Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  In August, the two women took a car trip to Santa Fe to visit the nearby Puye cliff dwellings, the ancestral home of the Santa Clara Pueblo. Driving across the Rio Grande and into the sweltering canyon backed by rows of blue volcanic mountains, they wore “as little as possible,” Georgia wrote Alfred, “and that is very little.” Their slow progress along the parched track to this ancient site felt like a voyage to “the heart of something….But only God knows what.” Traveling together into the past, they could not help wondering what lay ahead.

  * * *

  . . .

  The Strands stayed in Taos for several weeks after Georgia’s departure for Lake George. Soon after her arrival there, Georgia told Beck that she was content: “Whenever I come back to Stieglitz, I always marvel to see how nice he is. There is something about being with Stieglitz that makes up for the landscape.” But she quickly realized that his toleration of her absence that summer owed a great deal to his infatuation with Dorothy. He became more than usually anxious as Dorothy’s due date approached, to the point of developing abdominal pains, which abated after Edward Norman wired that his wife and newborn son were fine.

  Georgia’s thoughts about this situation may be gleaned from the advice she sent Brett that fall, when her friend was trying to write about her years with Lawrence. In Georgia’s view, one had to face the shadows in order to carry on: “The vision ahead may seem a bit bleak but my feeling about life is a curious kind of triumphant feeling about—seeing it black—knowing it is so and walking into it fearlessly because one has no choice.” By then, she had no choice but to cope, as consciously as possible, with the love affair that was changing the terms of her marriage.

  In October, a new financial panic began, with numerous bank failures followed by a decline in the money supply. Paul worried about the declining value of his and Beck’s stocks: “I cannot resist buying a paper every day to see how much more our ‘fortunes’ have shrunk,” he told Alfred. After their return to New York, Beck took charge of the Place, typing correspondence, reminding donors that their pledges were due, and working on the budget. She informed Alfred that the 1930–1931 season’s totals would be lower than the year before, some “guarantors” having ended their support. She was thrilled to receive an unexpected gift from him, three prints, including one of her hands holding a glass ball from her first session as his model. “I can not tell you how beautiful they look,” she wrote, “the hands hold that shining crystal forever.” Alfred replied that he would see her soon, as he was “itching to be on the job.”

  Unlike previous years, when he was loath to leave the lake, Alfred was actually “itching” to see Dorothy, who had just returned to New York. Georgia may have hoped that she would stay home with her children, but this was not what happened. Dorothy took on what had been Beck’s duties at the Place. One can only wonder whether Beck continued in her role as Georgia’s confidante at this time, when Georgia kept her feelings to herself. Just the same, by going to the gallery only to hang shows (her own would open in January), Georgia let it be known that she was keeping her distance.

  The title of O’Keeffe’s 1931 exhibition—“Recent Paintings, New Mexico, New York, Etc., Etc.”—hinted at her new life apart from Stieglitz. “Back from her second (or is it third?) visit to New Mexico, Miss O’Keeffe says she is ready to go again,” Edwin Jewell wrote in the Times. Her last trip had resulted in new themes unified by the “mysterious quality” common to her work: landscapes, “with their hills that, in rhythmic, vital waves, both reveal and retreat…flowers and shells that live an inward life of their own, or that mirror in fugitive flashes the inward life of the artist.” O’Keeffe clearly meant “to stun rather than to confide.”

  It would have surprised O’Keeffe to see Jewell’s perceptive review on the same page as his critiques of two socially conscious muralists, José Orozco and Thomas Hart Benton. Orozco’s A Call to Revolution, at the New School for Social Research, was disappointing, Jewell wrote, despite its lively portraits of Lenin, Gandhi, and other figures because its diverse elements were not interrelated. By contrast, Benton’s murals at the Art Students League depicted scenes from American history “with a fervor that makes the work essentially original.” Jewell ended by alluding to the debate between those who claimed that art must be politically engaged and those who decried this stance: “You will probably like these pages of history either very much or not at all.”

  By then, Strand was working with Clurman on ideas for socially engaged cultural events. Clurman’s talks to drama groups about the need for a New York company on the model of the Moscow Art Theatre had already attracted people like Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, with whom he would form the Group Theatre. He argued that rather than distract audiences from social problems, the theater should address them. When Strand took Norman to meet this group, she rallied to the cause. Seeing no contradiction between the Stieglitz ethos and the Group Idea, she joined the Group Theatre’s executive council.

  In February, when Georgia’s show was still at the Place, she received an extraordinary letter from Dorothy. Of Georgia’s dislike of her relations with Alfred, Dorothy wrote grandly, “You are preoccupied with the relationship of any two living forces which feel the necessity of merging with one another in order that they may attain fulfillment.” Then, in her newfound role as critic, Dorothy said that she admired Georgia’s work but found it sad: “so sad that one cannot stand it, and so beautiful in its greatness beyond desire that one stands and bows down before it….You are an artist—you are beautiful and so I love you.” While Dorothy’s tender of affection expressed her wish for closeness between them, her efforts would have the opposite effect.

  Clurman remarked on Dorothy’s air of guilelessness to Stieglitz: “One is easy with her because she receives so effortlessly that one feels no check on one’s own personality….One can be with her and at the same time alone with oneself.” Clurman’s letter is reprinted in Norman’s memoirs, perhaps as a tribute to her effect on people other than Georgia. Alfred kept singing Dorothy’s praises to friends—extolling her talents, intelligence, and many accomplishments at so early an age. He was forty years her senior, but Dorothy’s adoration made him feel young again.

  What was more, despite the age difference, or perhaps because of the excitement it generated, their lovemaking (which probably began at about this time) was highly fulfilling to the young woman, whose rapport with her husband left much to be desired. “To have a complete erotic experience again and again is breathtaking,” Norman would boast in her memoirs. Years later, she declared, “Any young woman would have been fortunate to have Stieglitz as a lover.”

  Still, Dorothy lacked one key element: She was not an artist. With Alfred’s encouragement, she took the next step. “Strand’s and Stieglitz’s prints have opened my eyes to the power of photography,” she wrote of this time, when Alfred lent her his Graflex, then bought her a smaller one and, despite his refusal to take students, taught her to use it. For Alfred, these sessions, which stirred him, were more important than anything else. For Dorothy, they were occasions to explore their love: “While I remain beautifully still for him, he makes comical faces, sticks out his tongue, at times smiles broadly—anything to make me laugh—before he settles down into being whichever self takes over.” Alfred paid homage to Dorothy’s new self with a portrait of the Young Lady as photographer. Wearing a dark cloche hat, she steadies her Graflex to take his picture in recognition of their passion for camerawork, and for each other.

  * * *

  . . .

  Georgia left for New Mexico in April 1931, a month earlier than the year before, with the intention of returning in July. Alfred planned to stay in Manhattan until mid-June (when Dorothy went to Woods Hole), after which he would repair to the lake. Meanwhile, he prepared Marin’s next exhibition, including his New Mexico watercolors, and worked with Dorothy on an edition of Marin’s letters. His mentions of her in letters to Geor
gia read as attempts to play down their intimacy: “Mrs. Norman” looked unwell while going over page proofs for the book; “the Normans” took Alfred to dinner with Clurman, Strand, and their friend Gerald Sykes. Alfred did not mention Dorothy when he urged Georgia to stay in New Mexico longer than planned: “You owe it to your work—which is really yourself—to utilize this great opportunity.”

  Rather than stay in “Mabeltown,” Georgia rented a cottage at the H & M Ranch in Alcalde, forty miles southwest of Taos. The owners, Marie Garland and Henwar Rodakiewicz, had gone with her to the Grand Canyon in 1929, and she had visited their ranch several times in previous summers. Her hosts formed a striking couple. Marie was a Bostonian in her sixties who had published three books of poetry and two tomes on Hindu spirituality; at twenty-eight, Henwar, her fourth husband, was completing his first movie, Portrait of a Young Man in Three Movements. Marie’s excellent meals and tolerant attitude suited Georgia perfectly.

  In the summer of 1930, the blue Jemez Mountains and dark mesas near the ranch inspired her to paint such oils as Out Back of Marie’s II, now known as Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico. A year later, Georgia would depict these landmasses with broad, flat brushstrokes to evoke the sensuousness of their adamantine forms, the way they echo the shapes of the female body. “There is something about all of it that makes me feel so close to the earth,” she told Alfred after her arrival. “I like being on the ground so much I just feel like jumping up and down.”

  In New York, there was little cause for elation. By June, as Alfred prepared to close the Place, the mood reflected the widespread fears following the latest bank panic. Centered in Chicago, it further harmed the economy by creating deflationary conditions (restricted credit, high unemployment, reduced consumption). Watching the stock market’s gyrations, Alfred worried about the future. “Wall Street is frightful,” he wrote. “I have gone through pretty tough times but none like this.” Still, Georgia was not to fret about him or the current malaise.

  Under the circumstances Paul took on more work as a cameraman. In June, he filmed the graduation ceremonies at Princeton, earning an extra one hundred dollars (the equivalent of about fifteen hundred today) for shooting in the rain. Beck kept her mother company in Atlantic City for a month, counting the days until she and Paul could go back to Taos. That winter, when she’d given Alfred one of her reverse oil paintings on glass, he had said that he would keep it at the Place “so Paul & all others can enjoy that little thing in the corner as much as I do.” As if that were not enough to gladden her heart, he had offered the Strands a joint exhibition the following year. Amazed that Alfred thought so well of her work, Beck had taken care to praise Paul’s: “You will find in it the grandeur and isolation of the New Mexican country—something he feels not only about that country—but about living itself.”

  As the Strands prepared to leave for the summer, Paul confided in Alfred, “If nothing comes out of it (the opportunity to work certainly is being given us, barring sickness), we will deserve no more such opportunities.” His loyalty to Alfred remained unshaken. He told the critic Samuel Kootz that he would not take part in Kootz’s book on photography unless Stieglitz was featured (when Stieglitz declined to send prints, Strand withdrew). But as he spent more time with Clurman, Paul became receptive to the notion of another kind of artistic community. In June, he met Clurman’s friend Clifford Odets, a cofounder of the Group Theatre; he would join the group in the fall as an artistic adviser—along with Aaron Copland, Waldo Frank, and, surprisingly, Stieglitz.

  Clurman had already noted Stieglitz’s competitive streak. After Clurman’s highly positive review of Strand’s 1929 show appeared, Stieglitz told him, “You would not have written about Strand as you did if you had seen my work first.” Clurman was also struck by a confession Strand had made to him: “I remember you…saying…‘the difference between my photographs and Stieglitz’s is that he has life and I have none.’ ” But Clurman saw no point in comparisons. When the two men took his portrait at Lake George, he wrote, “Stieglitz’s photograph shows me receptive, smiling, kindly, and soft. Strand’s photo has me stern, ready for battle, indomitably prepared for every terrible eventuality….Each of these two artists had done his self-portrait.”

  The Strands arrived in Taos toward the end of June, having rented Mabel’s Pink House and arranged for Paul’s darkroom above the movie theater. A woman from the Pueblo saw to their needs. “I think I am on my way now,” Paul told Seligmann, “much more sensitized to the Mexican spirit, which lives here darkly under the bright light.” He was intrigued by the interweaving of cultures: the Indian, the Mexican, and the traces of the white settlers whose dwellings he photographed in old mining towns. They stood there “with a kind of courage and an undeniable dignity”—words that suggest how he wished to present himself.

  That summer, Paul sensed that he was succumbing to the Southwest. “The days slip by within this magical repetition of sun and storm and cold scarlet nights,” he told Alfred. “So much so that if one had not made a few photographs & paintings standing on the mantel—they might well be a kind of dreamlike mirage.” He and Beck did little but work; her paintings showed promise: “Some of them very handsome indeed—all of them good workmanship.” As for himself, he had “gotten more into the spirit of the country and so the photographs are simpler—more direct.” They hoped to stay in Taos as long as possible, perhaps until October.

  Though Beck rarely dated her paintings from this time, we can watch her progress, starting with Red Geranium, a 1931 still life that makes one think of Georgia. “I seem to be hunting for something of myself out there,” Georgia wrote during their first summer in Taos, when she sought inspiration in flowers, shells, and stones. Two years later, Beck kept to the theme in which Georgia excelled—blossoms treated like self-portraits. But rather than paint wildflowers, as Georgia had, Beck portrayed a well-behaved geranium in its yellow pot. Given the geranium’s frontality, one may infer the lingering influence of O’Keeffe, whose flowers had confronted viewers in this way for a decade. However, painting backward, Beck created a flat, almost two-dimensional flower quite unlike her friend’s. In time, she would use highlights and shadows to model her subjects’ contours—techniques that were taught at art schools but that she had to learn on her own.

  What mattered most to Beck, one suspects, was that Paul admired her discipline at a time when he, too, was focused on his art. Leaving each morning at the same time, he drove into the countryside in search of promising sites. The photographer Dorothea Lange, then living in Taos, recalled him as “this very sober, serious man…he was so methodical and so intent that he looked neither to the right nor to the left.” She reflected much later, “All the photographers I’d known always were with lots of other people, but somehow this was a lone man, a solitary.” (Paul never spoke to Lange but went on photo shoots with Ansel Adams and Carlos Chávez, who were Mabel’s guests that summer.)

  Paul went on photographing the ghost towns and stark landscapes that lent themselves to unified pictures of land, sky, and the occasional building—as in Dark Mountain (1931), where the formal details of an adobe are balanced by the distant mountains. Formalist concerns are also paramount in images like Ghost Town, Red River, New Mexico, a close-up of a ruined dwelling’s clapboards; similarly, images of the Ranchos de Taos church treat it like an abstraction, bringing its masses to the frontal plane to enhance its monumentality. A revealing story is told about Strand’s pique when he found a basketball backboard affixed to the church’s rear wall. After complaining to the priest, he paid the boy who had put it there to remove the backboard because it spoiled the picture in his mind.

  Strand hoped to create an extended portrait of New Mexico in the same way that he had approached the Gaspé Peninsula. Yet as the backboard episode suggests, his attitude was that of an outsider. In discussions with Chávez and Elizabeth McCausland, who was also in Taos, he kept returning to the role of the artist
in society. Increasingly, Strand would use his camera in the attempt to document ways of life different from his own. Yet, as he said years later, he took few portraits of “the people who lived there…the people indigenous to New Mexico”—perhaps because the growing sense of dislocation that he and others experienced in the 1930s only deepened his habitual reserve.

  Paul Strand, Ranchos de Taos Church, New Mexico, 1931

  That summer, while Strand worked from his stance as an outsider, O’Keeffe immersed herself in the landscape that would shape her art for the rest of her life. Visitors were surprised to find bleached animal skulls arranged around her studio, where a ram’s head with a curly horn had pride of place. On drives into the country, she picked up bones and other treasures—an eagle feather, a kachina doll with “a curious kind of live stillness,” a pink shell that was a gift from a Tewa Indian. “When I leave the landscape it seems I am going to work with these funny things that I now think feel so much like it,” she told Henry McBride. She would go east in July: “I don’t seem to remember what its like there but I’ll be finding out. Cant leave that man alone too long.”

  Georgia’s ruminations may have been prompted by reading Mabel’s article in Creative Arts, “Georgia O’Keeffe in Taos.” With the superior knowledge of one who had lived there for years, Mabel described Georgia’s awe when she and Beck first arrived: “ ‘Wonderful’ was a word that was always on her lips.” Much of the piece was devoted to Georgia’s driving: “Beck Strand had the dubious joy of teaching her and we all watched her lovely silver hair grow more silvery day by day….Driving the Ford stimulated Georgia in exact proportion to Beck’s nervous apprehension….Beck—whose noble friendship never wavered—would come in haggard and distraught and sinking into a chair, exclaim: ‘Well, I don’t know what Stieglitz would say!’ ” Mabel ended by taking credit for Georgia’s exalted state: “It did her what is called good and thus we share somewhat in her fate.”