Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  Stieglitz and O’Keeffe went to the museum on opening day, December 31, 1940. It was surely gratifying to see a reproduction of his iconic Night—New York on the catalog cover and to read MoMA’s tribute to “his courageous pioneering and experimentation, untiring struggle to have [photography] recognized as a medium of artistic expression…his impact on more than a generation of workers and his uncompromising demands on them to achieve the finest quality of craftsmanship and perception.” The exhibition was a grand survey of the art, including work by Abbott, Atget, Mathew Brady, Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Moholy-Nagy, Eliot Porter, Man Ray, Sheeler, Steichen, and Weston.

  It was also a reunion of sorts. Aligned across the wall in their simple frames, the eight Stieglitz prints appeared to introduce the three Strands: Given the sequencing, some saw Strand’s Photograph—New York as an homage to his mentor. Displayed in this way, Stieglitz’s prints (including The Hand of Man, The Steerage, and Georgia O’Keeffe—Hands and Thimble) seemed to have made peace with the occasion. And while the inclusion of Norman’s 1934 portrait of Stieglitz may have struck an incongruous note, it was not remarked upon except by The New York Times, which praised her use of shadows.

  To his entourage, it seemed that “Sixty Photographs” had been planned to usher in Alfred’s seventy-seventh birthday, on January 1. Georgia wrote to McBride, “I see Alfred as an old man that I am very fond of, growing older—so that sometimes it shocks and startles me when he looks particularly pale….I like it that I can make him feel that I have hold of his hand to steady him as he goes on.” That spring, her attempts to “steady” Alfred included helping him organize thirty-six boxes of his photographs while sorting through her own work. When she was with him in New York, Georgia saw to his comforts, such as buying him the unfashionable clothes he favored and ordering a loden cape from Germany when his old one wore out. Every year, before going to the Southwest, she hired companionable housekeepers to care for him and arranged for friends to keep an eye on him.

  Even so, Alfred was downcast for much of the spring. It lifted his spirits somewhat to read a Vanity Fair article entitled “The Fighting Photo-Secession,” by Steichen, whom he hadn’t seen in twenty years. In the current context, Steichen wrote, “the heritage stemming from this Photo-Secession movement stands out in bold relief as a great tree against the sky, and the trunk of that tree is Alfred Stieglitz.” Alfred let his old friend know that he was “bowled over” by his words: “If you were here I’d grasp your hand.” A meeting was arranged; the two were reconciled despite their differences—which were largely of Alfred’s making once Steichen went into commercial photography, Alfred’s bête noire.

  But Alfred’s dejection, exacerbated by chronic health problems (painfully itching skin, sinusitis, angina), returned to plague him that summer. “I’m managing to scrape through one day after another,” he confessed to Arthur Dove. “Do absolutely nothing but lie about….Not a thought in my head or elsewhere.” Worse, he feared that the war would force him to close the Place just as the first war had brought the end of 291. “If I have the misfortune to live a year or two longer, I shall find myself where I was in 1917,” he told Nancy Newhall (Beaumont’s wife), who was taking down Alfred’s remarks with an eye to writing his biography. She noted sympathetically, “He feels alone, although surrounded by friends…that the place of photography in the average mind is rather worse than when he began.”

  Over the next years, as fewer people went to the Place, Stieglitz became convinced that it was dying. “The beautiful living things no longer mean anything real to people,” he told Nancy. Fearing that Georgia would do away with his intimate portraits of her after his death, he was tempted to destroy them. Shocked to hear him say that he should have died after his first angina attack, Nancy replied, “Then I and so many others would never have known him. It meant a great deal to us; no doubt we were selfish. He said it was not selfish. Still, for the first time he was envious—of the dead.” In 1943, when Hartley died at sixty-six after exhibitions at several prominent galleries, Stieglitz mused, “What a lucky man…to have passed out in his zenith.”

  By then, Georgia had taken the precaution of moving to a smaller but warmer apartment a block from the Place. That way, Alfred could walk to the gallery (taxis were scarce due to gasoline rationing), and he no longer complained of the draft. But that winter, as he recovered from further angina attacks, visitors to the Place found him much reduced, mulling over his failings or dozing on the cot that Dorothy had installed for him, wrapped in his cape.

  But he rose to the occasion when people came to see him as he was about to turn eighty. To Nelson Morris, who interviewed him for Popular Photography, he was the one “whom the younger generation of serious camera workers had come to regard as the[ir] patron saint.” While Stieglitz disapproved of what he saw as current misuses of their medium, he admired Morris’s Rolleiflex and said that he would have liked such a camera. His early work, Morris thought, was the precursor of the reportage practiced in Life: “His photograph of a steamship steerage…will long rank as an example of the high type of work we present-day journalistic photographers seek to emulate.” Morris took a compassionate picture of “the great old man”—his second in color, Stieglitz mused, harking back to the autochrome one by Steichen.

  It was surely with mixed feelings that Stieglitz consented to talk to Thomas Craven, who ten years earlier had dismissed him as a “Hoboken Jew” lacking a sense of the American background. Craven found him on his cot, “suffering from a heart attack, and from an aching heart, too…but his ego was unimpaired.” Craven could not resist the occasional jibe: Stieglitz had become “the center of a cult of frustrated artists and the dilettantes who spoke of him—and still do—in terms reserved by less obsequious persons for the Lord Almighty.” Yet Craven delivered an almost unbiased account of Stieglitz’s importance as a photographer and gallerist while praising his refusal to enrich himself. Their interview appeared in The Saturday Evening Post with reproductions of The Steerage, portraits of O’Keeffe, and a likeness, by Norman, of Stieglitz looking his age.

  On January 1, 1944, a group of well-wishers went to the Place to celebrate Alfred’s eightieth birthday. He expatiated on the absurdity of the commemorative pieces appearing in the press, like Craven’s tribute to him as an “old master of the camera.” Still, the new year brightened his mood, and recognition by mainstream periodicals drew people to the Place in greater numbers. That winter, he worked with the Philadelphia Museum of Art to choose thirty-five of his prints, along with three hundred drawings, paintings, and photographs (including six by Strand and four by Norman) from his own collection, for an exhibition entitled “History of an American: Alfred Stieglitz, ‘291’ and After”—an implicit response to those who contested his right to speak for American art.

  By the spring, however, Stieglitz was often too tired to do anything but rest. One day, a man in a rumpled suit walked up to him in the street and asked brusquely, “You Stieglitz?” He introduced himself as Weegee, the crime photographer; although Alfred had never heard of him, he asked him up to the Place. “Weegee the Famous,” as he liked to style himself, recounted his visit as a cautionary tale about the nature of fame:

  He started to talk, the most famous photographer in the world, the man who sponsored unknown painters and sculptors who are famous today. Stieglitz pointed to a phone near his cot. It never rings, he said. I have been deserted. The paintings on the wall are orphans. No one comes up to see them! He was a failure, he told me…others were successful because they had wanted money, because they were politicians, showmen.

  Weegee photographed Stieglitz on his cot, a portrait that is less than complimentary. Suddenly, he slumped over in pain and whispered, My heart. It’s bad. When he had recovered, Weegee left, murmuring to himself, “It doesn’t seem right that such a great artist should have such a little reward.” His account of their meeting in PM, a New York daily, did not so mu
ch pay homage to Stieglitz as depict him as a great man humbled.

  Judging by their poses, a double portrait of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe taken at this time by Arnold Newman (who photographed famous figures) was meant to support Alfred’s stature as the grand old man of photography. The dominant figure, he stands erect and stares at the camera, while a diminutive O’Keeffe seated behind him looks to one side. Yet, according to Sue Lowe, this image belied the state of their rapport: “Over the past several years, the prevailing ingredient in the relationship between Alfred and Georgia—a mutual generosity that many failed to perceive—had grown. In some ways, they had exchanged roles.” Although Alfred had been “steeling” himself for Georgia’s departure that year, he wrote, “Your going is very right—For you. So it must be right for me.” He added, “It’s all a difficult lesson—living if one is truly conscious of the significance of the moment.”

  By 1945, Alfred had weakened considerably, while remaining mentally vigorous. His spirits lifted with the end of the war. Despite his opposition to MoMA’s plan to give Georgia a retrospective the following year, he agreed, when she insisted that a one-woman show would not only benefit her career but underscore his role in bringing it to this point. After completing his biographical sessions with Nancy Newhall, Alfred spent the summer at Lake George. Georgia joined him in the fall, and together they chose the paintings for her new show at the Place and MoMA’s retrospective the following spring, the first devoted to a woman artist.

  Stieglitz attended the opening of O’Keeffe’s retrospective on May 14, 1946, despite his reservations. To his surprise, he approved of MoMA’s installation: “It is a glorious exposition. In a sense a miracle…I am glad to live to see this day.” He and Georgia went to a party at the Newhalls’ with friends and colleagues, including Abbott, Sheeler, André Kertész, Strand, and Norman, whose presence there caused Georgia to turn around and walk out. Georgia read only two of her reviews, a laudatory piece by McBride and an essay by James Thrall Soby, MoMA’s curator of paintings, which acclaimed her as “perhaps the greatest of living women painters.” (Soby continued: “She created this world; it was not there before; and there is nothing like it anywhere.”)

  Alfred was delighted by Soby’s review, since the curator had not thought much of her work at first, and deeply moved by what they had accomplished together: “How beautiful your pictures are at the Modern…we are a team.” The next day, as she was preparing to leave for the Southwest, he wrote, “You need what ‘Your Place’ will give you. Yes you need that sorely. And I’ll be with you, Cape and all. And you’ll be with me here.” Enchanted to find the love notes that she had left for him in the apartment, he responded, “Ever surprised. And ever delighted.”

  Alfred stayed in New York while the housekeeper began packing for his trip to the lake. On July 6, he went to the Place to meet the Newhalls. They found him on his cot, barely able to whisper that he had had a heart attack. He was taken home and put to bed, where he was seen by his doctor. There was nothing to worry about, Alfred told Georgia on July 8 (the doctor implored her to come back). As he was dressing to go to the Place the next day, he suffered a massive stroke and was taken to Doctors Hospital. He never regained consciousness. The telegram informing Georgia of his condition reached her on July 11. She rushed to the Albuquerque airport in her cotton dress and work shoes, arriving in New York in time to get to the hospital before he died in the early-morning hours of July 13.

  The next day, twenty of Alfred’s friends and family, including Sue Lowe, Anita Pollitzer, Steichen, and Strand gathered at Frank Campbell’s funeral home on Madison Avenue. Georgia had torn the satin lining out of the plain pine coffin she had selected and, overnight, sewn into it a new one of white linen. The casket, draped in black, reminded some mourners of the black cloth–covered camera of Stieglitz’s early days in photography. Following his wishes, there were no speeches or music, only some flowers. According to Lowe, “Georgia accepted condolences in calm dignity, her self-containment making the extravagant tears and sobbing embraces of some around her [including Dorothy] seem grotesque.” Then, after the ceremony, “Georgia, with a majesty I shall never forget, eluded the hands of sympathizers and entered the limousine that would carry her behind the hearse to the crematorium.”

  Later that month, Georgia took Alfred’s ashes to Lake George and buried them at the base of an ancient tree at the water’s edge. She could not imagine going back there, she would write to one of his Stieglitz relations, “unless—maybe to stand just for a moment where I put that little bit that was left of Alfred…but I think not even for that. I put him where he could hear the Lake.” She noted cryptically, “That is finished.”

  * * *

  . . .

  In the days after Alfred’s memorial, Georgia tended to unfinished business. She had been “strained but under control” at the funeral, Strand told the Newhalls, while Dorothy, “utterly shattered,” wept. Nancy Newhall informed Ansel Adams that Dorothy was shocked when Georgia told her to remove her things from the Place by the fall and to cede control to her—moreover, that she considered Dorothy’s relationship with her husband to have been “absolutely disgusting.” Dorothy managed “a few heartbroken responses”; Georgia consulted a lawyer, which brought “a new note of dignity” into the situation.

  In time, Dorothy devised her own monument to Alfred, in the form of the Stieglitz Memorial Portfolio, published in 1947, with scores of tributes by prominent artists, writers, critics, and friends, including Paul and Rebecca—but nothing at all by Georgia.

  Rebecca

  Rebecca Salsbury James, Taos, 1937

  Of the scores of tributes in the Stieglitz Memorial Portfolio, the most personal was signed “Rebecca Salsbury James.” No doubt surprised to be asked for a contribution, Beck described her first meeting with Alfred:

  I first knew Stieglitz in 1921—taken to him 25 years ago by Paul Strand, straight from a gold and brocade parlor at 39 West 96th Street, N.Y.C., to a tiny storage room in the old Anderson Galleries. The first time I heard him talk was at the Chinese restaurant in Columbus Circle—he talked from seven to midnight. After that first talk I went back to and finally left the gold and brocade parlor, never again to be quite the same person.

  By then, she could measure the distances she had traveled from her mother’s parlor to her moderne quarters at the Strands’ and finally to the spacious adobe in Taos where she lived with Bill James. In her view, Alfred had set her on the path to becoming the person she was meant to be.

  Beck was fifty-five when she wrote this tribute. She and Bill had lived in the house they called Casa Feliz since 1937, when they married. She would spend the rest of her life there. The dry mud walls and undulating lines of Spanish-Pueblo Revival houses like Casa Feliz reference both the Pueblo’s adobe structures and the town’s colonial past—the perfect place to confirm her life as a westerner. Casa Feliz was also the first home that Rebecca chose for herself, having spent several years with Bill at El Pueblito, a cross between an artists’ commune and an art center (now the Harwood Museum). After a honeymoon in Mexico, they began restoring their adobe to suit her idea of life in harmony with the local culture.

  It seemed fitting when five men from the Buffalo Bill show turned up in Taos and joined their work crew, as if her father’s world had come to put the seal of approval on her own. Over time, she and Bill added exterior walls, patios, and a studio above the garage. Her art had gone “more or less to hell,” she told the Baasches, but Casa Feliz was living up to its name: “I love it so I scarcely leave.”

  When Rebecca went to New York after her mother’s death in 1937, she was glad to see Paul and meet his wife, the actress Virginia Stevens (they married in 1936). But she felt uneasy about his politics: “I’d much rather see him put all his energies and interest in his work.” She also called at the Place and recalled this visit on her return to Taos:

  I expected to find St
ieglitz older & frailer—but he looks just the same. He started a great harangue but I just laughed & told him he was a bad old man—then he laughed too. It all seems very far away from this secluded, rough, easy-going life here—but I know there was much of value in it all for me—and painful as much of it was, I am glad it all existed.

  She still cared for Alfred but could not forgive his behavior toward Paul.

  From their base at Casa Feliz, Beck and Bill made forays into Taos’s nightlife. The town’s frontier atmosphere attracted cowpokes, horse dealers, and gamblers with names like Doughbelly Price and Curly Murray. The Jameses played poker at Mike Cunico’s place and downed the hooch known as Taos Lightning. Lined up at the bar, Beck recalled, “artists, writers, truck drivers, cowmen, business men, farmers, traveling salesmen, celebrities, quenched their thirst, swapped stories, laughed and hollered.” Mike gave the regulars nicknames (“Shotgun,” “The Buffalo,” “The Kangaroo Kid”); one of them noted, “Becky shunned the rest of the town, allying herself with the sporting clique”—an observation that measures her resolve to present herself as her father’s daughter. Her style set her apart: She wore soigné western garb that showed off her figure, and smoked cigarettes in a long silver holder.

  In time, Bill became a director of the Denver bank founded by his grandfather and was comfortable enough to serve as a village councilman. Beck became irate when The Taos Review announced that she had inherited $85,000 from her mother (the equivalent of two million dollars today). “This is decidedly not the case and I wish you would so inform your readers,” she protested. (The details of her inheritance are not known, since Mrs. Salsbury’s estate, worth more than six million dollars at today’s rates, was divided among her nine heirs.) Beck preferred the account of herself in The Houston Chronicle (“noted artist of Taos, N.M., and daughter of the late Nate Salsbury”), published when she lent her Wild West memorabilia to an exhibit about Buffalo Bill.