Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  It was impossible not to marvel at Lachaise’s devotion to Isabel—his muse since they had met nearly twenty years before in Paris. Ten years younger than Isabel, Gaston had moved to Boston to be near her (she was married at the time) and waited a decade until they could marry. In her mid-fifties, Isabel continued to pose for the voluptuous sculptures inspired by his vision of her. Writing about his 1918 exhibition, McBride called Lachaise “ardent,” and his nudes, “energy incarnate.” Another critic observed, “The breasts, the abdomen, the thighs, the buttocks—upon each of these elements the sculptor lavishes a powerful and incisive massiveness…that answers not to the descriptions of nature but to an ideal prescribed by his own emotions.”

  Beck grew fond of Isabel over the course of the month. “You should see Mme L. move through the icy water with as much grandiose calm as though she were serving afternoon coffee,” Beck told Alfred. The women were already on intimate terms when Beck took on her role of helper during Isabel’s preparations for her new home. She admired the older woman’s way of leading an unconventional life but may have wondered about Gaston’s devotion to her as muse in the flapper age, when charms like hers were out of fashion. (Beck was drawn to a small Lachaise torso that resembled her own curvaceous frame—a piece that she later bought for her art collection.)

  Their husbands were also supportive of each other. Lachaise had written of Strand’s work that it expressed his personality “in a clear forceful simpli[fi]cation.” That summer Strand began a set of studies of rocks, plants, and driftwood meant to show the thing itself, rather than (as Stieglitz claimed to do in his Equivalents) as counterparts to emotional states. One such image, Rocks, Georgetown, Maine, exhibits great delicacy in its treatment of geological pattern: the layered stone resembles feathers or wings. Simplifications of this kind, Lachaise maintained, revealed “the spirituality of matter.” Strand would return the compliment in his essay on the Frenchman turned American. Inspired by the young country’s vitality Lachaise had created “a synthesis in which human growth approximates the rich variety and growth of nature.”

  For the rest of the month, Paul trained his focus on the natural world. Beck missed their photographic sessions, the intimacy he’d once brought to his portraits of her—which had been shelved while he concentrated on his career as a cameraman. She could not have helped comparing their relationship to the older couple’s, given that Gaston’s sculptures relied on Isabel for inspiration. Reflecting on her own position—reliable wage earner and occasional muse—Beck may have seen herself in a negative light. She was neither a traditional woman like Isabel nor an accomplished painter like Georgia, her chief examples of women married to artists.

  Beck came up with a plan to bring her closer to Paul while taking her in a new direction. After persuading him to teach her to use his Graflex, she took a series of photographs, printed them in his darkroom, and sent one of the best, “Blue Sky Without a Cloud,” to Alfred, followed a few days later by a portrait of the hotel dog and “a head of Mr Strand looking very alert!” Alfred thanked her for her amusing tribute to his sky images and seemed glad that she and Paul were “snapping & sporting.”

  Paul Strand, Mme. Lachaise and Rebecca, Georgetown, Maine

  Paul Strand, Gaston Lachaise, Georgetown, Maine, 1927

  By the end of August Paul had “ten fine prints,” he told Alfred, despite dropping his camera into the water (he and Beck saved several films and developed them in his darkroom). He found time to take snapshots at the beach, one of a formally dressed Gaston kneeling before Isabel to tie her shoelace and another of a swimsuit-clad Beck. His most striking photograph shows Isabel, portly in her full-skirted dress, gazing into the distance while Beck, in modish trousers and with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, sits below her on the sand—two generations of artistic women. While one cannot date Strand’s Georgetown images with certainty, he may also have taken several portraits of Lachaise glowering in his peasant’s shirt—an image full of feeling for his friend’s struggles.

  After the Strands’ return to New York, Paul gave Alfred an account of their time in Georgetown: “The weeks in Maine were so fine, really perfect days of work and play…we enjoyed Lachaise and Madame Lachaise whose attentiveness and acquaintance with the island made our own enjoyment of it keener.” What he did not say was that they were thinking of buying a house there, to re-create something of the ambience of the Hill in a more carefree style—like that of the warmhearted Lachaises.

  * * *

  . . .

  For Alfred, a summer without the Strands proved peaceful but uninspiring. Severe eye pain kept him from reading or printing, and Georgia was having difficulty walking after her legs became swollen following a smallpox vaccination. The treatment prescribed by Leopold Stieglitz—a month’s bed rest with her legs wrapped in bandages—did not help her disposition. At Alfred’s invitation, Rosenfeld and the Kreymborgs were staying at the Hill to work on their new manuscripts, and Toomer was expected.

  Uncharacteristically, Georgia turned over the use of her shanty to the Kreymborgs, since she could not even hobble there to paint. Various family members—Leopold and Lizzie, Alfred’s sister Selma—were also in residence. When Elizabeth Davidson’s girls arrived for the summer, three-year-old Sue curtsied and said, “How do you do, Aunt Georgia?” to which she responded by slapping the child and growling, “Don’t ever call me ‘Aunt.’ ”

  Having agreed to forgo children of her own, Georgia had little time for those of others. She set herself apart from the group; rather than eat meals prepared by Lizzie’s cook, she made salads of watercress and onions to enjoy on the porch while the others indulged in Stieglitz family jousting. “We had two yowling brats here for six weeks who carefully kept anyone from tasting their food or having anything resembling peace,” she complained to Ettie Stettheimer. Once her legs recovered, she often rose at dawn to row across the lake, where she studied the trees, which inspired a series of paintings once the guests departed.

  “The Hill would have been nothing for you this year,” Alfred told Beck. Missing her high spirits, he relished every chance to tease her in allusions to times past. “Don’t let a whale swallow you up when you are sporting in the Maine waters,” he cautioned, and in a postscript, he asked whether the whales liked her “Waterlilies” (his name for her breasts). When she wrote that she had been pronounced “gynecologically PERFECT” (she was still unsure about having a child), he replied, “I thought surely you were on the way to triplets.” In the same letter, he embraced her as “one of us photographers” and offered to “boom” her. That she was pondering what she saw as the choice between having “triplets” and finding her way as an artist did not occur to him.

  In the same letter, Alfred enclosed a print of the Strands taken on one of their stays at the lake. In the foreground, Beck, in profile, bends her head back to kiss Paul, who turns to her with his eyes closed. She thanked Alfred, then chided, “You did do rather badly by little Strand. I look like a giantess beside him.” She enclosed her print of the Lachaises’ place in Maine and said that mutual friends had spoken of Georgia’s improved health: “She means so much—& is so rare in these hurried days.” Beck confessed that she missed Alfred, especially after “meeting” his bust in Lachaise’s studio. “I couldn’t help patting your cheek! it was fine to have your lovely presence in the room even in that form & I realized how very much you have always meant & still mean to me.”

  Alfred was flattered that Beck missed him and wished that she were there to help him repaint the kitchen floor, but also, he wrote, “to take you in hand & make a real photographer of you.” He hoped that Georgia would soon start “her autumn fling”—the weeks of nonstop painting possible after the departure of guests. By mid-October, only Rosenfeld and Toomer remained, the latter working on an account of his spiritual evolution. Since his return from France the year before, interest in Gurdjieff had grown among the intellec
tuals who met at the homes of influential figures like Muriel Draper and Jane Heap. Toomer had also set up a study group in Harlem, which drew Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes.

  In Toomer’s view, Stieglitz was as much a spiritual guide as Gurdjieff. His photographs revealed the essence of things—“the treeness of a tree…what bark is…what a leaf is…the woodness of wood.” One day, as Jean, Paul, Alfred, and Georgia were having breakfast while a snowfall blanketed the hillside, it seemed that they were cut off from the world. At that moment, a great warmth suffused the kitchen—“a most amazing sense that life was coming into us, that the wide world was immediate out there, that we were in the midst of happenings in America, that Stieglitz had an interior connectedness with life.”

  Stieglitz, in turn, felt a strong connection with the young writer. Toomer believed that Alfred was one of those rare people who helped others to find their way. This ability, he thought, explained to his generation “why we value him, we who are younger than he but old enough to realize that thought and action are nothing unless they issue from and return to being.” Perhaps intending to reveal the young man to himself, Alfred asked him to pose out-of-doors in his rumpled cardigan and overcoat—a session resulting in fifteen portraits that capture his moody charm.

  Meanwhile, Georgia was hitting her stride. Making up for lost time, she painted seven portraits of trees—the kind that she preferred, at times, to people. The vitality of nature is implied in the swaying limbs of the birch trees with which she had communed over the summer. In two oils entitled Birch and Pine Trees, the branches of a dark green pine enlace the birches’ silvery trunks; another in this series, Birch and Pine Trees—Pink, was, she later told Toomer, “a painting I made from something of you the first time you were here.” While she was too discreet to say more, the embrace of the rose-toned birch limbs by the darker pine hints that Toomer was one of those who made her see shapes that “passed into the world as abstractions—no one seeing what they are.”

  By November, Alfred had printed nearly 350 images. “I have a few that will tickle ‘das Beckchen’ all over,” he wrote, “& make her feel particularly glad she has a photographer as a husband & a photographer as a very good friend.” He and Georgia were in a frenzy of production but had no definite housing prospects for the winter. They had applied for rooms at the Shelton, perhaps at Beck’s suggestion, but since its completion the year before, the residential “club hotel” had been fully occupied. He continued drolly, “I hope New York will have some tiny corner with a bed in it to receive two such distinguished American citizens.”

  * * *

  . . .

  At the last minute, the Shelton’s managers found that they could offer the couple a two-room suite on the eleventh floor. The hotel was situated at Lexington Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, and the expressive use of its setback construction let light and air into the streets below. Its thirty-four stories made it the tallest hotel in the world; it offered such amenities as a cafeteria that served breakfast and dinner, housekeeping services, a pool, a gymnasium, and a billiard room, as well as comfortable lounges and reading rooms. It was an ideal solution for Georgia.

  While their bedroom was just big enough for twin beds and a chest of drawers, the sitting room windows gave a sense of spaciousness, and its sleek decor—off-white furniture, pale gray walls, and curtainless windows—created an atmosphere that encouraged her to focus on painting. Visitors were surprised to note the absence of canvases on the walls. When Anita Pollitzer paid a call, Georgia explained, “I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it.” She claimed the dramatic exterior views for herself in a series of sketches of the skyline and St. Patrick’s Cathedral—shapes that would soon appear in her paintings.

  Although the pace of life in New York was more hectic than Alfred remembered, he and Georgia no longer felt that they had to be part of it. To Alfred, their sparsely decorated suite seemed like an ocean liner high above the busy streets. “We feel as if we were out at midocean,” he told Sherwood Anderson. “All is so quiet except the wind—& the trembling shaking hulk of steel in which we live—It’s a wonderful place.”

  By contrast, the Strands had gone back to “the old grind.” Each day Beck made her way from West Eighty-third Street to her job with Dr. Roberts, whose practice as a gastroenterologist, while not enthralling, offered good working conditions and a Park Avenue location just blocks from the Shelton. Paul used his inheritance to add to their growing art collection (through Alfred, he purchased a Hartley) and promised to help underwrite Alfred’s next venture, the exhibition space he planned to rent at the Anderson Galleries. But film assignments required his absence from the city for weeks at a time, and Beck no longer felt inspired by photography, which she had taken up to share his passion rather than as her calling.

  “Every time you go away there is the same old lost feeling,” she told him. “I really am having a little inward struggle—with still the same old urge for something to develop—an affirmation of something.” She continued pensively: “I guess I miss being photographed a lot.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Turning the Page

  1926

  Beck dealt with her feeling of loss by giving her support to Alfred’s latest scheme. His plan to open an exhibition space in a large, high-ceilinged room in the Anderson building—to be called the Intimate Gallery—was the affirmation she had been waiting for. Along with Stieglitz family members, wealthy patrons, and Paul Rosenfeld, the Strands committed themselves to underwriting the costs of renting room 303. While helping to prepare the space, Beck also bought art by Alfred’s favorites to add to the Strands’ collection. Despite the cooling of relations with Georgia, Beck’s embrace of the gallery, known to friends as “the Room,” seemed to assure her place in the inner circle.

  Stieglitz informed prospective visitors that the Intimate Gallery would serve not as a commercial space but as “a Direct Point of Contact between Public and Artist.” (Just the same, he set prices according to his ideas of what buyers could afford and whether they cared deeply for the work.) Building on the theme of his 1925 Seven Americans show, he planned to devote the Room to Marin, O’Keeffe, Dove, Hartley, Strand, himself, and the unnamed number seven—a designation that would allow him to vary the list as he saw fit. Only at the Intimate Gallery, he maintained, could art lovers reflect upon “the complete evolution and the more important examples of these American workers.”

  For their first exhibition, Georgia covered the walls with unbleached muslin, and every morning Alfred swept the black rug to remove smudges. The tall windows took up so much space that there was room on the walls for only a few paintings; the rest were placed on the floor or on the furniture. The newly brightened gallery, Stieglitz told Anderson, encouraged the paintings to be themselves: “There is no artiness—just a throbbing pulsating being.”

  Stieglitz’s nativist approach functioned as an implicit critique of the many Americans—artists, writers, and intellectuals—who had flocked to Paris or Berlin, where they could live well due to the exchange rate. O’Keeffe went along with his pro-American rhetoric while noting that it should not limit one to a particular style, such as representation. “One can’t…be an American by going about saying that one is an American,” she declared. “It is necessary to feel America, live America, love America and then work.” Much later, she recalled the effect of this credo on the men in the group: “They would all sit around and talk about the great American novel and the great American poetry, but they all would have stepped right across the ocean and stayed in Paris if they could have.” She added, “Not me, I had things to do in my own country.”

  * * *

  . . .

  One of the things Georgia meant to do was to paint her “New Yorks.” After several years of good sales, she was ready to tackle the scenes from her windows. Strand and Stieglitz had already photographed the cityscape in a variety of moods; Sheeler and Demu
th, who occasionally filled the number seven slot, were painting urban landscapes with simplified forms and industrial subject matter, the style that became known as Precisionist. But these approaches were overtly masculine. It seemed inappropriate for a woman to tackle the subject—an objection that only intensified O’Keeffe’s desire to persevere: “When I wanted to paint New York, the men thought I’d lost my mind. But I did it anyway.” Her first cityscape, New York Street with Moon, was completed in 1925 but was omitted from that year’s Seven Americans show due to Alfred’s uncertainty about showing something so unlike her previous work.

  In February 1926, he invited the Strands to join Seligmann, Georgia, and himself to hang her new show, “Fifty Recent Paintings, by Georgia O’Keeffe.” They placed New York Street with Moon between two of the big windows, as if its jutting forms fit easily into the skyline on either side. The first thing one saw on entering the gallery, this canvas made a striking contrast to her petunias, maple leaves, and birch trees—a gamble on the part of the hanging committee that paid off on opening day, when it was sold. “No one ever objected to my painting New York after that,” O’Keeffe noted.

  Her exhibition was a success. Until April, when it came down, the Room was often so crowded that it was difficult to get inside, let alone see the paintings. Georgia absented herself to attend the National Woman’s Party convention in Washington at the request of Anita Pollitzer, the group’s executive secretary. A member in good standing since 1913, Georgia delivered a speech that was, Anita thought, the best of the evening. A journalist in attendance wrote that if O’Keeffe cared for anything other than her work, “it is her interest and faith in her own sex….She believes ardently in woman as an individual—an individual not merely with the rights and privileges of man, but, what is to her more important, with the same responsibilities. And chief among these is the responsibility of self-realization.”