Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  Beck and Georgia prepared the Room for the first show of the season—work by Hartley, who was still in France. When Beck wrote to him about the fir tree they trimmed on his behalf, he replied that it was surely “the gayest note in what…cannot help but be a solemn event.” In the same letter, he described the challenges of the medium that she was trying to learn: reverse oil painting on glass. This traditional form, in which the artist applies paint from the surface to the background, demanded patience. In Hartley’s view, the only ones to master it were sign painters, yet recently Arthur Dove, Rockwell Kent, and Joseph Stella had explored this demanding form.

  Shortly before the opening of Georgia’s exhibition in February, she described some of her canvases to Mitchell Kennerley. Yellow Hickory Leaves with Daisy brought to mind autumns at the lake: “The thing I enjoy of the autumn is there no matter what is happening to me—no matter how gloomy I may be feeling—so I came up with my hickory leaf and daisy….It is a particular triumph because everybody and everything about me seemed to be particularly in the way of my doing anything.” She also liked Red Barn, Wisconsin: “The barn is a very healthy part of me…my childhood.” Looking at her show, she saw the world of her imagination: “I never get over being surprised that it means anything to anyone else.”

  The remarks of some critics still held surprises. Twelve years after her first exhibition, O’Keeffe was such an institution, one wrote, that it was hard to know what to say. Another surmised that she would one day be seen as an old master. Meanwhile, her new work represented a transition: Oils like Red Barn, Wisconsin and her East River views seemed less original than her flowers and abstractions. Still, McBride marveled at her latest calla lilies, “fully a yard wide.” They put him in mind of Walt Whitman, who, like Georgia, had “grand ideas for America.”

  Few mentioned O’Keeffe’s leaf paintings, a theme that she would continue to develop. Faded and Black Leaves, a composition painted parallel with the picture frame, positions the large central leaf and its smaller companions against one another. It is tempting to see in the central leaf’s torn edges a note of fragility and to read the leaf-against-leaf placement as an equivalent for human relationships. But it is just as likely that the play of shapes and colors appealed to her as a source of solace no matter how gloomy she might have been feeling.

  When the show came down, Georgia decided to forgo the ordeal of annual exhibitions. She and Alfred were quarreling, he anguishing over the possibility that Kennerley’s finances might mean the end of his support for the Room. Alfred dictated the rhythm of their days to suit himself; the exchanges that had nourished their rapport seemed to have ended. Worse, Georgia had done no painting that winter. “I must get back to some of my own ways or quit,” she told Ettie Stettheimer.

  About this time, McBride wrote a critique of American expatriates. These “truant artists” should come home. Hartley, named among those “jeopardizing their careers for the dubious consommations of the Café de la Rotonde,” was both enraged and stirred by McBride’s words, confessing to Beck, “I want to get into some really wild places in the U.S.” He would “strike West” if it became financially possible.

  Georgia had not forgotten their friends’ accounts of the Southwest as a mecca for artists. Hartley had praised the Pueblo Indians’ rapport with their landscape, Rosenfeld considered them a deeply soulful people, and the Strands agreed that their stay in New Mexico had revived them. Throughout the winter of 1929, Georgia tried to convince Alfred that a stay of some months there might take her work in new directions, but he panicked at the thought of her going away—his usual anxiety having become more acute because of his liaison with Dorothy.

  Georgia turned to Beck, who was also keen to strike west. If they traveled together, a plan that Alfred would find hard to refuse, they could immerse themselves in the shapes and colors of their native land while pondering the future. As Alfred tried to argue Georgia out of going, she fought back with her own weapons: silence and strength of feeling. “If I can keep my courage and leave Stieglitz I plan to go West,” she told a friend. “It is always such a struggle for me to leave him.”

  In the meantime, Alfred’s decision to show Paul’s work at the Room galvanized the Strands. One wonders what Beck thought of Paul’s decision to show only his nature photographs. While his choice of prints presented a unity of theme and treatment, it would have been hard not to reflect on the omission of his portraits of her. Of the thirty-two prints in the show, four were taken during their 1926 trip to the Southwest and the rest in Maine—when Beck had organized their stays to let Paul focus on his art. Leaving her out of the show made sense aesthetically, but it was a way of holding her at arm’s length.

  It would also have been disappointing to learn that Alfred would not write the foreword for Paul’s catalog. At the last minute, Lachaise contributed an homage to his friend’s “precise, clear, fundamental” work. In the language of the Stieglitz circle’s nativism, Lachaise concluded, “Strand’s photographs are powerful, personal, spiritual, decisively American contributions.”

  While Lachaise hailed Strand as an American master, the critics emphasized his feel for composition. Noting that a show of his work was overdue, the Times regretted that it was restricted “to the vegetable kingdom” but praised his close-ups of rocks, grasses, ferns, and driftwood. The New Yorker was less forthcoming. Strand’s art was marked by selectivity—“arrangements of matter, composed by nature, and bounded by the horizons of his camera.” The review concludes, “Mr. Strand remains to us a superb connoisseur of forms and delicate arrangements.”

  Stieglitz continued his practice of holding forth throughout the run of the show. The photographer Berenice Abbott went to the gallery one day and listened to Stieglitz’s discourse. Praising some of Strand’s prints and critiquing others, he seemed less than enthusiastic about the work as a whole. Abbott was taken aback by Stieglitz’s tone when he showed her his Equivalents, hinting that their vision of life was larger than Paul’s.

  It came to Strand’s attention that Stieglitz did not always place his work in a good light. When he voiced his concern, Stieglitz replied, “I’m afraid you have misunderstood many things I have said during your show.” Still, three prints sold, among them Garden Iris, bought by Stieglitz for O’Keeffe. Its tight focus resembles her close-ups of the flower and suggests that while relations with Strand were strained, their artistic affinities still held. Stieglitz sent Strand a check for $187.50, explaining that he had deducted 25 percent of the cost ($250) for overhead.

  By then, both men were adjusting to their wives’ departures, and Beck and Georgia boarded the Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago on April 27. Although Beck’s plan to absent herself from New York had not provoked opposition, she blamed herself for a recent “row” with Paul. Of her decision to leave, she wrote, “I can’t help it. It’s like trying to keep a thoroughbred horse in a strange stall—or else a jackass! and whichever I am, I am a failure at any adjustment—I hope there will be more peace from now on.” She hoped that the separation might bring them closer.

  On leaving Grand Central Station the two friends settled into their comfortable seats and wept. Then, as the train rolled north along the Hudson, Beck declared, “Well we did it ourselves.” She meant, Georgia told Alfred, “that we left of our own accord—nobody sent us.” Recalling that day years later, Georgia reflected, “The difficulty in getting out here was enormous, but I came.”

  * * *

  . . .

  Given the volume of correspondence among the foursome that summer, one might think that they did little but write to one another. This was not the case, but the women’s decision to go west marked a turning point for all of them. Judging by the exuberance of their letters, Beck and Georgia thrived on doing as they pleased—drinking in the grandeur of New Mexico while opening themselves to the unconventional way of life they found there.

  They stopped in Chicago to see
Georgia’s brother Alexis and his family—a visit that let Beck see Georgia in her native element. The next leg of the trip, to Santa Fe, began with high expectations. The California Limited’s accommodations were famous. It had dining cars, a lounge car, an observation car, and sleeping quarters. Beck wrote to Paul on the Limited’s stationery, with its dream-inducing logo, “en route,” as they watched the country unfold—the Kansas plains, the rugged Colorado vistas, the mountains of New Mexico. “All my American or Western blood sings in me,” she exulted. (One wonders how he took her next sentence: “All the Jewish blood dries up like a vapor under a sun so strong it cannot survive.”)

  “We are here—and we are both much pleased,” Georgia informed Alfred. The next night they ran into Mabel—who “began working on us,” Beck told Paul, “and has…offered us the same studio you and I had.” Despite the drawbacks of Mabel’s, such as being under her thumb, Los Gallos had its charms—the location, Lawrence’s studio, and the staff, who prepared three meals a day. And once Mabel set her mind on something, it was hard to resist. Going to Taos for the Pueblo Indians’ dances, they set off in Mabel’s Cadillac along the dirt road that wound its way through the river canyon before rising to the high-desert country, backed by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

  They inspected the Pink House, although it was not yet ready for them. At a slight distance from the main house, it still had Lawrence’s frescoes and massive vigas—Spanish-style rafters made of tree trunks whose ends projected beyond the adobe walls. Seeing the little house gave Beck “a terrible yearning,” she told Paul. She added, “Much as I want you here I feel that this separation will be good for us.” He should tell Alfred, who believed Georgia to be fragile, that she had not had “a single ache or pain…in spite of new food and exciting vistas constantly opening up.”

  Mabel and Tony Luhan, Taos

  Beck’s sentiments are echoed in Georgia’s letters. “This really isn’t like anything you ever saw,” she told Alfred. She felt about the Southwest as she had in the past, “only maybe I enjoy it even more because I think I understand it.” A few days later she wrote, “I wish I could tell you how alive I feel—I really never felt better in my life—Beck is amazed.”

  Clearly, Georgia had bounced back from her depression of recent months. The air was intoxicating, the adobes’ massed shapes offered themselves as subjects, and the local attractions, like the Pueblo dances, were so inspiring that everything felt like a dream. After a few days, when an ailing Mabel retired to her bed, Georgia and Beck began going on jaunts with Tony Luhan. When Georgia asked him if he admired Taos’s Sacred Mountain, he replied simply, “That’s why I’m here.”

  Beck and Georgia stayed at the main house for some weeks with Mabel’s other guests—Una Fairweather, a mystic, and Ella Young, an Irish poet who spoke eloquently of elves, fairies, and the benefits of talking to trees. Ella’s unearthliness intrigued Beck, and her talk of “astral bodies, reincarnations, vibrations, ghosts, spooks, mediums” was a lingo that she wished to learn. Within a short time she began to think that it would be easy to believe that “the whole landscape has a religious feeling.”

  The two friends established a routine of vigorous hikes alternating with painting sessions. At first, Georgia was put off by the mountain range: “It is as though I fall into something from which there is no return.” To find her way into this landscape, she did a large oil of cottonwood trees and showed it to Beck, who approved. Then, sensing that it had more in common with her Lake George paintings, Georgia concluded, “It isn’t really of this country.” One evening they took a walk into the hills, where a large black cross stood flanked by smaller ones. Abstracting its shape, Georgia painted the cross against the dark sky. Soon she would tell Alfred, “I just feel so like expanding here—way out to the horizon—and up into the sunshine.”

  Beck found herself in the position of living at close quarters with the woman she most admired while trying to forge her own path. When Georgia worked in her studio, Beck looked for subjects that, unlike the mountains, were not intimidating, choosing themes that suited her current medium, pastels, like floral bouquets and an abstraction inspired by what she felt when Tony played his drum—“a resonance that banged through me from head down the spine and into the toes!” A few days later, she rejoiced to Paul, “Georgia looked at my pastels tonight and I feel ever so much better as she liked them very much.”

  As Mabel’s health worsened, Beck took on the management of the household and continued in this role when Mabel went to Buffalo in June for a hysterectomy. Of Beck’s new role, Georgia told Alfred, “She makes a fierce face over it but I think she likes it.” Georgia did not say that she, too, relied on Beck’s practical side. They took the bold step of buying a car together, which they then named “Hello.” Paul was not to tell Alfred that Beck was teaching Georgia to drive. Georgia’s slow mastery of the wheel exasperated her friend, as did remarks about Beck’s domesticity: “Georgia is extremely self-centered—thinks mostly of herself.”

  In a photograph taken soon after their arrival, the two women form an arresting pair. Side by side in front of the Pink House, they complement each other, Beck’s prematurely gray hair tied in a chignon, as are Georgia’s dark tresses. Visitors remarked on a certain resemblance. They dressed alike in minimalist blacks and whites, and both were resolute about what they hoped to accomplish. Hutchins Hapgood’s daughter Miriam, who was staying at Mabel’s, saw them as striking examples of female emancipation. Surprised to find O’Keeffe sewing shirts for Stieglitz, Miriam compared her stitches to her brushstrokes and saw in Beck’s fondness for western garb an embrace of her role as Nate Salsbury’s daughter. Georgia could have been speaking for Beck when she told Alfred, “This seems to be my world—and I can’t help it.”

  Rebecca Strand and Georgia O’Keeffe, Taos, New Mexico, 1929

  Which did not mean that their husbands were forgotten. Beck kept a picture of Paul by her bed and dreamed of holding him close: “I wish you could come to me with your plunge & swiftness and that I could receive the blessing of it.” To remind Georgia of what she was missing, Alfred sent love to “Lady Fluffy.” Georgia posted him a nocturnal kiss: “My night is so different from your night….It touches something in me that I so like to have touched.” Alfred sent more love to Fluffy. “She must be looking quite a wild one,” he wrote, unsure whether he could take “a real picture of her. —Of you?”

  One wonders if the women shared these fantasies when reading their letters aloud at night. “We both say we are not lonesome,” Beck told Paul, “still I am sure we both feel that the only thing lacking is our respective beaux, for there are times when love would be most welcome.” She asked him to join her in Taos: Georgia would give them the Pink House and sleep in her studio.

  Still, they did not lack male companionship. John Collier, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, and his son Charles were Mabel’s guests that summer. The composer and photographer Ansel Adams was also staying at Los Gallos; Adams, who was photographing the Pueblo, would collaborate with Mary Austin on Taos Pueblo, the book published the following year with his images and her text. Marin arrived a few weeks later. “He doesn’t know where he is,” Georgia told Alfred, “but he is pleased.” One morning, Marin told Beck that he could not paint the landscape: “He feels he has no right to make the country what he ‘sees’ it but it should be done as what it is.” Soon Marin would feel sufficiently grounded to evoke it in a series of watercolors.

  Surrounded by artists, each with a particular genre, Beck adopted one that had not been claimed, reverse oil painting on glass. Her subjects, flowers on their own or in vases, were traditional, but her technique was not. After painting the foreground on the underside of the glass, she worked backward, a painstaking exercise but one that suited her desire to be in control. Georgia encouraged her. Having herself painted a great many botanical portraits, she could appreciate Beck’s adaptation of the genr
e to this medium, as in Portrait of Miriam—1929, which showed Miriam Hapgood as a sunflower. To Miriam, Beck’s portrait captured “the transformation…taking place in me that summer.”

  Beck’s paintings also reflected changes in herself. Although she felt she had to explain her choice of another motif—artificial white roses from a department store—she told Paul that they were placed in churches in tribute to the Madonna, which gave them an aura: “I know that artificial flowers sound horrible to you, but they really are quite beautiful.” On seeing the roses’ potential, Georgia, too, began painting them. Teaching Georgia to drive required forbearance; helping her to find new themes allowed Beck to see herself as a peer.

  The two women behaved like best friends, giggling over private jokes, escaping the other guests to go on jaunts, and, after Mabel’s departure, spending most of their time together. (They took care not to be seen sunbathing nude: “G & I get into our skins & out of our clothes right after breakfast—put down a blanket and lie in the warm, healing sun,” Beck told Paul.) Beck set aside her city shoes in favor of moccasins, but although she wore pants when riding, she went along with Georgia’s request for her to dress in a feminine way. When Beck made herself a red flannel skirt, Georgia contributed silver buttons for the belt and gave her a necklace of silver beads. They shopped for earrings for Madame Geo, whose pared-down styles were set off by these western touches.

  Rebecca Strand and Georgia O’Keeffe, Taos, 1929 tintype

  Sometime later, they had another picture taken in their finery. Beck is the dominant figure in a black “sateen” workman’s shirt with a necklace of silver beads and bear’s teeth; her arm is around Georgia, the smaller figure, whose pose and garb echo her own (Georgia wears four strings of white wampum to contrast with the dark fabric). Beck placed this image in a decorative frame—a gesture acknowledging their embrace of their new lives. In letters to Paul, she took pride in their partnership: “The miracle of Georgia’s and my ‘getting on’ together continues—happily & naturally—& will to the end—She says she is satisfied with it—& that’s convincing.”