Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  In October, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz returned to Oaklawn by themselves. He printed the negatives from the summer’s photography. She painted the dramatic change of seasons. “G. quite enamored of the turning leaves—gorgeous reds and yellows and every shade of green,” he wrote.46 When the cold weather grew too harsh for comfort, they returned to Manhattan to the news that the war had come to an end.

  On November 11, the Armistice was signed. As soon as they heard of the victory, around a thousand shipbuilders stopped work to parade down Fifth Avenue, bareheaded and carrying hastily scrawled banners reading, “We did it to the Kaiser.” Stieglitz looked down at them and snorted that victory would mean a breadline for most of them.

  Five days later, he said, “I do hope Germany will yet teach the world that something which I think peculiarly inherent in her—or should I say inherent in the German nature. . . . The antiquated part of Germany is smashed now. . . . Now is the real living time for any one gifted with seeing.”47

  As noisy crowds celebrated in the streets, millions relieved that their loved ones were safe, O’Keeffe learned of her father’s death.

  Sixty-five years old, Frank O’Keeffe had fallen off the roof of a barracks at Camp Lee, Virginia, where he was working as a carpenter. Though Georgia had not heard from him in some time, the news of his death came as a deep shock.

  “Everything is very uncertain today, Papa is dead . . . and as if to make things more queer . . . the town is yelling and screaming and ringing and whistling over the Peace news . . . I’ve just wondered if a day could be much worse.”48

  The news put the scattered O’Keeffe siblings in touch with one another. In Canyon, Claudia heard from Francis. “I was not surprised,” she wrote to Georgia. She had been thinking of their father more than usual since, six days before his death, she had received an unexpected gift of twenty-five dollars from him.

  Ida, a student nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, went to identify her father’s body and sign the death certificate, and it may have been her decision to have her father cremated. His remains were placed next to the bodies of his parents in the Catholic cemetery of Sun Prairie.

  Frank O’Keeffe’s will left Claudia ten dollars a month until she turned twenty-one. Claudia agreed with Georgia that there was “something” in her father that was good, despite the terrible end of his life. She asked plaintively, “The O’Keeffe family always kept things in the dark—and I hardly know what to think about it—Wish you’d tell me.”49

  For O’Keeffe, who had found in Stieglitz a source of paternal comfort, the transference was complete: both of her parents were deceased and there was no longer any place to call home. Shortly after hearing about her father, she learned that her younger brother Alexius had been gassed during the last campaigns of the war and shipped to Wisconsin to recover. Claudia had checked into the Amarillo hospital with influenza.

  The little studio seemed to provide O’Keeffe her only comfort. She coped with the loss of her father as she had with the loss of her mother—adding it as a brick in her wall of isolation. Stieglitz did not press her for details and she was not forthcoming. When he wrote the news to Strand, he warned him not to send any letter of condolence. She wanted silence.

  O’Keeffe might not have considered living as Stieglitz’s mistress if her life had not been so full of setbacks and disappointments. She had ceased allowing herself to care about the opinions of others, and after years of poverty and intermittent illness, alienated from small-town society, her decision to live with a married man might have seemed like a step up in life. At least Stieglitz would provide the security and stability that she needed. As she had told Strand, he seemed to be the only one who understood her.

  Stieglitz, however, stood in awe of her decision. He struggled with the process of radically realigning his life. The 291 gallery, synonymous with his person for more than a decade, no longer existed. His estrangement from wife and daughter caused him pain and embarrassment. His only hope for the future lay with O’Keeffe.

  On November 15, four days after hearing of her father’s death, O’Keeffe turned thirty-one. The couple spent the evening at Hedwig’s apartment, where O’Keeffe was full of real laughter. Stieglitz recalled the scene: “I lightly amused,” he said. “And my old mother undoubtedly contented to see that we were so fond of one another and more like kids than grown ups.” Then, with a jolt, he remembered that it was also his anniversary. “Twenty-five years ago, I married.”50

  II

  At Smith, Kitty continued to concentrate on her studies and attempted to be fair-minded about her parents’ separation. She lamented that summer snapshots sent by her father were too painful to review. “I . . . did not know real life then. Life had been ideal—my people ideal. It was all so beautiful—they are no longer, only very human.”1

  Stieglitz clung to the delusion that his wife and daughter could be convinced of the positive effects of his decision to live with O’Keeffe. He reprimanded Emmy that her bleak view of the future wasn’t fair to any of them. “I know that out of the chaos of the world and the chaos of our own particular little circle something fine must evolve even if it isn’t that particular thing you may have in your own mind. Don’t be too hopeless. Chaos to me has always signified Hope. And Peace. Good Will. And intense desire to minimize your suffering. And so minimize also Kitty’s and mine.” But then, being Stieglitz, he added, “And also Miss O’Keeffe’s.”2

  Emmy, caring little about minimizing Miss O’Keeffe’s suffering, retaliated by showing his letter to Kitty. Predictably outraged, Kitty wrote, “Oh father dear—you can’t imagine how I yearn for frankness—sincerity.”3

  As the terms of the separation were endlessly reviewed, Stieglitz was clearly more concerned with the good opinion of his daughter than with that of his soon to be ex-wife. Before the advent of O’Keeffe, Kitty had written to him several times a week from college, lacing her letters with endearments. Since the separation, her letters to him were infrequent and tense.

  Kitty, an honors student in the chemistry department, was an intelligent young woman. She told her father that she empathized with his exasperation over Emmy’s self-centered values. But the separation enabled her to see that narcissism was not confined to her mother: both of her parents were self-involved personalities. As Kitty pulled away, Stieglitz convinced himself that if she just understood him better, all would be forgiven. “She might feel a little less at war with the world and herself if she did see me just a trifle as I actually am,” he wrote.4

  But the harder Stieglitz struggled with Kitty, the more he lost. After her strained visit to New York during her spring break, he wrote her the most plaintive of father-daughter letters:

  Why is it that I seem invariably to hurt you with what I say—when you are the last person in the world I wish to hurt. . . . I do so wish I had the power to make myself clear to you—not because I want you to understand me. . . . but because I know I can help you living—not with words—not even actions—but with something more real than either. I know you have no friend like I am your friend. Perhaps I’m all wrong. . . . Perhaps I don’t know what a friend is, nor what a Father is, or a husband is.”5

  This last sentence contained a painful truth. Stieglitz often had difficulty coping with the responsibilities and repercussions of long-term relationships, and his strict determination to be right cost him dearly.

  Far from granting absolution, however, Kitty’s reply from Northhampton betrayed her wish for a reunion between her parents. “If only . . . it could have been what I had hoped for, still hope for, that the three of us can come together,” she pleaded.6

  With none of the Stieglitzes prepared to give ground, a triangle of opposing relationships hardened into place. Predictably, tension revolved largely around finances. In addition to receiving money from Emmy, Stieglitz had borrowed money from her brother Joe Obermeyer, a successful stock market investor. Stieglitz’s modest yearly income of around three thousand dollars from his father’s
trust had only been ample when combined with Emmy’s own three-thousand-dollar trust fund. Although his prosperous brothers regularly bought paintings and photographs from the gallery to supplement his income, Stieglitz had little financial independence.

  Stieglitz’s relationship with money remained as complicated and conflicted as it had been when he was a young man. Ever since his first few years in the printing business, when he was subsidized by his father and barely turning a profit, he had devoted himself to being an artist and a gentleman. For Stieglitz, this meant a refusal to participate openly in the pursuit of income. He had turned down portrait requests from many notables, and was reluctant to let his work be printed in magazines other than his own. The 291 gallery was considered a spiritual redoubt and a temple to creativity. If anyone should be considered sufficiently deserving to purchase a work of art there, the proceeds went directly to the artist after 15 percent of the sale was allotted to the rent fund.

  During his editorship of Camera Notes and Camera Work, Stieglitz had argued that amateur photographers were the true artists because their passion was not sullied by the urge for commercial gain. He extended this position to painters and never relinquished his claim for his own amateur status, understanding the word “amateur” to mean one who works out of love for the field. He criticized colleagues who disagreed, and vilified Steichen for having to support himself with portrait commissions and for signing a commercial photography contract with Conde Nast.

  O’Keeffe was innocent of Stieglitz’s financial status and sought to stay clear of his operatic arguments over money. Like many in the art world, she considered him to be rich and, indeed, he accomplished amazing feats of patronage, collecting and publishing with relatively minor resources.

  At the end of January, O’Keeffe’s sister Ida came to stay at the studio for four nights. Out of a sense of propriety, Stieglitz moved uptown to his sister Selma’s apartment. The O’Keeffe sisters were worried about Claudia, who was recovering from influenza at the Waring home of Leah Harris. As though replaying Georgia’s crisis of the previous year, Harris and her brother-in-law nursed Claudia back to health. Claudia wrote of Harris to Georgia, adding that she was pleasantly surprised when Harris kissed her on the lips. After recovering from the flu, Claudia accepted a position at a reform school in Texas from which she sent Georgia thrilling accounts of teaching young female criminals.

  Each morning, Stieglitz would go to his tiny office to answer correspondence. He also hung around the Fifty-ninth Street studio. O’Keeffe’s challenge was finding time and privacy to paint, as well as desire. She had grown completely dependent upon him. “She is torn by the desire to do different things—so is apt to do nothing but be with me,” Stieglitz worried. “She is lovlier [sic] than ever—a great responsibility because of that very fact.”7

  Stieglitz continued his serial portrait by photographing O’Keeffe’s nude torso framed against a window. The light around her sculpted body transformed her soft flesh into the very likeness of a marble goddess on a pedestal (though she actually was standing on the radiator). She later said, “That was difficult—radiators don’t intend you to stand on top of them.”8

  O’Keeffe was slight and sexual, unlike Emmy, who had been hefty and self-conscious. Stieglitz was in a constant state of wonder. He wrote to the California photographer Anne Brigman, whose pictures of female nudes he had exhibited at 291: “No tricks.—No fuzzyism.—No diffusion.—No enlargements.—Clean cut sharp heartfelt mentally digested bits of universality in the shape of Woman—head—torso—feet—hands.”9

  When he used the tripod-mounted view camera, Stieglitz frequently photographed O’Keeffe as a conjunction of angles and curves. He shot her neck twisted so that the muscles were stretched taut. Her feet with the toes splayed. Her fingers clutching at the breasts.

  For her part, O’Keeffe complained, “I always knew that at a certain time when the light was right we would have to be photographing. He’d often get me out on a windy spot on the coldest day when no part of you could stay warm.”10

  While Stieglitz pursued the serial portrait of his lover, O’Keeffe continued with her own work. She executed a pair of floating dark spheres partially concealed by a pair of vertical panels in charcoal and completed two drawings: No. 17 Special and Special No. 39. O’Keeffe repeated the motif of these drawings within an oil painting with celadon panels and fuchsia globes titled Green Lines and Pink. Stieglitz could not resist the opportunity to photograph her hands extended upward, her fingers slightly parted as if she were about to caress the balls. O’Keeffe may not have understood the erotic implications of the pose at the time, but seventy years later, when she wrote Some Memories of Drawings, she wryly captioned the first charcoal with the warning, “No comments, please.”

  In 1919, O’Keeffe started to respond to Stieglitz’s photographs in her own work. She copied his photograph of her breasts pushed inward by her arms, painting her flesh in teal and her nipples a deep rose. But she must have thought better of the exercise—four years later, she restretched the canvas and painted on its reverse Alligator Pears, a picture of two avocados in a white napkin that are posed in a similar manner to her breasts. But studying Stieglitz’s photographs of her and of the landscape had a definite influence on the sense of compression and enlargement in O’Keeffe’s paintings. Simultaneously, Stieglitz’s photographs were themselves becoming more abstract as a result of his careful study of O’Keeffe’s paintings.11

  In March 1920, Stieglitz exhibited the more modest portraits of O’Keeffe alongside work by other 291 artists at the Young Woman’s Hebrew Association on 110th Street—an institution supported by Aline Meyer Liebman, a dedicated patron of his gallery. In a preoccupied Manhattan the modest show provoked little notice.

  O’Keeffe was gradually adjusting to the change of pace from her years on the Texas plains. Instead of a provincial milieu, she was surrounded by a group of sophisticated artists, writers, and intellectuals. Stieglitz’s unflagging nervous energy, fueled by a breakfast of six pieces of zwieback and a cup of cocoa, kept him talking with various admirers from early morning until late evening. O’Keeffe observed, “He would start out in the morning saying one thing, and by noon he would be saying the exact opposite, and then in the evening he would have changed his mind again. He thought aloud, you see.”12

  Deprived of Emmy’s allowance, Stieglitz met colleagues for dinner at the reasonably priced Far East Tea Garden, a Chinese restaurant near Columbus Circle. Critics Herbert Seligmann, Waldo Frank, and Paul Rosenfeld would join whoever else happened to be in town, either 291 artists or others from the dispersed Greenwich Village scene. O’Keeffe absorbed much of their discussion, though she rarely participated. “I would listen to them talk and I thought, my, are they dreamy,” she said. “I felt much more prosaic but I knew I could paint as well as some of them who were sitting around talking.”13

  With his gallery closed, these gatherings were Stieglitz’s way of staying in touch with art world politics and gossip. During the spring, the galleries were “teeming with moderns.” A show of Monet’s paintings of the past two years prompted Stieglitz to wonder, “He must be over seventy! It’s great to see those old fellows continue to experiment.” Durand-Ruel showed Renoir, and de Zayas’s Modern Gallery featured Matisse as the sole exhibitor in one of its last shows. In the wake of the war, America had emerged as a world power and New York as the center of modern art. Yet the European modern artists continued to outstrip their American counterparts in critical appraisals and sales. Stieglitz was always looking for opportunities to promote his modern American artists.

  Marin, Hartley, and Dove could easily have found other galleries, but they remained loyal to Stieglitz even when he lacked gallery space of his own. Stieglitz worked behind the scenes to exhibit these artists with sympathetic dealers such as N. E. Montross and Charles Daniel, where Hartley showed at the end of 1918.

  Dove, who had only shown once at 291, became a regular visitor and within a few years was
one of the couple’s closest friends. He had grown up in Geneva, a small town in upstate New York, where his contractor father hoped he would become a lawyer. After attending Cornell University, however, Dove moved to Manhattan to pursue freelance illustration for magazines like The Century. Artists Robert Henri and John Sloan encouraged Dove to pursue painting. In 1908, Dove and his wife, Florence, went to Paris. Upon his return a year later, he struggled as an illustrator to pay the bills and paint in his spare time. After his son was born in 1910, the Doves took over a farm in Westport, Connecticut, where a small arts colony had been established. Living on a meager one hundred dollars a month earned mostly from the sale of eggs—Dove’s father refused to contribute to his son’s income—Dove began a series of lyrical abstractions, purportedly the first ever produced by an American artist. Although Stieglitz exhibited Dove’s work, it remained outside the taste of most collectors for decades. Dove, however, immediately comprehended and admired O’Keeffe’s paintings. He told Stieglitz, “That girl is doing without effort what all we moderns have been trying to do.”14

  Steichen, who had purportedly cried with pleasure upon seeing O’Keeffe’s drawings in 1916, brought Leo Stein to her tiny studio. Frank Crowninshield, who had published O’Keeffe’s illustrations in Vanity Fair, made a point of visiting the studio, as did Jacob Dewald, who had given Stieglitz the money to support O’Keeffe.

  Slow sales forced Marius de Zayas to close the Modern Gallery, but he stayed in touch with Stieglitz, and his visit to the studio lasted three hours. Stieglitz observed triumphantly, “The photographs just landed him, as I knew they would, as they landed others.”15