Meanwhile, Alfred and Georgia were enjoying a second honeymoon. Reflecting on her time in Taos, Georgia told Mabel, “The summer had brought me to a state of mind where I felt as grateful for my largest hurts as I did for my largest happiness—in spite of all my tearing about, many things that had been accumulating inside of me for years were arranging themselves—and rearranging themselves. The same thing has been happening to Stieglitz.” Their delight in each other is palpable in the portraits he took to commemorate their reunion. In some, the twinkle in her eye transmits her glee in these “rearrangements”; in others, his acceptance is implied in images of Georgia standing beside her car.
The stock market collapse did not disturb their happiness, even though Alfred’s income would be reduced. What worried him were the implications for the future: “With the smash up in Wall Street, I wonder how many people will be interested in ‘painting’ and ‘photography’ and in what I stand for.” Paul wrote, with remarkable understatement, “This has been a trying two weeks.” Although his father had suffered losses, Paul’s response was calm: He might manage to negotiate a lower rent for the gallery. Stieglitz offered to release his donors from their commitments, but none found it necessary to accept. He and Georgia returned to New York to attend the opening of the Museum of Modern Art, an occasion it would have been unwise to boycott.
“It seems to me that we never went to town in better condition,” Georgia wrote Beck before they left. “Good idea that going West! And when I spread out my work last night before packing it—I patted myself on the back and said to myself—Not so bad—Guess you’ve won again—It looked so good I called him in to look at it….He curled over in a chair—and looked as pleased and surprised as I felt….Of course I can pick holes in it—but what of that—one can pick holes in anything.”
CHAPTER 15
New York in New Mexico
1930–1931
Stieglitz was delighted with the new gallery. Its name, An American Place, was apt, a visitor noted: “American it is, from door mat to uncamouflaged steam piping; American in the best sense, with none of the intruding furbishings and fixings so often…deemed essential.” The high ceilings, the large central room, and the four smaller ones made the Place feel like the Intimate Gallery on a loftier scale. From this perspective, Alfred began photographing the skyscrapers going up in midtown—the start of a series to depict the city in transition.
Alfred’s circle called these rooms the Place or 509, in the spirit of 291. The first season was to start with Marin and O’Keeffe, followed by a group show of five members from the usual roster. Georgia worked with the Strands to ready the gallery. They painted the walls white and the floor a glossy gray and set up floodlights with blue bulbs to simulate natural illumination. To inaugurate the central space, the women trimmed a fir tree with presents for their friends, including the Luhans—a kind gesture after Mabel had tried to upset Beck by suggesting that she must be “miserable” in New York. She replied, “I am very chipper & lively—having nothing to be miserable for.”
“Georgia O’Keeffe: 27 New Paintings, New Mexico, New York, Lake George, Etc.” opened on February 7, 1930. Of the twenty-seven paintings, nineteen had been done the summer before—among them images of a ceramic rooster at Los Gallos and After a Walk Back of Mabel’s, a vertical rock shape seen against the colors of the American flag. Visitors did not, as Georgia feared, poke holes in her reputation on the basis of this new departure, but some were surprised by the subject matter—the Taos Pueblo, the Ranchos de Taos church, and the dark Penitente crosses against skies painted in glowing reds or blues.
“I saw the crosses so often—and often in unexpected places—like a thin dark veil of the Catholic Church spread over the New Mexico landscape,” O’Keeffe observed of Black Cross, New Mexico, a canvas painted after a walk in the hills with Beck. Her crosses provoked varied responses in the critics, who pondered their reference to the Church. McBride addressed the issue in his usual manner: “Georgia O’Keeffe went to Taos, New Mexico, to visit Mabel Dodge….Naturally something would come from such a contact as that. But not what you think….Georgia O’Keeffe got religion.” He quoted Georgia’s tart reply: “Anyone who doesn’t feel the crosses…simply doesn’t get that country.”
Edward Jewell went further. The new O’Keeffe show was the most exciting so far: “The pictures look perfectly beautiful….Perfectly hung and in a perfect light, [they] can never hope to appear to better advantage.” A note of “monumental vigor” had emerged in some. Pine Tree with Stars at Brett’s (now known as The Lawrence Tree) was astounding, its vision of solitude “pierc[ing] through to sheer spiritual experience.”
Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1930
Stieglitz documented the show with nine installation photographs, but only one of the artist. Posed in front of her most forceful composition, After a Walk Back of Mabel’s, O’Keeffe seems as upright as the boulder that dominates the painting. Part of her white collar peeks out from her black garment like a cross, enhancing her air of detachment; her wry expression hints at her awareness of Alfred’s preoccupation with Dorothy, who photographed her looking at the camera with an odd half smile.
Stieglitz began taking photographs of Dorothy at this time, the start of an extended portrait consisting of some 150 images with similarities to his portrait of Georgia. In his early photographs, Dorothy is the Young Lady of his reveries—shy, reflective, a bit withdrawn. As a group, they dwell on her dark eyes and full lips, except for a study of her hands joined as if in prayer. Dorothy’s bold side was not on display, nor did Alfred’s camera capture her determination to replace Georgia as his muse.
Although the repercussions of Wall Street’s collapse were not immediately felt in the group, some voiced a concern about the direction art would take in the future. Hoover claimed that the economy was sound, and indeed, five months after the market crash, the Cleveland Museum of Art paid O’Keeffe four thousand dollars for her White Flower. Stieglitz depended on her to pay the rent at the Shelton and prop up finances at the Place. From these lofty perches he continued to photograph buildings under construction: the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the RCA Victor Building, and the RKO Building at Rockefeller Center. Increasingly, these images reflected his sense of isolation. “My little capital is shrinking fast,” he told a friend. “And I didn’t speculate!! As if living today wasn’t the worst kind of speculation.”
Stieglitz would come to feel that he was being singled out by the progressives, who dismissed his cause as individualistic or, worse, blind to the country’s ongoing crisis. Muralists like Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry were engaging with social problems by painting scenes that glorified family and labor as core American values. In March, New Masses, the reinvigorated leftist periodical, denounced O’Keeffe’s new show as an example of bourgeois individualism. Stung by this attack, she agreed to debate Mike Gold, the magazine’s pugnacious editor, in defense of her work and the Stieglitz group’s aesthetic.
One can imagine the Strands trekking to Greenwich Village in her support. The debate, held at the Hotel Brevoort in March, was deemed important enough for the New York World to send a reporter, who described O’Keeffe as the more sympathetic of the debators: “Her face, unadorned by cosmetics, with its flash of intelligent arched eyebrows, her severely simple silk dress, her tapered, sensitive, ivory-colored hands, merged quietely into a whole, utterly simple, utterly poised.”
Gold, who seemed ill at ease, began by arguing that art needed to engage with the issue of the day—the plight of the oppressed. When O’Keeffe asked if women were included in this group, he said that only working-class women qualified. She replied that women were oppressed regardless of class; moreover, artists could allude to their woes without resorting to the “glorified cartoons” favored by New Masses: “The subject matter of a painting should never obscure its form and color, which are its real thematic contents. So I have no diff
iculty in contending that my paintings of a flower may be just as much a product of this age as a cartoon about the freedom of women—or the working class—or anything else.”
But in Gold’s view, form and color were “artified evasions” of reality. “You’re a nice boy all mixed up by a lot of prejudices,” O’Keeffe concluded. “I’ll take you to see my show, and then bring you home to Stieglitz and dinner!” (There is no record of her having done so.)
The terms of their argument, which would shape alliances in the years to come, were too dissimilar to be reconciled. Those who, like Strand, had begun to think that art should relate more directly to society would have felt uncomfortable to see the two points of view dramatized in this way. By fall, Strand found himself drawn to cultural work that acknowledged the conditions in which it existed; he and Clurman were discussing the possibility of another kind of artistic community, a “Group Idea” rather than a coterie of “seers.”
One wonders what Beck thought of the debate. After asking Gold whether he disliked flowers because they were not useful, Georgia scolded, “You may be seeking the freedom of humanity, but you want to make art a tool…your mass artists will inevitably become bad artists.” To Beck, who was still struggling to be seen as an artist, Georgia’s defense would have been persuasive. “I have made three paintings on glass and done a lot of chores for 509,” Beck told Mabel, emphasizing her loyalty to the Place and her status as an insider.
* * *
. . .
For the next three years, the Strands would summer in New Mexico while Paul labored to compose images blending social awareness with aesthetic effects and Beck mastered the discipline of reverse oil painting on glass. Both found satisfaction there as members of a group of East Coast and foreign transplants seeking to immerse themselves in what they called “the authentic America.” While trying to forge a renewed sense of connection to each other, they were also seeking a social relatedness of a kind that was rapidly becoming less likely at the Place.
Mabel invited Georgia and Beck to stay with her again in 1930, but both felt that they should make separate travel plans in accord with their husbands’ wishes. Georgia again had difficulty making up her mind about leaving: “I couldn’t decide until Stieglitz decided—it came quietly—naturally….It is almost as tho Stieglitz makes me a present of myself in the way he feels about it.” Arriving in June, to find Mabel still suspicious of her rapport with Tony, Georgia ate her meals in town, often with the Marins, and later with the Strands.
Beck agreed to stay with her mother in New Jersey while Paul drove their car south, put it on a boat to Texas, then drove to New Mexico—a holiday, to Beck’s way of thinking. They would meet in July to take up residence at the Pink House. Hartley wrote to Beck to encourage her: “You must paint your glass pictures. I am jealous of you that you should know that style of painting.” Alfred gave her his blessing: “May the summer intensify your passion for the Wilds of the West….I don’t see why passion shouldn’t be intensified when passion is really passion.” He added, “Georgia is leading a relatively quieter life….It’s all very different this year.”
What Alfred did not say was that he was obsessed with Dorothy, who was spending the last months of her second pregnancy with her family. His letters to Georgia that summer lack the passion of the previous year, owing to the fact that he was writing daily to Dorothy and making frequent calls as her due date approached. He took few photographs—shots of the “little house” that served as his studio and some Equivalents, all less tortured than those done the summer before, during his breakdown. He told Georgia that her absence did not disturb him: “You must not set yourself a date to come back. Your work must come first.”
While Georgia found that she could work best by avoiding the kerfuffles at Los Gallos, it was difficult to ignore the struggles being waged by Mabel, Brett, and Frieda Lawrence over Lawrence’s ashes once Frieda had brought them there after his death that spring. Mabel let guests know that Georgia was no longer her favorite: She had recently lured the poet Robinson Jeffers to replace Lawrence as resident scribe. Georgia moved into the hotel, where she took her meals. Taos was “so beautiful—and so poisonous—that the only way to live in it is to strictly mind your own business,” she wrote; “as one chooses between the country and the human being the country becomes much more wonderful.”
After some preliminary drawings Georgia began to translate the landscape onto canvases that reflect its solitary splendor. She would complete twenty-two landscapes that summer, including brilliantly colored studies of the mountains in Alcalde, where she stayed for some time with her friend Marie Garland. O’Keeffe’s studies of the flowers outside her Taos studio, in turn, inspired bold close-ups like Black Flower and Blue Larkspur. (“Strand likes it much,” she told Alfred. “No one else has seen it.”) She painted the Ranchos church, which Strand was also depicting, but their views of the building were quite different: “I hate the back of my Ranchos church….It is heavy—that is why Strand likes it I suppose—I want it to be light and lovely and singing.”
While O’Keeffe respected Strand’s aesthetic, she rejected his “heaviness”—his fixation on the idea of the landscape as a problem. The solution to this problem, he would claim, lay “in the quick seizure of those moments when formal relationships do exist between the moving shapes of sky and the sea or land”—as in his Badlands, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the cloud patterns complement the jagged line of mountains and the irregular shapes in the foreground. Strand’s 1930s images of relationships between sky and land form an initial response to Stieglitz’s emotive use of clouds in Equivalents, and mark the start of his effort to avoid imposing his personality on nature.
“The only thing that is intensely living for me here is the country itself,” Paul told Alfred. Yet he could not grasp the spirit of the Pueblo. “I must admit that the Indians are not very much a part of the summer for me. I know I can’t do anything for them nor can I live with them and possibly in time get to know something about them—to penetrate that barrier that Lawrence so quickly sensed.” That summer, he would take several images of Indian rituals that treat the dancers not as individuals but as swirling patterns of light and dark.
Strand set aside his formalist concerns on occasion—in photographs of Marin painting outdoors and the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez gazing at the landscape, and in several portraits of Beck that reflect the return of closeness between them that summer and his respect for her as a “worker.” Acknowledging the many shades of emotion in their rapport, Beck sat for him in poses recalling their sessions from the 1920s, and at least once, in the nude—a torso that brings to mind both Paul’s and Alfred’s earlier portraits. This set of images suggests a rapprochement between photographer and muse, which is not to say that their relations were without strain.
In the heady atmosphere of Taos, where Beck felt more at ease than Paul did, she could relax in front of his camera. She gave herself unstintingly to the enterprise, changing her clothes and poses to suit the occasion. Her prematurely white hair is fastened in a bun for one image in which her heart-shaped silver brooch marks a contrast to her dark garments and severe expression. She poses in profile, with her hair down, or with her back turned in the same cloaklike garment, seemingly detached from the demands of the session. In another, she is seen in profile against a sky full of clouds; apart from shots of her naked bust in front of a rough wooden door or on a bench, there are few indications that these portraits were taken in a particular landscape.
Unlike Paul, Beck strove to incorporate the Southwest in her art. Her painting of the Ranchos church differs from his studies of its massive forms as well as from Georgia’s semiabstract renderings. In Beck’s version, residents in native costume traverse the foreground and the church looms in the distance—there to serve the people, rather than as an inspiration for artists. Still, while it is difficult to date her reverse oil paintings, two completed in 1
930 suggest that when painting flowers, Beck felt Georgia’s influence. In Echo of New England, two calla lilies stand in a blue vase against a screen of red and white curtains; Austerity, its companion piece, shows a single calla in a black vase. Yet Beck’s lilies are unlike Georgia’s voluptuous specimens even when they suggest stand-ins for the female form. Their glassy surfaces avoid the imprint of the artist’s persona and hold at bay the potential viewer’s engagement.
Paul was proud that Beck and he worked diligently all summer. He told the Baasches, “Beck has done some ten nice glass paintings and I, God knows how many photographs. Never worked so much before—almost every day—like a job.” Still, toward the end of August he took part in a community effort dreamed up by Beck in support of Mabel’s fund drive to remove tin cans from the roads. Beck’s tour de force, a tin can tea dance, was adopted by the local artists, who made posters while Beck and Miriam Hapgood decorated the hall with tomato cans. The town united in the effort, including an auction and men’s and women’s beauty contests—the sort of thing that brought out Beck’s high spirits.
“I hope you are as much in love with the life down there as ever—And that you are painting some & well,” Alfred wrote encouragingly. After years of uncertainty about her right to count herself among the chosen, Beck could finally do so. The Taoseños not only accepted her as one of them but adopted her view of herself as Nate Salsbury’s daughter—a “character” in her own right. The circle of those who admired her work widened, including the artists Nicolai Fechin and John Young-Hunter, Spud Johnson, Ansel Adams, and Georgia, though she and Beck saw each other less frequently than the year before.
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