Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  Soon, Georgia felt well enough to think of sailing to Bermuda with Marjorie Content and her daughter, Sue Loeb, who would keep her company at a hotel on the western end of the island. Reassuring Beck about her plan to spend the spring there, she wrote, “I like Margery [sic] very much and a place where the sun shines and it is warm—where no one will ask me how I feel and no one I know will be around seems very good to think of….It is time to get out of here even if the view is good.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Don’t Look Ahead or Behind

  1933

  “I did pick myself up and get away,” Georgia reassured Beck in April, when she was convalescing in Bermuda. But it was too difficult for her to describe this “strange little island.” By then, Beck had joined Paul in Mexico, a place that offered the couple the hope of a reconciliation, or at the least time to assess their differences. In June, Georgia was still unsure about returning to New Mexico. “The doctor is insistent that I should not go west till the end of July at the earliest….I am glad Paul is finding something down there that he likes—and that interests him. Give him my greetings and tell him I wish him luck.”

  * * *

  . . .

  Both O’Keeffe and the Strands had left the country just when it seemed that the hope engendered by Roosevelt’s election might have been justified. Checking out of the hospital a few weeks after his inauguration, Georgia was in no condition to attend to the great changes he would make over the next months—the start of measures that would constitute the New Deal. Nor could she have paid much attention to conditions at the end of the year, when the country’s economic woes were at their worst. By then, stocks had lost most of their value, some ten thousand banks had failed, and more than thirteen million Americans were out of work. In the winter of 1932–1933, the low point of what some were calling the Great Depression, the social crisis deepened fissures in professional and personal ties alike.

  After Paul’s break from Alfred the previous spring, the Strands decided to go back to Taos. This stay would be critical for Paul, whose desire to refocus his art had intensified in recent months through his involvement with the Group Theatre. Already imagining a trip to Mexico, where art was part of the revolution, he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to spend the following year there, but he was turned down. When he decided to go anyway, Paul wrote to his friend Carlos Chávez (the composer was then head of the Fine Arts Department in the Ministry of Public Education) for help in getting his equipment across the border; Chávez invited him to show his work in Mexico City.

  Paul’s decision to leave Taos by November left Beck in a quandary. Loath to abandon the site that fostered her sense of herself as an artist, she was also unsure about putting her relationship with Bill James on hold in order to follow Paul. Bill admired Beck as a woman and an artist, but he, too, was married. Both would have to be divorced if they were to be together. In the meantime, there was the risk of scandal getting back to her family—above all, her mother. And it was painful to consider the effects of divorce even in free-spirited Taos. One of Paul’s portraits of Beck taken before he left for Mexico shows her in black, with a big black hat partly shielding her tense visage from the camera, and from him. The distance between them is palpable.

  Beck returned to New York in November while Paul prepared to drive to Mexico. One evening, she confided in Harold Clurman, who informed Paul that she seemed unable to imagine the future. “Perhaps she will find some resolution of her problem,” he continued, “and perhaps that is why she had the impulse to return.” Clurman also commented on Paul’s break from Alfred, whom he just seen: “The main burden of his talk was that you had misunderstood his criticisms. That because you were so superb a photographer—your prints better than his in many respects—he felt it is his duty to counteract glib praise from unqualified people by testing your work by the severest standards.” Clurman applauded Paul’s decision to go to Mexico: The country seemed to hold “something which will answer some need in you.”

  In February, Clurman told Paul that he and Beck had spent much of the night drinking while she poured out her distress:

  Beck “broke down” and confessed her pain and despair. I don’t mean she became maudlin: on the contrary, she became very real, spoke more truly than in her more “self-possessed” moments. She spoke what was on her heart….In her pain, I recognized all the pain and doubt that seems to dwell in everybody nowadays and fills the atmosphere like the very air we breathe. What she expressed was simply that inability to hope, to believe, to trust and enjoy life, which makes life such a pointless martyrdom to so many of the people we know and love.

  By then, Paul had made the grueling drive south to Mexico City with Susan Ramsdell, a friend from Taos, taking with him an assortment of prints, including work shown at the Place the previous spring.

  Chávez had arranged for his work to be shown at the Ministry of Education’s Sala de Arte. The “Exposición de la Obra del Artista Norteamericano Paul Strand” included landscapes from Maine, the Gaspé, Colorado, and New Mexico, as well as three portraits of Ella Young and seven of Beck—presumably the images taken in Taos a few months earlier. Hartley, who was in Mexico, helped Strand hang his show in the light-flooded sala. Although his prints were up for less than two weeks, Paul was touched that some three thousand people came to see them. “With the show at street level, people would go in one door, go through the room, and out the other door. It became part of the street. All sorts of people came: policemen, soldiers, Indian women with their babies….I’ve never had such an audience anywhere else.”

  Strand then wrote a proud but conciliatory letter to Stieglitz about the show, a striking contrast to his last exhibition at the Place yet one that drew on what he had learned there.

  I put myself in Chavez’ hands completely and the show is the result of his engineering….Everything I asked for was given…the spirit not unlike the Place—and I feel you would not be ashamed of the show. Probably you could easily improve it—but it is the best job I could do, and I know no one but you or Georgia who could have done it better.

  Having just learned of Georgia’s illness, he continued, “Too cruel—to be struck down that way—and she must get better—I want to believe she will.” He concluded, “Mexico is another world—on the surface almost too picturesque—Beneath—something very extraordinary.”

  In February, when Beck made up her mind to join Paul in Mexico, she booked passage on the Orizaba, a Ward Line cruiser that serviced the New York–Cuba–Mexico run. The ship called at Nassau, Havana, Progresso, and Veracruz; passengers on the five-day voyage south took advantage of the fact that once at sea, they were not subject to Prohibition. (Ward Line cruises were known as “alcohol-enriched vacations”; the previous April, the poet Hart Crane, who had been drinking after a fight, had jumped to his death from the Orizaba’s deck.)

  Paul would have met Beck in Veracruz, then taken her to Mexico City on the train, which ascended from the steaming, gardenia-scented plains through orange groves and coffee plantations into the mountain range topped by the volcanic Pico de Orizaba, the highest peak in the country. One can picture her gazing at the changing scenes from the observation car while she listened to Paul’s tales of his adventures. By the time they descended into the Valley of Mexico, she would have been filled with the sense of how “very extraordinary” the country was, and what it meant to Paul as the place where he could practice his art in the context of the social experiment taking place there. They took in Hartley’s exhibition of his landscapes, including an O’Keeffe-like Popocatépetl, Spirited Morning—Mexico; when the trio traveled to nearby villages together, Hartley told Beck that he would be glad to leave.

  The Strands joined friends from Taos, Miriam Hapgood and Edward Bright, in Oaxaca City. Although the town had recently suffered an earthquake, there was much to delight the senses—vibrant textiles and gaily decorated pottery, along with heaps of bright-co
lored vegetables in the markets, Baroque churches, and ongoing fiestas. (“These people have an exuberant creativity and natural taste,” Miriam wrote unselfconsciously.) The two couples stayed in Oaxaca for the month, leading up to the Good Friday Penitente ritual, when a Christlike figure crawled into town on his knees, “his back torn and bleeding from the thorns of an organ cactus strapped across his shoulders as in the arms of a cross.” While the peasants’ religiosity struck some foreigners as excessive, Beck and Paul came to feel that its expression in art and ritual embodied a form of belief in keeping with their lives.

  During this time, Paul took many of the photographs that would comprise his Mexican Portfolio, including sculptures (bultos) by anonymous artists found in local churches. Assuming that Beck resumed her role as his assistant, she would have sat for hours in semidarkness during the long exposures required to capture these richly textured devotional figures. For the eerily beautiful Virgin, San Felipe, Strand intensified the statue’s rapt concentration by slowing his shutter speed to photograph close-up; his Cristos, crowned with real thorns or marked by bleeding wounds, treat the figures’ heightened realism as allusions to the exaltation of spirit. The Strands undoubtedly sensed that these figures were ideal subjects. Although hard to make out, they were always available and never moved.

  By then, Paul had worked out a way to deal with this issue in his portraits of ordinary people by taking candids with a prism attached to his lens—a modern version of the device he had used for street shots in the 1910s. In his view, this technique was justifiable because it allowed him to capture people’s natural expressions—since the prism made it seem that his camera was pointed elsewhere. In this way, his Woman, Pátzcuaro, embodies “Mexicanidad”: Wrapped in her shawl, the woman is archetypally Mexican. Similarly Man, Tenancingo accords its subject, a fiercely mustachioed peasant in a white overblouse, a distanced respect, as if the photographer did not wish to intrude on this man’s solitude.

  Strand was perhaps unaware that to some, especially those on the Left, virtues of the kind emphasized by his prints were seen as attributes that persisted at the expense of a more up-to-date vision of the country. From his perspective as a well-intentioned gringo, these images mattered because they tapped sources of belief lacking in countries like his own. Writing to Marin about his trips to places where “the Indians live very much as always,” he mused, “they amazingly keep a certain innocence.” He would have discussed these questions with Beck, whose fluent Spanish allowed her to immerse herself in the culture.

  Paul explained his new focus to a colleague, the photographer Irving Browning:

  I made a series of photographs in the churches, of the Christs and Madonnas, carved out of wood by the Indians. They are among the most extraordinary sculptures I have seen anywhere, and have apparently gone relatively unnoticed. These figures [are] so alive with the intensity of the faith of those who made them. That is what interested me, the faith, even though it is not mine; a form of faith that is passing, that has to go. But the world needs a faith equally intense in something else.

  Given this approach, it isn’t surprising that Strand framed street scenes to eliminate contemporary references: There are no electric lights, no telephone poles, nothing to mar the sense of “timelessness” that he found appealing. Nor did he focus on deprivation, preferring instead to work from a detached, yet empathetic, idea of noble poverty.

  Still, the problems of daily life were never far from his mind. From Oaxaca, Strand informed Chávez that he and Beck could not stay in Mexico unless he found a job. She and Miriam took the train to Mexico City while Paul drove his beaten-up Ford along the nearly impassible roads. He accepted Chávez’s offer of a teaching post at an elementary school. It paid a wage but left him free to travel to Michoacán with Augustín Chávez, his patron’s nephew, to arrange an exhibition of children’s art. Touring this impoverished region with the young man, who became his translator, he took more of the images that would compose his visual record of Mexico—again choosing to omit things like railway lines that might detract from his version of rural life.

  While Paul visited other parts of the country, Beck explored the arts and crafts of Mexico City. At this time, she began what would become a rich collection of brilliantly colored miniature sculptures. Inspired by these folk creations, she completed several reverse paintings on glass—a pale magnolia nestled in green leaves, a pink rose in an ebony vase, a bloodred sacred heart aflame against its black background, and a white lamb with flowers, entitled Painting for a Little Girl. In these months, she may also have bought the wooden sculpture of the Christ Child as a pilgrim depicted in her “serious and poignant” reverse oil Santo Niño de Atocha. (He was “a very fine little gentleman, a little consentido—spoiled—in his satin bloomers and ruffles,” she told friends.) Beck’s growing command of the medium encouraged her to portray the human figure overtly or implicitly: In Mexican Gourd Pitcher and Tulip Bud, the subject’s armlike handle suggests a female form, with the head, a tulip bud, protruding from the vase against the luminous blue background. For her as for Paul, Mexico offered fresh spurs to creativity.

  Alfred sent Beck his ironic congratulations: “So you are a real Mexican now—Well I hope you like it.” (He noted Georgia’s progress but seemed more interested in making sure that Beck received a copy of Dorothy’s Dualities.) Georgia wrote Beck from Bermuda, “It is warm and slow and the sea such a lovely clear greenish blue I have done little but sit—However the sitting is good—Am glad I came.”

  Far from New York, it would have been touching to be reminded of the fault lines in relations between the pair who had been Beck’s idols. It was easy to see in Alfred’s obsession with Dorothy the seeds of Georgia’s breakdown. By herself much of the time as Paul traveled to remote parts of Mexico, Beck pondered her own dilemma—her uncertainty about the future and the steps they would have to take if Paul decided to stay in Mexico. At the same time, returning to Taos to wait for Bill’s situation to be resolved meant a leap into the unknown. There was the matter of his divorce, under what conditions he might acquire one, and the matter of her finances when it became known that she was no longer with Paul.

  In August, after Paul’s return from his travels, the Strands sought and obtained a preliminary divorce. A few days later, Beck boarded the train that would take her home to the United States. While people believed that it was she who had initiated the divorce proceedings, a letter from Paul to Kurt Baasch states that he had made the decision: “It was I who crystallized the situation after three years of constant pain and struggle to resolve what finally became inevitable….We actually did it without bitterness, ugliness or resentment—but as you must know, knowing us, at the cost of the most tearing, wrenching & suffering for both.” Their decision was, he believed, “an act of faith in each other—in life itself.”

  Writing to Paul on the voyage north, Beck said that she still thought of him as her husband. Alone, she felt “exposed, vulnerable, rather frightened.” But knowing of his faith in her, she would try to have confidence in “this obscure and rather menacing step I have taken.” Toward the end of the three-day trip, after examining the divorce papers, she polished off the bottle of whiskey she had brought with her—“a godsend,” she told him, in her current state of blankness.

  * * *

  . . .

  When Georgia returned to New York in May, she told Alfred that despite the improvement in her health she had no wish to resume life there while he wound up the season at the Place. The next day, he took her to the lake, where she spent the summer under the care of Margaret Prosser, the housekeeper, and later Georgia Engelhard. Alfred refrained from inviting guests because of her nervous state. Georgia’s condition was “pathetic,” he told Dove. “At times I feel like a murderer. There is Kitty. Now there is Georgia.”

  It was just as well that Georgia had been in Bermuda when Dorothy’s book of verse was launched, since her ri
val’s effusions on love, jealousy, and the divine impressed some in their circle. Rosenfeld wrote that her poems possessed “a great deal of knowledge and a deal of innocence”; Brett gushed that they turned “Religious Ecstasy…into an utterance that is incorruptible.” Had Georgia glanced at the contents, she would have been mortified by the poem entitled “The Purity of Alfred Stieglitz” and enraged by its companion piece, “Georgia O’Keeffe, Neo-Primitive Iconographer.” (Dorothy called this poem an homage to her rival’s art: “With a sadness beyond sadness/She creates an Affirmation—Reharmonizing Dissonance.”) While it is likely that their affair ended at about this time, Alfred and Dorothy wrote to each other daily—while he bemoaned the emptiness of life without her.

  Alfred sought solace in nature—the lake, grasses, trees, and skyscapes—which he captured in images that seemed to offer refuge from his anxiety about Georgia’s collapse. He also took some striking portraits of her. In one group, she leans against her new Ford convertible—a form of support, literal and metaphorical, betokening her wish for independence. In Georgia O’Keeffe—Hand and Wheel, her fingers caress the lustrous cover of the spare wheel—an image that calls to mind his studies of her hands from a happier time. In others, she leans pensively against her convertible, perhaps waiting for the day when she can take the wheel. (O’Keeffe included six images of herself and her Ford in her 1978 version of Stieglitz’s Portrait—as if they said something important about her at that time.)