Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  In March, an interview with O’Keeffe in The Chicago Evening Post quoted her on a woman’s right to fulfill her potential. The interviewer, Blanche Matthias, linked O’Keeffe’s sense of autonomy to her “profoundly feminine” art, answering her call for a critic who shared her vision. “Many men here in New York think women can’t be artists, but we can see and feel and work as they can,” O’Keeffe declared. In response to complaints about obstacles in the way of a woman’s career, she snapped, “Too much complaining and too little work.” Matthias concluded ironically, “Women like O’Keeffe are dangerous….Look sharp, you worlds, who see in flag-waving an excuse for murder, and in power, your privilege to abuse. The O’Keeffes are coming!”

  But few apart from Georgia’s intimates understood the cost involved in her calls for self-realization. The day after her talk to the convention, she returned to New York and collapsed from stomach pain, followed by dramatic weight loss over the next few weeks. One can imagine her reading her reviews in bed, perhaps smiling at The New Yorker’s words on her success: “Psychiatrists have been sending their patients up to see O’Keeffe’s canvases….They limp to the shrine of Saint Georgia and they fly away on the wings of the libido.” McBride began by saying that he would note the opinions of her female fans before giving his own: “I like her stuff…but I do not feel the occult element in them that all the ladies insist is there. There were more feminine shrieks and screams in the vicinity of O’Keefe’s [sic] works this year than ever before.”

  Beck learned that Georgia was ailing in March, when she was again keeping her mother company on the New Jersey shore, and wrote to Dudley Roberts, whose expertise in gastroenterology made it likely that he could help. When Georgia consulted him, Beck asked Roberts to keep her informed, “for I really feel responsible for whatever happens to her.”

  Beck was adding Georgia to her list of concerns at a time when the Salsburys were going through a difficult patch. Mrs. Salsbury’s sale of the family home and the distribution of the proceeds among her children allowed Beck to give up her job as a medical secretary, but with financial independence came the need to take responsibility for their mother, who had recently settled in an apartment close to her son Milton, her primary support. When Milton needed surgery, Beck took their mother to New Jersey during his convalescence, which was slower than expected, and then the two women extended their stay while Milton’s wife looked after him.

  On Beck’s return to New York, she took on the additional task of sorting through their father’s papers to relieve Milton of the work he had begun with Richard Walsh, the literary editor who contacted him because he was writing a book on Buffalo Bill to show “the processes by which a semi-legendary figure was created.” Beck was happy that Nate’s story would at last be told from his perspective, and Walsh expressed his gratitude to her for her hard work, but by late spring, after a series of colds, she felt too weak to keep going—though she had, she told Alfred, avoided “la gripette.” She did not mention her fear that she might have tuberculosis, which ran in the family.

  She had already begun to imagine a long vacation and was thinking of spending the summer in Europe with Paul before they settled down and had children (she felt that at almost thirty-five, this might be her last chance). But like Georgia, Beck believed that she had things to do in her own country—in her case, Square Butte, Montana, where her father’s ranch continued in operation. “I have been thinking about the ranch,” she told Paul. “It will eventually be sold—and when I think that perhaps you will never see it if you don’t go now it makes me quite ill.” She would ask the manager if they might stay; if not, they could go to Europe. But, she added, “my first love is the butte.”

  Beck was articulating what had always been the case. While she embraced the Stieglitz circle’s staunch nativism, she also wanted to share the Salsbury legacy with Paul. (She may have reflected that except for his weeks in New Mexico as Alfred’s envoy, she, Georgia, and Hartley were the only ones in their circle who had spent time west of the Mississippi.) Between colds, Beck planned an itinerary to accommodate her need for a restorative holiday and Paul’s for new sources of inspiration. When she told Alfred of their plan to spend three months in the West, he gave them his blessing. “Stay away as long as you possibly can,” he wrote. “It’s your chance.”

  * * *

  . . .

  When Beck learned that she and Paul would not be able to stay at her father’s ranch, she settled on Estes Park, Colorado. (She may have been influenced by Isabella Bird’s popular account of her travels there, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.) Soon after their arrival, she sent Alfred a postcard showing their cabin: surrounded by wildflowers, it had a fine view of the snow-topped peaks.

  From this vantage point, New York seemed like “a distant and disagreeable ant heap,” Paul told Alfred. Marin should join them: far from seeming aloof, the Rockies were “closer somehow to human experience.” No doubt thinking of his correspondence with O’Keeffe during her time in Colorado, he went on to say, “Georgia knows this country and I think she will agree with what I am rather vaguely trying to say about it.” After consulting a doctor, Beck learned that she was anemic but not tubercular, but she was still feeling unsteady. “After what has happened in the family,” Paul added, “I only wish we could be here in the West a year at least.”

  Paul Strand, Blasted Tree, Colorado, 1926

  While he was glad to report that Beck was having “a good-bad time with her watercolors,” Paul was circumspect about his own work—nature studies rather like his photographs from the previous summer in Maine and a new series, images of twisted tree stumps, suggesting some uneasiness about the “human experience” that seems to echo in their forms. In one, Blasted Tree, Colorado, branches jut out from the trunk like misshapen limbs; in another, Tree Root, Colorado, the root’s angle resembles a bent, or broken, leg—as if nature were in sympathy with human suffering.

  Paul’s portrait of Beck posed against a tree trunk may be related to his tree series from this time, when she could not decide whether she wanted children, or whether being true to herself meant finding her way as an artist. “Paul made the tree prints when I was so ill in Estes Park,” Beck told Alfred. “I was frantic and he [was] trying to bring me to the point where I could decide for myself what to do for myself.”

  In August, the Strands moved to Mesa Verde, Colorado, the site of ancient cliff dwellings. Paul photographed the well-preserved alcove houses as nearly pure geometric form and developed his work each night in the hotel cellar—in one instance, printing the image of a rock shelter upside down to enhance its balance. They went on to Santa Fe to find Rosenfeld and the Kreymborgs, who been spending the summer there to complete writing projects. “Your babies haven’t been loafing,” Paul assured Alfred.

  Paul Strand, Rebecca, Taos, New Mexico, 1932

  But judging by the paintings that he and Beck saw in the Santa Fe museum, the local artists had been wasting their time. “I have never seen more trashy, utterly commonplace picture making. It is almost unbelievable that this amazing country can be seen in such a dead way.” The only one who showed a sense of place was Hartley, though his work was not on view: Paul had to talk the attendant into retrieving the museum’s one Hartley from storage. He hoped that Marin and O’Keeffe would one day do the Southwest justice.

  The Strands’ next stop was Taos, where Hartley had lived and painted ten years earlier. Taos, a stop on the popular Indian Detours trips hosted by Harvey Girls in Navajo-style outfits, had been an art colony since the nineteenth century, when several academically trained artists (including Ernest Blumenschein, Frederic Remington, and Walter Ufer) came to paint the landscape and the Pueblo people’s timeless dwellings. Locals had taken to calling Taos “Mabeltown” after Alfred’s friend Mabel Dodge bought an extensive property near the Pueblo, married Tony Luhan, a Pueblo Indian, and began her reign over the town’s soc
ial life. When Mabel learned that Paul and Beck were staying in a bed bug–ridden hotel, she offered them la Casita Rosa (the Pink House), a small adobe on her property. It had a separate studio and the cachet of having housed D. H. Lawrence, whom Mabel lured to Taos in 1922 with the promise of time to write.

  The main house, where they took their meals, was called Los Gallos, after the array of ceramic roosters perched along the roof. Filled with Mabel’s unconventional guests, Los Gallos was impossible to describe. It was “casual, amusing, a scream, a playhouse, a theatre, a church, a harem, a studio, a nursery, a yacht, a boudoir,” Beck told Alfred. She added, “Why she has been so kind to us we do not know except that she probably is to everybody.” Beck felt so relaxed there that she painted a number of cheerful watercolors of the scenes around her.

  One wonders whether Mabel told the Strands about Jean Toomer’s visit earlier that year. On meeting Toomer in New York, she had urged him to go to Taos to establish a Gurdjieff center at her home, and once there, he understood that Mabel not only planned to take the center under her wing but meant to lay claim to him, as well. Declining to be a kept man, he returned to New York after sending most of the funds she had donated to Gurdjieff. What began as a “magnificent gift to consciousness” ended in mistrust, recriminations, and, in time, the end of Mabel’s infatuation.

  Through Beck, Mabel also extended an invitation to Alfred and Georgia to come to Taos. “It’s really very beautiful,” Beck assured him, “& she would do some great things.” The idea would take several years to germinate. Having learned from Rosenfeld that Georgia had recently fled from Lake George to her sanctuary in Maine, Beck expressed the hope that she and Alfred were now in better health. She ended with a question: “And are you content? Best to Georgia—I want her to be happy too.”

  A few weeks later, Beck let on that she had come to understand something about herself in recent months: “My taste for adventure has developed into an appetite!”

  * * *

  . . .

  Their summer at Lake George had been dismal, Alfred replied, “a sort of hash & and not good hash at that.” It began with an attack of kidney stones that landed him in New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital. Georgia and her sister Ida looked after him during his convalescence at the lake; there were no guests except for one of Georgia’s painting students. Lee and Lizzie Stieglitz sent their cook to prepare meals for the household while they were in Europe: They planned to go to the Hill on their return with the Davidson girls. Far worse, from Georgia’s perspective, Alfred’s sister Selma kept announcing her imminent arrival. Georgia grew more than usually anxious and started losing weight again after Ethel Tyrrell and Eva Herrmann, the daughters of Alfred’s friends, came to stay and Alfred photographed them in the nude—which no doubt brought to mind his sessions with Beck.

  In August, Eva told Georgia that she had seen Alfred kissing the cook. Georgia then decamped to York Beach, where she spent most of her time walking by the ocean. “I was like a mad woman,” she told Alfred. “All the world seemed gone from me—everything that I had ever been able to touch and to build my life on seemed shattered.” But solitude agreed with her: “I will be all right—I knew it out there tonight—It is something that goes thru my blood.” She took solace in the shells she picked up from the sand and in the serene hues of the sky and water. “It seems to be the first firm feeling I have had under my feet in months.”

  Alarmed, Alfred took the unusual step of going to York Beach at the end of August. Their passion revived, and Georgia agreed to return to the lake, for she could not imagine living without him. A few days before her scheduled return, she felt ready to paint: “I have been letting the ocean and the rocks and the sand get into me,” she wrote. By then the outer world had permeated her vision. In Blue Wave Maine, a sense of boundlessness suffuses her depiction of the sea, tossed by a stylized wave and lit by the glow along the horizon—a scene from nature approaching the sublime.

  She was also sorting through the shells that she planned to treat as subjects. It is tempting to see in this new series of oils reflections of her state of mind—her need for solitude and her concern that in her isolation, she was cutting herself off from life. Three oils from this time show silver-and-white clamshells standing upright in a confined space; small in scale, they evoke twin motifs of opening and closing. Suggestively, Open Clam Shell allows a view into the bivalve’s interior but blocks access into the small opening within; Closed Clam Shell shuts itself up tight, offering its line of closure to the (too inquisitive?) gaze. O’Keeffe’s apple series had depicted changing patterns of relationship; her enigmatic shell series meditate on the integrity of the self.

  In a magnanimous moment, Alfred wired Georgia to say that she should stay in Maine as long as she liked. She put off her departure for another week while he went to New York to choose work for an international art exhibition being organized by Man Ray, Katherine Dreier, and Marcel Duchamp, the founders of the dadaesque Société Anonyme. From the lake, Georgia wrote to him that this phase in their relations “mark[ed] the turning of a page” although she did not know “what is on the other side.” This sentiment, which recurred the next day, conveys a nascent sense of poise in the face of his demands: “It must be that I am turning a page in my life—and I must see as clearly as I can what is—not what I want to see—but what is.”

  They spent the next month together at the lake. In addition to the clamshell series, Georgia painted a number of floral pictures, a poignant study of the maple tree with which Alfred identified, and six oils, each called Shell and Old Shingle. Placing a shell from Maine next to a shingle from the roof of an outbuilding, she looked at them from all sides until they became “shapes together—singing shapes.” While this series contrasts the shell’s smooth curves with the shingle’s flinty texture, these shapes also evoke O’Keeffe’s turning over in her mind the contradictions between her thirst for solitude and her responsiveness to the pull of life with Alfred. Moreover, the landscape entitled Lake George Blue (whose handling of sky and water contrasts with the openness of Blue Wave Maine) feels dark, heavy, and foreclosed.

  Surprisingly, Stieglitz did not send any of O’Keeffe’s recent paintings to the Société Anonyme exhibition to be held that fall at the Brooklyn Museum. Instead, he chose her Abstraction II and Maple Tree (also called Grey Tree, Lake George), compositions that were undeniably modern but predated her “turning of a page.” (He also sent works by Dove, Hartley, and Marin, along with eight of his photographs, although none by Strand, after giving the thought some consideration.)

  Alfred and Georgia returned to New York in November to take possession of suite 3003 on the twenty-eighth floor of the Shelton—a good omen in his opinion, since it echoed the number of the Intimate Gallery, 303. Georgia made the main room, which was also her studio, into a minimalist space that anticipated what would become her unvarnished lifestyle. A visitor recalled, “I entered a room as bleak as the North Pole. It might have been a cloister or the reception room of an orphanage, so austere was it, with its cold gray walls, and its white covers over dull upholstery. There was no frivolous pillow, no ‘hangings.’ The only spot of color was a red flower on an easel. There was not an inch of cretonne or a dab of chintz….All the charm of life is out there beyond the windows.”

  Living together in this austere space for the next ten years, Alfred and Georgia, despite their love for each other, would disagree more often than in the past. At thirty-nine, tied to a man in his sixties who was set in his ways, Georgia longed for greater freedom, while Alfred wanted a partner who would devote herself to him as artistic impresario as well as to their private life. By the new year, when they were preparing her annual exhibit at the Room, Georgia sensed that change was inevitable.

  Alfred, too, was mulling over their rapport. “Any true relationship is tragic,” he was heard to say. “Marriage, if it is real, must be based on a wish that each person attain his potentiali
ty, be the thing he might be, as a tree bears its fruit—at the same time realizing responsibility to the other party….At least trees can only be themselves.” It may not have occurred to him that Georgia was already wondering how to be herself under the circumstances—since it was clear that despite Alfred’s desire to recognize his responsibility to her, his own needs would always come first.

  CHAPTER 13

  The End of Something

  1927–1928

  Once again, the new year began with O’Keeffe’s exhibition at the Room. “Much is happening—but it doesn’t take shape,” she told Waldo Frank, whose essay on her in his new book, Time Exposures, had “more of a warm kindly feeling—and less of the knife for me than for most of the others.” The effects of Georgia’s page turning would not be evident in her show: “It is too beautiful….I would like the next one to be so magnificently vulgar that all the people who have liked what I have been doing would stop talking to me.” She had mixed feelings about the event: “I have come to the end of something.”

  By all accounts “Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings, 1926” was beautiful. The elegant neutrals of her cityscapes—four Sheltons, three East Rivers, two street scenes—created a subtle background for her cannas, calla lilies, and the showstoppers, the purple petunias and black iris, which inevitably evoked erotic feelings. The brochure included statements by fellow artists. Oscar Bluemner’s may have given her pause: “In this our period of woman’s ascendancy we behold O’Keeffe’s work flowering forth like a manifestation of that feminine causative principle, a painter’s vision new, fascinating, virgin American.” Still, Demuth praised her as a colorist: “In her canvases each colour almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself, on forming the first rain-bow [sic].”