family members, Sherwood Anderson, and others, including the Strands, who bought a view across Lake George painted when Beck was in residence, a show of support and an avowal of her insider status.

  While it is likely that Beck supplied the funds for this purchase, Paul did his part by writing to Henry Tyrrell about O’Keeffe’s importance in American art. Recalling Beck’s remarks on Georgia’s dislike of the innuendos purveyed in reviews, Paul asserted that her work’s place was among “things of the mind and the spirit.” He continued: “Here in America…the finest and most subtle perceptions of women have crystallized for the first time in plastic terms, not only through line and form, but through color used with an expressiveness which it never had before.” O’Keeffe’s show demonstrated that she had “the power and precision of genius.”