Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Now that she was free from her obligations in Amarillo, Bement advised her to study with Dow at Columbia Teachers College and to complete the requirements for a teaching certificate. Aunt Ollie agreed to underwrite the venture.

  When the twenty-seven-year-old O’Keeffe arrived in Manhattan in September 1914, she saw that much had changed in seven years. Greenwich Village and Paris were dancing a tango of heady cultural exchange, and the entire city seemed electric with the afterglow of the Armory Show. All that had previously been accepted and understood as the status quo had been upturned, and in cafes and bars, people were talking about modern art.

  She rented a tiny room for four dollars a week and permitted herself one luxury, a pot of red geraniums set out on the fire escape ledge. She looked up her old friend Dorothy True, a pretty and adventuresome blond whom she had met at the Art Students League. More important, she met the young woman who was to change her life—Anita Pollitzer.

  The three aspiring artists, who addressed one another with the formal “Miss” before their last names, all attended the drawing class of Charles Martin at Teachers College. They were considered sufficiently advanced in their talents to warrant a special screen to separate them from their less accomplished classmates; they were entitled to draw from still lifes of their own creation as opposed to copying from plaster casts.

  In preparation for her New York studies, Bement had told her to look at the reproductions in Eddy’s book and to read Kandinsky, where she was struck by the artist’s assertion that colors “awake in the soul emotions too fine to be expressed in words.”17 Within the first months of classes, O’Keeffe began exploring her considerable gifts as a colorist. “I went mad with color, that winter in New York,” she said. “In that color class I used to go crazy. . . . I was liking such snorting things.”18

  However, the theories of Kandinsky and Dow did not release her from the confines of realism. In Dow’s printmaking class, she completed Lady with Red Hair, a monotype of the simplified profile of Dorothy True against a blue background dotted with white outsized snowflakes. A pointillist still life of a yellow plate, green fruit, and statuette of a red horse appears very much the class assignment.

  Although friendly with True, O’Keeffe preferred the company of Pollitzer. At twenty, Pollitzer was the youngest daughter of a well-to-do cotton broker in South Carolina. Never having lived in a big city before, she was irrepressibly optimistic about the cultural and intellectual potential of Manhattan. She was seven years younger than O’Keeffe, yet the two women developed a deep friendship.

  It was Pollitzer who introduced O’Keeffe to early feminist writings and ideas, convincing her to join the National Woman’s Party, which advocated suffrage and the emancipation of women. But politics was just one of Pollitzer’s many enthusiasms. Perky and girlish, with a mop of curly dark hair, she raced around carrying stacks of poetry books, papers, and a hairbrush. O’Keeffe recalled, “She usually had a little paint on her face and hair . . . a very lively, very interested little person.”19

  By contrast, Pollitzer saw her older friend as “direct as an arrow and hugely independent.” O’Keeffe had grown quite lean, accentuating her high cheekbones and straight profile. Her hair, now longer, was straight, and she tied it back in a bun. Living on meager savings and the money borrowed from her aunt, she established firm priorities. Despite the allure of rallies and salons, dances and parties, she was sufficiently mature to recognize that she had only enough energy and time for painting and classes at school. Her art came first. As Pollitzer recalled, her “colors were always the brightest, her palette the cleanest, her brushes the best—although to accomplish this she would do without much else.”20

  O’Keeffe did, however, make visits to the art galleries. On her first Sunday in the city, she noticed that the American Watercolor Society was having its fall show, so she went to see what her old friends were up to. It turned out that they were not up to much. In the past six years, their work had not changed, and O’Keeffe said to herself, “Making a painting as good as these is no problem.”21 She made a watercolor of a slim girl in a black dress standing before some red salvia. She framed it herself and was unsurprised to find it accepted by the watercolor society for their spring show. After the show, she tore the painting up, realizing that she did not want to join the ranks of her “boring” colleagues.

  On another fall day, O’Keeffe and Pollitzer took the trolley car from Morningside Heights on 120th Street to the midtown Montross Gallery to see an exhibition of Dow’s prints and his paintings of the Grand Canyon. O’Keeffe found Dow’s theories more appealing than his actual paintings, but she took into account that they were composed from photographs taken on trips to the Grand Canyon in 1911 and 1912. She, too, would eventually use photography in the composition of her own pictures.

  Of all the galleries, O’Keeffe and Pollitzer most frequently visited 291. “I didn’t understand some of the things [Stieglitz] showed, but it was a new wave, I knew that,” O’Keeffe recalled. “It showed you how you could make up your mind about what to paint.”22

  In December and January, O’Keeffe went to 291 to see the Cubist drawings of Picasso and Braque—works that were on loan from Picabia. “I looked at it a long time but couldn’t get much,” she told Pollitzer. Less perplexing to her was the dried and deserted wasp’s nest displayed on a pedestal as an example of nature’s sculpture.

  In the midst of a full-blown infatuation with Katharine Nash Rhoades, a beautiful thirty-year-old painter and poet who was both independently wealthy and in love with him, Stieglitz was quite unaware of O’Keeffe’s visits to 291. During the early spring of 1915, he exhibited Rhoades’s naturalistic paintings along with those of her attractive friend Marion Beckett. Steichen’s marriage to Clara was troubled; his wife claimed that her husband was having an affair with Beckett, the privileged daughter of New York solicitor Charles H. Beckett. (In 1919, Clara filed divorce papers charging Beckett with alienation of affection and asking for two hundred thousand dollars in damages, a lawsuit that made the headlines of the New York Times.) Steichen denied any infidelity and maintained that Clara was pathologically jealous.23 Meanwhile, Clara poured out her suspicions and accusations in letters to Stieglitz, who was contemplating his own infidelity with Rhoades.

  Though he was tired of his adversarial marriage to Emmy, Stieglitz could not commit fully to a relationship with Rhoades. After her only exhibition at 291, a heartbroken Rhoades burned all of her canvases and gave up the notion of being an artist. Later, the journalist and collector Agnes Meyer introduced Rhoades and Beckett to the Detroit industrialist Charles Freer, who referred to the trio as “The Three Graces.”

  The profits from his American Car and Foundry Company enabled Freer to pursue his passionate collecting of the Orientalist work of his friend James McNeil Whistler and of Chinese and Japanese art; over time, his holdings became incorporated into the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art.24 Rhoades became Freer’s companion and assistant, and ultimately, an expert on Oriental art.25

  O’Keeffe and Pollitzer visited 291 frequently, and it was the gregarious Pollitzer who initiated a friendship with Stieglitz. He asked her such personal questions that O’Keeffe backed away, thinking, “That isn’t for me. Let them talk if they want to.”26 Still inexperienced for her age, O’Keeffe was frightened of Stieglitz’s presumptuous and intimate manner. His advances had already discouraged True from visiting the gallery alone.

  In the late spring, when O’Keeffe and Pollitzer stopped by 291 to see the Marin show, Stieglitz was complaining loudly that Marin had spent all of his recent earnings to buy an island off the coast of Maine. For Stieglitz, this meant having to sell yet more paintings, so that the irresponsible Marin would have something to live on that year. Stieglitz’s irritation was O’Keeffe’s revelation. When she saw Marin’s fractured depiction of the fifty-five-story Woolworth Building, then the tallest building in the world, she exclaimed, “I was crazy about (it) flying around—fall
ing down”27 The fact that his watercolors of seascapes and skyscrapers were selling for enough to pay for an island residence meant that she, too, might support herself by selling her paintings.

  O’Keeffe had decided to become an artist before her family had lost its money and social position. Reluctantly, she had come to accept the identity of art teacher rather than artist. Marin’s success illuminated the possibility that one could make a living from painting.

  Although she was enrolled as a candidate for a bachelor of science degree in fine arts education, O’Keeffe had not improved academically. At the end of the year, she received a low C in the principles of teaching, and a D in English. (Her spelling and punctuation remained determinedly eccentric.) Yet in a July 1915 job recommendation, Dow said that he had heard good things about her teaching—she hadn’t taken his senior teaching methods course—and he praised her abilities as an artist, calling her “one of the most talented people in art that we have ever had.”28

  Before leaving New York at the end of the spring term, O’Keeffe stopped by 291 to insure that future issues of Camera Work would be forwarded to her in Virginia. She found the gallery empty but heard some “talk behind the curtains.” Without calling to Stieglitz, she left out of shyness. “I even liked it when there was nothing,” she told Pollitzer.29

  She returned to Charlottesville that summer knowing her time in New York was over; she had to make the transition to full-time teacher yet hold onto her dream of becoming a professional artist.

  Her prospects did not look good. Frank O’Keeffe’s creamery failed that year, and, with Ida’s blessing, he left Charlottesville to pursue a new job inspecting buildings around the state. Francis, an architect, had moved to Cuba to design schools for the government. Alexius was studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Catherine returned to their home state and entered the nurse’s training program at Madison General Hospital. Anita was training to be a nurse at St. Lukes Hospital, while Claudia attended high school in Charlottesville. O’Keeffe ran her mother’s boardinghouse while teaching three classes with Bement.

  That summer, O’Keeffe painted a Matisse-inspired portrait of Catherine with bright red hair contrasting with her violet dress and posed against a leaf-green background. It was done on the back of O’Keeffe’s commercial illustration for an advertising agency in Chicago, a watercolor of a woman in an olive coatdress seated in a green field. Years later, Catherine sent her vibrant portrait to be framed, and the craftsman exposed the side that he preferred—the Art Nouveau–style illustration—and hung it in his shop window. To be fair, both paintings were accomplished, but O’Keeffe wanted no evidence of her stint in commercial art.30

  After only a few weeks back in Charlottesville, O’Keeffe was despondent. She welcomed letters from the ebullient Pollitzer, who began addressing her as “Pat” rather than “Miss O’Keeffe.” O’Keeffe agreed with the change, saying, “it always seemed funny that we called each other Miss.”31 By the end of the summer, O’Keeffe was able to confess to her young friend that she was in love.

  Arthur Whittier Macmahon, a political science professor at Columbia University, was teaching at the University of Virginia that summer. The son of liberal, well-educated parents, he was the valedictorian at his graduation from Columbia University in 1912 and had received his master of arts degree in 1913. He had roomed with the handicapped writer Randolph Bourne and traveled with him in Europe. O’Keeffe later said that she was impressed that Macmahon “judged people by the way they treated the crippled Bourne.”

  One can see the mutual attraction—two bright, attractive loners vibrant with all the ideas and theories of lively Manhattan were soon drawn to one another in slow-paced Charlottesville. Macmahon shared her passion for long walks and, the consummate intellectual, he was fascinated by her intuitive and sensual relationship with nature. When they stopped by a stream, she didn’t hesitate to pull off her shoes, though not her stockings, and soak her feet in the cold water. Gently stroking a leaf, she pointed out its velvety surface.

  During the last months of summer, O’Keeffe took Macmahon hiking and camping along the trails of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Mostly, he talked and she listened. O’Keeffe was drawn to men who could be her teachers, though Macmahon was three years younger. Dannenberg had been a fellow student but more experienced in the ways of the world; Macmahon could explain social and political developments in ways that she could understand. “We had a great time,” she wrote to Pollitzer. “I have almost a mania for walking and he did too so we just tramped—and tramped and tramped. He gave me so many new things to think about and we never fussed and never got slushy so I had a beautiful time and I guess he did too.”32

  VII

  Although she’d found love in Charlottesville, O’Keeffe still needed a job. She applied for the position of drawing supervisor for the schools of Wilmington, Delaware, but while she awaited a reply a job offer from a two-year Methodist teachers’ college for women in Columbia, South Carolina, arrived in the mail. With a teaching load of only four classes a week, the position would allow her time to explore the creative urges spawned by Dow’s theories. “I had gotten a lot of new ideas and was crazy to get off in a corner and try them out,” she said.1

  She was hesitant to make firm plans, however. Macmahon had returned to New York, and she hoped that he would invite her visit him there. When O’Keeffe didn’t hear from him, she took the initiative, confessing her unease at being the first to resume their relationship: “I started not to—then I thought no—that would be playing a game—and games don’t interest me like they do most women,” she wrote. “I want to write you so I will.”2

  When this strategy failed to elicit his invitation to come to New York, she mailed her letter of acceptance to South Carolina, just four days before classes started. “It would probably be good for me to sit down and slave by myself for a year,” she wrote Pollitzer, adding that South Carolina “will be nearer freedom to me than New York.”3 She reminded her well-to-do friend, “You see I have to make a living. I don’t know that I will ever be able to do it just expressing myself as I want to—so it seems to me that the best course is the one that leaves my mind freest.”4

  Columbia College had a reputation for training young ladies from prosperous southern families to become music teachers. But the war in Europe had brought about shipping embargos and eliminated many markets for American cotton, and enrollment at the college had fallen to one hundred and fifty students. The buildings were run down, there were few supplies, and half of the faculty had been let go. The school administrators, however, considered an art teacher to be essential.

  The school was situated two miles north of the capital city of Columbia. Known for its pretty antebellum homes, broad green parks, and the University of South Carolina, the town failed to impress O’Keeffe, who, upon arrival, dismissed it a “confounded place.”5

  She lived in a small dormitory room, which suited her lack of commitment to the position. Despite the civilized presence of her neighbors—a professor of literature named James M. Ariail, his wife, and their four-year-old daughter—she found Columbia to be even slower and more backward than Williamsburg. “I never felt such a vacancy in my life. Everything is so mediocre,” she complained to Pollitzer. “All the people I’ve meet [sic] are all right to exist with—and it is awful when you are in the habit of living.”6

  Pollitzer, the sensible native of nearby Charleston, retorted, “It won’t hurt you to know tame people for a little while.”7

  Pollitzer had resumed classes at Teachers College as well as at the Art Students League, which meant regular bulletins on the activities of mutual friends and teachers. At a time when O’Keeffe was floundering, Pollitzer remained her loyal fan. She reported that O’Keeffe’s design for a surface pattern class was on display in a glass case at the college. “It knocked me flat on my back,” she exclaimed, adding to the letter a sketch of O’Keeffe’s drawing of three floating targets crowned by three little a
rches.8

  O’Keeffe eventually took refuge in the natural beauty of the South Carolina countryside. During the balmy fall afternoons, she hiked through the pine forests of the Appalachians and collected bright chrysanthemums to decorate her dormitory room. Occasionally, she took her students with her, impressing upon them the need to pay attention to their surroundings. “We all stood still and listened to the wind way up in the tops of the pines,” she told Pollitzer.9 During the lonely nights, O’Keeffe took solace in playing her violin, though she played with more feeling than talent.

  Although she was poorly paid, O’Keeffe had an abundance of free time. Columbia was the crucible of isolation where she transformed her years of study with Dow and Bement into an art of her own. Every week, she wrote copious letters and sent rolls of drawings and pastels to Pollitzer—the only person she entrusted with her nascent ideas. Identifying her feelings with the brightly colored flora of scarlet cosmos and lavender petunias, she wistfully queried, “Do you feel like flowers sometimes?”

  Along with other works that O’Keeffe found troubling, these drawings have disappeared over time. “I always have a curious sort of feeling about some of my things,” she wrote. “I hate to show them—I am perfectly inconsistent about it—I am afraid people won’t understand them and—and I hope they won’t—and am afraid they will.” Her ambivalence stemmed from a dawning awareness that her most intimate emotions were starting to reveal themselves in her art, an awareness that was heightened by the fact that another beau was seeking her attentions. It was a replay of her romance at Lake George nearly a decade before, though she pleaded to Pollitzer, “Don’t think me Man crazy.”10