Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Stieglitz and Strand fell all over themselves showing off for their visiting artist. On the way home, Stieglitz wrapped O’Keeffe in his great loden cloak. She proclaimed it a “great party and a great day,” rare words in her ever-cautious apportioning of enthusiasm.

  O’Keeffe returned to Canyon convinced that her ten days in the city had been a success. She felt more a part of 291, and Vanity Fair had purchased her illustration of a reclining debutante, largely due to Stieglitz’s friendship with editor Frank Crowninshield.

  It looked to be a slow, hot summer of teaching. She completed two realistic watercolors of the Canyon landscape, one of the orange and green canyon with crows and another of the red mesa. As was her habit, she was warming up for another foray into abstraction. Then, in early June, a letter arrived from Strand. She wrote back breathlessly,

  I knew you would write, knew . . . that I meant something to you—it was just a look in your eyes that made me turn away quickly—and wonder in a wild way . . .

  Then the work—Yes I loved it—and I loved you—I wanted to put my arms around you and kiss you hard. . . . Its so funny the way I didn’t even touch you when I so much wanted to. I don’t know why but it seemed that I mustn’t—that it wouldn’t be fair to you—I don’t know why. And afterward I was almost afraid to be alone with you.”8

  Strand, who was similarly smitten, had included one of his prints with his letter. She coyly remarked, “I think I’ll love your print more than you do. . . . I felt that I ought not touch you—Still am telling you that I wanted to.” Referring to Riverside Drive, where lovers strolled in the evenings, she added provocatively, “Take me out on the Drive some nights with you—will you?”9

  The sober-minded photographer had given O’Keeffe his copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot to read on the train trip west and she wished he had been there to read it to her. “I’ve been wanting to tell you again and again how much I like your work,” she wrote. “I believe I’ve even been looking at things and seeing them as I thought you might photograph them—isn’t that funny—making Strand photographs for myself in my head. . . . I think you people have made me see—or should I say feel new colors—I cannot say them to you but I think I’m going to make them.”10

  In fact, such pictures were painted only days after she wrote those words. “The moon seems very near full tonight—and quite near it is a very little star. The straight line where the ground and sky meet tonight is very wonderful as I see it out my window.”11

  O’Keeffe produced her boldest and most direct watercolors to date, a series called Evening Star. Intense rainbows are wrapped around a point of light like a vibrant, celestial target. Bold strokes of beryl and jade run along the bottom of the paper, pure ruby is rolled around in circles of mandarin and citrine. These watercolors bear witness to the startling force of modern painting, especially the unfussy compositions of modern photography as practiced by Strand. The stacked bowls, among Strand’s own favorite prints from 1916, is likely what he sent to O’Keeffe. It was a print she would have known from her trip to 291 and from Camera Work. This photograph is the likely source for her seven Evening Star watercolors with their stacked circles, one inside the other, replicating the shapes in Strand’s photographs. (The first in her series, simple tangerine sky and horizon, doesn’t feature the circular forms.) This was the second instance of photography directly affecting the composition of O’Keeffe’s painting, but it would not be the last.12

  She also painted Strand’s portrait in three entirely abstract watercolors of a strong, dark tubular shape surrounded by washes of yellow, blue, and red. (She must have felt them to be a success; she executed three more abstract watercolor portraits of her friend Watson, a mechanic in Canyon.) O’Keeffe wrote, “I sang you three songs—in paint. I’d like you to hear them. I don’t know why—but I would—it’s all the same song sung different ways. . . . I feel you took me with you—even though I’m not there at all.”13

  O’Keeffe wanted to write to Strand but was hesitant. She told him, “Write me so I’ll know where to send those letters to. I don’t know why—but I have a notion not to send to 291.”14

  O’Keeffe could hardly have been unaware that Stieglitz’s interest in her was bordering on the obsessive; he had written to her nearly every day for the past year and a half. But she did not want to jeopardize her professional relationship with him by calling attention to Strand’s interest in her. She made it apparent to Strand that she was granting secrecy to their correspondence, and that her feelings for him must be kept from Stieglitz, whom she considered more of a father figure. Unbeknown to O’Keeffe, Strand and Stieglitz were comparing notes.

  Strand’s next letter provided his home address, so they no longer corresponded care of 291. His letter put what she called “wheels in her head,” and, that evening, she walked in preoccupied silence until her sister complained that walking with her was “just the same as being alone.” Lying down upon the hard, desert soil, O’Keeffe watched heat lightning make “wonderful zigzags flashing all round of the edge of the sky.”15

  On a Sunday morning, after breakfast, she collected the mail and received another packet of small prints from Strand.

  I picked them up again and again—and found myself unconsciously looking off into space every time before I put them down. . . . It’s almost as though you are sitting by me—silent—yet telling me so many things I want—just to reach my hand out to you and let you hold it. Can you understand that—its different from telling you in words what they say to me—in a way it is much more real. Maybe that’s why I want to touch people so often—its only another way of talking. . . . The little prints make me conscious of your physical strength—my weakness relatively but that in spite of . . . my weakness I give you something that makes it possible for you to use your strength—or should I say express it. Is that why I wanted to put my hand in yours as I looked at them—I don’t know. Do you understand a little?

  The look in your eyes that startled me so . . . I had just run from eyes—I had run like mad only to find a glimmer of the same thing in new eyes—So I looked away—wondering. Wasn’t there any place to get away from that look—from folks that feel that way about me. My fault—yes. Maybe.16

  Strand’s letters to O’Keeffe have been lost or destroyed, but it appears that, like Macmahon, he was taken aback by the frankness of her emotions. He must have made some such protest, because her next letter was defensive. “If you knew more of me you would probably be disappointed. . . . You need not write me anymore if you don’t want to. I feel that in a way I am spoiling—maybe—a person you had made up that gave you pleasure. Honesty is a merciless thing. I don’t know whether it is worth while or not—Still I have never had any choice in the matter.”

  With that same disconcerting honesty, she carried on, “So many people had kissed me in such a short time—and I had liked them all and had let them all—had wanted them all too—It simply staggered me that I stood there wanting to kiss someone else—another one I thought—for goodness sake—What am I getting to—It wouldn’t be fair to you.”17

  O’Keeffe’s vacillating between dependence and independence had the desired effect of keeping her suitors confused. She seems to have suffered from feelings of insecurity whenever she was confronted with relationships or the prospect of commitment. “I seem to like many people enough to make them miserable—No one enough to make them happy. I am not fine—nothing fine about me. And I’m not sorry about it either. I’m only what I am—and I’m free to live the minutes as they come to me—If you know me at all you must know me as I am.”18

  In a punitive tone, she added that men

  never understand me—unless maybe Stieglitz does—don’t know that I understand myself—It’s really thinking a great deal of many—wanting to give much to many—because I some way seem to feel what they feel—never wanting to give all . . .

  As a woman it means willingness to give life—not only her life but other life—Nobody I know means t
hat much to me—for more than a moment at a time—I cannot help knowing that—the moment does not fool me—I seem to see way ahead into the years—always to see folks too clearly. It’s always aloneness.19

  When Strand told her that this last letter was unkind, she turned meek and apologetic. “I wanted to take the unkindliness away by putting my arms around your neck and asking you not to mind.”20 O’Keeffe had started to hate Canyon, the place that she had loved just a few months before, and she told Strand that her favorite picture was no more than a black piece of fabric in a black frame echoing the black view from her window.

  “I want to be out under the stars—out where there is lots of room,” she sighed. During one of her nocturnal rambles, she thought that the cities of Amarillo and Canyon “sparkle like black opals on the plains.”21

  The nets of stars that so sharply illuminated the darkness of the desert prompted her to return to the technique of making a grid of navy-blue watercolor—the gaps revealing white paper that created the effect of stars in blue sky. Starlight Night so pleased her that she later had it reproduced as her Christmas card.

  Staying up all night, she watched dawn radiate in auras above the horizon. “The light would begin to appear and then it would disappear and there would be a kind of halo effect, and then it would appear again,” she said.22 She captured that halation in three watercolors, Light Coming on the Plains, Nos. I–III. The circles within circles, this time rendered in livid monotones similar to the silvery neutrals of photography, once again recall Strand’s influence on O’Keeffe’s work.

  And so it went for many weeks as O’Keeffe encouraged Strand, discouraged Macmahon, dated Reid, and corresponded with Stieglitz. She dedicated sheaves of correspondence to the inadequacy of language. To Strand, she complained, “Queer that two folks have such a hard time to get acquainted.” Blaming Stieglitz, she added, “It wouldn’t have been so hard if nobody else had been in the world—that is—if other folks hadn’t scared us so.”23

  O’Keeffe’s state of emotional turmoil brought up unsettling memories, and after visiting a sick neighbor, she became so upset that her mother’s voice came to her in dreams. Lying in the dry heat of mid-July, soothing herself with the distant sound of lowing cattle, she wondered, “If I could compose music I’d make something that would sound like cattle.”24

  Then, abruptly, O’Keeffe’s letters stopped coming. Strand was staying in Twin Lakes when he wrote to Stieglitz at Lake George to see if he had heard from “Canyon” lately. “I haven’t,” Strand replied. “I suppose there is something that makes it impossible—something perhaps that I said or left unsaid—I don’t know.”25 Stieglitz reassured Strand, “Letter writing of all kinds to anyone—would have been forced—and as you know Canyon does not force.”26

  Stieglitz’s own position was constrained, as it had been with other women. “Of course, my own trouble is purely the family question—the same trouble I’ve had for so many years.” He wrote that his photography was stagnant. “I have tried several attempts to get something of the daughter. . . . She is really not easy.”27

  After the lengthy wait for a letter, Strand hardly was comforted by O’Keeffe’s next confessional, in which she announced that Reid had proposed: “He is like this country. . . . I believe I’d like to live with him—for a while anyway but I hate the idea of being tied—It seems I have never seen anyone with such damnable nerve—I don’t see how we could possibly make it anything. . . . We have laughed over it—and talked over it—both saying it looks impossible but that doesn’t phase him at all.”28

  After delivering her surprising news, O’Keeffe left for a month’s vacation in the Rocky Mountains with Claudia—leaving Strand in an uncomfortable state of limbo.

  A flood had washed out bridges along the most direct route through Denver, Colorado, so the two sisters bought passage on a train that traveled through Albuquerque, New Mexico. Georgia, who had never visited any of the Southwest except the flat terrain of the Panhandle, gazed out the window at a passing mosaic of rosy soil and blue-tinged mountains covered in piñon and fir.

  Upon arrival in Colorado, the sisters took a truck along a road so rutted that it took them five hours to travel twenty miles. Georgia sat in the front passenger seat, insisting, “I don’t like second hand scenery.”29 During the trip she resumed her epistolary flirtation with Strand, (avoiding any mention of Reid) and invited him to New Mexico, where “the nothing ness is several times larger than in Texas.”30

  Claudia remained in Boulder while her adventurous sister went to Estes Park, Denver, and Ward, as well as the Rocky Mountains. She sketched and painted watercolors of the mountains in the Indian Peaks area of Long Lake. In the first three watercolors of mountains and pine forests, the white of the paper is left blank to delineate snow on the lapis peaks, a technique that she continued to hone. In another five watercolors, Pink and Green Mountains, Nos. I–V, the mountains and clouds dissolve into arcs of luscious pastel. As refreshing as ice cream, these studies show how adept O’Keeffe had become in watercolor.

  During her travels, O’Keeffe was commissioned to design a window for the swimming pool complex at Denver’s Rocky Mountain Country Club. The drawing for the design was later featured in Vanity Fair as The Frightened Horses and the Inquisitive Fish. In graphic black and white, three sylphs prance among Art Nouveau waves carrying galloping mares and gaping salmon. Harking back to her days in commercial art, the window design also reveals a whimsical side of her personality that rarely appeared in her paintings.

  The sisters returned by way of Santa Fe, an artists’ colony of eccentrics and sophisticates from around the country. The light of the town was lucid and the colors scintillating. “I loved it immediately,” O’Keeffe recalled. “From then on I was always on my way back.”31

  Still, the Texas plains remained, “like a marvelous song too lovely to sing—to wonderful to try to sing.”

  Upon her return to Canyon, O’Keeffe found that Strand’s letters had piled up. Impetuously, she decided to end her relationships with Reid and Macmahon and wrote to Strand, “I feel as though I’ve just wiped my hand across the table they were all on and tumbled them all off. . . . They are all gone from the present anyway. And it’s a great feeling that I have of being gloriously free. Some would call it fickle—a ridiculous word. With me, it’s more a feeling of mastery of myself. I always feel like a sort of slave when I’m liking anyone very much.”32

  In the same letter, she wrote a lengthy fable of a chestnut tree that stops sharing its nutrients with its fellow trees in order to grow above them into cleaner air with better light to produce larger fruit. The taller tree is resented by other trees, but its fruit endures as theirs does not and its seed produces another lovely tree of equal quality. O’Keeffe explained that the tree was being “unsentimental.” It was a warning that her own survival depended upon her ability to be unsentimental.

  President Woodrow Wilson had called for a declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917, and Canyon was abuzz with patriotic enthusiasm. In a frenzy of excitement, mothers and wives cheerfully prepared picnic suppers for the young men who were going to war. Every week, the newspaper listed the boys being sent to the Army, and the Normal News column that traditionally chronicled events at the college was replaced by photographs, cartoons, and articles on battles at the front lines. Pollitzer, the devoted pacifist, sent her friend the anti-war Imagist poetry of Amy Lowell: Beginning of Guns as Keys: and the Great Gate Swings. Although Americans had been divided on the merits of intervention, after Wilson assured them that “the world must be made safe for democracy,” a juggernaut of patriotism rolled across the land.

  Before the war, German-Americans had been considered model citizens, but by the fall of 1917, they were being fired from jobs, humiliated, and ridiculed. Dr. Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony, was fired and interned as a dangerous alien. Conductors avoided playing works by Mozart and Beethoven. Libraries removed, and in some cases burned b
ooks by German authors. Teddy Roosevelt condemned “those who spiritually remain foreigners in whole or in part.” Congress passed wartime laws against espionage and sedition with heavy penalties for saying anything “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive” about any aspect of the government or the war effort. The Post Office forbade mailing privileges to all periodicals that did not support the government’s policies.

  Despite Wilson’s assurance that “We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities . . . no material compensation,” Stieglitz believed America’s intervention to be commercially motivated. He was convinced that the German people were victims of the war. He spent the summer at Lake George reading the life of Napoleon and feeling as though it was he who had been exiled to Elba. The war underscored all that seemed difficult and oppressive in his life.

  After German forces sank the Lusitania on May 7, drowning 128 Americans, the grim reality of the distant war was brought home. The incident churned feelings throughout the country and strained many friendships, including Stieglitz and Steichen’s. Stieglitz argued that the Germans had issued advance warning, and “It served them right.” Stieglitz remarks infuriated Steichen, and spurred his decision to support the Allied war effort. The thirty-eight-year-old Steichen volunteered for military service and joined the Signal Corps Photographic Division. Later, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel for his breakthrough discoveries in aerial reconnaissance photography. His commitment to the American war effort led him to change the spelling of his first name from the Belgian “Edouard” to the American “Edward” and to become a naturalized American citizen.33

  Stieglitz later observed, “Much of the enthusiasm that had existed at 291 gradually disappeared because of the war.” After taking his daughter to Smith College in September, he returned to Manhattan. With the closing of 291, for the first time in two decades Stieglitz had no magazine to publish, no gallery to run, nowhere to go. Unable to bear the idea of being home all day with Emmy, he took an office in the Anderson Galleries, where he conducted business and correspondence. Housed in a neo-classical building on Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, the Anderson Galleries was one of the preeminent auction houses in the city for the sale of rare books, furniture, decorative art, and paintings.