Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  The Old Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, the venue for her next show, complemented this approach. This historic building seemed to confer its endorsement on her work, which was displayed in antique cabinets and on the main room’s whitewashed walls. The show gave a full picture of what could be done with colcha—including fiesta skirts and a bedspread stitched with flowers. Some of the colchas were placed next to the designs that had inspired them, and others were paired with reverse paintings on glass using the same motif. (Bill’s coat of arms was also on display.) Beck posed for New Mexico Magazine in front of the cabinet that held her miniatures. The magazine’s critic described her favorite: “A tiny cluster of three roses, each petal perfectly formed, yet not larger in size than a dime.” She concluded, “To revive a craft long since discarded…and to do this quietly without fanfare or shouting from the housetops to attract attention, is an accomplishment worthy of note.”

  Beck’s exhibitions in 1954—in Roswell, New Mexico, and New York—could not have been more dissimilar. In the spring, she showed embroideries with spiritual themes at the Roswell Museum, where work by O’Keeffe, Hartley, and Marin had been on display. In a change of emphasis from these modernist icons, the Roswell exhibition honored Catholic archbishop Lamy (the model for Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop) with a display of liturgical art. One wonders how Beck felt seeing her work among the richly embroidered velvets, silks, and brocade at the museum—whether she felt at home there.

  In September, she and Bill traveled to New York with her paintings on glass for a one-woman show at the Martha Jackson Gallery, which featured up-and-coming artists. The paintings were grouped by subject: flowers, paired shells entitled Peace, figures, including her walking women, and landscapes, among them Fire and Air and Imagined Landscape. Her world was “intimate,” Elizabeth McCausland wrote in the catalog: “There is no room for panoramas in the grand manner; but a leaf of a shell may be of vast import.” Her oils transmitted their maker’s sense “that she is bound in the unity of human beings which none can expect to escape if he is to fulfil himself as a human being and as an artist.”

  The New York Times was less generous in its appraisal. While James’s oils came from “the Far West,” the reviewer wrote, they were not “without extra-local appeal.” Her feel for “the lonely drama of the high mesalands” was palpable, but the mood was somber—with “hints of menace in the…solitary black-clad figures who move through the landscape with such a stricken Martha Graham air.” Still, her flower pictures were “attractive,” and her “mildly surrrealist subjects…neatly painted.” That her work was owned by such people as Leopold Stokowski, Frieda Lawrence, Millicent Rogers, and the late Alfred Stieglitz (among the collectors listed) failed to impress him.

  Just the same, the gallery sold nine paintings, and Beck left ten of her best ones in New York for future shows. From Taos, she wrote to Paul about the gallery in Palm Beach, Florida, that wanted to show her work. She had agreed but changed her mind when she considered the venue: “The things—which are austere, most of them, and of this country, might not go well in that plush place.” It gave her greater pleasure to be asked to contribute a painting to the Lawrence memorial chapel in the hills above Taos. Impressed with Paul’s latest book of photographs, which had just arrived, she said, marveling, “It’s amazing how hard you continue to work. I am afraid I do not have the same drive although I keep going.”

  While Beck felt the need to justify herself as a “worker,” her forties and fifties were the most productive years of her life. An inveterate scrapbook maker, she began to document these years in a photo album, which presents a carefully curated picture of the couple’s life together. Looking through its pages is like watching a slide show. We see Beck as snappy dresser Taos-style—in riding pants and boots, blue jeans and checkered shirt, or formal garb, a black satin blouse with a silver brooch. There are photos of the couple smooching and Beck swigging from a bottle of gin, as well as a tribute to her father in front of Casa Feliz: Beck, in work clothes, poses with the men from the Wild West Show. A portrait of the Jameses with Bill in a suit and tie, western version, and Beck in a denim shirt transmits their ease with each other.

  The album also includes shots of Beck in fiesta garb (at fifty, she is as lean as when she first came to town) and at a cattle sale, as secretary of the Angus-Aberdeen Cattlemen’s Association. In many images she is smiling; in a few, she stands solemnly in front of her artwork. At her fifty-second birthday party, the marks of age on her face are softened by her happiness; Bill beams in the background. In others, at a costume party, he peeks out from under an impromptu headdress while brandishing Beck’s Lachaise torso, kept in the hallway, she explained, to give “a rich and warm reception to everyone who enters our front door.”

  Beck painted and embroidered for her own pleasure but also to make gifts for friends. For a couple newly settled in Taos, she painted a still life entitled Bowl of Vegetables. It shows a dish full of produce rather than the traditional flowers; the back reads “For Jane and Rick, Happy Many Things But Mostly a Happy Home.” In the same spirit, she painted Shell on the Sand, a small oil that hints at vast spaces, and inscribed it “To Celebrate a/Friendship/To Cady Wells from/Rebecca James/September 25, 1937.” (Wells returned the favor by giving her his abstraction embroidered in the region’s colors, with “Rebecca S. James” and the date, 1950, at the center.) Later, when Beck realized that she had given away over half of her creations as presents, she understood more fully how her art was woven into the mesh of her friendships.

  She made every effort to keep in touch with Georgia. Once Georgia was living in New Mexico year-round, she went to Taos on occasion; Beck continued to give her gifts of foodstuffs, flowering plants, and blouses in the styles they both favored. After one visit, Beck wrote a mock obituary for “a slightly known citizeness who had lived there for the past 15 years, Rebecca Salsbury James”; she had died, the spoof asserts, by trying to help “the extremely well-known lady artist, Miss Georgia O’Keeffe,” who had been unable to zip up a pair of pants (Georgia had recently adopted jeans). After “a succession of rage-strokes,” Mrs. James sends a message to say that “everything is very pleasant in Heaven, though she would almost rather be in Hell which she missed only because of her noble act of friendship for Miss O’Keeffe.” There is no reply to this odd missive.

  Georgia invited the Jameses to spend Christmas with her that year, but Beck turned down the chance for them to trim the tree together, given the need to look after Bill’s “critters.” After one visit to Taos, Georgia wrote, “I wish you would both come over and look at my world here—it is really very good—more for what is around out doors.” Following a visit to Georgia’s new home in Abiquiu, Beck wrote to Paul, “She looks well and still gets that ‘witchy’ look—but it’s always fun to see her and talk over ‘old times.’ ” (The next sentence describes Beck’s sixty-first birthday party in an implied comparison to Georgia’s solitude.) Sometime later, Beck complained, “She is a notoriously bad correspondent.”

  The somewhat barbed quality of these letters suggests that while Beck’s rapport with Georgia eased over time, she could not help comparing herself with the “extremely well-known lady artist.” After telling Georgia about her shows in California, Beck mentioned that she had seen Georgia’s work in San Francisco. From then on, she sent Georgia reviews of each of her shows. “Here we are after 40 years on the same piece of pink paper!” she exulted when both their names appeared in a gallery brochure. Georgia’s example was still with her, when Beck sold ten embroideries: “As you used to say about a show when you sold something—‘I am not a failure.’ ”

  By then, Beck and Bill had grown very close to the Benrimos. Beck admired Tom’s Surrealist-tinged landscapes and saw in Dorothy a kindred spirit. Their rapport, based on their cosmopolitan backgrounds, respect for one another as artists, and shared delight in the absurd, was apparent. They reveled in events
like the Casa Feliz poker soirées, with the players in costume and under the influence of Bill’s liberally administered booze. One year, the Benrimos made paper miniatures of the Jameses in fiesta garb—a tiny Bill in red trousers and checked jacket with a cigar, and a larger Beck in her signature outfit, toting a gun. Beck’s For Dorothy, a colcha with gold and silver threads stitched into the wreaths around a gleaming heart, conveys its maker’s affections. Dorothy was one of those rare people, Beck wrote, who “carry over into maturity what is most special and pure in childhood.”

  By the late 1950s, Beck rarely left Casa Feliz. She had begun suffering from joint pain a few years before. When her condition was diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis, she underwent a variety of treatments. Her letters to Paul include details of her prescriptions and injections, including gold salts, then thought to slow the progression of the disease. In 1960, she wrote:

  I am still plagued with arthritis & never pain free—My doctor says it took a long time to get it & will take a long time to get better—but sometimes I wonder if it is worth the effort….I can’t get up the studio steps to paint & my hands are not very good for embroidery—besides when one feels so ruddy uncomfortable it’s hard to do anything “creative”—Maybe I just don’t have the fortitude—but at my age [sixty-eight] it is difficult to summon it.

  She spent her days reading, listening to music, and sewing. In spite of her gnarled fingers, she had made a set of embroideries on the theme of the seasons. “I know you would like them—they ‘say something.’ ”

  Paul’s opinion still mattered to her; their rapport strengthened with the distance between them. “I cannot realize I am 70,” she wrote when he sent her another book of his photos as a birthday gift. It gave her pleasure to think of her oils in his house. Recalling the years when Paul photographed her repeatedly, she added, “I once asked you if you plan to publish the group of portraits you made—Or have you given it up?” Her letters do not return to the subject.

  The following year, when Paul sent his latest book, Beck thanked him. “What a worker you are—for one who is no longer young. Keep it up as long as you can lest disaster strike you.” She had some good news: The Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe planned to show her embroideries. She calculated that she had made some two hundred colchas and an equal number of paintings, of which seventy-five had sold. “So you see in my 32 years here I have not been lazy!” She added, “If it were not for Bill I don’t believe I would want to go on.”

  That winter, when Beck sought treatment in Carmel, California, for a bronchial complaint, she and Georgia corresponded frequently. Beck thanked Georgia for her gift—a chic wrap dress that was easy to put on because it had “no buttons, zippers, snaps, or fussies.” When Beck learned that she was to undergo lung surgery she told Georgia that she would wear the dress to the hospital: “If I leave the hospital in 2 weeks I shall wear my black dress out again. But whatever happens know it will be the last garment I shall wear on this earth whenever the last moment does come along.” The operation was a success, and Beck returned to Taos, but there was little improvement in her arthritis: she limped about “like a lady convict with a ball and chain!”

  Even so, Beck’s handicaps did not keep her from speaking her mind. To a graduate student seeking to learn the conceptual bases of Paul’s photography, she wrote, “My experience with every artist I have ever known is that no one of them works with a pre-cerebro-psycholigico-philosophico-psychico concept in mind. Artists put down what they do because primarily they must affirm the things they care for most—people, landscape, seascape, or still life—something they are moved by or that ‘begs’ to be captured in permanent form.” She sent Paul a copy of this letter, which spoke for him but also for herself.

  Exercised by what she saw as misleading criticism, Beck wrote to Van Deren Coke, who had cultivated a rapport with her as director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum and enlisted her help on his book, Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist’s Environment. Coke’s account of Beck’s career made her so angry that she wrote to protest his “irresponsible guesswork.” Her choice of subjects had nothing to do with Georgia’s: “Yes, I painted flowers—what artist has not—but I have also painted landscapes, adobe houses, the campo santo, birds, the native people.” To his claim that her use of sharp edges was inspired by Paul’s images, she replied that she favored them because she disliked “fuzzy” ones. Similarly, the idea that she had learned about reverse oils from Hartley was wrong. “Everyone is influenced at one time or another…the important thing is whether he or she outgrew that influence.” (Beck tried to make up with Coke by inviting him to her next exhibition.)

  On May 19, 1963, Bill drove Beck to Santa Fe in time for the opening of her show at the Museum of International Folk Art. Some two hundred people showed up; the one who gave her the greatest pleasure was Georgia. Writing to Paul, Beck rejoiced: “Georgia came from Abiquiu! She thought the show very beautiful and said ‘Rebecca, you have certainly sewed your heart into these things.’ ” Beck sent Paul a copy of the catalog, with color photographs of her embroideries and texts by E. Boyd and Frieda Lawrence. The museum had done a fine job. Just the same, she continued, “pain is my constant companion…a rather bitter ‘swap’ for what we thought would be some wonderful last years together—they have been blasted and we must face whatever lies ahead. But if I am to eventually become bed-ridden I don’t want to live.”

  Paul’s concern about Beck’s health may have motivated him to go to Taos that summer, when he and Hazel Kingsbury, his third wife, were in the United States. Knowing that they would stop in Santa Fe to see her show, she told Paul to compare a reverse oil and colcha, each called Devout Woman, since they were based on the same motif, a church he had photographed. Despite her eagerness for him to grasp the connections between their work, she asked him to book a hotel in Taos: “I’m not ‘up’ to very much in the way of entertaining—and Bill has enough in taking care of all my needs.” She was, however, glad to see Paul and meet Hazel, “to know, in spite of distance and the years that have flown by so fast, that there is still the old friendship.” Paul gave the Jameses a print of the Ranchos de Taos church; Beck gave the Strands a colcha entitled A Quiet Place, to complement those he had bought. “I am still overcome,” she wrote after their departure, “not only by your wanting the things, but your so generous purchase.”

  That fall, she had some pleasant surprises. Her Santa Fe show was held over; at Paul’s suggestion, the Currier Museum, in Manchester, New Hampshire, asked to show her embroideries; Georgia came to see her and talked of sending her exhibition to New York, perhaps to the Museum of Modern Art. “I am pleased she thinks the things good enough,” Beck told Paul. “It’s hard for me to think of them as ‘important’ because they were made over the years with no intention of public showing.” Some months later, an editor from Women’s Day magazine who had seen her colchas in Santa Fe commissioned Beck to write an article on the tradition. She was to be paid handsomely; there would be other assignments in the future.

  By then, Beck understood that she could take on only a few projects, things she could handle while sitting in a chair. Her embroideries were shown at the Currier Museum the following summer, but there were no reviews; her only satisfaction was seeing her name with Georgia’s in the brochure. After her most recent visit, Beck told Paul that Georgia was “a very true person according to her own lights.” She reflected, “40 years have not diminished our friendship & liking for one another—because, I think, we have never ‘invaded’ one another—or become ‘intimate’—although we experienced a great many things together.”

  Over the next two years, Beck worked diligently to organize her papers in order to give them to archives that would make them available to the public. She began with her father’s reminiscences. Her friend Otto Pitcher, an actor in local productions, transcribed the papers concerning Nate’s theatrical career to send to the New York
Public Library. After a long correspondence with Donald Gallup of the Yale Collection of American Literature, where Stieglitz’s papers were held, Beck donated her own, including letters from Stieglitz, O’Keeffe, Hartley, and Mabel Luhan; the album she made to display Stieglitz’s photographs of her; her father’s books and memorabilia, along with curiosities like Buffalo Bill’s moccasins. She advised Paul to think of doing the same. Gallup had come to see her. He was “neat and ‘scholarly’ without being pedantic.”

  About this time, the Jameses decided to leave their art collection to the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque, which gave them a show. In the catalog, Beck explained that theirs was not a collection “in the strict sense of the word.” It included works by “the artists Stieglitz believed in—Dove, Hartley, Marin, O’Keeffe and Strand”—who were, in those days, “in a process of continuous development toward the great stature they would later achieve.” Later, she added paintings by Fechin, Benrimo, and Cady Wells, thus putting together “this modest cross-section of work by American artists.” Beck sent Georgia the catalog, with the image she included of her “from the Pink House Days”—an allusion to their summer at Mabel’s, since Georgia would know that it had been cropped from one taken of them in 1929. Beck did not go to the opening.

  By then, her main project had become the restaging of her life. She organized her personal archives to give to the local history museum—scrapbooks from her childhood and school days, with the texts of her poems, songs, and other writings, assorted memorabilia, and binders of photographs of her life in Taos, carefully annotated for the scholars who would one day read them.