Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  Few critics mentioned the shell paintings. Exceptionally, Helen Read’s interest in O’Keeffe’s handling of form led her to applaud her treatment of the clamshells’ pearly interiors and their textured outsides. Read concluded, “There are few conceivable subjects which so put to test her ability to paint…and yet relate it to all of life.” A well-dressed woman in the early stages of pregnancy was seen gazing at two of the small paintings, a white flower and a white shell. The visitor, who introduced herself as Dorothy Norman, had been coming to the gallery for some time but lacked the funds to make a purchase.

  McBride wrote that he looked forward to an account of “ladies’ day” at the exhibition. “This priestess of mystery known as Miss O’Keeffe almost had me in her power,” he wrote tongue in cheek, but he thought it best to leave the subject to the ladies, some of whom said that “gazing into Miss O’Keeffe’s petunias gave them the strangest imaginable sensations.” Her new work was “intellectual rather than emotional,” indeed “rather French.” O’Keeffe told him that she was glad “to have the emotional faucet turned off,” and went on to say, “The ladies who like my things will think they are becoming intellectual…the men will think them much safer if my method is French.” The exhibition was a success. The six canvases sold brought in seventeen thousand dollars (equivalent to over $200,000 today)—O’Keeffe’s highest earnings to date.

  Strand was pleased that the Room’s last show of the season would be of Lachaise’s voluptuous females, among them the walking woman in bronze that the sculptor had given the Strands as a gift. Paul also purchased a portfolio of Marin’s work and an O’Keeffe, which he paid for in installments. (That year, he had a number of film assignments—including Betty, Behave, Columbia University’s Varsity Show, which was screened at the Waldorf-Astoria.) Paul brought his best prints from Maine and Colorado to show Alfred in hopes that he, too, would have his turn at the gallery, and although Alfred approved of his new direction, he did not offer to hang them.

  Beck took the matter in hand. Relying on their mutual fondness, she wrote to Alfred: “Ever since Paul told me that you had seen his recent work and affirmed it I have been wanting to tell you how happy this has made me….I felt sure that you would see in some of his prints what I felt sure was there.” After commenting on the portraits of her taken in Colorado, she gushed, “Do you know how lovely you are? And that for all this and everything else that you inherently are and always will be I am ever-increasingly grateful.”

  Alfred’s reply was affectionate toward Beck but cautious in regard to Paul. “Yes, several of those photographs of Paul’s are very fine—He told me how they happened—after I had remarked that these were truly alive.” But that was all he said. It would take him two years to decide that the rest of Paul’s work was sufficiently alive to warrant being shown at the Room—despite his protégé’s support of its activities and his status as one of the seven whose creativity it was meant to celebrate.

  The Lachaise exhibition, a critical success, closed on April 14. Stieglitz bought three small sculptures for himself but not the alabaster bust of O’Keeffe—perhaps because it betrayed a lack of feeling for her as a woman. (She would later acquire it for herself.) That same day, he and Georgia quarreled, and she fled to Connecticut to be with friends. While they were still passionate about each other, both acknowledged that their desires were often at cross-purposes. She said that she felt misunderstood; he sent assurances of his love, along with a well-worn excuse: He had been preoccupied by the gallery. “You charge me with neglect,” he chided. “I hold you have no actual ground for feeling what you do—or maybe how you feel it.” In a more detached mood, he allowed that their conflicts might be due to other things, like age: “Maybe the 23 years difference…brings its own individual inevitability.”

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  . . .

  Beck’s worries multiplied that spring as her brother’s condition worsened. In June, she helped Milton’s wife by looking after their baby and made plans to take her mother on vacation after his next operation. In a letter to Alfred, she asked ironically whom she would have to care for next. “Myself? No—because I really feel I’m not alive to take care of—Just existing and ready to live somebody else’s life so they can live….What the hell!” Was this “the good life,” she wondered. Alfred’s reply may not have brought much comfort. “Yes, you are there…to help others live. It’s a hellish life all right when one has two sides to one’s makeup.”

  Hoping that Milton’s convalescence would go well, Beck took their mother to New Jersey. But dealing with her mother’s criticism of her unconventional ways (like her preference for scanty underwear) made her feel once again the impossibility of finding her way. To Paul, who was filming in Princeton, she wrote that she was furious at having to stay put “when I would like to go to Alaska—make love to a handsome chauffeur—get drunk—paint my facia [sic] low & common as a release from all this deadly atmosphere.” (Like his other letters, his reply to this cry of rage is not extant.)

  Although rumors of an impending stock market drop had Beck concerned about the future, her brother’s recovery lifted her spirits. Still, time spent at their hotel—the other guests were “fat—prosperous—& not a single suggestion of any fire”—made her fear for herself. “What, oh my darling,” she asked Paul, “shall I be at 50? 60? 70?”

  Their life together was on hold. Paul was unsure about future assignments, and it was too soon to act on their plans to return to Maine. In August, when Milton seemed much improved, they traveled to Georgetown, but returned to New York when they learned that he was dying. He did not know her at first, but then, she told Alfred, “smiled with ineffable tenderness, said ‘hello darling’—then slipped off.” Beck had written to Georgia about his death but thought her letters so inadequate that she destroyed them. She could, however, open her heart to Alfred: “When I see how easily life flows into death I can only beg you not to get involved in all the things that harass you….Life is precious—especially yours.”

  Summer at Lake George took its familiar shape that year—peace and quiet before the arrival of family members and guests, followed by the hubbub that pushed Georgia to thoughts of escape. At first, following a bout of rheumatism in her hand, she did little painting, and Alfred declared himself to be empty of all thoughts or ambitions. When Georgia discovered a lump in her breast, he took her to Mount Sinai Hospital for surgery, and after the tumor was found to be benign, she spent eleven days in bed. By September, she was painting again, but without much enthusiasm; nor did he feel excited about his new prints.

  All in all, the summer was disappointing, except for visits by Georgia’s favorites, Donald Davidson and Georgia Minor (Englehard), who repaired with her to the shanty for cocktails. It rained so much, Georgia told Anita Pollitzer, that when it stopped, “one has a mania to spend all ones time turning the house hold goods such as mattresses and pillows and blankets in the little sun that stingily shows its face.” One day she tore down part of the porch roof to let in more light. “It caused an uproar.”

  She expressed her discontent in several stunning landscapes that imply the wish for a sunny locale. Blazing with the heat and light lacking at the lake, Red Hills with Sun seems to tap into the energy of the West as reimagined in her private vision. Similarly, in Black Abstraction, the most dramatic canvas from this time, O’Keeffe conveyed what she had seen on the operating table as she succumbed to the anesthetic—the bright overhead light shrinking down to the white dot at the dark center of consciousness, and of the composition.

  In September, Alfred told Beck, who had gone back to Maine, that he and Georgia were enjoying the autumn. Yet, he added, “there seems to be little spirit to anyone.” Beck was delighted to hear from him. “The wires of mutual thought must have been vibrating across the distance,” she mused before telling him of her sorrow. “The past three years were such a nightmare…that I have really needed this much time to make up for the da
mage.” Under the care of Isabel Lachaise, she had her own room, which she filled with flowers. After Milton’s death, Paul had stayed in New York to shoot a film and for that reason had been unable to continue his nature photography. “Deep down,” she added, “he would give a lot to go on without interruption.”

  Beck had also been thinking about the future. She was still uncertain about her artistic vocation and continued to doubt her suitability for motherhood. It was at about this time that she and Paul reached the decision to forgo parenthood. In September, she told Alfred that she would never have children: “I have missed the moment….I shall try to find an equivalent.” Some of her women friends had found their “equivalents”: Georgia was fulfilled by her art, Isabel by being Gaston’s muse and by the creation of their home. This decision, she wrote, “leaves me freer to move along a different direction”—although she could not say what it would be.

  For the rest of the month, Beck went antiquing with Isabel, reembroidered a vintage rug, and made ornaments with seashells, activities pursued between bursts of house hunting. The naively painted decorations on the glass panes of antique clocks and mirrors caught her eye, especially their use of floral themes. In letters to Paul, she described the houses for sale in Georgetown but refrained from taking the next step while he was in New York. (“Why can’t we take the real estate leap with more confidence when all our friends dash so gaily off?” she asked.) Lacking Paul’s replies to her letters, which beg him to join her, we cannot know whether their closeness had diminished, or whether he was simply focused on his career. Meanwhile, Beck put his equipment in storage so that he could resume work if he returned.

  In October, to her surprise, Paul allowed himself two weeks in Maine. “We are well—gay—busy,” she exulted to Alfred, especially once Lachaise had also returned from New York. The two couples were enjoying local festivities like the county fair. “I got the most thrill out of it,” she wrote. “Anything touching on showmanship always moves me tremendously.” Beck sent her greetings to Georgia, as well: “Tell her for me, specially, that I hope she is gay—and that all the loveliness of which she is so truly capable has had a chance to exist.” Beck had been loath to express her feelings more openly, given her sense that “she is interested only in adequate things.”

  The Strands returned to Manhattan that month after a trip to Boston to see the prints that Alfred had donated to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1923. Beck was delighted to see two of the images that Alfred had given her. “They sang and vibrated with enormous vitality,” she wrote: “How lucky I am to have them—and others through your generosity.” While Paul was keen to return to photography, it was rewarding to learn that Manhatta would be screened at the London Flim Society that fall. The first feature-length talkie, The Jazz Singer, had just opened in New York, signaling the end of the silent era in motion pictures. The Strands’ financial investments were performing as expected, and like many Americans, they were optimistic about their value continuing to rise.

  Beck considered the idea of taking a painting class with Charles Martin, a modernist artist recommended by Georgia—perhaps a worthwhile move if she were to become an “adequate” painter. But after starting another secretarial job, she decided to experiment on her own. She completed several compositions based on arrangements of fruit—unavoidably suggesting Georgia’s treatments of this theme.

  That winter, Georgia took on a new role at the recently opened Opportunity Gallery, located on East Fifty-sixth Street. When Alon Bement, the gallery director and Georgia’s former teacher, asked her to curate the December exhibition, she chose mainly work by women, including that of her sister Ida Ten Eyck, Georgia Englehard, Frances O’Brien, and Helen Torr Dove. For Beck, it would have been heartening to think that her work might one day be included—provided that Georgia decided to take it seriously.

  In the meantime, Paul was having difficulty persuading Alfred to do the same with his work. His mentor often sought his advice about photographic papers and printing techniques, but he was in no hurry to schedule a show of Paul’s photographs. Instead, he urged him to turn his mind to helping publicize Georgia’s next exhibition by writing about her for Creative Art. Paul declined Alfred’s request; he had just begun a piece on Lachaise for the new annual of art and letters, American Caravan.

  By the end of the year, relations between the two men had cooled. “You know that my interest in you is as great as it is in Marin or Georgia,” Stieglitz wrote, before undercutting this profession of interest by dismissing Paul’s concerns as personal. He continued: “I say many things in an abstract way which are taken personally when not so intended. I am rarely personal. You must know that after all these years.”

  Stieglitz had a lot on his mind as 1927 drew to a close. Despite O’Keeffe’s wish to stay at the lake, he insisted on returning to New York in November to supervise activities at the Room. There would be seven exhibitions that season, starting later that month with one of Marin. Georgia’s would inaugurate the new year, preceded by some advance publicity—an article about her in Creative Art by the critic Louis Kalonyme (the opportunity that Strand had turned down).

  From then on, Stieglitz also indulged his “personal” side in talks with Dorothy Norman, the well-to-do young woman who had visited the Room the previous spring. At twenty-two, Norman had taken part in several causes of the sort disdained by her wealthy parents-in-law, among them the American Civil Liberties Union. In her view, the Normans’ “reactionary political attitudes” corresponded to their preference for conventional works of art, while she and Edward, her husband, “gravitate[d] to art that is breaking new ground.” Dorothy was exhilarated by what she saw at the gallery.

  Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothy Norman, 1930

  Not long after giving birth to her first child, she found Stieglitz alone there. He asked if her marriage was emotionally satisfying, and she said that it was—even though, as she would write in her memoir, marital pleasure had eluded her. Stieglitz continued:

  “Is your sexual relationship good?” Talking about such matters is of vital importance, in spite of my inability to be totally honest. Stieglitz inquires, “Do you have enough milk to nurse your child?” Gently, impersonally, he barely brushes my coat with the tip of a finger over one of my breasts, and as swiftly removes it. “No.” Our eyes do not meet.

  Dorothy was electrified. From then on, she went to the Room almost daily.

  Stirred by Dorothy’s devotion as well as by her flapperish air, Alfred let her do whatever she wished. Members of the group noted that the two seemed to dote on each other. At this point, Dorothy was perhaps too naïve to suspect that Alfred consistently took pleasure in flirting with pretty women. Claiming to be inspired by the Room and its presiding spirit, she told him: “If you do want any help—I’m just aching to give it. I love what you’re doing.” To show her commitment, she took on the secretarial work (formerly Beck’s domain) and used her father-in-law’s birthday check to buy a Lachaise sculpture. Soon Dorothy began jotting down Alfred’s pronouncements, with the idea of writing a book about him.

  During the time when Dorothy was becoming a fixture at the Room, Georgia discovered another lump in her breast. On December 30, she underwent a second surgery at Mount Sinai, where she remained for the next ten days. The cyst proved to be benign, but her recovery was long and painful. It was a dismal start to the new year.

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  . . .

  Her exhibition opened without her being present on January 9, 1928. By then, the critics recognized O’Keeffe as a mature artist. McBride praised the boldness of her Shelton Hotel paintings, the visionary Red Hills with Sun, and the brooding Dark Iris. Annual exhibitions tested an artist’s staying power, he noted, yet O’Keeffe seemed “to pursue her way in calmness toward the idea she clearly indicated for herself at the beginning of her career.” Despite his initial doubts about the secrets in her flowers, he could say with conviction that pa
intings like the swirling Abstraction—White Rose “content those who respond to the painter’s touch and to her clarity of color—and mean just what the spectator is able to get from them.” He concluded, “To overload them with Freudian implications is not particularly necessary.”

  O’Keeffe was so pleased with McBride’s review that she wrote to thank him: “What you have done has helped make a place in the world for what I do.” Still weak from her surgeries and increasingly annoyed by Dorothy’s presence in her life, she took solace in friends like McBride, on whom she knew she could rely.

  When Alfred introduced Dorothy to Georgia at the gallery, the young woman’s first impression was that she was “striking” despite her unfashionable clothes. On hearing of Dorothy’s work with the ACLU, Georgia told her that she should drop all such “nonsense” and help the Women’s Party. Dorothy replied coolly, “Other causes interest me more.” Still, while she did not fathom Georgia’s refusal to call herself Mrs. Stieglitz, she respected her opinions. Georgia did not reciprocate: “I never did like her….She was one of those people who adored Stieglitz, and I am sorry to say he was very foolish about her.”

  Although Dorothy did not buy anything that day, she donated a hundred dollars (the equivalent of over a thousand dollars today) in support of the gallery. Soon she befriended members of his entourage, starting with Paul and Beck. When the Normans met the Strands at a mutual friend’s, Dorothy sensed Paul’s reserve. Later she studied his prints and asked what kind of camera he used. “He glared at me,” she recalled, “and replied haughtily, ‘It is not the camera.’ ” When Dorothy related her faux pas to Alfred, he showed her some of his Equivalents. “Now, instead of being saddened and humiliated, as I was at Strand’s, I exult at having seen something extraordinary.” (Did she also sense his pleasure in impressing her at the expense of his disciple?)