Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  Beck did not hold the unpleasantness against him, especially once Alfred sent her two prints of herself taken at lighter moments. “They show there’s life in the old girl yet & who knows, I may yet be a music hall queen, started on a histrionic career by little A.S.” Alfred had been kind to write during “this jangly time,” she added, when Paul’s aunt Josie lay dying. “I sit and wonder what its all about, this death thing—that’s lurking for us all.” It was reassuring to learn the terms of Paul’s aunt’s will: She had left the house to her sister, whom the Strands regarded as the head of the household. Alfred told Beck that he held her in his thoughts.

  During the fall, Paul put in long hours on an assignment to film operations at the Jersey City hospital. Having negotiated better terms at her job, Beck wrote to Alfred, “I’ve learned to make myself independent—with not much of a training to start with—except an antagonistic family and a passion for independence.” Now that the housing situation had been resolved and both she and Paul were contributing to their upkeep, “the idea of a child becomes active—but not yet.” She added, “Perhaps some day—if the doctors give me a clean bill of health and I’m not too old.” (She was nearly thirty-three.) Beck looked forward to her next adventure: “Someday I’m going off. Break tracks and get into trouble.”

  Alfred, on the other hand, was turning his mind to practical things, like finding a home for himself and Georgia. They returned to New York in November and, with the proceeds of their sales and the promise of a thousand dollars a year from Leopold, rented the top floor of a brownstone on East Fifty-eighth Street. Unconcerned with the election of Coolidge to the presidency, Alfred took pleasure in Sherwood Anderson’s dedication for his newly released memoir, A Story Teller’s Story: “To Alfred Stieglitz, who has been more than father to so many puzzled, wistful children of the arts in this big, noisy, growing and groping America.”

  Alfred heard from another of his “puzzled” children, Jean Toomer, when the young man returned to New York to teach the Gurdjieff method. That spring, Toomer had told Alfred about his efforts to square his spiritual quest with his private entanglements. Although some friends had declined when pressured to take sides regarding the Toomer-Naumberg-Frank triangle, Jean told Alfred, “We’ve again made conduits to each other. I believe that this time (we are worse than lovers!) things will hold.” He hoped that Alfred would help him with finances when he began teaching Gurdjieff’s method. Alfred and Georgia attended his classes but did not pursue the matter, no doubt because they had other things on their minds.

  When Alfred’s divorce became final, he redoubled efforts to persuade Georgia to marry him. The entwining of their personal and professional lives would be ratified by their union, which would also simplify issues like taxes and inheritance. It was urgent to regularize their relations now that Kitty had been institutionalized following a relapse: Her doctors believed that their marriage would force Kitty to accept reality.*

  Georgia acceded to Alfred’s arguments, on certain conditions. She was thirty-seven. She had made a name for herself and earned an income from the sale of her art. She did not want to be known as his wife, which would imply that her achievements were the result of his sponsorship. (It was surely hard to accept that his sensational portraits and marketing of her as “Georgia O’Keeffe, American” had played a big part in establishing her reputation.) O’Keeffe remarked years later of her desire to keep her name: “I wasn’t going to give it up. Why should I take on someone else’s famous name?” She agreed to marry but not to become a Stieglitz.

  The couple had to go to New Jersey to obtain a license because of Alfred’s status as a divorced man, which prevented him from remarrying in New York. The plan was that Marin, who lived across the Hudson, would meet them at the ferry landing and drive them to a justice of the peace in Cliffside Park. This official would then issue the license and perform the ceremony three days later. On the way, Marin turned to joke with Georgia, hit a grocery wagon, and careered into a lamppost. They emerged from the car unhurt but badly shaken. It was not a good start.

  On December 11, the couple went back to New Jersey, where they were married without incident by the justice of the peace, with Marin and George Engelhard, Alfred’s brother-in-law, as their witnesses. The ceremony was unusual only in that Georgia insisted on omitting the pledge to love, honor, and obey. There were no guests, no exchange of rings, no celebratory dinner, no announcement in the papers. Only a few friends were told that they had married. Years later, asked how she felt at the time, O’Keeffe replied, “What does it matter? I just know I didn’t want to.”

  * The theory advanced by Kitty’s doctors proved to be wrong. Her emotional state remained that of a child; she would be institutionalized for the rest of her life. Alfred, barred from visits because of her rages when she saw him, sent gifts but had little to do with her husband or their son. He harbored the idea that a genetic fault in his makeup was to blame for Kitty’s condition.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Treeness of a Tree

  1925

  In the new year, Stieglitz began organizing a large-scale exhibition to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of 291. Rather than show O’Keeffe’s work, he would promote the idea of a group of artists whose vision was both homegrown and aesthetically advanced. To prove the point—that the group shared a visual language attuned to native culture—he announced the show with a Barnumesque flair: “Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs & Things, Recent & Never Before Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz.” The show would be at the Anderson Galleries from March 9 to 28, 1925.

  Stieglitz outdid himself as a pitchman. In advance of the opening, he produced a sixteen-page catalog with essays by Sherwood Anderson and the sculptor Arnold Rönnebeck, a poem by Arthur Dove, and a roll call of the exhibitions mounted at 291—as if they had led, inevitably, to his new show. McBride thought that Stieglitz would fill the gallery with the aid of the pro-American rhetoric with which he characterized these artists. Strand, unconcerned with the ballyhoo, felt vindicated that Stieglitz would be showing his prints for the first time since 1916. It would be the ideal venue, Alfred told Beck: “I am very glad that there is to be the chance to see them publicly under such perfect conditions.”

  To underscore the idea of a group vision, he devised an installation featuring Demuth’s portrait posters of Dove, Duncan, and O’Keeffe at the entrance and examples of work by each of the artists in the hall. The preopening publicity worked as expected. On opening day, “there was an immense buzz of talk of people who were as much interested in each other as in the new pictures.”

  In the main room, visitors encountered each of the seven artists on the walls devoted to their work. “O’Keeffe outblazes the other painters in the exhibition,” Edmund Wilson declared in The New Republic. Her giant petunias, calla lilies, and landscapes (three abstractions, each titled From the Lake) affected him viscerally, unlike Marin’s seascapes and Hartley’s “sullen” still lifes. On the next wall, Strand’s prints were grouped by subject matter—cityscapes, studies of leaves, and close-ups of machinery. While it may have surprised members of the group that his portraits of Beck were not included, some were glad to find her present in Dove’s assemblage portrait of the Strands. Entitled Painted Forms, Friends, it employed metal rods, wires, nails, and a coiled spring to depict their rapport in rounded shapes that recalled her own as well as Paul’s focus on his Akeley.

  In the weeks before the opening, Beck was keeping her mother company in Atlantic City, where Paul sent her a copy of the exhibition catalog. One can picture her smiling at Rönnebeck’s listing of “Jack Dempsey, the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store, Buffalo Bill, baseball, Henry Ford, and perhaps even Wall Street” as the symbols from which the seven in the group constructed their reality. The catalog was beautiful, she told Paul, and the show likely to
be “a whopper.”

  While positive responses were to be expected from those in the inner circle, some of the uninitiated were put off by the hoopla. The catalog surrounded the art “in a halo of words,” a critic wrote: “Americanism and emotionalism are self-consciously and unduly emphasized.” Others said that the show was meant for a coterie. Professing herself an outsider, one critic praised Strand’s Leaves: “exquisite in texture and color, as indeed are his photographs of buildings and machines.”

  One can imagine Beck skimming the reviews for mentions of Paul. Elizabeth Cary, writing in The New York Times, allowed that Stieglitz’s Equivalents were beautiful, but Strand’s images of machines seemed “more obvious in their truth.” The comparison between their bodies of work reappeared in The Arts. Stieglitz’s pictures of clouds were “expert,” but Strand’s diverse images formed a “conscious arrangement of material in which the attractiveness of his subject matter plays no small part.”

  It was awkward to have the two men’s work compared in print, but even more disconcerting to read McBride’s tribute to Strand’s images penned in the belief that they had been made by Stieglitz. The photographer was the “Bellini” of the machine age, McBride wrote: “What used to be expended upon madonnas is here lavished upon pistons and revolving steel wheels.” Stieglitz made light of the matter by suggesting that McBride might be senile, even though he also praised O’Keeffe. (McBride reserved his scorn for Hartley’s “awfully fatigued” paintings, the result of his decision to live in Paris rather than in the United States.)

  Georgia, bedridden with the flu, took pleasure in McBride’s review. “You are good! and I laughed at what you did to me—We are going to send it to Hartley—so that he sees what you say about those who live abroad.” Despite her mental fog, she was thinking of a new subject—the urban landscape. If she could accomplish what she had in mind, she wrote, “my New Yorks would turn the world over.” And, not coincidentally, prove the rightness of Stieglitz’s promotion of her as an exemplar of native modernism.

  Despite his efforts to publicize the “Georgia O’Keeffe, American” label, some critics reverted to Freudian-inspired notions. A “peculiarly feminine intensity…galvanized all her work,” Edmund Wilson believed. Unlike male artists, whose creations stood at a distance from themselves, women artists had a way of “appearing to wear their most brilliant productions…like those other artistic expressions, their clothes.” Thus, a woman’s art was a projection of herself: O’Keeffe’s dark green cornstalks were “charged by her personal current and fused by her personal heat.”

  Georgia did not write to thank Wilson or comment on his clothes analogy, although it would have been easy to mark the contrast between her sober garb and her vivid canvases. On the one hand, she believed in the idea of differences between male and female experience and felt that her art conveyed them. On the other, she did not want it seen through a Freudian lens. “I have always been very annoyed at being referred to as a woman artist rather than an artist,” she said years later. But in the 1920s, cross with the male critics, she hoped that another woman would know how to express the distinctions that she saw in her painting.

  At about this time, Georgia contacted Alfred’s friend Mabel Dodge Luhan, who had been trying to lure him to Taos since settling there. After meeting Mabel on one of her visits to New York and reading her essay on the actress Katharine Cornell, Georgia asked whether Mabel might want to write about her: “A woman who has lived many things and who sees lines and colors as an expression of living—might say something that a man can’t—I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.” Mabel would accept the invitation, but not in the way that Georgia anticipated.

  Given her strained relations with Beck, it is not surprising that Georgia did not turn to her for this purpose. Since the previous summer, there had been no overt rift, yet each remained detached in her dealings with the other. Due to the lack of correspondence between them at this time, it is impossible to know the details of their relations, but it seems that a certain froideur prevailed.

  By then, Alfred and Georgia had become friendly with Florine and Ettie Stettheimer, whom they met at Paul Rosenfeld’s soirées. Florine had invited Georgia to tea after the 1921 show at the Anderson Galleries. “I was pleased to see her whole, as so far I only knew her in sections,” she informed her sister. (Her insightful poem about the couple begins, “He photographs/She is naked/he proclaims/She has no clothes/other than his words.”) Georgia and Alfred attended the Stettheimers’ evenings in their well-appointed home on Seventy-sixth Street, Florine celebrating her circle’s gatherings in faux naif paintings that depict their guests (including Duchamp, Hartley, McBride, and Stieglitz), but she did not show her own work. Georgia enjoyed the sisters’ sly sense of humor.

  Alfred continued his risqué correspondence with Beck. After she told him that she had frayed her buttock skin when riding in Atlantic City, he said that he dreamed of photographing the “roundness & texture & line” of her posterior. From Lake George, he reported an actual dream about her, one that was “satisfactory for all concerned.” He continued in terms that she was bound to understand: “The Hill seems not quite complete without Splashing Waters—Yodelling greetings to the morning.”

  Beck refrained from comments on Alfred’s dream but described her new job with Dr. Dudley Roberts and mentioned the photographs that Paul had recently taken for Gaston Lachaise, who gave the Strands two of his drawings. They hoped to spend August in Maine, where Lachaise was building a summer home. But she would miss Lake George: “The three months in three years—are still alive to me—my quiet attic room & the other little room—the lake, the clouds, the hills—the pain—the caring—G’s struggle—You—well, perhaps some day again—you will let me come.”

  In the meantime, she and Paul swam often in the Olympic-size pool at the Shelton, a luxurious new hotel on the East Side, and strolled nightly in the park along Riverside Drive. By the end of June, tired of being alone when Paul was out of town (that year he filmed two movies, several sports events, and varied hospital procedures), Beck confessed to Alfred that she was “ready for trouble.” She added, “It’s good I am not coming to the Lake.”

  * * *

  . . .

  More than trouble, Beck needed a change of scene. Since the last century, many New Yorkers had “rusticated” in Maine; recently members of the Stieglitz group escaped the scorching city summers by decamping there as well. Hartley, with whom Beck corresponded regularly at this time, painted his brooding mountain landscapes in the western part of the state, and Rosenfeld and Toomer planned to work on their current projects near York Beach in August. Others in the group spoke of the peace they found along the rocky coastline, whose primeval forests, granite rocks, and churning seas offered subject matter for painters and photographers alike.

  Even before the war, several pictorialists had found their way to the pristine coastal area called Seguinland and had settled on Georgetown Island, at the mouth of the Kennebec River. In the 1900s, the photographer F. Holland Day invited Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence White to his retreat there. The trio formed a summer school of photography held at the Seguinland Hotel. Marin came to the area in 1914 and, with Stieglitz’s help, earned enough from the sale of his seascapes to buy the small island where he painted during the 1910s. Other modernists who summered there included Max Weber and the Zorachs, along with Gaston and Isabel Lachaise.

  Still, the decision to summer in Georgetown may have felt like an abandonment of Lake George. While Stieglitz encouraged “his” artists to seek refreshment in Maine, he did not go himself, having suffered through O’Keeffe’s trips to York Beach. Nor had he wanted to see Lachaise’s sculptures when the Frenchman tried to interest him in showing them at 291. Since then, McBride had compared Lachaise to Michelangelo, and the new cultural arbiter, The Dial, featured essays on the sculptor by others, including Rosenfeld. By 1925,
Stieglitz was warming to Lachaise, particularly after he and O’Keeffe accepted his offer to portray them (he had already done busts of E. E. Cummings and Marianne Moore). Alfred voiced his approval of Beck’s plan to go to Georgetown: “You’ll enjoy it there much more than you could possibly the Hill this year.”

  The Strands moved into the Seguinland Hotel at the end of July, the management accommodating Paul’s needs by giving him a space for a darkroom. The Lachaises showed them around and took them on bracing swims, “au naturel all of us and no constable about to worry us,” Beck told Alfred; Isabel joined them at the hotel while their house was being completed. Once rested, the Strands took vigorous hikes and climbed the ocean-weathered rocks on the shoreline. “You and G. would love this place,” Beck wrote. “It is wild and free—I wish you could be here with us.” In lieu of going there, Alfred sent her a print of the lake to remind her of their summers together.

  It surprised Beck to find out how deeply she and Paul responded to the landscape: “At first the country seems very austere and almost melancholy—but after a time as it reveals itself it becomes more & more lovely and in places almost tender.” One day the couple rowed to a remote beach, where they enjoyed themselves “sans vêtements.” That the landscape seemed “almost tender” suggests that relations between the couple softened as Paul began finding new subject matter in nature—though he did not avail himself of the opportunity to resume his portrait of Beck.