After the Strands’ arrival in June, when Paul and Georgia drove their cars across the Rio Grande, his got stuck in a sandbank: She and two Mexicans labored to get it out. “It hurt Strand mightily to have to pay the Mexicans the four dollars,” she reported to Alfred, adding, “I really had to laugh at him.” She found Paul annoying—especially when he critiqued the painterliness of her recent canvases. Later, when she went to Taos to see Beck, they rode to visit Frieda Lawrence at her ranch. “They sat there in their saddles, handsome and straight as Indians, turning their horses around and around so as to see the view,” Frieda recalled. “I never had seen such women, so unconcerned about everything except the beauty around them.” She would always think of Georgia as she appeared that day with Beck, “beautiful and unmuddled.”
* * *
. . .
Picturing the Strands in Taos, Alfred wrote to Georgia: “Beck is reveling in her heaven—And Strand will add to his trophies of photography. What a chance he has. He ought to do some great work this year after the criticism I gave him.” Alfred added that he had been printing some “large New Yorks”—a theme that would reestablish his preeminence. His relations with Paul underwent further strain due to Dorothy’s dislike of both Strands; that summer, when Alfred took few photographs except for some somber Equivalents, the idea of Paul’s recent accolades may have revived his competitive streak. Georgia was surely struck by Alfred’s insistence that she stay away longer: “I’m really in better shape in every way than in ages. Except perhaps the Little Man doesn’t show as much interest in life as at one time.”
Alfred did not let on that his thoughts were focused on the hope of a tryst with Dorothy, whose ardent missives begged him to join her before Georgia’s return. In one, she recounted a dream about a woman’s desire to be “utterly one” with “God”—Dorothy’s pet name for Alfred. In others, she plotted ways for them to be together provided Georgia stayed in New Mexico until August. Earlier that year, Beck had told Paul that she hoped not to be drawn into “the problem between G & S,” adding, “That has long since gotten beyond what anybody can do about it.”
Georgia decided to return to the lake in July after Alfred told her that he was going to Boston to see his son-in-law and grandson, then stay with the Normans. During his visit, he and Dorothy took pictures of each other, including shots of her nude, in a field of flowers. In a carefully worded letter to Georgia, he described the Normans as “a good combination even if not perfect” and praised Dorothy’s domestic skills, which he compared to Georgia’s: “So different from what you’d have & do.” But the seashore was not the best place for Dorothy to practice photography; he hoped to arrange for her to visit him at Lake George.
One can only imagine Georgia’s reunion with Alfred on July 16, a few days after his tryst with Dorothy. (Apparently, Georgia ignored the extent of their intimacy. Judging by Dorothy’s fear weeks later that she might be carrying Alfred’s child, his stay at Woods Hole included the enactment of her dream.) Soon, Georgia confided in her friend Vernon Hunter, “I am feeling a bit disgruntled that I thought I had to come East and came the middle of July. Everything is so soft here. I do not work….I walk much and endure the green.”
By then, Alfred and Dorothy were writing to each other several times a day and holding long phone calls in front of their spouses, as if their spiritual accord made them immune to the mundane claims of marriage. Alfred went to Boston on August 26 to meet Dorothy at a hotel, where (he told Georgia) they had separate rooms, then took her to Woods Hole. Rehashing recent arguments with Georgia about a possible separation, he wrote, “In spite of our ‘failures’ respectively I feel that I still have something to give you if you will let me—& I know you have very much to give me.” The idea of separate quarters at the Shelton seemed “ridiculous,” but he would accept her decision. He closed with a peace offering: “I’m going to photograph you as soon as I get back.”
Georgia made up her mind to face the situation. “I sometimes wonder where I am—what time of year is it—and what is it all about,” she told Beck. “I have been working on the trash I brought along—my bones cause much comment.” Alfred’s family was annoying, but she enjoyed walks in the hills with the other guests. “So all put together—it seems a pretty good life,” she continued after thanking Beck for her gifts—a shirt, a cactus, and a sage plant—souvenirs of the Southwest to help her endure the green. She was sending Beck funds for a corduroy skirt and jacket: If she couldn’t feel at home where she was, she could at least dress as if she did. The letter ends plaintively: “My greetings to Paul—also specially to Tony—and anyone else who may think of me.”
Beck, who could appreciate Georgia’s dilemma, sent her the corduroy skirt and jacket, along with a black-and-white handkerchief, which inspired Georgia to dye her new garments black. “I feel perfect,” she told Beck, “almost as good as an animal with fur on it.” Then she confessed, “It seems quite impossible that the summer is over—It has been a bit fantastic to say the least.” Although Georgia did not mention Dorothy, her rival’s influence is implied in her uncertainty about the future: “I may stay up here after Stieglitz goes to town—haven’t decided—but probably will—I don’t feel a bit ready for town. If the others all go to town I’ll stay—if they stay I will not.”
CHAPTER 16
Divided Selves
1931–1932
While Georgia pondered her options, Beck grew ever more loath to leave Taos. Her summer had been “the best ever,” she told Alfred. In addition to completing fifteen reverse oil paintings, she was having a grand time, especially riding “like hell” on her “wild little horse.” She continued: “We’ve gone miles over the sagebrush—through the arroyos, by moonlight or in the burning sun—there have been dances, parties—mucho whiskey….New friends—some of them swell.”
One new friend who probably kept Beck company on these rides was mentioned only in the next sentence—the kind of allusion that makes sense if one reads between the lines. Paul had gone to Colorado with some of his friends while Beck remained in Taos to let her oils dry before their departure. Like a woman who declines to give her lover’s name but can’t help mentioning him obliquely, she gave Leadville as the group’s destination: This Rocky Mountain mining town was the family home of Bill James, the most prominent of her “swell” new friends. Now the owner of the Kit Carson Trading Post (where tourists on Indian Detours trips bought souvenirs) and a member of the town’s hard-drinking circle, Bill had noticed her strolling through Taos. While the outlines of their love affair can be pieced together from photographs and correspondence, we do not know its exact chronology. It’s clear, though, judging by her actions in the months to come, that Bill James’s presence in Taos was one of the main reasons for her reluctance to leave and her decision to return, by herself, the following winter.
* * *
. . .
Georgia’s attempts to bring New Mexico to New York were making changes at the Hill. Claiming the farmhouse as her domain, she took down a closet wall to make her room larger, painted the floor dark green, and laid a Navajo rug. “The house is full of bones & skeleton heads—Mexican flowers, etc,” Alfred told Beck about these alterations to the decor, and to relations between himself and Georgia.
Josephine B. Marks, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George
As promised, he took new portraits of her. Three prints entitled Georgia O’Keeffe—Hands and Horse Skull contrast the skeletal head with her suntanned hands. These prints were remarkable, he told her, “but they do not actually express my feeling about you underlying all temporary feelings.” Georgia also posed in an Indian blanket, holding the skull she was about to depict in several oils, and in the nude—her torso seen frontally and from the rear in shots that emphasize overt views of “Fluffy.” Alfred added, “My real feeling for you is in only a couple of the very fine nudes.” He was taking stock, accepting Georgia’s independence
while laying claim to her physicality. (“I have been photographing like mad for the last 10 days, nudes chiefly,” he told a friend: “Large old fashioned fever heat.”) That fall and winter, the couple made love often—while Alfred continued relations with Dorothy.
Georgia and Alfred went to New York together in October to ready the Place for the first exhibition of the season. “It’ll be funny (!) to hang the Marins without your & Paul’s help,” Alfred wrote Beck, still in Taos, “but it would have been very foolish to cut short your stay down there. I hope we’ll manage.” When they were done, Georgia returned to the lake, leaving Alfred to do as he pleased while she prepared for her exhibition at the end of the year. Paul and Beck went to see Alfred soon after their return and discovered that he had indeed managed without them. Feeling remiss, Paul reinserted himself into Alfred’s good graces by working with Dorothy on funding and other issues at the Place.
Paul had recently heard from Duchamp’s friend Julien Levy, who hoped to inaugurate his Madison Avenue gallery that fall with a retrospective of American photography. Levy asked him to lend work but, downhearted about his prospects, Paul agreed to do so only if Levy bought three prints at a hundred dollars each—this on the advice of Stieglitz, whose cooperation Levy hoped to obtain. Stieglitz persuaded Levy to enlist his father as a backer and, rather than lend his originals, made him buy an old Camera Work to cut out Alfred’s prints and hang them at the show. Levy remained fond of Stieglitz, but in his memoirs, still “appalled by the force of [Strand’s] bitterness,” he wrote that Paul “seemed to have been born with a black cloth over his head.”
During this period, Georgia began a painting of the cow’s skull that appeared in Alfred’s recent portrait of her. It would never sell, she thought, but it amused her. As she painted the blue background with red stripes on each side of the skull, the canvas made her think “many funny things about painting—Art—Myself—and maybe America.” O’Keeffe’s account of her process is worth quoting at length:
I thought of the city men I had been seeing in the East. They talked so often of writing the Great American Novel—the Great American Play—the Great American Poetry. I am not sure that they aspired to the Great American Painting….I knew that at that time almost any one of those great minds would have been living in Europe if it had been possible for them. They didn’t even want to live in New York—how was the Great American Thing going to happen? So as I painted along on my cow’s skull on blue I thought to myself, “I’ll make it an American painting. They will not think it great with the red stripes down the sides—Red, White and Blue—but they will notice it.”
With the creation of this defiantly “American Thing,” O’Keeffe affirmed her right to evoke the native scene in her own way, as Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton were doing, yet as something of a joke, although one that would make the great minds take notice.
Pleased with her new theme, O’Keeffe painted more skulls, sometimes adding artificial flowers to their heads. A composition featuring a horse’s skull with a pink rose placed jauntily over one eye “makes me laugh every time I look at it,” she told Alfred. She also liked her depiction of a jawbone backed by a black fungus: “Sounds diseased but it isn’t.” Other horse’s skulls, with and without artificial white roses of the kind that Beck had found on their first summer in Taos, were also diverting: “I really don’t know why I laugh because it really isn’t funny—only seems funny to me.” To some, these paintings’ symbolism is more apparent than their humor. One of her biographers notes, “As well as death, they represent an interior strength, tranquil, remote, and enduring.”
Georgia drove to New York in November for the opening of Julien Levy’s gallery. She talked to him about “her country”—the canyons near Santa Fe “where she thought she would like to live, perhaps for the rest of her life.” The colors were constantly changing, she explained: “Browns, oranges, red, and then violet and deep into purple.” In contrast to the gallery’s white walls the vista in her mind’s eye seemed “most unreal while all the time it is very real.” Paul’s views of New Mexico, each turned away from the next on the curved walls, seemed out of place beneath their glass frames. Of Levy’s retrospective (which included Käsebier, Haviland, Steichen, and Weston), Edwin Jewell wrote, “This is probably the first really successful attempt to give a synthetic picture of photography’s development in America.”
Georgia made several trips to New York that fall, sometimes without giving advance notice. One day, she arrived at the Shelton, to find Alfred with Dorothy: He had brought her to their rooms to continue their portrait sessions. In what reads like a repeat of Emmy’s finding Alfred with Georgia years before, some biographers say that Dorothy was naked (this cannot be confirmed). Whatever took place, Georgia went back to the lake the next day. She told Alfred, “Talking in this way cannot go on—neither of us can afford to be spent that way….I kiss you very quietly—and very sadly.” Alfred wrote the same day that he regretted having hurt her; still, they had “fluffed beautifully.” Echoing Oscar Wilde, he mused, “It is said that people kill what they love.”
Over the next weeks, the Strands inventoried the works they had brought back from Taos for their joint exhibition in the spring. Paul would show his landscapes from the Gaspé, New Mexico, and Colorado but none of his portraits; Beck hoped to enhance her paintings’ allure by placing them in old Mexican frames made of punched tin. She would finally be seen as an artist with her own aesthetic rather than as a muse, yet given Alfred’s distraction, the prospect of their show was unsettling.
In December, when Georgia returned to New York to hang her show, Alfred was beset by money problems, including a shortfall in the gallery’s general fund. Despite his reluctance to deal with finances, he covered some costs and paid the rent for the darkroom. He had hoped to reimburse himself from the fund, he told Paul, who was acting as treasurer. But given the depressed art market, this was unthinkable, nor could he repay investors. Georgia would donate several thousand dollars to the fund in the form of paintings; he would contribute twenty-five prints “at the average value of $150—or maybe only $100 apiece.” In this way, “the dignity of the experiment called An American Place will be upheld.” Alfred thanked Paul for his efforts on their behalf: “I know the strain you are under—must be under with everything as it is.”
Alfred then took Paul into his confidence about plans “to breathe a bit of life” into the Place. When Georgia’s exhibition closed, he would display his own work: “For photography’s sake, for The Place’s sake, & for my own impersonal sake.” The time was right, he thought, to show his new series, the “New Yorks,” taken from his windows at the Place and the Shelton to document the city’s transformation. While Paul admired these increasingly remote images of the skyline, Alfred admitted in a moment of doubt, “Everything is so far from my own ideal that I oftentimes don’t quite know whether I see a reality or not.”
The timing of their shows was less than ideal. Georgia’s opening received a brief mention at the bottom of a full-page spread in the Times devoted to the Diego Rivera retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which was causing a flurry in the press. Rivera had worked feverishly to create the portable murals depicting heroes like the revolutionary Emilano Zapata as well as scenes of striking workers being suppressed by soldiers. Closer to home, his Frozen Assets, a composition set against the New York skyline showing a homeless shelter on top of a bank vault, provoked observations about the work’s immediacy at a time of long breadlines.
In December, Edward Jewell devoted three articles to the Mexican artist. Under the circumstances, when all New York appeared to be debating the merits of politically charged art, it seemed likely that O’Keeffe’s new paintings would be overlooked. On a different but equally vexing note, after hanging her canvases she had to submit to the trial of having them documented by Dorothy in her role as gallery photographer. (By then, Dorothy was all but running the Place.)
In the new year, as Beck prepared to return to Taos, Paul visited the Rivera show with Elizabeth McCausland; Georgia also took the time to see what everyone was talking about. To her surprise, Rivera turned up at the Place with his wife, Frida Kahlo. “I think his show very uneven but he himself is a person,” Georgia told a friend. “He came to my show—stood in front of every painting—looking and carefully considering it—a fullsized—deliberating person—and I thought to myself—If one person like that came every year and looked that way I would paint much better.”
Soon the critics began responding, some in shock, to O’Keeffe’s juxtapositions of bones. “I imagine that she saw these ghostly relics merely as elegant shapes,” McBride wrote. “Like the plant forms and shells…that she so inordinately admires, these bones to her are part of nature’s marvelous handiwork.” O’Keeffe explained to an artist friend that these oils were “a new way of trying to define my feeling about that country.” That the critics deemed them newsworthy due to their subject matter made her feel “like crawling far far into a dark—dark hole.”
In a letter to Brett, she allowed that she had not worked on this theme long enough to move through the “objective” phase and into the “memory or dream thing that I do that for me comes nearer reality.” Looking at her last year’s work made it hard to start again: “I try to make out a direction for myself for at least a year and as that involves my personal living as well as my working it becomes a bit difficult.” Then, picturing Brett’s shack and Frieda’s ranch in the hills above Taos, she mused, “[I] wish I could be walking along…without my clothes on—or sitting up among the trees in a sunny spot—alone—just me and the sun and the trees and the pine needles.”
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