In Taos, Beck was sorting through Paul’s prints still in her possession and taking his part against Augustín Chávez. Still angry about their friend’s “perfidious” conduct, she urged Paul to “fight him with lethal weapons” to keep him from taking credit for their film. She added, “If you let A. steal it, I’ll have my first disappointment in you—ever.”
Paul returned to the Southwest with Bobby Hawk in December, then traveled around the region while deciding whether to go back to New York. We can only imagine his reunion with Beck, and his reaction to the flamboyant figure she cut in Taos. It is not known whether he saw Alfred and Georgia in New York before leaving for Moscow to meet Soviet cultural leaders, including film director Sergei Eisenstein. About that time, Strand told a friend, “I have come to the point where I believe that any young artist who is not aware of the human struggle—economic and political—which overshadows…every part of the world today—is strangely outside the main currents of life.”
Georgia was already planning to return to Ghost Ranch in June, before spending the winter with Alfred—the pattern she would maintain for the next decade. Once he accepted her need to live according to her desires, they established a new equilibrium and missed each other during separations, when Georgia worried about the effects of his aging. Sometime later, she told McBride, “Aside from my fondness for him personally I feel that he has been very important to something that has made my world for me.”
By then, the foursome had dispersed both geographically and psychically, yet for the most part they thought fondly of one another. Beck’s yearning for “the old days” gave way to her wholehearted embrace of life in Taos. Paul remarried and immersed himself in the task of aligning his art with his politics—which would, in time, mean leaving the country. Georgia devoted her creative energies to her new homeland while remaining attentive to Alfred. She and Beck visited each other and sent gifts, but as Georgia became the iconic figure of her later years, their closeness diminished somewhat. It was the end of an era—one in which their influence on one another flowed in all directions, and the interweaving of their lives in support of Alfred’s “Idea” established the foursome’s bonds as friends, protégés, mentors, and lovers.
AFTERMATH
Alfred
Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Alfred Stieglitz, 1944
One gray day toward the end of 1934, Imogen Cunningham went to the Place. Stieglitz had just taken down the exhibition of his work timed to complement the publication of America & Alfred Stieglitz. Cunningham had just come from San Francisco to do portrait work for Vanity Fair. Having admired Stieglitz since the 1910s, she decided to start her portrait series with him.
The likenesses Cunningham took that day, she told him, confirmed her memory of Stieglitz “as the father of us all.” In one, dressed in a dark overcoat, he pored over papers at his desk while Cunningham watched him “like a hawk.” In another he posed in front of O’Keeffe’s Black Iris with a guarded look in his eye, as if daring Cunningham to think any less of him because of his age. Still the impresario of the Place, she recalled, “he stood rock-steady for every shot.”
Alfred told Imogen that he and Georgia were delighted with her work. Her “rock-steady” likeness would run in the March 1935 Vanity Fair, he added with obvious satisfaction. The magazine devoted a double-page spread to his work—two portraits of Georgia, an early landscape, and an Equivalent—to underscore his fame as “the camera’s almost legendary saint.” Following this encomium, the editors proposed a sly summation of Stieglitz’s life: “Fifty-one Years in the Dark Room.”
The New Yorker’s Lewis Mumford suggested an equally lonely parallel for Stieglitz’s struggle on behalf of “seeing.” He was the Captain Ahab of American art; his recent exhibition had been even more “climactic” than the memorable one at the Anderson Galleries in 1921, with its “incomparable studies of the nude.” Still, if Mumford’s review made up for criticisms of America & Alfred Stieglitz, Stieglitz lacked the means of response he had had in Camera Work. “That’s the one thing I do miss,” he complained to Arthur Dove. “A weapon in the form of one’s own printing press.”
Stieglitz also missed the support of younger people acting on his behalf, as the Strands had done. That spring, he looked to the artist William Einstein, a distant cousin of his who had recently returned to New York from Paris. While he did not think much of Einstein’s painting, he enlisted his enthusiastic relative to help with the tasks needed to keep order at the Place.
The other candidate for the job, in Alfred’s mind, was Ansel Adams, whom he had first met in 1933, when Adams came to show him his portfolio. At the time, Adams watched Stieglitz scrutinize his prints, shut the portfolio, and announce that while they were some of the best he had seen, he could not give him a show. After that visit, inspired by Stieglitz’s dual roles as gallerist and photographer, Adams opened a gallery in San Francisco and began the correspondence that demonstrates his reverence for the older man. (“I would not have believed before I met him that a man could be so psychically and emotionally powerful,” Adams wrote to Strand.) But Adams was unlikely to leave California, having made common cause with Cunningham, Edward Weston, and others committed to a “straight photography” approach to natural form.
O’Keeffe, who had befriended Adams on her first trip to Taos, invited him to the Shelton when he returned to New York in 1936. The young man showed her and Alfred his recent prints, taken under the sway of Alfred’s belief that images of nature could be equivalents of psychic states, and was thrilled when Stieglitz offered him a show. “I have done one good photograph since my return,” Adams told Stieglitz. “My visit with you provoked a sort of revolution in my point of view.” It also gave Stieglitz a disciple of the kind he had had in Strand, albeit at a distance.
He decided to open the Place on a “western” note. When Georgia returned from Ghost Ranch and showed him Beck’s latest oils, he saw that her imagery offered another approach to native art, one that could enhance the East-West connection that promised to bring new life to the gallery. “I open 1936–1937 with you & Adams,” he informed Beck. Adams’s work would hang in the big room and hers in the small one. Beck’s reply is missing, as is her response to his note the next day saying that he had changed his mind but would show her work later that year.
One wonders to what extent Georgia influenced the decision to accord Beck the status she coveted—to be shown at the Place in her own right. In another letter to Beck, Alfred remarked on his “queer” way of doing things. He added, “Truly beautiful moments can never be killed. And we have certainly enjoyed aplenty.” As for their misunderstandings, he mused, “They are part of the growing pains I suppose if there is any growth at all….Am not as spry as I was not so very long ago.”
Alfred’s sense of vulnerability had intensified in response to shifts in his rapport with Georgia. Earlier that year, she had accepted a commission to paint a six-by-seven-foot mural at the Elizabeth Arden Beauty Salon for the unprecedented sum of ten thousand dollars. Because the couple’s rooms at the Shelton were too small for such a project, Georgia rented an airy duplex on East Fifty-fourth Street overlooking the East River and asked Alfred to join her there. “She has a penthouse studio,” he told Adams half in shock; the studio was “so grandly spacious and light that I feel queer.”
Georgia decorated in her usual manner—white walls, dark brown floors, black furniture relieved by Navajo rugs and arrangements of flowers, shells, bones, and skulls. Alfred resisted the move (the duplex was drafty and so far from the Place that he had to take taxis) but then gave in to her wishes. When friends came to dinner, the housekeeper Georgia hired for such occasions saw to everything. Along with the knowledge that her life in the Southwest awaited her, her income reinforced the sense of self-command that came with these arrangements.
Despite their affection for each other, Alfred was slow to adjust. “I haven’t been well,” he complained t
o Adams after Georgia’s departure for Ghost Ranch in 1936: “Heart. Damn it.” He added, “My memory isn’t what it was. It’s like the heart. A bit on the blink.” What he did not mention was his fear that what he stood for no longer mattered. After Adams’s first meeting with Stieglitz, the younger man had asked him to consider the idea that he presented “an all-enfolding armor to the world which keeps both the good and bad from you, which protects and prohibits at the same time.” In 1936, he wrote to reassure Alfred of his enduring significance: “The Place, and all that goes on within it is like coming across a deep pool of clear water in the desert.”
By then, Stieglitz had chosen the group show to follow Adams’s work, in a sense prolonging its western theme. Hartley and O’Keeffe were represented by canvases inspired by the earth forms of New Mexico—O’Keeffe’s “brawnier and at the same time subtler,” according to the Times. The reviewer seemed bemused by the pieces in the smaller room: “recent decorative paintings on glass by Rebecca Strand, wife of Paul Strand, photographer…chiefly floral and design subjects with a hint of O’Keeffe.” While only one of Beck’s pieces sold, they were “much admired,” Alfred wrote when her show closed. He added, “It’s ever the old story here[.] I refuse to become a ‘Salesman.’ ”
Although the country was still suffering under the weight of the Depression, Alfred’s disdain for salesmanship had not abated, nor had he changed his mind about socially relevant art. Still, he departed from his practice of showing the usual roster of artists in order to display the satiric watercolors of George Grosz, who had fled to New York from Germany, and he sent funds to László Moholy-Nagy so that he, too, could escape to the United States. Stieglitz had been slow to recognize the Nazis’ threat to Europe as a whole, but once Hitler annexed Austria, conversation at the Place was interrupted when members of the group turned on the radio for the news. Dorothy proposed the idea of publishing a magazine to oppose all forms of repression; Alfred offered her the Place as her headquarters.
By the spring of 1938, alarmed by the prospect of an European war and mourning the death of his brother Julius, Alfred was depressed. In April, he suffered a heart attack, the first of a series of coronary episodes; two weeks later, he came down with pneumonia. In a note to Edward Weston, he mused, “Will you and I ever meet again. —I doubt my ability to come West or really to go anywhere ‘far’ from the source.” After Georgia took him to the lake, he recovered slowly, while doing his best to undermine her plans to return to Ghost Ranch. In July, exhausted by the demands of caring for him, Georgia told a friend that she dreamed of “a dry open space all by myself.” Once Alfred’s health was stable, she left for New Mexico, where she stayed until November—the pattern she would follow in the years to come. Dorothy went regularly to the Place to supervise the gallery’s finances and produce her magazine. (Ironically, it may have been a relief to Georgia to know that Dorothy was looking after Alfred during her absences.)
For some time, Dorothy had also been taking down Alfred’s reminiscences. From 1938 on, they would appear in her magazine, Twice a Year: A Semi-Annual Journal of Literature, the Arts and Civil Liberties, which reproduced his signature scrawl on the cover and four of his prints in each issue. As Twice a Year’s presiding spirit, he welcomed the stream of contributors who visited the gallery—poets, novelists, and intellectuals, like his old friend Dreiser, and new ones, like Henry Miller (who wished he had known Stieglitz at 291: “If I had met him then,” Miller wrote, “the whole course of my life would probably have been altered.”) Interchanges with newcomers revived his spirits, and Alfred took pride in Dorothy’s credo that the arts sustained the spirit of freedom.
While this manner of addressing the situation in Europe had a heartening effect, Alfred’s hostility to the institution he saw as the competitor to his life’s work—the Museum of Modern Art—did not abate. He grumbled that at MoMA, “politics & the social set-up come before all else.” His suspicions had deepened in 1935, when Alfred Barr, the director, asked Beaumont Newhall, who ran the library, to plan an exhibition on the history of photography. Stieglitz turned down Newhall’s request to have him chair the advisory board and refused to lend work. Nor did he attend the show’s opening in April 1937, which included images by Adams, Berenice Abbott, Weston, and Walker Evans, along with thirteen prints by Strand. The following year, still recovering from his heart attack, Stieglitz relented. Receiving Adams and Newhall at his bedside, he give Newhall permission to use an image of Lake George as the frontispiece of his forthcoming book, Photography: A Short Critical History, and to dedicate it to him. The men nearly broke down when Stieglitz asked them to take his place as photography’s champions.
By then, Stieglitz had ceased taking pictures, bringing to a close the most passionate years of his life. In a letter to Weston, who had recently won the first Guggenheim Fellowship given to a photographer, he tried not to sound envious of Weston’s good fortune. The letter also reveals his disdain for contemporary work (“So little vision. So little true seeing”) and his bittersweet sense of the present:
Here I am the first time in 55 years without a camera. Yes there seems to be millions on millions of photographers & billions of photographs made annually but how rare a really fine photograph….I’m an old man. May be have been an “old man” for many years….Waldo Frank some years ago said to me: “Stieglitz when you are dead I’ll write your biography.” I wondered how much he knew about me & why wait till I’m dead. But all I said was: Frank my biography will be a simple affair. If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman & you’d ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she’d say: He always treated me as a gentleman.
If he had failed to teach Americans to embrace “seeing,” he remained, at least in his own eyes, his medium’s favorite suitor.
Dorothy’s portraits of Alfred in these years also bear witness to his sense of himself as photography’s lover. In some, he entrusts himself to her as his confidante; in others, the twinkle in his eye suggests that he is savoring their past intimacies; in still others, he rests his head on the back of a chair to gaze at the woman who continued to inspire him. But these portraits also hint that Dorothy had begun to distance herself. Her studies of Alfred’s gnarled hands bring to mind both his portraits of her youthful ones holding her camera and of Georgia’s elegant fingers taken in the years when she gave herself unstintingly to the role of muse.
Over time, Alfred came to accept Georgia’s annual displacements. They spent winters together in New York; in the spring, before going to New Mexico, she went to Lake George to prepare the house; then, depending on Alfred’s health, she returned to the lake in the fall. When apart, they sent each other deeply thoughtful letters that still conveyed their affection. Writing of the war from Ghost Ranch, Georgia observed, “All seems so peaceful off in the country like this”; in the last line she teased, “You are a lunatic and I love you.” Missing her but secure in the knowledge that she would return, Alfred conceded, “You would have gone to the southwest sooner or later….I realize full well, and have for years realized it, that all this set up [Lake George] is not for you, that you couldn’t stand what I am forced to stand….It’s all in my photographs—It’s all in your paintings.”
Despite occasional complaints about what he had to endure, Alfred enjoyed being coddled by the female members of his family. Sue Lowe recalls conversations with him at the lake on subjects ranging from Hitler’s madness to her budding sexual feelings, a topic to which he returned with each grand-niece (Georgia thought that his infatuation with fifteen-year-old Ann Straus had much to do with her resemblance to Dorothy). He continued to rise early, read his correspondence, and prepare envelopes for his replies, occasionally putting a note for Dorothy in an envelope meant for Georgia. Lowe gives a tender account of his routines: “Correspondence dispensed with, he either set off for the post office, his round of miniature golf, and his chocolate ice-cream cone or for his wicker chair on the porch—to read,
catnap, to talk with guests, or to photograph with his eyes the grasses, trees, barns and sky.” As he grew weaker, he renounced activities except for his daily walks, and when Ann Straus introduced her fiancé to him, his infatuation loosened its grip.
A certain remoteness from his coreligionists’ fate may be attributed to the Stieglitzes’ view of themselves as assimilated members of modern society. Initially Alfred did not seem too concerned with the fate of the Jews, but once the Germans began bombing England, he abandoned his efforts to persuade listeners that the German people, misled by the Nazis, were not responsible for the war.
One wonders whether Alfred was shown Strand’s striking response to Nazism. A photograph of a skeleton crucified on a swastika, this overtly political image appeared in 1939 on the cover of TAC, the Theatre Arts Committee magazine, under the title Swastika (a.k.a. Hitlerism). Alfred and Paul were reconciled when Paul came to see his mentor in 1940 after his second angina attack of the year. Dorothy, who had taken over Alfred’s correspondence, wrote to Paul, “It was really beautiful to see how much your note and the visit meant to him.”
But Stieglitz was still not ready to set aside his suspicions about MoMA’s plans for a Department of Photography, the first of its kind, under Beaumont Newhall. When Newhall, again working with Adams, sought to enlist Stieglitz as its eminence grise, Stieglitz made it clear that “he could not accept a subsidiary or ancillary position in an arena he felt he had created.” Some months later, following failed attempts to mount a Stieglitz retrospective as the department’s first show, the two men were astounded when he agreed to let them display some of his prints at their inaugural exhibition, “Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Esthetics.”
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