The album entitled “Rebecca William,” which remained at Casa Feliz, is the most curious of these endeavors. It begins with images of the house, the stage set on which the play of the Jameses’ life took place. Next she arranged portraits of the Salsburys in a kind of flashback to her childhood, with images of her mother, herself, and Rachel, their brothers, and nannies, all formally attired. But just as with the cropped image of Georgia, she repurposed these portraits. Cutting large brown paper frames to place over each image, she covered up her twin and their frilly dresses in a photo of the two girls together to present herself as unique. To “read” this version of her life pre-Bill, one must gently lift the frames that keep one from seeing the whole picture, the family ambience from which she had removed herself. The many joyful shots of her life with Bill are followed by photographs of him before they met; it ends with a set of portraits of him looking fondly at the photographer, most likely his wife.
“I am getting into fields I never knew I would,” Beck mused about her collaboration with Dorothy Benrimo. One hundred of Dorothy’s images of crosses from local cemeteries, taken with Bill’s camera, were to be exhibited at the Amon Carter Museum, in Fort Worth; Beck, who had introduced Dorothy to the director, wrote an essay for the catalog, which was entitled Camposantos. Sitting in her chair, she studied these black-and-white images. Benrimo’s hope, she thought, was “to capture in some permanent form the illusive quality these simple grave markers evoked. How make real such inner abstract feelings as humility, simplicity, solitude, faith? How communicate outwardly the mystery of death?” Beck hoped that Paul would like the images and her essay, which concludes, “This is a lovely…contribution to the esthetic archives of Spanish-American mores as recorded through the perceptive eye and receptive heart of Dorothy Benrimo.”
About this time, the Jameses drew up their wills. Each made bequests—to relatives, Taoseños in their employ, and the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation, but chiefly to each other. Should both die as a result of an accident, they wished to be cremated and have their ashes scattered on the mesa west of their pastureland. Their wills testify to the care with which they planned the end of their lives. At the same time, Beck set up accounts for Nate Salsbury’s children and instructions about the works of art to go to him, along with their house. And she sent Nate the few remaining items that had belonged to her father: canes, cuff links, swords, and suspender buckles.
Given that Bill was younger than Beck, they took it for granted that he would outlive her. His death of a heart attack in 1967 came as a terrible shock. “I do not know if I shall be able…to carry this massive burden of grief,” she wrote to Paul. “His heart broke long ago—12 years, over what happened to me, and mine broke seeing his break—yet we could have gone on facing this together.” Her greatest comfort had come from Georgia, who took Bill’s body to Albuquerque for cremation, then brought the ashes to Taos to be strewn on the mesa: “6+ hours of being in the car—getting home at 9 at night—and she is 80—nobody else has come anywhere near that unforgettable act of friendship.”
Rebecca was fortunate in finding two caregivers in town, Raycita Cordoba, a woman from the Pueblo, and Winifred Legge, who had studied art in Paris and conversed with her in French. They were “more than satisfactory,” she told Paul, but her life felt “vacant.” Still putting her affairs in order, she donated one of the five properties she had bought over the years to the Kit Carson Foundation. The plaque read “In Memory and in Honor of her Husband, Bill James who once lived here.”
Georgia visited when she could, bringing vegetables from her garden; Paul sent loving support. “We were much moved by your own account of all that you have been doing in placing and giving away your own precious things to the repositories where they will be seen and appreciated,” he wrote. Hers was “a wrenching task and a valiant one.” Paul’s letter came too late. “I can no longer live without Bill,” Beck wrote to Nate earlier that month. “I died the day he did and each day since has been a marking time until I could do all the things I had to do the way I wanted….I am at last free and want release—I want to go in quietude to him.” On July 8, 1968, she ended her life with an overdose of medication.
The Taos News ran her obituary on page one. Spud Johnson wrote the next day that he was struck by Rebecca’s contradictions. “She was tough, and yet she was gentle…stubborn and uncompromising, but extremely vulnerable. She was gay and witty—and then sometimes curiously humorless. She was a sensitive, perceptive artist and a lady, yet her language could, on occasion, be as rough as a stevedore’s.”
In accordance with her wishes, there was no service. Like Bill’s, Rebecca’s ashes were scattered on the mesa to the west of her pasture. In lieu of an epitaph, her thoughts on the camposantos may suffice: “There are hundreds of these blessed fields scattered throughout New Mexico. Commonplace or unusual, crude or refined, these grave markers rise in uncounted numbers as mute, yet eloquent testimonials.”
Paul
Paolo Gasparini, Paul Strand, Orgeval, France, 1957
Contributors to the Stieglitz memorial had been asked to ponder the question “What has gone out of our lives now that Stieglitz is no longer here.” Seeking to evoke “the principles for which he stood, and the spirit in which he worked,” Norman placed Strand’s tribute after the posthumous appreciations by Demuth, Hartley, and Lachaise and before Seligmann’s praise of Stieglitz as the guiding spirit for all who “devote themselves to the quest of revelation.”
Unexpectedly, Strand recast his mentor’s legacy in the language of revolution. Adapting Stalin’s description of the writer’s role under socialism, he wrote that Stieglitz would be mourned by “men everywhere who believe that ‘the artist is the engineer of the soul’ ”; while Stieglitz didn’t use such terms, “they describe the very foundation stone of his faith.” After praising his struggles on behalf of modernism, Strand exhorted the next generation to carry on the fight: “We realize as perhaps he did not that the freedom of the artist to create and to give the fruits of his work to people is indissolubly bound up with the fight for the political and economic freedom of society as a whole.”
By 1947, when the portfolio appeared, Strand’s tribute would have disturbed many who hoped to put such debates behind them. His convictions had strengthened over the last decade, when he played a leadership role among cultural “workers” for whom art’s purpose was to drive social change. While the rhetoric of struggle against reactive forces was still current in New Masses, where this tribute first appeared, the magazine would cease publication the following year, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities began its harassment of left-wing organizations. Saying more about Strand’s beliefs than about his mentor’s, his homage discomfited those who wanted to remember Stieglitz in the messianic prose that echoed throughout the portfolio.
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. . .
Soon after Strand’s return from Mexico in 1935, he traveled to Moscow with his Akeley camera to join Group Theatre founders Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford. Well received because of their politics, the trio were invited to the Moscow Art Theatre and to see the latest Russian films. Strand met the leading film directors, including Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko. Eisenstein, who thought that Strand was essentially a still photographer, offered him a job even so, but visa problems kept him from staying on. Still, the creative ferment of these months in Russia moved him to seek out Americans who shared his views. He joined the American Labor Party in 1937 and remained a member for the next decade.
After his return to the United States, Strand joined the film group Nykino, whose progressive stance inspired its members to make documentaries illustrating the struggles of ordinary people. At the invitation of his friend Ralph Steiner, Strand traveled to Texas to make a film on the dust bowl; Leo Hurwitz, a member of Nykino, joined them. “It was just fantastic to see that reddish earth blowing,” Strand recalled. “We got to some pla
ces where you were right down to the crust of the earth.” But Pare Lorentz, the director, showed no interest in the script that Strand and Hurwitz wrote to indict the ranchers whose exhaustion of the soil had brought about the catastrophe. The final version, entitled The Plow That Broke the Plains, was “a pretty picture,” Strand thought, “but…the guts had been taken out of it.”
In 1937, Nykino evolved into Frontier Films, the company founded by Strand and Hurwitz to make documentaries that would serve as warnings to their countrymen. “We were very concerned about what was going on in the world,” Strand explained. “I suppose other people might have described us as radicals.” They were particularly concerned about the Spanish Civil War. Of Frontier’s six documentaries, Heart of Spain, edited by Strand and Hurwitz from footage shot in Madrid, and Return to Life, filmed in Spain by Cartier-Bresson, were shown in support of the Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy.
Frontier Films also obtained a print of Strand’s Redes, released in the United States as The Wave; a local critic called it “an interesting photographic album, but a dull motion picture.” Together, Strand and Hurwitz developed an editing style blending Soviet and American techniques. They based their most ambitious film, Native Land, on recent Senate testimony about civil rights violations—attacks by corporations on labor unions and atrocities by the Ku Klux Klan—and enlisted the well-known singer/activist Paul Robeson as their narrator. Native Land took four years to make and was not released until 1942, just months after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor—a time when civil rights issues were lost in the groundswell of pro-war opinion.
Hurwitz, who was almost twenty years younger than Strand, looked to him as a professional artist. “He had the feeling…that once you took an idea, you put your teeth in it, you worked with it, you took responsibility for all its corners,” Hurwitz recalled. But Strand was hard to know: cranky at times, ungenerous at others. In these years he also acted as a mentor to the young photographers at the Photo League, a progressive group that overlapped with Frontier Films. As an honorary member of the board, he took part in discussions about the degree to which one could create images combining social meaning with artistic merit: “Strand was a kind of patron saint…admired by everybody at the League.” But he took few photographs, with the exception of his much-reprinted image of a skeleton crucified on a swastika.
Strand made a brief return to nature photography in 1936, during his honeymoon with Virginia Stevens on the Gaspé Peninsula. They had met at the Group Theatre, where she acted in a variety of plays under the direction of Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg. Virginia was twenty-three and Paul forty-six when they married. She looked up to him. On daily photo shoots in the Gaspé, he taught her to see the material world as he saw it. “I was made aware of things I had never been aware of before,” she recalled. Still, “as a human being wanting somebody close,” she found Paul’s idea of a honeymoon different from her own. “He could not touch you and caress you….I entered the dark wood when I married him.” One cannot help thinking that Paul’s memories of his time there with Rebecca cast a shadow.
Virginia resumed acting after their return to New York. Over the course of her career, she performed in Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, contemporary plays, including the intriguingly titled Weep for the Virgins, and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. While pursuing her career, she also played a major part in Paul’s next project, his portfolio of Mexican photographs. Lee Strasberg suggested the idea of staging the images like a play. Starting with shots taken when Strand first went to Mexico, moving on to architectural facades, then church interiors and worshippers, the sequence would move back and forth to give a sense of place. Virginia took on the role of publisher, including responsibility for reproductions to approximate Paul’s originals. Of this project, Strand observed obliquely, “Craftsmanship is built upon years of work—years of experience with and feeling for the materials of the craft.”
Paul’s feeling for his materials was more acute than his sense of how to nurture a rapport with his wife. Over time, Virginia was increasingly disturbed by his “volcanic angers” and his inability to relate to her except through his art. “Nothing turns him aside or weakens his drive,” she remarked years later. “He was never in any doubt about his talent.” He agreed to see her therapist but reported after a session that he spent his time talking about photography. Some people could not be analyzed, the therapist explained; Strand was one of them. Perhaps he felt that Virginia’s engagement with his work was in itself rewarding: She played a grieving widow in Native Land. Strand’s photography was “his best effort to render the emotional significance of the object,” Hurwitz wrote at this time. His images seemed impersonal, yet they recorded the emotions locked away below their surfaces: They were his “autobiography.”
In the mid-1940s, Strand expanded on an autobiographical project of sorts with Nancy Newhall, who was replacing her husband (then on military duty) at the Museum of Modern Art. Newhall asked Strand to help mount an exhibition of his work, the first retrospective accorded to a photographer and his first in New York since the unsatisfying show at An American Place in 1932. As they looked at his images together, Paul told Nancy about his break from Stieglitz. He had fallen under the spell of Stieglitz’s vision of O’Keeffe, but his marriage to Rebecca had not achieved anything like their rapport. Worse, his extended portrait of her had been “forced”; it irritated both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe (he did not mention its effect on Beck). “The message was still too painful to accept,” Newhall noted. Strand’s vision struck her as somber—unlike that of Stieglitz, who once told her “that Paul had no sense of humor, especially about himself.”
Newhall struck a more positive note in her essay for Strand’s MoMA catalog. “The work of Paul Strand has become a legend,” she began. “Rarely exhibited, its influence has nevertheless spread through the last thirty years of photography.” Then, echoing Stieglitz, she called Strand “a discoverer of photographic forms and concepts for our time.” Newhall praised his sense of place: “His search for fundamentals that shape the character of all that rises from a land and its people.” Noting that his images had been called, variously, “brutal, cruel, tender, selfless, precious, static, timeless, tumultuous, [and] wonderfully alive,” she left the final verdict to viewers of the future.
Edward Jewell wrote a cool appraisal of Strand’s retrospective in The New York Times. His development over the last thirty years was “well illustrated” and his “diversified material” fittingly arranged by groups, of which the abstractions were among the most striking. Jewell admired Strand’s close-ups of rocks and driftwood from Maine and the “narrative” of his time in Mexico. But he had little else to say. Like Newhall, he quoted Stieglitz’s remarks about his protégé to give “the great dean of American photographers” the last word (Jewell mentioned that lenders to the exhibition included Stieglitz and “Miss Rebecca James”). Beck wrote Paul distractedly that she wished that she could see the show.
Strand’s collaboration with Newhall took a more personal turn after his return to still photography. Over time, they found a way of working together on a book in which his images would be complemented by her selection of writings by representative New Englanders. He began with portraits of self-contained individuals encountered on visits to Maine and Vermont. His subjects, who had led hard-scrabble lives, inspired Strand’s respect. Their book, Time in New England, became an evocation of an American past based on moral integrity—a tacit response to the present.
In 1944, after a trip west for documentary film work that included stops to see the Jameses in Taos and Ansel Adams in Yosemite, Strand’s attitude toward the country changed. He agreed to chair the photography section of the Independent Voters Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt, which soon merged with Progressive Citizens of America, a group calling for negotiations with the USSR and an end to war. That year, Strand also did film work for the government and took part in a pr
oject with Hurwitz and Newhall, an eighty-foot-long photomontage chronicling the Roosevelt years. In 1945, he was invited by the Roosevelts to the inaugural ceremonies and lunch at the White House, along with some 250 American artists and scientists.
When the war came to an end, Strand returned to the project with Newhall. While he traveled around New England to photograph, she wrote to suggest images that would illustrate the ideas emerging in her choice of texts, such as interiors comprised of domestic objects, to reflect a simple life, or natural prospects, to evoke spaciousness of thought. “The problem was to marry the photographs I had and would take over the next few years to that text,” Strand recalled. The marriage of image to text became “a major turning point in my whole development.”
It was also a return to the past—to summers when Beck had accompanied him on photo shoots, and times in the apple orchard at Lake George. Strand found himself going back to subjects he had first attempted in Maine—trees standing like sentinels in a sere landscape, the sea’s ebb and flow, a shy jack-in-the-pulpit (quite unlike O’Keeffe’s bold studies of the plant), along with portraits of New Englanders and the architecture of churches and meeting halls. His most buoyant print, Apple Tree in Full Bloom, almost bursts out of its frame. At a time when McCarthyism was casting a pall on cultural life, this symbol of a vibrant national heritage expressed hope for a renewal of the consensus begun in New England, including the “freedom of the individual to think.”
By this time, Strand was associated with more than twenty organizations that would be deemed subversive by the U.S. attorney general, starting with the Photo League, which was formally charged in 1947; Strand gave the opening speech at a protest meeting. The FBI had had him in their sights since the release of Native Land, along with Robeson and Hurwitz, who would be blacklisted in the 1950s despite his film work for the Office of War Information. Convinced that Strand was a Communist, the FBI took an interest in his sponsorship of Progressive Party leader Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1948 and his activities as cochair of the Progressive Citizens of America’s arts division.
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