Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  By this time, Strand and Hoffman were engaged in plans for the two-volume catalog that would accompany his retrospective. Walter and Naomi Rosenblum, friends from progressive photography circles in New York, suggested ways to structure his work; Catherine Duncan, an Australian writer living in France, took on some of what had been Hazel’s job by editing the text and keeping track of its multiple versions. The first section, “Camera Work, Early Personalities,” was a backward glance within the book’s overall review. It included one portrait each of Stieglitz, Marin, and Lachaise (but none of O’Keeffe) and two of Paul’s over one hundred portraits of Rebecca: Rebecca Salsbury, a head shot from 1921, and Rebecca’s Hands, taken two years later.

  The vast retrospective, with nearly five hundred photographs, toured the United States for two years, traveling to St. Louis, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Strand approved of the way it was hung, with sculpture by Picasso, Brancusi, and Lachaise in dialogue with the images, and he felt vindicated by the response. “Paul Strand is one of the legendary names in the history of American photography,” the Times declared. “Mr. Strand remains to this day a vital photographic artist.” Strand’s art exhibited “the beauty of soberness,” another critic mused. He continued, “The effect of seeing so much Strand is to feel yourself elevated to a level of noble and pure sensations. His language—his plain, documentary-like, straightforward style—has a modern feeling to it, but the story he wishes to tell is a 19th-century one, or at least one that is far from us in time. Like other members of the group that periodically clustered around Alfred Stieglitz.”

  In interviews, Strand credited Stieglitz with launching his career but took care to distinguish his starting point from that of his mentor. On the importance of emotional content in photography, he said that understanding mattered more than feeling—to his mind, “a very easy way to escape reality.” Strand thought that he had grown as an artist by meeting reality on its own terms. His satisfaction is evident in his remarks on photography as an art that offers “something new through which the human spirit and mind can express themselves.” While some still saw it as a mechanical medium, this attitude was waning now that museums were starting to collect photographs.

  During this time, the Strands often stayed in New York. Michael Hoffman introduced the photographer Richard Benson to Strand, with the idea that Benson might print for him, though Paul had never allowed anyone except Hazel in his darkroom. John Walker, a young Canadian who showed Strand his own photographs, asked if he could make a film about him. To his surprise, Strand agreed. When Walker asked which images he should look at, he said, “It’s what you see that’s important.”

  In 1973, Strand was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the following year, he gave extensive interviews to Calvin Tomkins, whose New Yorker profile evokes Strand’s pleasure at his long overdue recognition. He also enjoyed speaking with the young photographers who sought him out. Asked if his retrospective had broken the barrier to seeing photography as art, he replied, “I don’t want to give the impression that I brought this about single-handedly. All I would say is that this exhibition was such a force, and the response was so strong, that the opposition has become less and less.”

  During these years, as Strand’s eyesight weakened, he continued to make prints, with Hazel serving as his eyes in the darkroom. His vision was restored after cataract surgery in 1973, but he was often irritable about technical matters and became even more dependent on Hazel. Yet he never stopped working. A friend observed, “He has a one-track mind, and nothing gets in the way of what he wants to do.”

  In 1974, the Strands learned that tests for Paul’s chronic shoulder pain revealed that he had bone cancer. He went back to New York for treatment, which did little to alleviate the pain. By 1975, his life was restricted to Orgeval. Their walled garden had become a world of its own, edged with flowers, herbs, and wisteria climbing up the walls. Paul photographed it in all seasons from his bedroom window and close-up, peering into layers of leaves and branches with an elegiac sense of natural cycles. (At his request, part of the garden was left untouched.) He gave these images titles that suggest his state of mind: The Apple That Fell, Iris Facing the Winter, Great Vine in Death. By this time, he was working with Catherine Duncan on the project he called The Garden Book. “As we worked, the photographs of flowers grew more and more evanescent,” she recalled, giving way to “grave, almost austere” images with titles like Revelations.

  Although Paul was often ill, he also agreed to work on two portfolios for Aperture with Richard Benson, who came to live with the Strands in 1975. Paul hobbled downstairs to check each step of the process; as he grew weaker, Benson took the prints up to his bedroom for him to inspect. The first portfolio, called On My Doorstep, would contain eleven photographs from different periods of his life, chosen from the yellow boxes of negatives kept by his bedside and under the bed.

  One day, Paul opened one of these boxes and found portraits of Rebecca that he had not seen for years and had never printed. Benson sensed that it upset him to sort through these negatives. For the portfolio, Strand chose the headless image he called Torso, Taos, New Mexico, 1930, which shows Rebecca’s voluptuous body, cut off above the breasts and below the pubic hair. “We couldn’t get the print to look right,” Benson recalled. Paul asked Hazel to bring them one of her silk scarves to tie on the lens: “The exposure was ruined by the passage of the light through the silk, but the print looked terrific.” The young man had the impression that Rebecca had been “a live wire.” Others remembered the episode differently: “Rebecca’s torso in its strange and shocking nudity gave us the ghostly shiver of voyeurs.”

  Paul was still not satisfied. He told Richard to use vintage paper for some additional prints of Torso. “Spurred on by my wish to be rid of that damn picture we had already worked so hard on,” Richard said, he did as he was told. The new prints pleased Paul but had to be destroyed because they exceeded the limit set for the portfolio. It is likely that seeing them revived Paul’s complicated feelings about his rivalry with Stieglitz. Getting the nude image of Rebecca to match the idea in his mind would have brought some comfort.

  Strand found the strength to keep working with Benson. During this time, he told a visitor, “When you come to the end of seeing—when seeing is only looking—then you’ve reached the end of your road. I don’t know, but it seems to me that if I could go on for another fifty years, I’d have no hesitation in saying that I would be very busy.” (He was eighty-five.)

  Strand made his definitive choice of images for the second portfolio, which he entrusted to Benson for decisions about printing. Soon thereafter, he became bedridden and refused to eat or drink; Benson kept watch at night while Paul remained in a semicoma. Strand died on March 31, 1976, after suddenly sitting up and exclaiming, “All my books!”

  * * *

  . . .

  That year, the Strand retrospective that had begun in Philadelphia started its European tour, over the next two years traveling to London, Stockholm, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Not long after his death, the Paul Strand Collection, composed of his papers, correspondence (including letters from Alfred, Georgia, and Rebecca), work prints, and master prints, was set up at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, and the Paul Strand Foundation (later part of the Aperture Foundation) was established by Hazel Strand and Michael Hoffman.

  During these years, John Walker began the interviews and patient reconstruction of Strand’s life that would result in his prizewinning film, Strand: Under the Dark Cloth. Thinking about his subject in relation to himself, Walker observed, “It turns out his photography was detaching him from his world….He was somewhat detached from the humanity that he was trying to capture.” Fred Zinnemann agreed with this assessment: “He didn’t have much deep contact with people. He loved humanity in the abstract rather than in the specific.”

  Walker also int
erviewed Hazel, who returned to the United States a few years after Paul’s death. By then, she had lost the enthusiasm that she had once had for photography. Thinking back on her years with Paul and what mattered to him, she said of his immaculate prints, “They were his women, they were his children, they were the love of his life.”

  Georgia

  Todd Webb, O’Keeffe on the Portal, Ghost Ranch, 1963

  Georgia did not contribute to the Stieglitz Memorial Portfolio. She would spend the years after Alfred’s death paying homage in her way—settling his estate, donating his collections to institutions, organizing his archives, and choosing the repository where they would be housed.

  Settling Alfred’s affairs touched her deeply. She coped with her mixed emotions while working with James Johnson Sweeney at MoMA to plan two Stieglitz exhibitions—one of his photographs, the other of his art collection. The press release announced that both would be held “at the express request of Georgia O’Keeffe, executrix of the Alfred Stieglitz Estate.” O’Keeffe’s resolve is not surprising given Norman’s push to assert herself as his memorialist. (Norman believed that Stieglitz had made her his executrix but had changed his will at O’Keeffe’s insistence.)

  In preparation for the MoMA shows, Georgia made small prints of Alfred’s photographs. That spring, she sent Beck fourteen prints of his portraits of her, for which Beck made a small hand-stitched album as a showcase. Some of these portraits would be in the exhibition, Georgia wrote: “I am going a bit out of my mind with this business….I am ready to be finished with it and be a painter again.”

  After the two shows opened on June 10, 1947, the Times ran Jewell’s review under the headline HAIL AND FAREWELL. Several portraits of O’Keeffe, among them her hands holding a thimble and, ten years later, a skull, were included, but there were none of Norman. (Upset that she had been left out, Norman photographed the sign outside the museum in a shot recalling Stieglitz’s photo of the Flatiron Building.) But the Times gave Norman the last word: Jewell ended by announcing the publication of her portfolio, with relevant details for buyers.

  Still, Georgia would have ample opportunity to shape Alfred’s legacy over the next three years with the help of Doris Bry, the Wellesley graduate she hired to manage the sorting process. Bry, who had been working with Norman, felt that she could not cope with both women; she devoted her time to O’Keeffe, whose no-nonsense manner she preferred to Norman’s “slushiness.” Bry would recall, “Working on this material with O’Keeffe was my graduate school. Later I realized that she had been training me to look after her own estate.”

  From the more than 2,500 Stieglitz originals, O’Keeffe chose what she called the “Key Set”—sixteen hundred master prints for the National Gallery of Art, the most important part of his estate. In each case selecting the best examples, she included the 331 photographs he had made of her between 1917 and 1937, and from his more than 150 photographs of Norman, she chose 19 of the more modest portraits.

  To disperse his art collection, some 850 pieces, including work by Rodin, Matisse, Brancusi, and Picasso, African sculpture, and prints by pioneer photographers as well as by friends like Strand and Steichen, O’Keeffe sought the advice of trusted associates—the curator Daniel Catton Rich, the Stettheimers’ friend Carl Van Vechten, and her financial adviser, William Howard Schubart, who was Alfred’s nephew. The bulk of the collection went to the Metropolitan Museum; the remaining works were divided among the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress, and Fisk University.

  Once her plans were finalized, O’Keeffe wrote a statement for the Times. “Stieglitz often said that he didn’t collect pictures, that the pictures collected him. I think he had no particular feeling of ownership…he left it for me to decide.” Still, she recoiled at the editor’s insertion of her status as his widow: “Kindly print the article as I wrote it or do not print it at all. I would prefer not to mention the fact that I was married to Stieglitz.”

  Bry was given the task of organizing Stieglitz’s archives—over fifty thousand pages of correspondence, files, scrapbooks, family documents, and photographs. Impressed by Donald Gallup, whom O’Keeffe met through Van Vechten, she decided to entrust Stieglitz’s papers to Yale. The papers would be shipped to New Haven over the next few years, but she restricted access to his correspondence with Emmy, Kitty, and Katharine Rhoades and stipulated that their own should be sealed until twenty years after her death. When financial support for the archive did not materialize, she donated the funds herself.

  O’Keeffe had been financially independent since the 1930s. With her inheritance (the equivalent of over $150 million today), she was wealthy. Moreover, she owned two houses in New Mexico—her base at Ghost Ranch, where she lived in the 1940s when not in New York, and an old adobe in Abiquiu being restored by Maria Chabot, the young woman who had, since 1941, been seeing to O’Keeffe’s needs there. Chabot completed renovations in 1949. That year, after concluding her affairs in New York, O’Keeffe returned to New Mexico for good.

  Moving had long been her way of escaping to a sense of greater freedom. Even so, O’Keeffe’s farewell to the city where she had lived for nearly thirty years stirred up the complex emotions implied in her 1949 painting of the Brooklyn Bridge. Unlike recent depictions of this epic symbol, O’Keeffe’s is deeply personal—perhaps “an abstract double portrait of herself and Stieglitz.” Their rapport, figured in the heart shape formed by the network of cables below the bridge’s neo-Gothic ogives, is also implied in the gradation of blacks, whites, and browns—the hues of Stieglitz’s medium. Yet the composition leads one’s eye beyond the bridge to the blue sky “calling—as the distance that has always been calling to me” (as O’Keeffe wrote of another blue horizon).

  Georgia wrote to Anita Pollitzer that she had not yet put the past behind her: “I still have so many tag ends of Alfred’s affairs to attend to….I will never be finished.” There was the matter of the Place. With the help of Bry, who came to Abiquiu that winter, Georgia turned Alfred’s haphazard accounts of her work into a consistent inventory, then put her mind to closing the gallery. She asked Beck to mark the occasion with a joint show of her reverse paintings on glass and Georgia’s canvases. When Beck bowed out due to apprehensions about New York, Georgia replied, “You make me feel very tough that I can still start out for that horrid old town.”

  “Georgia O’Keeffe, Paintings 1946–1950” failed to excite much interest in the art world, where the loose, disruptive canvases of the Abstract Expressionists held sway. The exhibition, including eight canvases entitled In the Patio, nine of cottonwood trees, and assorted landscapes and flowers, emphasized her southwestern sources, a lexicon by then at odds with the trend toward subjectless art. O’Keeffe’s Brooklyn Bridge, her only canvas from the Stieglitz era, hung next to the somber Black Place Green, a juxtaposition that dramatized her turn to the majestic paintings for which she would increasingly be known.

  O’Keeffe’s new show received faint praise. The Times called her “an enigmatic and solitary figure in American art”; the critic’s somewhat tepid review began, “Admirers of the decorative art of Georgia O’Keeffe may well encounter surprise”—the surprise being her choice of trees rather than bones or flowers, and the fact that they were “suggested rather than realized.” McBride noted her pared-down technique, “an increased urge to dispense with all fripperies.”

  Georgia maintained her composure despite the lack of enthusiasm. “I have always been willing to bet on myself,” she told Schubart. “I dont even care much about the approbation of the Art world.” Once in New Mexico, she rejoiced, “I can not tell you how pleased I am to be back in this world again….I feel about my friends in N.Y. that I have left them all shut up in an odd pen that they cant get out of.”

  O’Keeffe’s world offered her more than the chance to dispense with “fripperies.” Since her discovery of Ghost Ranch a decade earlier, she had
been working to remake her life in that landscape: “All my association with it is a kind of freedom,” she observed. In 1937, after three summers at the dude ranch, she moved to an adobe on the property, two miles from the main house—in direct communion with the landscape. O’Keeffe striped pinkish reds and yellows across her canvases to depict the cliffs looming beyond the ranch (Red and Yellow Cliffs) and limned the distant Pedernal mesa in glowing blues (Red Hills with Pedernal). The Pedernal, her “private mountain,” would recur in numerous compositions, paired with a totemic deer’s skull or framed by a shape suggesting a pelvic bone. O’Keeffe bought this adobe in 1940, despite its lack of heat or running water, because she loved the solitude.

  But it was a difficult place to inhabit by herself. In 1940, she met Maria Chabot, a young woman whose local knowledge and independent mind appealed to her so much that she invited her to Ghost Ranch. Chabot had left school at fifteen. A Spanish speaker and an aspiring writer, she had lived in Mexico, studied Spanish colonial artifacts, and created the craft markets in Santa Fe as part of her work with the Association of Indian Affairs; when they met, she was running the ranch of O’Keeffe’s friend Mary Wheelwright, who collected Navajo art. Chabot offered to manage O’Keeffe’s encampment so she could devote herself to painting. Each summer, Chabot laid in supplies, kept house, and organized expeditions to O’Keeffe’s favorite spots, including the otherworldly rock formations she called “the White Place,” which she painted after nights camping amid its towering cliffs and spires.

  Maria’s spirit of adventure complemented Georgia’s in other ways. During the war years, when food was rationed, they worked to be self-sufficient. Meals were often made with canned goods enhanced with spices. Georgia told the Stettheimers about scouring the mesa for a plant called chimaja: “I loved walking in the low sun—evening light through the red and purple earth—bending or kneeling often to pick the small fragrant leaves….It entertains me too—to find something to eat—growing wild out in that bare place.” After Maria planted fifteen acres of beans, Georgia boasted, “We manage very well—canning and drying and preserving….Those beans mean steady contact with the Spanish people of the valley.”