Girl with Brush and Canvas

by Carolyn Meyer

  Leah was sure it was Zeller, and she asked Paul to go and talk to him and make him promise to leave her alone.

  “But this is none of my affair!” Paul said. “It’s something that ought to be handled by a lawman. Isn’t there a sheriff around here to take care of it? Or an order from a judge that he must stay away?”

  “It isn’t done that way in Texas,” Leah insisted. “Here we take care of things like this in person. Mr. Zeller frightens me!”

  I was annoyed at Leah for expecting Paul to solve her problem—just as she often seemed to be expecting me to solve her problems. But I did think it was ungentlemanly of Paul not to go to Zeller and settle the matter. That would have taken some pressure off me as well.

  It turned into a comic opera: Paul finally went to see Zeller and convinced him to come and apologize. When Zeller did show up, Leah and I had gone for a walk. Paul kept him there, but when we didn’t come back, Paul finally allowed him to leave if he promised to return. Zeller did return—this time with the sheriff and a warrant for Paul’s arrest, charging him with “forced imprisonment.” Leah and I arrived in time for her to explain the situation, and the sheriff, who must have struggled not to laugh, got everyone to apologize.

  Paul was embarrassed and angry. Nerves were on edge. We were all irritating each other.

  Occasionally Paul asked if I’d given any further thought to making a trip to New York. I said I had not, explaining again that I had no money, and that I was expected to teach summer courses in Canyon. Then one of us would change the subject.

  Now he brought it up again. “Mr. Stieglitz is worried about you, Georgia. He wants you to come to New York so he can help you. His niece, Elizabeth, has a studio you could use, at least for a while, until you find something else.”

  “I know. She wrote to me before I left Canyon. It’s very kind of her.”

  “Then why not accept the offer? Stieglitz is determined that you must be persuaded to come.”

  That was when I finally realized that Paul was there because Mr. Stieglitz had sent him. I had thought he’d come solely because he wanted to see me. But now I understood that he was pushing me away, and pushing me toward Mr. Stieglitz.

  I knew it was time for me to leave Waring. Leah was weary of me, and I was of her, but I still could not decide what to do.

  “My dear Georgia,” Paul said tenderly, reaching for my hand. “You must know that I love you. You are very beautiful, and such a remarkable woman in every way. But you need someone to care for you. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I do know.” I felt drained. The fatigue and weakness had come back.

  “Stieglitz has spent hours thinking about how to help you. He believes that you must come to New York.”

  “But is that what you want, Paul? For me to come to New York?”

  He sighed, shaking his head. “Sometimes I don’t know what I want. But you must decide what’s right for you.”

  What did I want? I was strongly attracted to Paul, I was sure he was just as strongly attracted to me, but he was an artist and nearly as poor as I was. I was drawn to Mr. Stieglitz, who was remarkable in his constant and caring support from so far away. But I wondered if being in the same city and seeing so much of each other would destroy the bond that existed between us and had been made stronger through our letters. Maybe it would be better to remain far apart—better for him with a wife and daughter, and better for me as an artist.

  Then a wire arrived, delivered by the telegraph operator, who brought it on horseback from the train depot.

  GEORGIA YOU MUST COME SOONEST STOP STIEGLITZ

  A decision could not be delayed any longer, and I made it.

  I showed the wire to Paul. “Tell Mr. Stieglitz I’m coming,” I said.

  PART VII

  “Success doesn’t come with painting one picture. It is building step by step, against great odds.”

  27

  New York—Summer 1918

  MR. STIEGLITZ WAS WAITING ON THE PLATFORM when the train pulled into Penn Station. Although I’d thought I was better—had nearly recovered, in fact—I was so exhausted, so weak and feverish when we arrived that I could barely stand. Paul embraced Mr. Stieglitz, gave me a quick kiss, and disappeared into the crowd.

  My benefactor, my guardian angel, or whatever role it was that Mr. Stieglitz had taken on, helped me to a taxicab and gave the driver the address of his niece’s studio. He half carried me up three flights of stairs. One room of the tiny apartment was outfitted as a darkroom; the other, with windows and a skylight, was where I immediately collapsed onto the bed and closed my eyes.

  For the next few weeks Mr. Stieglitz fussed over me constantly, nursing me patiently back to health. He came every day, bringing eggs that his friend Arthur Dove had sent from his chicken farm in Connecticut. “I gave Arthur his first show at 291,” Mr. Stieglitz told me, carrying a tray with an egg he’d boiled perfectly and toast he’d buttered and kept warm under a napkin. “One of America’s first abstract expressionists. You remember the little pastel that hung in my office?”

  “I do.” And Mr. Bement had shown me reproductions of Dove’s work. “Please thank him for the eggs, and for his wonderful work. He and I see things very much the same way.”

  We talked as much as my strength would allow, continuing the intimate conversation—about art, about life—that we’d been having through our letters for more than a year.

  I stopped calling him Mr. Stieglitz. From then on, it was simply Stieglitz; I never called him Alfred. We drew closer and closer, and within a month of my arrival in New York we had become lovers. He set up his camera, and I posed for him whenever he wanted. He moved into the studio with me. I began to paint again.

  But the summer was passing, and I was expected back in Canyon at the end of August. Again I had to make a decision: to go or to stay.

  Stieglitz asked, “What would you do if you could do absolutely anything you wanted for a year?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “I’d paint.”

  “I can make that possible for you,” he said.

  Stieglitz himself had very little money—his wife was the wealthy one—but he somehow persuaded his brother to lend him a thousand dollars.

  “I love you,” he told me after he’d made the arrangements. “This is your future as an artist.”

  He had given me an enormous gift: I would not have to teach. With Stieglitz’s encouragement, I abandoned the idea of going back to Texas and resigned my position—probably to the relief of everyone in Canyon.

  I wrote to Claudie, explaining that I was staying in New York, with whom, and why. She wrote back that she would stick it out in Canyon for another year, and then she planned to enroll at Columbia Teachers College and get a degree.

  I remember when you took every cent of your savings to go to New York to see him, Claudie said. I’m not at all surprised you’re with him. Besides, it’s your life, no one else’s.

  Stieglitz was intense and eccentric, as one might guess from his wild hair and piercing dark eyes and excited way of talking. He could be incredibly stubborn about little things, like how long a soft-boiled egg should be boiled. He hated change—he wanted everything to remain the same, always. He was also passionate and tender and as energetic as a man half his age.

  He adored me, and I was mad for him.

  Naturally, people soon found out about Stieglitz and me. We made no secret of our relationship. Some were shocked and outspoken about their disapproval. Although I was thirty years old and was used to living as I pleased, I felt guilty about living with a married man. Stieglitz’s wife was furious. His daughter, Kitty, took her mother’s side and was also furious. I hadn’t had any contact with my brother Francis in years, but I imagined he would have been severely critical. Alexius was sternly condemning—not only because Stieglitz was a married man, but because he was a Jew; somewhere along the way my favorite brother had become anti-Semitic.

  But not everyone disapproved: Stieglitz’s m
other insisted that he bring me to their summer home on Lake George, and from the start she welcomed me as part of the big extended Stieglitz family. It was a marvelously happy time for both of us. Stieglitz took photographs and developed them in an old greenhouse that he’d somehow made lightproof, and I painted and painted—abstract watercolors of trees, a forest fire, canna lilies. Every evening, after dinner with the raucous Stieglitz clan, he and I rowed out onto Lake George, where the only sound was the creak of the oars and the lap of water against the hull. We watched in blissful silence as the sun disappeared behind the mountains and twilight descended, and rowed back by moonlight.

  The war in Europe raged on through the summer with no end in sight. The newspaper headlines delivered nothing but bad news. The former president Teddy Roosevelt’s youngest son, Quentin, had been killed, along with thousands of our “doughboys.” The Germans had crossed the Marne River, not far from Paris. I heard that Ted Reid was in the Signal Corps and still hoping he’d learn to fly. Alexius had been sent home on a stretcher from the war in France with lungs badly damaged by poison gas. Paul Strand came by to tell us that he’d enlisted in the army and thought he’d be assigned to the Medical Corps. Stieglitz could hardly bear to speak about the war.

  Then the tide turned, and in November, just days before my thirty-first birthday, the Germans surrendered. The armistice was signed on November eleventh. The Great War was over. The city was a madhouse, the streets jammed with people screaming, cheering, and crying.

  In the midst of all the joyful celebration, I received a telegram that my father had died.

  Papa had been working as a carpenter at an army base in Virginia, and he’d fallen off a steep roof. We had once been a close family, but although we still cared about one another, we had scattered and had little contact. There was no funeral. Ida, who was in nursing school, arranged to have the body sent to Sun Prairie to be buried in the Catholic cemetery alongside Papa’s parents and brothers. Mama’s bones would remain with her family in the Episcopal cemetery in Madison.

  I had not heard from my father in a very long time, but his death came as a great shock and affected me much more deeply than I had expected. I begged Stieglitz not to speak of it. I had to work through the loss alone.

  Yet despite the pain of Papa’s death and the corrosive gossip about my personal life, my work was getting better and better—watercolors of mountains and landscapes around Lake George, still life oil paintings when we were back in the city. I was painting what I wanted, and recognition of my work was growing. I was achieving everything I wanted as an artist.

  And Stieglitz was wholly responsible for it—not only with the hundreds of letters he’d written and the financial support he’d given me, but with his belief in me as an artist. His contacts with art critics and collectors, too, were crucial. He seemed to know everyone of importance in the art world, and he had a great sense of timing. He had shown my first work in 1917, when I was in Canyon, but he would not mount another exhibit until he felt the time was right.

  By 1923, I had done over a hundred pictures we both knew were worth showing.

  28

  New York—Fall 1924

  STIEGLITZ’S WIFE FINALLY GRANTED HIM A DIVORCE, and he wanted to get married. I did not. I was almost thirty-seven, and Stieglitz would soon be sixty-one.

  “I don’t see any reason to marry,” I told him. “We’re fine the way we are.” We had been together for six years.

  “I’d be doing it for Kitty,” he said. “She might feel differently about me if we’re married and she sees there is no way her mother and I would be together again.”

  I didn’t think that my marrying her father, or doing anything except disappear forever, would change Kitty’s feelings, but I finally gave in and agreed to the marriage. He’d be doing it for Kitty, and I’d be doing it for Stieglitz. The one thing I would not give in on, though, was changing my name. I was born Georgia O’Keeffe, and I would remain Georgia O’Keeffe.

  On a blustery December day a few months after his divorce became final, Stieglitz and I took the ferry from Manhattan to Cliffside, New Jersey, to meet our friend, the artist John Marin. John picked us up in his new auto and, with another friend, drove us to a justice of the peace.

  After we’d repeated the necessary words and signed the required papers, John drove us back to the ferry. Stieglitz and I were in the back seat, and when John took his eyes off the road and turned to say something, he struck a grocery wagon and then ran into a lamppost. The wagon was demolished and the auto banged up. No one was hurt, but it seemed like an ill omen all the same.

  A year after we were married, we moved out of the tiny studio and into an apartment on the thirtieth floor of the Shelton Hotel. I liked the simplicity of our life there: a room as bare as possible with gray walls, simple furniture draped in white linen, and nothing else. We lived without a kitchen and took our meals at inexpensive little cafés—I didn’t want to spend my time and energy on cooking and housekeeping duties.

  I painted the view from our windows high above the East River, especially the stark lines of the buildings at night. Stieglitz tried to talk me out of painting views of the city and wanted me to stay with landscapes and still lifes. “Nature is a more feminine subject,” he said.

  I ignored that advice. I didn’t believe that art had a gender, and I hated being referred to as a “woman artist.” Why must every art critic mention my sex? I could answer my own question: because the critics—all of them men—did not take women seriously as artists. When my paintings were shown at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, it was over the objections of the men in charge who did not want to have a woman’s paintings in the exhibit.

  My watercolors and oil paintings attracted a lot of attention, not just for my skill as an artist but for the subject matter that people found “shocking”—my enormous flower paintings. When Stieglitz saw the first one, even he was shocked.

  “I don’t know how you’re going to get away with anything like that. You aren’t planning to show it, are you?”

  Of course I was! If I painted a flower in its actual size, no one would pay attention to it and notice its beauty. But if I painted it in huge scale, people would be startled, they’d have to look at it, and then they’d see how beautiful it was.

  But he could not tolerate change of any kind—and that extended to my work.

  The same men who wouldn’t take women seriously as artists decided that my paintings were erotic. They wrote that the flowers were renderings of the female genitals. That had not been in my mind when I painted them. Those men were writing about what was going on in their own heads and had nothing to do with what was going on in mine. I resented their assumption that my paintings were about sex. I got sick of hearing about it and being asked about it, and finally I refused to discuss it at all.

  Stieglitz said I ought not complain; the pictures were fetching high prices.

  I continued to experiment with subject and style—landscapes, still lifes, abstract shapes. When I finished a painting, I’d hand it over to Stieglitz. He knew art collectors who were willing to pay top dollar for a painting, and he’d decide which collector was worthy of owning my work. I did a series of six small flower paintings that were hung together at a show. A collector—one whom Stieglitz had not met before—saw them and wanted to buy all six. Stieglitz quoted him a price that was outrageously high, and the collector immediately agreed. But even that didn’t satisfy Stieglitz, who lectured the buyer on the responsibility he would take on when entrusted with “one of the greatest works of our time.” To my surprise, the sale went through.

  I was now recognized as one of the most important abstract artists in the country, and my work was selling. Everyone assumed Stieglitz was wealthy, but money had always been a problem for him. He had not earned much from his photographs, and 291 lost more than it brought in. Fortunately for him, his former wife was from a rich family, and the other Stieglitzes were very well off, but it was always a struggl
e financially for the two of us.

  We cared deeply for each other, but from the beginning there were tensions in our marriage. I wanted to go new places and explore new things. Stieglitz wanted only his familiar routines and surroundings. He detested the sort of changes I thrived on. I was tired of spending rainy, cloudy summers at Lake George with three generations of the large Stieglitz family, plus all the friends who came there for vacations—their vacations, not mine. During the six months at Lake George each year, it was my responsibility to keep the place running. I craved solitude, I needed it to paint, but Stieglitz couldn’t bear to be alone. He had to have people around him.

  One of our visitors was Rebecca Strand, called Beck, whom Paul had married in 1920. The Strands’ marriage was turbulent. I liked Beck, but it was plain that Stieglitz liked her even more. Certainly he liked to photograph her, and she was not his only subject. Beautiful Katharine Rhoades was another Lake George guest who posed for him. I’d first seen Katharine’s paintings at 291 with Anita Pollitzer and Dorothy True when I’d been a student in New York, and had not been impressed by them. I remembered when Dorothy had suggested—jokingly, I thought—that Stieglitz’s interest in Katharine was more romantic than aesthetic. I tried to ignore his intense focus on these women and said nothing. It would not have changed anything.

  In New York Stieglitz had rented a small, rather shabby space we called the Room, where he exhibited my work as well as paintings by John Marin and Arthur Dove, and Paul Strand’s photographs as well as his own. We had been married less than a year when he met Dorothy Norman. She was twenty years old—forty years younger than my husband—and was married and the mother of a young child. She was also very rich. She began coming to the Room, and soon this foolish young woman had installed herself there to “help.” I could see that Stieglitz had fallen in love with her, as he had once fallen in love with me. Although he vigorously denied it, it was obvious to everyone that they were having an affair.