Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

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  . . .

  Alfred’s account began cheekily: “Stieglitz once more. There seems no escape.” In using the third person, he may have hoped to deflect feelings in those who thought, as he claimed to do, that exhibitions were passé. Yet New Yorkers were “hungry for wisdom,” he continued, complimenting potential viewers in advance. For this reason, he had agreed to show his Songs of the Sky, images in which they might find revelations, “perhaps even a philosophy.”

  By contrast, O’Keeffe believed that her work was “very much on the ground.” Writing to Sherwood Anderson to ask him for a foreword to her catalog, she noted, “There will be only two abstract things—or three at the most—all the rest is objective.” With his help, she hoped to counter eroticizing reviews with her “objective” studies of fruit, flowers, and landscapes. Disappointed by his refusal, she chose three reviews from the year before, including the notice by McBride advising her to get herself to a nunnery. “I have kept my pictures small because space in New York necessitated that,” she said in a short statement, voicing her hope that “someone will buy something.”

  Visitors encountered O’Keeffe’s fifty-one drawings, oils, pastels, and watercolors in the larger of the Anderson’s two rooms. Her colors were dazzling, especially the varied greens of the pears and avocados; the white calla lilies seen in photographic close-ups showed the extent to which this flower had captured her imagination. Some puzzled over her nonrepresentational oils, such as Dark Abstraction—a composition suggesting a landscape traced with folds of red and blue. But given the lilies’ phallic pistils and the slits at the center of the abstractions, most viewers found it hard to see her work as objective.

  McBride spoke for those who had doubts about the artist’s apparent naïveté. O’Keeffe found in the calla lily “the secrets of the universe,” he wrote tongue in cheek. “The crux, so to speak, of the calla is the yellow rod at the base of which the real flowers occur, and it is this yellow that sounds Miss O’Keefe’s [sic] new note. The best of her new pictures, to me, was a flaming arrangement of yellows, very spirited, very pure.” His insight into O’Keeffe’s blend of spirit and purity was echoed by Helen Read, who declared, “This is O’Keeffe’s show.” Yet Read equated her work with her person: “Each picture is in a way a portrait of herself.”

  Whether the same was true of Stieglitz’s photographs was another matter. His placement of Spiritual America, the image of a gelded stallion, at the entrance to his room, all but dared viewers to question his intentions. With his images of clouds, McBride wrote, the photographer had gone “about as far in finish and subtlety and richness as the camera can go.” (McBride ended by quoting the critic who found “something spooky in them.”)

  Elizabeth Cary confessed that having found Songs of the Sky “emotionally torturous,” she felt their spiritual import once Stieglitz explained them. She added, “Pictures must speak for themselves, however.” Cary’s comparison of their shows concluded with a statement of preference: “Even though each plate of Stieglitz is a solved mathematical problem, there is a curious suggestion of other problems to come. In every composition of Georgia O’Keeffe, with a greater simplicity and a more direct power, there is something more satisfying and complete.”

  With their work in adjoining rooms and their relations a matter of common knowledge, it was inevitable that some chose to compare the two artists. The majority of critics praised Stieglitz for his role as photography’s pathfinder even when they did not grasp his intentions. A second review by Read was devoted to O’Keeffe but again linked her art to her sexuality: “Psychoanalysts tell us that fruit and flowers when painted by women are an unconscious expression of [their] desire for children.” Despite Georgia’s best efforts, her work was still being defined according to ideas of femininity that reduced artistic expression to sublimation.

  Beck went to the Anderson Galleries soon after her return to New York. In a letter to Paul, she had less to say about their friends’ shows than about the gallerygoers. They were “a funny mob…old spinster gals—flappers—hawk nosed student boys” gathered around Alfred as he “roared” at them. Jacob Strand joined her (Alfred was fond of Paul’s father, who gave him financial advice); Beck suggested that she, Paul, and Jacob purchase one of Georgia’s paintings. Before the end of the show, they bought the semiabstract Alligator Pear No. 11, with the fruit seen against a green triangle set in white drapery. Alfred, Beck, and Georgia repaired to a nearby restaurant, where he added a note to Beck’s letter to say that she was in fine form: “We’re glad to have had her with us for the evening.”

  The next day, Beck bought a copy of Port of New York, which had just been published. She had little to say about her role in the preparation of the manuscript. After inspecting the illustrations, she pronounced Paul’s portrait of Alfred a success but could not say the same of Alfred’s portrait of Georgia, who looked “rotten.” Above all, she wanted to reassure Paul of her love: “You have released a lot in me & I wish I could do as much for you.”

  Following the closing of their joint show and purchases of O’Keeffe’s paintings by the couple’s friends, their difficulties seemed to have been resolved. Alfred expected to clear several thousand dollars, and he looked forward to opening a new gallery. But despite her sales, Georgia had doubts about the viability of art. She told her sister Catherine that commercial art of the sort she had practiced in the past allowed one to earn a living but was “prostitution,” and went on, “few real artists make money enough to live….You are not mixed in with the hash of the world like I am.”

  That spring, Paul took on the task of answering Georgia’s critics. Her art was that of a woman, he argued, but did not result from her sexuality. One can imagine his conversations with Beck, and her role as typist, as he wrote and rewrote this essay. It began, “Here in this American land, something rare and unforeseen, something precise and significant in the realm of the spirit, has unfolded and flowered in the work of Georgia O’Keeffe.” Women had not, until recently, distinguished themselves in art because they had been “limited to the home and to the lesser crafts,” such as weaving and lace making. In these domains, their “imaginative resourcefulness and…savage intensity” could not attain the level of art, in his view “a philosophic projection” onto the material world. By the time Paul’s essay reached final form, these passages had been edited out, presumably at Beck’s suggestion.

  The final draft argued for O’Keeffe’s importance in artistic terms. Using color and form, she had created “a communicable aesthetic symbology expressive of the social significance of her world”—a portrayal of reality on a par with those of Matisse and Picasso. Like the feminists Christabel Pankhurst and Emma Goldman, O’Keeffe was a pioneer, and her work, grown from the native soil, deserved comparison “with the best work of men.” Strand’s accolade would meet with approval from the group—although not from its subject—when it appeared in print.

  Georgia turned her mind to more urgent concerns, such as putting their belongings in storage before moving out of Leopold’s house. “It seems we have been moving all winter—Stieglitz has to do everything in his mind so many times before he does it in reality,” she told Sherwood Anderson. They went to Lake George in June, aware that they would have to find lodgings on their return to Manhattan. Meanwhile, she was glad to be there alone: “I don’t know why people disturb me so much….It is the first time I have come here that I have really liked it.”

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  . . .

  Alfred set about disrupting their solitude almost immediately. He photographed the chestnut tree on the hill, which struck him as an heroic figure—holding on despite its waning powers, like himself. “Even the old chestnut tree on the upper Hill is singing his swansong,” he informed Beck, letting her know that he looked forward to having her there: “You know what I feel about you.” In his next letter, he compared Georgia’s recent oils to Beck’s work from the ye
ar before and said to give herself time to paint.

  Beck replied that Alfred’s departure had left a hole in her life. She also missed Georgia, “although that crabbed wench probably won’t believe it.” After a visit to Long Branch, where the neighbors welcomed her as “the same old Rebecky…wild as a hyena,” she was dreaming of “rolling in the buttercups, sans negligee” at the Hill. If Alfred and Georgia agreed, the Strands would go there for the aptly named Independence Day.

  Alfred wrote that they would be pleased to have them. Meanwhile, he was taking pictures of a naked Beck in his mind: “I thought of you frequently as I saw the high grasses here—& full of white daisies—& it was hot—& I felt wouldn’t Beck like to plank herself down here—sans.” Paul was once again in his good books, having supplied his portraits of Alfred to the British Royal Society for an article in his honor and to Vanity Fair for the magazine’s “Hall of Fame.” He was glad that Paul’s career was taking off: “You have achieved your aim of last summer. And have really gone way beyond what you then dared hope for.”

  The Strands arrived at the Hill for the Fourth of July. Beck tried to make a place for herself by doing household chores, but Georgia, annoyed at having to set aside her oils, became frustrated. In the weeks following the Strands’ departure, when a stream of friends and family, including the Davidsons, started showing up, she lost her appetite and took to her bed. Alfred tried to protect her from intrusions into her solitude but also let her know that he felt threatened by it. She protested to Sherwood Anderson, “I have to keep some of myself or I wouldn’t have anything left to give.”

  Their relations were further complicated by the news that Emmy had finally granted Alfred a divorce, to be finalized in September. He would then be free to marry, a step that in his view would defuse the tension in their lives by formalizing their personal and financial arrangements. Georgia, who was less than pleased by the prospect, would try, unsuccessfully, to resist marriage. Looking back on her fight to preserve her independence, she observed, “I like getting what I’ve got on my own.”

  Vanity Fair had just named Georgia to their “Hall of Fame” a month after Alfred’s appearance there in June. The July issue, which celebrated America’s independence, sported a cover that she could have designed. It showed two young women throwing fruit at a fleeing male oppressor in Colonial garb from their perch high in an apple tree. In her “Hall of Fame” portrait, one of Alfred’s from the year before, Georgia glares at the camera as if confirming the caption: “She is rapidly coming into her own as an American painter of the first magnitude.” Paul joked to Alfred, “Georgia looked at home in the H of F—the lightweight champ of the ladies, ready and capable of knocking them all dead.”

  Paul could not have anticipated that his return to the Hill at the end of July was poorly timed. Thinking that he had done the cause another good turn, he brought the proofs of his essay on Georgia, which was scheduled to appear in Playboy—then an avant-garde magazine of letters run by Egmont Arens. (The issue would include Arens’s praise of Alfred and Georgia as leading lights of the art world.) Although the Davidsons did their best to comfort Georgia, she blew up at Paul after reading his piece. Rather than seeing it as a vindication, she took out her resentment at all those who explained her art in terms of her sexuality—though Paul had taken pains not to do so. They argued, and he left feeling baffled and rejected; Beck became indignant on his behalf.

  Under the circumstances, Beck did not feel welcome to spend August at the Hill as planned, especially on hearing from Alfred that she should take one meal a day elsewhere because he did not want Georgia in the kitchen: “There’ll be no trouble at all unless the lady folks can’t live without.” He continued ineptly: “I wouldn’t say ‘Come’ unless it were ‘right’ all around. Of course you may have new plans.” Realizing that Georgia did not want her at the Hill after the blowup with Paul, Beck decided to board at the Pines.

  “This thing with G.O.K. has had a curiously liberating effect,” she wrote Paul from the train. “Before there was always excitement & now I’m indifferent.” Alfred met Beck at the station, looking downhearted, but “said nothing about your contretemps….I told him exactly what we felt—& he agreed that there was no other way to feel.” In Beck’s resolve to maintain her composure, she turned down Georgia’s invitations and claimed to enjoy meals at the Pines, where there were no dishes to wash, “no fuss of any kind.”

  Alfred was disconcerted by the tension that had flared up among the four of them. Unable to admit his role in their disagreements, he thought of it as a falling-out among the “lady folks.” And given his reliance on advice from Paul’s father, he no doubt sensed that friction between himself and the Strands might have unfortunate consequences in the future.

  Beck decided to make the best of things. She spent her days riding the horse she had rented, swimming, resting, doing crossword puzzles, and writing to Paul. “Don’t fret for a minute about any disharmony here….Georgia goes about her business, I about mine.” Beck and Alfred resumed their afternoon swims; he photographed her making faces at him; Georgia offered to let her stable her horse at the farm. But she had no idea what Georgia was thinking. When the July Playboy arrived, Beck told Paul, “It’s much nicer than the lady it is about.”

  Still ailing, Georgia said nothing about their estrangement until the day when she suddenly opened up. “She is very unhappy,” Beck explained, “and what happened here has nothing to do with you.” Georgia was beside herself with worries—the pressure to marry, the conflict she felt between her love for Alfred and the demands he made on her, his need to have his way, combined with his frailty and increased dependence. “So much suffering between two people who really care so much for one another that they hurt one another,” Beck lamented. She spoke with both of them after Georgia broke down: “She has been pushed pretty far & is pretty ragged—spiritually.” But while the three of them were again at peace, Beck could not forgive Georgia for hurting Paul.

  The rest of the month went smoothly except for the prolonged stay of Leopold and Lizzie Stieglitz, who talked of building their own cottage on the property. When she could, Georgia slipped away to her shanty, where she was painting specimens from her garden: corn plants with their dark green leaves unfurling in opposite directions and close-ups of flowers, more calla lilies, red canna, and pink petunias painted larger than life. Beck’s emotions clouded her judgment: “I don’t like the things she has done this summer.”

  Paul did his best to remain on good terms with Alfred, trying in vain to find the papers that Alfred wanted for printing and sending him his Graflex when Alfred’s own camera suffered mechanical failures. Paul also confided in Alfred about the declining health of his aunt Josie, who owned the house on Eighty-third Street where the Strands had lived for decades. Until the terms of her will were known, it seemed likely that he and Beck would also have to find new lodgings. Paul thanked Alfred for voicing his concern about the couple’s future.

  On her return to New York, Beck received a note from Alfred. He had been printing his images of her, which gave him a heartache: “I do see all I missed doing I would so liked to have done with La Beckalina das Beckchen! A G[od] D[amn] Shame…no one to blame but yours truly.” He continued: “I don’t think the summer was lost for you in spite of all the ‘unnecessary unpleasantness’—I wish I were just a bit ‘wiser’—or whatever you call it.”

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  Life at the Hill smoothed out after the departure of summer guests. Ida O’Keeffe arrived in the middle of September and took to brightening the rooms with floral bouquets, while also relieving Georgia of chores. Rosenfeld, who joined them for a few days, flirted with Ida, to Alfred’s dismay. A biographer writes, “With Rosenfeld, as with Strand, Alfred felt an intense sexual rivalry. It was as though he could assuage his fears about losing Georgia…if he could defeat his ‘sons’ on the field of love.” When Ida refused to pose in
the nude, he took pictures of her long underwear flapping on the line—a sly riposte to her so-called reserve.

  Glad to have Ida as her ally, Georgia went back to painting the world outside her door. Autumn leaves that had fallen on the ground inspired new arrangements of shape and color. In her bold, large-scale Pattern of Leaves, a torn burgundy maple leaf overlies its companions in a confined picture space; similarly, Leaf Motif No. 1 approaches abstraction through O’Keeffe’s handling of the leaf’s inner and outer edges. Other studies from this time imply that, like apples and flowers, leaves offered a way to evoke the intricacies of human relations.

  O’Keeffe once declared that she would enjoy people more if they were like trees, and she and Stieglitz looked to the trees at the farm as familial presences. In 1919, engrossed in his composite portrait of Georgia, Alfred had told a friend that he had also been photographing trees—“human trees,” like the venerable chestnut with which he identified (The Dying Chestnut). On their return to the lake in 1924, he wrote of his regard for this upright specimen. One can see in O’Keeffe’s The Chestnut Gray, painted that year, an allusion to Alfred’s esteem for his arboreal counterpart. Like his 1919 photograph, her frontal composition addresses the tree head-on, as a being facing mortality. When not turning his camera skyward, Alfred photographed other favorite trees on the farm.

  Alfred Stieglitz, Long Underwear, Lake George

  All was harmonious, Alfred told Beck, now that Georgia could devote herself to painting. Beck answered tartly, “I am glad that it is at last peaceful—and sorry that Das Beckchen is apparently not one of the people that is ‘complementary’ to others.” Relationships were “sensitive plants,” Alfred replied, and human beings “queer bits of mechanisms” that sometimes broke down. Looking back on the summer, he tried to console her: “You really had nothing to do with the, let’s call it unrest—inner of G.—as I see it. But we won’t go into that. You have too much sense.”