During this time, two codicils were added to O’Keeffe’s will. The first gave Hamilton the power to sell her Abiquiu house or otherwise dispose of it and compensated him for his services. The second, which undid the original will’s provision for the bulk of her estate to go to museums, left O’Keeffe’s paintings and properties—a sizable fortune—to Hamilton. Under the impression that they were to be married, O’Keeffe wore a white kimono on the day of the signing. She held on to the arm of the judge who was to have witnessed the document but, on reading it, declined to do so. Other witnesses were found; O’Keeffe signed in a quavery hand.
When President Reagan awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 1985, O’Keeffe was too weak to attend the ceremony. By then, she spent days in her room, facing the light that filtered through the window. As she gradually lost her sense of time, memories of Stieglitz came back to her. Hamilton visited every day but spent weekends with his family. She often asked him to drive her to Ghost Ranch; when he refused, she became petulant. The stress of taking care of her under these circumstances took a toll on Hamilton, and he kept threatening to leave.
In March 1986, Hamilton went to Acapulco for a vacation with his family. The housekeeper called to let him know that O’Keeffe was fading. Hamilton said to tell him if her condition worsened. That night, when her breathing became labored, O’Keeffe was taken to the hospital. She died at noon on March 6, while the Hamiltons were in transit from Mexico. She was ninety-eight.
In accordance with her wishes, Georgia was cremated and her ashes returned to Hamilton. He drove to Ghost Ranch, climbed to the top of the Pedernal, and scattered the ashes in the direction of her home there, over the high-desert land that she loved more than any other.
* * *
. . .
But this was not the end of the story. O’Keeffe’s family opposed probate by charging Hamilton with undue influence over her and challenging the codicils that radically enhanced his inheritance. During the ensuing case, Hamilton’s background was investigated, O’Keeffe’s domestic and medical personnel were brought in to testify, Doris Bry was subpoenaed, and some fifty people were interviewed. In 1987, an out-of-court settlement was reached, in which Hamilton accepted the family’s position: The codicils to her will were voided and its original terms accepted, including the distribution of the bulk of her work to museums. Hamilton kept Ghost Ranch, her letters to him, and a number of paintings and copyrights.
Although the parties to the suit agreed not to discuss the settlement, the National Gallery’s O’Keeffe retrospective became the occasion for Hamilton to tell his side of the story. It was not true that he had exercised undue influence: “Her health wasn’t what it had been but she knew what she was doing.” The retrospective opened in November 1987, when O’Keeffe would have been one hundred. Greenough, Hamilton, and Jack Cowart served as the editors of the catalog, which let O’Keeffe speak in her own voice through a selection of letters to Alfred, Paul, Rebecca, and others. Greenough notes, “The letters poignantly reveal her great love for Stieglitz and the landscape of New Mexico, and they speak of her struggle to construct a way of life that would accommodate both.”
Twenty-five years later, Greenough would publish My Faraway One, the edited O’Keeffe-Stieglitz correspondence, which invites one to follow the twists and turns of their relationship—for which these passionate spirits had no models. A few years before her death, O’Keeffe asked Greenough to take on this project, telling her only to “make it beautiful and make it honest.” Reading the record of their attempts to reconcile artistic, emotional, and spiritual fulfillment, readers may be moved by their wish to “touch the center” of each other, and by the story of their engagement with their fluctuating worlds.
ENVOI
Looking back at this quartet of strong-willed egos nearly one hundred years later, we can ponder the affinities chronicled in their vast correspondence—in this way, as O’Keeffe wrote to Stieglitz, “peeping over the rim into our world.” Their liaisons can also be traced when considering the artworks made by them for one another. For just as poets write sonnets, odes, or even limericks, so artists devise gifts for friends and lovers in the language of their shared pursuits.
For decades, Stieglitz’s intimates orbited around him like the planets of their own solar system. The idea of their circle as a distinct universe was understood by the recipients of affectionate gifts such as Dove’s 1925 abstract portrait of the Strands, Painted Forms, Friends. Displayed at Stieglitz’s “Seven Americans” exhibition that year, this assemblage paid homage to two of the circle’s most faithful members, whose labors, personal and artistic, supported the group’s commitment to “seeing.”
Dove’s portrait was surely in Rebecca’s mind when she devised a gift for Paul to express her sense of their marriage. In 1934, just months after their divorce, she painted an “object portrait” entitled Paul, which alludes to his metier in its shapes, especially the black circle suggesting a camera lens, and its dimensions (eight by ten inches, those of his photoplates). Perhaps the most eloquent items in this playful composition are the green twig of life and the red heart crowned with the letter P, symbolizing the bonds between them. At some point, she revised the inscription on the back to read “Paul/Taos/1934/Rebecca Salsbury James”—a farewell that became an au revoir in later years, when she found in Bill James the loving support that allowed her to flourish as an artist.
Although Paul and Rebecca maintained a strong connection, his gifts to her were ambiguous. He sent her each of his photo books, but none of them mentioned her. The magnum opus of his later years, these volumes would have brought to mind her role in the trips to the Gaspé, the Southwest, and Mexico that helped him develop his ideas about the sense of place. Yet his portrait of her, including more than one hundred images, was never shown; to the end of his life, he kept most of these negatives under his bed. The problem, he confessed to a friend, began when he came under the spell of Alfred’s portrait of Georgia: “He could not help reflecting something of that experience when he photographed Becky. But Becky was not Georgia, and he was not Stieglitz.”
More detached observers have found in these portraits a moving study of Rebecca’s subjectivity, her intensely focused search for a way of being in the world. The National Gallery’s 1990 exhibition of Strand’s work included several of these portraits, and a likeness of her graces the catalog’s cover. In 1996, an exhibition entitled “Rebecca” assembled fourteen portraits of her, which were published without comment except for enigmatic quotations from Strand, such as “All good art is abstract in its structure.” This indirect acknowledgment has served as her memorial until recently, when shows of her work began to afford her recognition.
It is not surprising that Paul and Rebecca sought to model themselves after Alfred and Georgia. Then as now, there were few examples of marriages that enhance the creativity of both partners, in which the claims of both head and heart are the bases for intimacy. Seen another way, shifts in the nature of connections among self-involved people, particularly artists, are inevitable. Yet the testament to these bonds, the exchanges that arose from the interlacing of their lives, still touch us.
In her eighties, Georgia reflected that her relationship with Alfred had been “really very good, because it was based on something more than just emotional needs.” She added, “Both of us were very interested in what the other was doing….Of course, you do your best to destroy each other without knowing it.” A few years later, she gave another account of his impact, one that speaks to his sway over the Strands and the rapport between the couples: “He gave a flight to the spirit and faith in their own way to more people—particularly young people—than anyone I have known….If they crossed him in any way, his power to destroy was as destructive as his power to build—the extremes went together.” She added, “I put up with what seemed to me a good deal of contradictory nonsense because of what seemed clear and bright and wonderful.”
> We can see in some of O’Keeffe’s tributes to Stieglitz—the illuminated Radiator Building, a 1927 cityscape with his name emblazoned in neon, and the 1949 farewell to the Brooklyn Bridge—her acknowledgment of what had been “clear and bright and wonderful” in their rapport. Still, recalling their long partnership as she chose Stieglitz’s portraits of herself for the Metropolitan Museum’s 1978 exhibition, she wrote with some ambivalence about his role as a source of light: “His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself.”
One could, of course, say the same of the foursome’s portrayals of their mercurial ties through their attempts to evoke the Zen-like closeness of artist and subject. Might such representations of the wish to perpetuate intimacy express at once the confines and the yearnings of the singular self?
Acknowledgments
I began this tale of a close-knit foursome with little sense of how intricate it would prove to be. What I first thought of as a story about creative affinities came to resemble a constantly changing choreography, one that figured the partners’ relations not in twos but multiplied four by four.
I started with Rebecca Salsbury’s letters at the Center for Creative Photography. The CCP staff guided my research in the Paul Strand Archive, which also holds Strand’s correspondence from Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others that allowed me to reconstruct the chronologies of their friendships. David Benjamin, Katie Sweeney, James Uhrig, and Shandi Wagner provided help of many kinds; Leslie Squyres gave generously of her time and attention over the course of the project.
With the assistance of Amanda Bock of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Department of Photography, I was able to study Strand’s portraits of Rebecca at a time when the PMA’s exceptional collection of his prints was still being cataloged, an invaluable resource for this project.
Sarah Greenough, Senior Curator and Head of the Department of Photography at the National Gallery of Art, arranged for me to examine original prints held there by Stieglitz and Strand, shared hard-to-obtain documents, and steered me in the right direction on numerous occasions.
This book would not have been possible without the aid of the staff at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the bulk of the documents consulted are held. Nancy Kuhl, Curator for Poetry, Yale Collection of American Literature, gave generously of her time; I also received assistance from Moira Fitzgerald, Anne Marie Menta, John Monihan, Matthew Rowe, Natalia Sciarini, and Adrienne Sharpe.
The staff of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum were unfailingly helpful. I would like to thank Tori Duggan, Elizabeth Ehrnst, and Kira Randolph, as well as Cody Hartley, Senior Director of Collections and Interpretation.
At the University of California, Santa Cruz, the staff of McHenry Library found whatever I needed; Dean Tyler Stovall and Irena Poli´c of the Department of Humanities gave invaluable support; Jennifer Chu offered help in the final stages; Jay Olson kept me digitally fit.
For access to material in the following private collections and for their insights, I am grateful to Alan B. Macmahon and Gail Macmahon Cornaro; Ellen Lowe and Sue Davidson Lowe; and the late Nate Salsbury III, Ellen Salsbury, and Peter Salsbury, without whose warm collaboration the story of Rebecca could not have been written.
For their gifts of time, materials, and advice I would like to thank the following institutions and people: Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Claudia Rice; Currier Museum of Art, Meghan L. Petersen; Harwood Museum of Art, Jina Brenneman and Debi Vincent; Lachaise Foundation, Paula Hornbostel; Monmouth County Historical Association, Laura M. Poll; Museum of International Folk Art, Laura Addison, Caroline Dechert, and Carrie Hertz; Museum of Modern Art Library, Lori Salmon; New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theater Division, Michael Messina; Roswell Museum and Art Center, Candace Jordan-Russell; Southwest Research Center, Nita Murphy; University of Delaware Library, Rebecca Johnson Melvin; University of New Mexico Art Museum, Bonnie Verardo; Wharton Esherick Museum, Katie Wynne.
Several people who knew my subjects personally or through their work helped me form my own picture of them. While Strand remains an enigmatic figure, the late Richard Benson illuminated his later years, as did John Walker, whose documentary Under the Dark Cloth is the best portrait of the photographer. Olga Vrana recalled moments with Strand when she was a child; Rebecca Busselle told me about her time with Hazel Kingsbury after his death. Calvin Tomkins, who interviewed both Strand and O’Keeffe for The New Yorker, encouraged me to see the group as a whole. The late Doris Bry shared recollections, including O’Keeffe’s high-handed treatment of her; Tony Berlant described O’Keeffe at Ghost Ranch. I gained insight into life in Taos from Susan Dicus Chittim, Florence Ilfeld Beier, and Rena Rosequist; Kevin Cannon invited me to the Casita Rosa when I was staying at Los Gallos, now a guesthouse and cultural center that still evokes the reign of Mabel Dodge Luhan.
I relied on Katherine Hoffman and Richard Whelan for their authoritative work on Stieglitz and Suzan Campbell for her pioneering thesis on Rebecca Salsbury James. Of the extensive scholarship on O’Keeffe, several studies were indispensable, including the biographies by Laurie Lisle, Roxanna Robinson, and Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, volumes by Barbara Buhler Lynes, and studies by Charles Eldredge, Sarah Greenough, Sarah Whitaker Peters, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, and Sharon R. Udall. My Faraway One, volume 1 of Greenough’s magisterial edition of the Stieglitz/O’Keeffe correspondence, came out as I was starting this project, making it possible to correct past misunderstandings and offer new interpretations. (While I am indebted to books by these and other scholars of the period, any factual or interpretive errors are my own.)
Many people provided responsive listening, material or moral support, and encouragement. They include Tenshin Reb Anderson, Kristina Baer, Janeen Balderston, Mary Blume, Scott Bongiorno, Jesszell Boyer-Marie, Cherie Burns, Karen Butts, Candace Calsoyas, Clark Carabelas, Warwick Clarke, Wanda Corn, Roland Cortadellas, Françoise Develay-Cortadellas, Sue Dirksen, Jean Englade, Michael Englade, Jack Eschen, Pamela Hall Evans, Michael Fenisey, Christa Fraser, Denis Gallagher, Peter Gessner, Helen Greenwood, Kokyo Henkel, Patricia Hewitt, Tom Honig, Tom Hurwitz, Michèle Jolé, R. R. Jones, Jerry Kay, Stephen Kessler, Rosie King, James Krippner, Cecily Langdale, Richard Menschel, Drew Miller, Nita Murphy, Mary Nelson, Sarah-Hope Parmeter, Jory Post, Flo Queen-Stover, Nanette Schuster, Liz Sheehan, Bernabe Struck, Terese Svoboda, the Tuesday group, Angela Thalls, Andres Vargas, Melissa West, Michael Wolfe, and Susan Wyndham. Valda Hertzberg, my beloved mother, urged me to keep writing as her life was coming to a close; Alexandra Kennedy saw me through the later phases of the book and into the next; my family provided moral support despite my immersion in other people’s lives.
Special thanks for reading portions of the manuscript go to Anne Bast Davis, Sarah Greenough, and Annie Bishai, whose invaluable suggestions and perspectives have enriched it. This book could not have come to completion without the spirited assistance of Chessa Adsit-Morris, whose meticulous research and organizational talents ushered the project through months of manuscript preparation and image research.
I also wish to thank the following for their help with the challenges of securing image rights: Sean Campbell, Buffalo Bill Center of the West; Charlotte Chudy, Aperture Foundation; Anita Duquette, Whitney Museum; Ellen Grier, Condé Nast; Peter Huestis, National Gallery; Nigel Harrison, Blake Hotel Collection; Betsy Evans Hunt, Todd Webb Archive; Fernanda Meza, Artists Rights Society; Diana Reeve, Art Resource; Claudia Rice, Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust; Michelle Roberts, New Mexico Museum of Art; David Rozelle, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Scullawi, Crystal Bridges Museum; Richard Sieber, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Norm Scott, Ned Scott Archive; Laura West, Sotheby’s; the owners of work by O’Keeffe in private collections; and Paolo Gasparini, who graciously allowed me to reproduce his portrait of Paul Strand.
As always, I am grat
eful to my agents, Georges, Anne, and Valerie Borchardt. I have been fortunate to work once again with the exceptional people at Knopf. Thanks to Carol Edwards, for bringing consistency to the manuscript; Iris Weinstein for her care with the layout; Carol Carson for her imaginative cover designs; Marc Jaffee, for shepherding the book calmly and carefully through the many stages of production; and Bob Gottlieb, my perspicacious editor. I would not have attempted this tale of interwoven lives without his support; he is the best listener and reader one could hope to have.
Endnotes
The bulk of the Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Rebecca Salsbury Strand James archives—including correspondence, manuscripts, and other personal papers—consulted for this book are in the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale University. The bulk of the Paul Strand papers, including Rebecca Salsbury’s letters to him, are held at the Paul Strand Collection, Center for Creative Photography, at the University of Arizona.
I have also made extensive use of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume 1, 1915–1933, edited and annotated by Sarah Greenough (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2011). This volume is referred to in the notes as MFO; unless otherwise specified all correspondence so referenced is held in the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive at the Beinecke.
Other published works for which full references appear in the bibliography are referred to by the author’s name or, for frequently cited sources, initials. When more than one work by an author has been cited, the short title is given. Correspondence is referred to by the author’s name, or initials in the case of frequent citations.
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