by Dawn Tripp
I write back to her—Such glorious news, the thought of you here! And definitely, you should pursue your degree. You must plan to visit the Lake this summer. If money is any object for your schooling, I can help.
Who knows where I’ll scrape that money from, but I will.
—
I HELP STIEGLITZ hang the exhibition on the red velvet walls of the Anderson Galleries. It is not me, I tell myself, when I look at the woman set among his other things—visions of old New York, ferry boats, carriage horses, aeroplanes, and city streets—iconic images of his earlier career, before he became more well known for dealing in the work of others. Of the 145 prints he hangs to show, 46 are images of me. In the nudes, my face is cropped out.
Three thousand people attend the exhibition. When the reviews begin to appear, his disciples stress exactly what he wants them to stress: the severity, the revolutionary aspect of his vision and of The Portrait in particular.
But other reviewers do not. One critic writes that his photography is “essentially aristocratic and expensive. He spends an immense amount of time making love to the subject before taking it.” Some reviewers manage to do both, praising Stieglitz’s ability to capture the wholeness of a woman in her fragments and, at the same time, describing my body in rudely intimate terms: “the navel, the mons veneris, the armpits, the bones underneath the skin of the neck…the life of the pores, of the hairs along the shin-bone, of the veining of the pulse, and the liquid moisture on the upper lip…lucent unfathomable eyes, the gesture of chaste and impassioned surrender.”
It’s the scandal that drew them. They’re not after the art. I am his mistress. It’s not a stranger’s body they’re describing, but mine. My mind tumbles through black space. How could I not have seen this coming? I should have known. What have I done?
—
I LIE IN bed for most of the day. The little blue scrap of sky outside feels unthinkably bright. I close the curtains. He finds me there that evening.
“Shall we go to dinner?” he says.
“Not tonight.”
“You are not feeling well.” He stretches out on the bed beside me. “What is it?”
I want to press myself into him, slip under the slight dark curved space his neck makes near the sheet, disappear.
“Have I left you alone too many days?” he says. But he must know. I can’t look at his face. I look into that thin dark opening into the pale of the sheet beyond. “I can’t bear how they write—it’s degrading. This has nothing to do with art,” I say to that shallow dark curve of space.
He strokes my hair. “Dearest Love. One must be talked about and written about, for people to buy. They are talking about the woman in the photographs, yes, but now they want to know more about this mysterious young artist whose work they have not yet been introduced to. They are dying to see it. And they will come to see it, when we let them.”
“The affair is what they’re writing about—not the art.”
“You must not care what anyone writes,” he says firmly.
“But you care—you care more than anyone.”
“It’s gossip. It means nothing.”
I will remember this moment. The space under his neck. I cannot tear my eyes away from it for the whole time we are lying there. Such a narrow space, but wide enough I am sure to flee through.
—
AS THE SHOW comes to a close, he announces a sale price of five thousand dollars for one of his prints—a nude.
“A sordid amount,” I murmur, drinking tea.
“It’s unique,” he says. “The plate was destroyed. No other print of that image will ever exist.”
I set down the teacup. A bit of brownish-gray liquid has spilled onto the saucer, making a sludgy mark.
“Sometimes it seems like you enjoy this attention,” I say quietly.
“Would you prefer I fail?” I glance up. His eyes are cool. It feels strange, that coldness. I turn away.
“No.”
“Darling,” he whispers, his hand reaching across the table toward me. “Don’t you trust me? This will only help you. Even McBride, whom I can never win over, is already aware of your work.”
“He’s never seen my work.”
“That doesn’t matter. When it’s shown, he’ll be looking for it. All of them will.”
—
IN APRIL, STIEGLITZ is invited by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to mount an exhibition. He accepts on the condition that they’ll include three works of mine. He takes the art by train to Philadelphia. While he is gone, I prep my canvases, canvas after canvas, running white lead over and over and over until the surface is smooth and shines, until it gleams with that thick whiteness—luminous, opalescent. I get out my paints, squeeze color onto the glass palette, perfectly neat, each remote from the others, an impeccable distance. I sit down at the easel, the whiteness of the canvas glares back at me. I put down my brush and go out for a walk.
—
ROSENFELD INVITES US to a concert of the Detroit Symphony, and after, we go to a restaurant on 59th. As they plow through chocolate éclairs, Rosenfeld is so witty—in his acerbic droll way—poking fun at Paul Strand’s new wife, Beck.
“Her father was a vaudeville troubadour,” he says with a flair of his fork, drops of vanilla cream clinging to the prongs. “Made his mark as manager of Buffalo Bill’s horrifically successful Wild West Show.”
I stifle a laugh. “I heard she was a basketball star.”
“She’s got the legs for it. Apparently, her mother has been trying to matchmake her into a marriage for quite some time.”
“Really?”
“Yes, because the tempers between them are so ferocious, she wants her out of the house.”
“Strand is swept away,” I say.
“She is beautiful,” says Rosenfeld. “And in search of something higher and more profound than secretarial work.”
“That’s what she does?”
“And I am afraid it’s a perfectly decent match, perhaps the only match, for her abilities.”
Stieglitz shakes his head, cutting off another sizable piece of his pastry. “Strand has introduced her to your work, Georgia.”
“Yes, that’s right!” Rosenfeld says. “He brought her by, didn’t he? And she was so taken by the O’Keeffes she saw, she has decided to roll up her sleeves and plunge into watercolors herself.” He shakes his head here and glances at Stieglitz who has an inadvertent smear of chocolate on the side of his face. “A little war paint, right there,” Rosenfeld says. “That’s the spot. You’ve caught it. Almost gone.”
“So what’s her art like, Pudge?” I ask.
“She is quite lovely, though a bit of a moll.”
“Her art?” I ask.
“Half a gnat of talent, perhaps less.”
I pick triangular pieces out of my grapefruit.
“Strand’s been making photographs of her, a serial portrait—sadly imitative of a far greater masterpiece.” Rosenfeld looks at me.
“Well for God’s sake warn her not to let Strand mount a show that will make her a public spectacle.”
Stieglitz glares at me.
“That’s not the end of it,” Rosenfeld continues, smoothly. “Beck’s begun to take after our exquisite Georgia in other ways as well—wearing her hair combed from her face, no makeup.”
“I’ve heard she wears trousers!”
“And the cigarettes,” he muses. “Don’t forget.”
I shake my head. “A woman is never going to gain anything dressing herself up like a man.”
VIII
I BEGIN TO resist, quietly, being photographed. I put him off gently. “I have work to do,” I say. “You know this.” He’s restless, though. He has been since his show closed and we were deposited back into the humdrum of everyday life. He’s begun to plan for the first major exhibition of my things—more than a year from now. He wants it a secret still. It will be his introduction of my work to New York, and only the closest in the circle know
.
By the end of June, the Lake is almost full: his mother, ailing, wrapped in shawls; Selma, along with his other sister, Agnes, her husband, and their sixteen-year-old daughter also named Georgia. We call her Georgia Minor or, more simply, The Kid. Stieglitz photographs her by the back door of the farmhouse, then naked in a window, clutching apples to her bare breasts—like some adolescent Eve—until her mother comes around the corner and ends it, urging her brother to find a more suitable subject.
He fumes over this.
“Convention is inane. I hate being boxed in by it.”
—
I TELL HIM I want to have my sister Claudia visit. She’s just arrived in New York.
“I know it might seem difficult with your mother unwell—”
“No, no!” he says, suddenly brightening. “Don’t give it a second thought. Invite her up. Ida, too. Have them both come. Yes. A little more O’Keeffe is what we need. I’ll write to them myself. Seligmann’s coming the week after next—I’ll have them come then.”
“No,” I say. “Not Seligmann.”
“He’s bringing the Hartley proof.”
“The essays?”
“Yes.”
“Then invite my sisters for the weekend before.”
I’m not keen on Seligmann—a writer for The New Republic and The Nation. I find him a tiresome sycophant, always trying to shoehorn himself into my good graces. But he’s editing Marsden Hartley’s new collection of essays, and there’s a chapter on women artists I’m featured in. I’m curious to see it.
—
CLAUDIE AND IDA come up from the city on the train and blow into the Hill—a sudden whirl of fresh air. I throw my arms around my youngest sister, then hold her at arm’s length.
“How you’ve grown up, Claudie! Ida, look at her. Our littlest one. All of twenty-one now.”
“And how lucky you are!” Claudia says. “It’s so lovely—the lake, this view.” She bubbles on. Stieglitz walks out to greet them.
“Hello. Hello,” he says smiling. “Welcome! So good of you to come. Wonderful to have you here.” He presses Ida’s hand, then takes Claudie by the arm, so charming. I watch how my youngest sister looks at him, shyly—he is that man after all, the one she did not trust once. She’s fallen under his spell.
“What shall we do first?” Claudia says, later at tea. “We have just these few days, and I want to do everything ten times over, at least. A hike tomorrow morning, do you think? We’ve brought our boots, right, Ida?” Ida nods and Claudia turns to Stieglitz. “Will you go with us and be our guide, Alfred. No bunk excuses please.”
“I’ll think about it,” he says. “There may be things I have to get to tomorrow.”
“Perhaps they can wait until the second half of tomorrow,” Ida says, wiping crumbs off her blouse.
“That’s right,” Claudia chimes in. “It’s a yes! Alfred will be with us. Now, which mountain—that one there, or that one farther down?” She points. “There must be a lovely sunset from that spot right there.”
—
WE SPEND THE weekend walking, laughing, swimming in the lake.
“He’s charming,” Ida says. “Every time I see him again, I remember just how charming.”
“Much less so before you came.”
“Why?”
“All sorts of reasons. His daughter is getting married—there’s rumor he won’t be invited. And his show is over. Everything got very dull for him after that.”
“But you were relieved.”
“Relieved to know I’d never let that happen again.”
Ida laughs.
“And in the last week or so, he’s been moaning on about our ‘poverty.’ ”
“Not everyone would consider it that.” I hear the sudden edge in her voice.
“His family may be wealthy, but we’re most definitely not.”
She doesn’t answer, but I know what she is thinking—we could get real jobs, be like normal people. Go out and work.
Claudie is swimming out toward the center of the lake. Her bathing costume is a size too large and drags around her hips. The sun is warm, the air is still.
I ask Ida if she’s heard from our younger brother, Alexius, in Chicago, and our sister Catherine who lives in Madison and just got engaged.
“Can’t you stay a little longer?” I say.
She doesn’t answer. I glance over my shoulder. She’s done a good sketch of the bank and the trees, the outline of a great blue heron. She shades in around the shoulder, and the darker shadows marking the feathers.
“Did you hear me?” I say.
“No,” she answers absently, without looking up, her round face focused on the paper as the pencil tip scratches back and forth. “I have to be back Monday.”
“Such a demanding schedule.”
“I love nursing. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
“And now it’s what Claudie will do as well.”
“Seems to be what the O’Keeffe girls are destined for. That is, apart from you.”
“I might like that kind of work,” I say. “Having a structure and schedule I don’t have to make for myself.”
Ida’s pencil stops then, and she looks at me. Sun on her face, she puts up her hand to shield her eyes. “That’s not who you are, or have ever been. And you know it.”
—
THE EVENING THEY leave, Herbert Seligmann arrives. The next morning after breakfast, I ask him if I can see that chapter in the proof of Hartley’s book that mentions me.
“It’s an extraordinary piece.”
“Yes, Stieglitz told me Hartley based it on my paintings he saw at the apartment.”
“More general really. He recognizes your vision as an abstract artist and he’s captured that.”
He hands me the pages. I take them down to the dock with a pencil, my feet dangling into the cold lake, and skim through until I find my name. Hartley writes about the life in my work, my place in modern art. He compares my work to that of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, but there is also this:
Georgia O’Keeffe has had her feet scorched in the laval effusiveness of terrible experience; she has walked on fire and listened to the hissing of vapors round her person. The pictures of O’Keeffe, the name by which she is mostly known, are probably as living and shameless private documents as exist….By shamelessness I mean unqualified nakedness of statement.
I look up. The light rings off the water. A mistake. There’s been a mistake.
It occurs to me that this is the only copy. It would be easy enough to lose it.
Stieglitz is on the porch, writing correspondence, a forgotten breakfast napkin still tucked into his shirt collar, the black folder of my work in its usual place beside him.
I hand him the chapter, the section marked off in pencil. “There’s been a mistake,” I say. “I’d like this to be changed.”
“Did you write on this?”
“I’ll erase it.”
“Give me the eraser.”
“I don’t have it here.”
“Then get it. This does not belong to us. You had no right to mark it up.”
“Read it, Alfred.” He’s trying to distract, to miss the point. He looks at me then, over the steel-rimmed glasses, and it must be something in my face that pulls him from the rut of the debate. His eyes drop to the page, and he reads. His brow furrows.
“I’d like it changed.”
“What?”
“These lines—these words, here, do you see? They are about the photographs, but the article itself is about my painting. ‘Living shameless private documents’—those words are about the photographs. They don’t belong in an article about my painting. You see?”
“I do.”
“Then you’ll ask him to remove those lines.”
“That’s the heart of the piece,” he says.
“It’s not the heart of the piece. When he talks about my work itself—how I use color, what I’m doing with abstraction. That’s the heart of
the piece.”
“It’s all excellent exposure,” he continues. “It will be good—”
“It’s not the kind of exposure I want.”
He sighs. “We’ve discussed this, Georgia.”
“We have not. This is my art he’s written about. We discussed your photographs. We never discussed this.”
“It’s a strong essay.”
“It’s going to be in a book—‘a woman turned inside out and gaping with deep open eyes.’ That is not my art. That is about the photographs.”
He studies me as if I am unwell. “It’s praise, Georgia,” he says. “It may not be the words you want, but it’s unmitigated praise. The piece is controversial. Just as your art is controversial. And this piece is, although you may not see it yet, everything your art is and can be: bold, glorious…” His face softens then. He looks at me so intently that the porch is gone, the lake, the house gone, it is only the two of us left in the world.
“Georgia, this is perhaps the hardest challenge for every artist. To see their art described in words, because how can words really ever capture the hours and vision that went into the work itself. No words can touch that.”
“But,” I say. “These words are not about my art. They are about your photographs.”
He looks away. He goes on. “Reviews will come. A whole landscape of them, describing the art of O’Keeffe, and at the end of the day, you will have to realize that all that matters, all that really matters, is that there was a feeling you had once, a feeling that burned in you enough that you took a few days or weeks of your life, and turned that feeling into color and form. What matters is that you keep yourself open to that—that raw inspiration, that madness, that passion; you must let yourself be driven by that need. You are a true artist. Your abstractions are ahead of our time. Who else is doing what you’re doing? No one. And I’m hell-bent the world will see it. And if some article in some book helps make that happen then I’m going to use it.”