Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  Beck, a.k.a. Becky, may have been amused by the conjunction of her different personas as well as by her reputation as “the most striking” person in Taos—as in the account of a journalist who compared her to a film star:

  During dinner at the tavern on the plaza, I saw Becky Strand….There she stood, just outside the door on the narrow sidewalk. She wore black cowboy boots, blue denim breeches and a black and grey checked shirt. On her head was a black slouch felt hat. Her hair is silver but her face is young. From a corner of her mouth a cigarette dangled….A picture from the Parisian Apache quarter, yet one of the more sophisticated of the Taos women.

  Beck thought well enough of this notice to paste it into the scrapbook of her exploits.

  Rebecca Salsbury James in fiesta garb

  Motivated by her recent success, she tried a variation on her chosen medium, using as her support antique mirrors with punched-tin frames. Bill’s mother ordered one to send to a friend in London, and Beck thought so well of them that she planned to offer the rest for sale to Elizabeth Arden. She was also painting a reverse oil based on a cross in a nearby graveyard. It is tempting to imagine Beck showing this piece to Georgia when the latter made her way to New Mexico in July, and to envision Georgia at her solo show in Santa Fe.

  Whatever Georgia thought of her work, Beck’s recognition by the local art world was encouraging. She accepted the Museum of New Mexico’s invitation to show her new pieces in their annual exhibition “Painters and Sculptors of the Southwest.” Four of her reverse oils were selected, outnumbering the work of other artists; Paul, another of her small “object portraits,” was probably among them. Like Beck’s recent Portrait of Bill, this composition evoked its subject through a witty arrangement of carefully chosen items, in this case alluding to photography in its central figure, a black circle that resembles a camera lens. Inscribed “Paul/Taos/1934,” it served as an affectionate farewell to their marriage.

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  . . .

  In the first months of 1934, as Georgia retrieved her self-possession, she continued to draw sustenance from her rapport with Toomer. “I started to paint,” she told him soon after his departure. “It will undoubtedly take quite a period of fumbling before I start on a new path—but I’m started.” By the end of January she felt up to a trip to Manhattan to see her retrospective, “Georgia O’Keeffe at ‘An American Place,’ 44 Selected Paintings, 1915–1927.” Alfred had chosen some of her most eloquent work—two Specials from 1915, clamshells, jack-in-the-pulpits, and abstractions. The New Yorker compared O’Keeffe favorably to Matisse but added, “These pictures are not derivations; they are sources.” Her canvases conveyed “almost every phase of the erotic experience” yet gave off a “fierce virginal candor.”

  Georgia was still finding it difficult to be in Manhattan. “I do not particularly enjoy thinking of [it],” she told Toomer. To have him with her in spirit at the Place, she added to Alfred’s selections the painting that crystallized her sense of him at the lake in 1925 (Birch and Pine Trees—Pink). “I never told you—or anyone else—but there is a painting I made from something of you the first time you were here,” she wrote. “It is rather disturbing to take the best of the work you have done from the people you have loved and hang it that way and go away and leave it.” Still, it was useful to see that with each trip to the city, she felt more equal to its challenges.

  When it became too cold to stay at the lake, Georgia went back to New York to be with Alfred. During this time, she realized that she still felt close to him: “There were talks that seemed to kill me,” she told Toomer, “and surprisingly strong sweet beautiful things seemed to come from them.” Just the same, she had to plan her future on her own terms. Two weeks later, she boarded a boat to Bermuda. From the ship, Georgia wrote that she was about to begin “another way of living,” and went on to say, “I feel more or less like a reed blown about by the winds of my habits—my affections—the things that I am—moving it seems—more and more toward a kind of aloneness.”

  From the island, where Georgia stayed at a house owned by Marie Garland, she wrote to ask Paul if he planned to stay in Mexico and told him that the Museum of Modern Art had bought her Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur (from her first summer in Taos with Beck)—which meant that with the funds from other sales she could pay her bills for the year. She had found new subjects—glossy green banyans and the voluptuous flowers of the banana tree. Writing to Beck, she was able to imagine the future: “I begin to think of New Mexico with a vague kind of interest.” But she would settle neither in Taos nor at the H & M Ranch because she did not want to see people. The only way not to be “run ragged” was to live on her own. She would have to go to New York before traveling west, “but if the doctor says I can go—I think I’ll make it.”

  On her return to New York, she saw Toomer, who had fallen in love with Marjorie Content. Although taken aback by the news, Georgia wrote warmly, “I like it very much that you and Margery [sic] have started what I feel you have—I like it for both of you.” Of herself, she said that she now understood many things that had disturbed her before her breakdown: “They seem to come clear in such a strangely quiet way—something seems to take form in me without my knowing why or how.” Alfred accepted Georgia’s need to return to the Southwest but planned to keep the Hill free of guests that summer in case she changed her mind.

  “I really have to move myself mostly with my head,” Georgia confessed to Beck. She justified the outlay of energy needed to travel as “the easiest way for me to get to work—and that I must do.” In June, Georgia met Marjorie in Chicago to drive her friend’s Packard to Alcalde, where they stopped at the H & M Ranch in spite of Georgia’s misgivings. Given her mixed feelings about Jean’s plan to join them there, she must have found it unsettling to learn that Marie and Henwar had divorced at about the time that he joined Strand in Mexico. Still, Marjorie and Georgia enjoyed the kind of companionable rapport that recalls her summers in Taos with Beck, when they pursued their interests by day and shared their intimate thoughts at night. When Mabel tried to lure Georgia to Taos, she wrote candidly, “I like you Mabel but some times you just seem so funny….I think the reason you seem funny to me when you behave badly is that I always feel you are mistaken.”

  Alfred was still worried about Georgia’s equilibrium. Shortly after her arrival in Alcalde he wrote, “I don’t know what state you’re in but I dare not let it affect me. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel it deeply.” Georgia’s reply is worth quoting at length:

  The last year I was in the city with you—from the fall of 1931 to the fall of 1932—our relationship was certainly not very pretty….During that time you did things…that you had no right to do without speaking to me about it if I was really any part of what the Place meant to you…every time I went there you made me feel you didn’t want me there—You will say you didn’t want me there because I didn’t want someone else there—and all I have to say about that is that I do not for one moment accept the idea of your going about publicly making love to someone else….It was you who wanted me and insisted on marriage and I am inclined to feel that I had a right to expect you to respect that relation.

  In the clear light of her new surroundings, Georgia understood that she could no longer accept the patterns of their life together. Her love for him, she wrote, “tears me to bits because I feel you have chosen a road without me.”

  Meanwhile Georgia was feeling her way toward something new as she explored the landscape on foot or in the Packard. In August, she went to Taos to see Beck but was unimpressed by her transformation. Writing to Ettie Stettheimer, Georgia said that Beck was “the same in spite of her boots and her pants—both I think are very warm in the summer—or any other time—and her whiskey.” She added, “I am not quite sure whether it is all just funny or very pathetic.”

  That summer, she found the place that would allow her to move toward her kind of aloneness. Cha
rles Collier drove her to see the landscape around Ghost Ranch, a dude resort at the eastern end of the Jemez Mountains that was composed of bungalows grouped around a ranch house at the end of a dirt road. Some forty miles southwest of Taos, it was another world. Beyond the ranch, quartz cliffs gleamed red and yellow in the sunlight; the nearby escarpments formed a geological layer cake; the Pedernal, a striated peak on the mountains’ north flank, dominated the view. Unfazed by the local belief that the ranch was haunted, O’Keeffe fell in love on the spot. After returning the next day and learning that there was a vacancy, she packed her bags, leaving Jean and Marjorie to themselves. She would see them again when she went to Taos in September to witness their marriage.

  Once she had settled in her spartan lodgings, Georgia set aside her prejudice against dude resorts. Ghost Ranch, which catered to people with means (it cost eighty dollars a week), offered good meals, privacy, an austere glamour (guests were given kerosene lamps), and the astounding scenery that she would paint for the rest of her life. At first, she hiked all day, stopping to bathe in irrigation ditches, or drove into the canyons, gathering rocks, bones, and branches as she went. At night, she often walked to the high mesa to watch the sunset flame across the sky—regaining the sense of freedom she had known in the Palo Duro Canyon.

  Soon she began painting the nearby hills, whose curves and hollows suggested bodily contours modeled in flesh tones. Of these sun-baked land-forms, where she imagined herself lying naked, she admitted, “A red hill doesn’t touch everyone’s heart as it touches mine.” But at this point, recovered from her collapse of the past eighteen months, it was pleasing to know that this was her landscape, and to claim it as her own.

  Ansel Adams, O’Keeffe and Carcass, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, 1937

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  . . .

  Alfred was in a reflective mood when Georgia returned to the Hill that fall. He had spent the summer photographing trees, grasses, and outbuildings while supervising plans for a volume in honor of his seventieth birthday—a project undertaken that year by Paul Rosenfeld, Waldo Frank, and Dorothy, who had chosen the contributors and were seeing the book into its final stage. One day, Alfred discovered some of his old glass plates in the attic, “in imperfect condition, scratched and battered.” When he made new prints of these early pictures (among them Sun Rays—Paula), he felt “startled to see how intimately related their spirit is to my latest work.” His youthful images looked as fresh as his recent landscapes.

  Still, he could not help noting the elegiac mood of the contributions to his birthday volume—to be entitled America & Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait. The editors, assisted by Lewis Mumford and the educational reformer Harold Rugg, had asked many of Stieglitz’s associates to write essays, among them Anderson, McCausland, Seligmann, Clurman, Toomer, and William Carlos Williams. Tributes by artists like Brett, Demuth, Hartley, and Marin were also included, though neither Georgia nor Beck wrote for the volume. The most surprising tribute came from Gertrude Stein, whose Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had recently become a best seller: Stein thanked Stieglitz for publishing her for the first time in Camera Work.

  Among the more substantial pieces were those Williams and Mumford wrote about Alfred’s social and cultural backgrounds. Rosenfeld described his youth, Seligmann retold the saga of 291. Norman waxed rhapsodic about the Place. Stieglitz’s artistic achievements were examined in an historical essay by his friend R. Child Bayley and in Strand’s revised 1921 essay, “Alfred Stieglitz and a Machine.” It fell to Toomer to evoke Alfred on the Hill—the essay he had been writing while keeping Georgia company there the previous winter. As a whole, the volume was marked by a messianic tone, set out by the biblical epigraphs alluding to its subject as a latter-day prophet—a “seer.”

  Unexpectedly, when the publisher saw the completed manuscript and its many photographs (Stieglitz prints and work by artists shown at his galleries), he rejected it as too costly. Through Dorothy’s social connections, she learned that Carl Van Doren of the Literary Guild wanted an art book for the Christmas trade; delighted with the volume, he pulled off a coup by publishing thirty thousand copies in the midst of the Depression. “The book at once clarifies and elevates the whole issue of art in America,” Van Doren opined. To Stieglitz, who had despaired of its seeing the light of day, it was “a Wonder.”

  It was also the occasion for him to break his vow not to show his work by starting the season with a retrospective, “Alfred Stieglitz: Exhibition of Photographs (1884–1934),” which opened on December 11, to coincide with the publication of the volume. This display of Stieglitz’s work—several Equivalents, selected images from New York and Lake George, and a Dead Tree series—also featured six portraits of Georgia, including two at the wheel of her car that seemed to testify to her need for independence.

  Historians who say that Stieglitz chose not to include portraits of Dorothy in this retrospective appear to have overlooked the double exposure entitled Dualities, which stood out among the small number of portraits shown due to its odd treatment of her face (she seems to grimace) and its echo of her book title, which Stieglitz had been preparing for publication when he took this portrait. In Edward Jewell’s tempered critique of the show, he acknowledged that Stieglitz had told him of this photograph’s “profound significance”—which escaped Jewell, despite the photographer’s remarks about its relation to “his philosophy of life.” Perhaps by then, Stieglitz had accepted the changes in his rapport with Dorothy and understood its effect on his marriage.

  Jewell’s less than effusive tone turned positively acerbic in his review of the commemorative volume a week later. Stieglitz’s philosophy, he wrote, had produced in his entourage “a sort of half-idolatrous worship, an atmosphere of incantation and pseudo-mystical brooding upon the thisness and thatness of life and the human soul.” Jewell quoted Norman’s comparison of the Place to a cathedral and its guiding spirit to a priest, and came down hard on Frank’s placing Stieglitz in the company of such figures as Plato, Socrates, and Confucius. While these “instances of emotional agitation” were mitigated by the more substantial contributions, he concluded, “a sometimes almost trancelike panegyric…constitute[s] the book’s essential message.”

  To make matters worse, Time magazine appeared on December 24 with Thomas Hart Benton on its cover. The arts review identified Stieglitz’s former friend as the most outstanding of the regionalists as well as “the most virile of U.S. painters,” as demonstrated in Benton’s canvases of farmers, field workers, hillbillies, and burlesque queens. Hostility between the Stieglitz group’s embrace of modernism, seen as a foreign import, and the stance of the more American-than-thou regionalists had been simmering for years; it erupted that fall when the conservative critic Thomas Craven denounced Stieglitz as “a Hoboken Jew without knowledge of, or interest in, the historical American background.” Benton pursued this line of attack in his review of the commemorative volume. Stieglitz suffered from “a mania for self-aggrandizement,” Benton wrote: With the changes wrought by the Depression, his influence had evaporated. Looking back, Benton wondered “how a small group of New York cultists can arrogate to themselves and a simple photographer a position of supreme eminence in American culture.”

  What O’Keeffe thought of this controversy went unrecorded, except for her disparagement of the regionalists, who, in her view, saw the American scene as “a dilapidated house with a broken-down buckboard out front”—the kind of dust bowl images painted by those who saw art as a vehicle for social commentary. It was Norman who enabled Stieglitz to have the last word in the row with Benton. Engaging him in an imaginary dialogue (their words noted by her) for The Art of Today, Stieglitz denounced Benton’s diatribe as an example of “the increasing gangsterism in what is called the art world.” Far from being passé, he was still the presiding spirit at the gallery: “The real joke of the matter is, that these people who are so cock-sure that I am dead, don’t e
ven come up here to see what is actually taking place.”

  But there were others who, like Benton, insisted that Stieglitz’s credo did not suit the circumstances in which the country found itself. America & Alfred Stieglitz was “a portentous and heavy document,” book critic John Chamberlain wrote in an end-of-the-year review that ran in the Times the day before Alfred’s seventy-first birthday. Art critic E. M. Benson, who published a biography of Marin that year, spoke for many outside the Stieglitz circle in his summation of their leader’s significance: “What one took for wisdom in 1905 sounded pretty flat in 1925, and sounds flatter still in 1935. It wasn’t Stieglitz who had changed, but his audience….In short, Stieglitz didn’t keep up with the parade.”

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  . . .

  Writing to Beck at the end of December, Georgia mentioned neither the reviews of America & Alfred Stieglitz nor the omission of both women’s thoughts about its subject. Instead, she sent New Year’s greetings and expressed regret that she had been unable to find the kind of pajamas Beck had asked for. Georgia was taking things out of storage in hopes of going back to work.