A social dervish, de Zayas quickly spread the word. Walter Arensberg, who had become the principal patron of such Dadaist artists as Marcel Duchamp, came with photographer and painter Charles Sheeler to witness Stieglitz’s renaissance. The knowledgeable collector was bowled over by the photographs and told Stieglitz that no painter could ignore their existence. Arthur B. Davies, organizer of the Armory Show, was full of compliments. Although visitors were polite about O’Keeffe’s paintings, their primary interest was in seeing Stieglitz’s portraits of her.
This endless stream of visitors, not to mention the pressure from Emmy and Kitty, was not without effect on the reclusive O’Keeffe. Her 1919 painting of the Fifty-ninth Street studio looks rather claustrophobic with its funereal palette and disorienting interior space. The view to the darkened rear room, with its narrow window reflecting mauve light from the courtyard, may have suggested O’Keeffe’s own ambivalence about life in the city. As she had in other new cities, she was also familiarizing herself by drawing and painting the surrounding buildings.16
Stieglitz showed visitors her early drawings and watercolors, including some abstract charcoals of soft arcs sliced diagonally by bold dark lines titled Black Lines and Black Diagonal. Along with Crazy Day, an unusually complicated charcoal of plant and flower patterns, and Blue Shapes, a collection of triangular and rectangular forms in blue watercolor, these studies revealed her increasing understanding of the abstract art practiced by Kandinsky. Nonetheless, Stieglitz encouraged her to concentrate on oil painting.
As advocated by Dow, watercolor had enabled O’Keeffe to discover spontaneity and to experiment with color. Yet it was considered a minor art in the hands of most artists, especially women. In any case, Marin was regarded as one of the country’s preeminent modern watercolorists. Charcoal was regarded as a preparatory medium.
As O’Keeffe translated her statements to oil and increased their scale, she earned Stieglitz’s approval. “Savage force—Frankness—The Woman—All in one—Beautifully expressed. . . . Her medium very much more under control,” he wrote. “In other words, oil is becoming a real part of her—the struggle with medium is disappearing. Still no strength or directness is disappearing.”17
Nineteen-nineteen was, after all, meant to be O’Keeffe’s year. Stieglitz had given her that time, and she rose to the occasion. Since the development of her style in 1915, O’Keeffe had followed Dow’s suggestion and worked serially, making multiple studies of the same subject in different colors and seen from various perspectives. In each of three paintings titled Black Spot, a sharp, black rectangle floats atop ebullient, pink highlighted balloons of pastel yellow, green, and blue. The paintings so impressed Rosenfeld on a visit to the studio that he bought one and reproduced it with his first article on O’Keeffe’s work. Explaining the source for these pictures, O’Keeffe commented, “Sometimes I know what it comes from, sometimes not. Dove was that way, too. Often a picture just gets into my head without my having the least idea how it got there.”18 Dove traded with her for a small brown and gray version of this abstraction.
After close to a year in New York, O’Keeffe’s longing for the plains of Texas led her to execute abstract paintings like Red and Orange Streak, a landscape of a darkened field and sky bisected at the horizon line by a chain of blood-colored mountains. A sickle of gold rises up in the work, an apparition generated by memories of the haunting sound of cattle in their pens lowing for their calves. “It had a regular rhythmic beat . . . repeating the same rhythms over and over all through the day and night,” she later recalled. “It was loud and raw under the stars in that wide empty country.”19 The memory of that same rhythm was also the inspiration for Series I—From The Plains, a domed hemisphere of deep blues capped by a saw blade edge. “From experiences of one kind or another shapes come to me very clearly,” O’Keeffe explained.20
Although the numbered paintings of Series I vary, all were frankly abstract and together they constitute a bold experiment in oil. Series I, No. 7, a pale disc with a white spike in its center, surrounded by veils of pink and blue, may have inspired Hartley’s observation, “She is impaled on a white consciousness.” No. 8 features a riven heart of ivory, blue, and pink. No. 10 consists of two glowing white mounds with green foliage and the lake in the background, while No. 10a raises the white mounds to fill the whole canvas. In Series I—White and Blue Flower Shapes, the white mounds are set below an open blue valley. Completed in 1920, Series I, No. 12 features a vast field of cloudy white: only the edges are touched with rose and hyacinth.
One abstract painting not included in Series I but which is indebted to No. 8 is another version of Blue Lines; this time, its radiating hemispheres of white, gray, steel, and pink are divided vertically by a thin blue fissure.
Many of the paintings in Series I were completed at Lake George, where O’Keeffe was incorporating the azure tones of sky and lake, and the verdant offerings of trees and grass. Flowers brought variety to her work, and O’Keeffe returned to the crimson canna lilies, this time in oil. One of these paintings, Canna, sold to the collector Dewald.
This important series of the canna lily marked the first time that O’Keeffe had worked from a realistic representation of a flower in oil, through nine variations, to a geometric, even Cubist, design measuring 22 × 17 inches.
As a body of work, O’Keeffe’s abstract oils and works on paper were as advanced as anything being painted in the United States. In brief, O’Keeffe began her career as one of Manhattan’s foremost abstract artists. But, six years after the Armory Show, abstract art was a minority pursuit, little understood by critics and even less by collectors. Dedicated to abstraction, Dove, for example, never wavered, but O’Keeffe was younger, more malleable, and more sensitive. She had cringed at the idea of Bement showing her abstract charcoals “just to be laughed at.” After her work had been shown, everyone from Professor Ariail to her Canyon landlord had laughed at her abstract efforts. Even Stieglitz was ambivalent. Eventually, O’Keeffe talked herself out of being an abstract artist, though she would make abstract pictures off and on throughout her career.21
When Stieglitz and O’Keeffe moved to Lake George in the summer of 1919, it set the pattern of their life style for the next decade, of winters in town and summers in the country. O’Keeffe learned quickly that the country was not synonymous with tranquillity when there were Stieglitzes around. In July, Stieglitz’s siblings insisted that their late father’s waterfront mansion be sold due to its costly maintenance. Stieglitz, who used the property more than any other family member, was least able to afford the upkeep. After months of prickly negotiations and acrimonious discussions among family members, it was agreed that the mansion would be sold but that thirty-six acres and the clapboard farmhouse on the hill would be retained.
Strand came to the lake at the end of the summer, making his first appearance since delivering O’Keeffe to New York the year before. His stint in the army had been brief but tragic. At the beginning of February, he had came down with severe pneumonia and been transferred to the Fort Snelling hospital. His mother and father rushed to Milwaukee to be with him. The strain and travel took such a toll on his mother that she contracted pneumonia and died of a heart attack. The devastated Strand told Stieglitz that he felt almost like a murderer.
Strand was still disoriented by his return to civilian life and further discomfited by warm memories of the previous summer’s adventure in San Antonio. As he watched Stieglitz and O’Keeffe’s cozy familiarity at Lake George, he recalled the intimacies he’d shared with the same woman on their romantic walks in the park. It didn’t help Strand’s troubled state of mind to be reassured by Stieglitz that O’Keeffe had gotten over her “queer feelings” about having him around.
Over the course of two years, Stieglitz moved from his apartment of twenty years, closed his gallery, and watched with dismay the sale of Oaklawn. In the spring of 1920, he learned that the East Fifty-ninth Street brownstone where he and O’Keeffe shared a studio w
as to be razed. Instead of looking for a place of his own, which he could not have afforded in any case, Stieglitz accepted an invitation from his brother Lee to live with his family in his spacious house at 60 East Sixty-fifth Street.
O’Keeffe had not bargained for such a compromise of her independence. She had not enjoyed economic security but she had lived on her own, supporting herself, for years. Suddenly, in addition to summers with the Stieglitz clan, she was to be with them for the rest of the year. “I don’t take easily to being with people,” she sighed. “Stieglitz always had people around him—he needed that I guess. . . . Even when [the Stieglitzes] went to Europe, they stayed in one of those residential hotels and invited lots of their friends to visit. We were always with people.”22
Before the annual pilgrimage to Lake George, she decided to take a solo vacation at York Beach, Maine, where she stayed in a boardinghouse with friends of the Stieglitz family, Marjorie and Bennet Schauffler. It was her first separation from Stieglitz in two years. She was beginning to discover that Stieglitz did not travel: his footloose years in Europe had been supplanted by a stolid attachment to Manhattan and Lake George. He may have expressed dismay about his family, saying, “Everything is relative but relatives and they are absolute,” but he rarely spent time away from them.23
In Maine, O’Keeffe rented a room overlooking a soothing expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Rising with the gray dawn, she padded downstairs for coffee, not bothered by the live lobsters she found crawling around in the pantry. With childlike exuberance, she ran down the boardwalk to the ocean and watched the waves crash and smooth themselves over the hard wet beach and spent hours walking and picking up shells and stones. At night, alone in her double bed, she looked out upon the lighthouse—a lone beacon in the darkness. Here she felt the relief of isolation so crucial to her well-being as an artist, a feeling complemented by her natural surroundings. Her ease recalled a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “All natural objects make a kindred impression when the mind is open to their influence. . . .”24 She made two sprightly watercolors of seaweed strands: untitled, and Abstraction Seaweed and Water—Maine, a pastel of the seaweed expressed in shades of red, yellow, gray, and blue, and divided down the center like a Rorschach blot.
After a couple of weeks, the refreshed artist returned to cajole Stieglitz into moving to York Beach. He refused, reminding O’Keeffe that there was plenty of work to be done at Lake George.
That summer, the large Stieglitz clan was squeezed into the renovated Victorian farmhouse on The Hill, as the area behind Oaklawn came to be known. Staff had been reduced to the aging Ella and Fred Varnum; additional help was hired as needed, and Hedwig brought her personal maid with her from the city.
With a decreased staff at The Hill, O’Keeffe helped with cooking as well as gardening, cider-pressing, and preserving. In stark contrast to Emmy, who rarely ventured into the kitchen, O’Keeffe found such simple domestic chores therapeutic and comforting—they reminded her of the farm and of the routines of nature. But she was not getting much done in the way of painting.
To avoid the crowded house, she took longer and longer walks. One morning, she seized upon an abandoned structure behind the barns. Young people who worked in the area had originally built the shed as a makeshift dance hall. O’Keeffe saw it as a place to work. She asked a local handyman to fix it up, but his estimate of five hundred dollars was prohibitive, in Stieglitz’s opinion. O’Keeffe, however, was learning to be resourceful. In August, she asked the help of Davidson—who acted as a handyman and gardener at The Hill—as well as his wife Elizabeth. Stieglitz found this do-it-yourself spirit to be so astonishing that he took out his camera to document Elizabeth and O’Keeffe, wearing chemises and floppy hats, bloomers and boots, grinning broadly as they brandished hammers and nailed shingles onto the roof.
In August, while O’Keeffe was busy renovating, Waldo and Margy Frank came to visit, staying at a nearby cottage. While the critic was busy writing, his wife pitched in on the renovations. Even Stieglitz helped lay the floorboards. In a matter of weeks, O’Keeffe had her studio and the requisite solitude.
Stieglitz assumed that the space was for the two of them, but O’Keeffe quickly informed him otherwise. Far from the farmhouse, she completed most of her Lake George paintings in what became known as The Shanty. During the sweltering summer months, she would paint nude. “We work and we work and feel foolish for working, then work some more,” she reported gleefully.25
The younger generation of critics like Waldo Frank and his peers regarded Stieglitz as a role model in terms of his tireless support of the new. A 1912 Yale graduate, Frank had gone abroad to study the works of Freud and Nietzsche, modern art and literature. Upon his return, he started The Seven Arts magazine with Randolph Bourne to publish antiwar texts and visual art by young American poets, writers, and artists. In Stieglitz’s portraits of him, the wiry, dark-eyed Frank wears a perpetually intense expression, even when caught in the act of peeling apples on the front porch.
In September, another member of that younger generation, Paul Strand, arrived to show Stieglitz and O’Keeffe some of his photographs, including the portrait of a fetching young woman named Rebecca. Stieglitz admired the work, complaining that his own photographs were not as successful, comparing them to “an incomplete erection, a sort of 7⁄8—the 1⁄8 lacking is often due to too much ‘intellectuality.’ I know the difference!”26
Stieglitz’s harsh comparison of sexual and photographic performance came as he was busily printing the portraits of O’Keeffe and attempting to seduce her into fresh poses. Mitchell Kennerley planned to show a retrospective of his work at the Anderson Galleries in February, including the composite portrait of O’Keeffe.
Shortly after Strand’s departure, O’Keeffe found Hedwig in the hallway of the farmhouse, collapsed in the throes of a stroke. She was rushed to Albany, where Lee met her with a nurse and ambulance for the trip to Manhattan. When the stroke was determined to be relatively minor, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz decided to remain at Lake George alone, where they indulged in long walks under the fiery fall foliage. Stieglitz told Strand that it felt “queer” not to have his mother at the lake, and expressed this sadness metaphorically in his photograph of an apple tree covered with raindrops. “Perhaps the raindrops are tears,” he wrote. “And perhaps that dark entrance that seems to you mysterious is the womb, the place whence we came and where we desire when we are tired and unhappy to return, the womb of our mother, where we are quiet and without responsibility and protected.”27
Apples were to be one of the many subjects shared by O’Keeffe and Stieglitz over the years. Her small oil studies of apples painted in the summer of 1919 were rendered in a traditional manner that recalled her training with William Merritt Chase. At first glance, these unpretentious pictures seem at odds with the bold abstractions that she had produced the year before. Certainly, these quieter studies resulted in part from O’Keeffe’s sense of domestic comfort and, possibly, from her desire to paint for pure pleasure without the pressure to make a big statement. It’s also possible that she hoped to generate a few quick sales with these subtler works.
On a deeper, more symbolic level, however, the titles of O’Keeffe’s apple paintings suggest that the apples themselves represent various family members. Apples—No. I portrays a pair of pinkish apples on a gray table corner and is seemingly a portrait of Stieglitz and herself. This sense of portraiture is apparent in the subsequent three paintings, in which the fruit completely fills the frame of each picture. In Apple Family A, Apple Family 2, and Apple Family I, each apple assumes individual physical characteristics, looking stalwart or impatient, oversized or diminutive, voluptuous or sinewy. O’Keeffe doesn’t attempt to include them as part of a larger still life, as she did in her paintings of Grapes on White Dish Dark Rim or Plums, where purple and mauve fruits are displayed on a white napkin in a bowl. Instead she paints the apple families as subjects unto themselves. It was hardly coincidental that O’Keeffe paint
ed this apple series when the farmhouse was filled to capacity with family members and friends.
In such a context, 4 Dark Red Apples—Black Tray, her painting of four perfectly round red apples on a black plate set in the center of a white ground, could represent O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, and their friends Paul Rosenfeld and Charles Duncan, a painter who had been in her debut show at 291 and who visited in October. 4 Dark Red Apples—Black Tray was followed by a fuller and more deeply colored version titled Dark Red Apples & Tray No. 2.
Rosenfeld, like Frank, was a generation younger than Stieglitz and an alumnus of The Seven Arts. Short and portly, with kind brown eyes and reddish hair, Rosenfeld was a bachelor. He had graduated from Yale in 1911, and a comfortable inheritance from his mother’s family allowed him to travel in Europe for six months before taking up residence in New York. In 1918, when he discovered that his brilliant Seven Arts colleague Randolph Bourne was ill and destitute, he devoted himself to caring for him until he passed away a year later.
Considered one of the most important critics of his day, Rosenfeld contributed extensively, both with words and hard cash, to the support of Stieglitz’s artists. As music critic for the Dial and the New Republic, he was the first American critic to analyze the work of modern composers Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schonberg. His first book, Musical Portraits, was published to serious acclaim in 1919. Rosenfeld’s elegant corner apartment in a stately building at 77 Irving Place was decorated with antique furniture in the style of a European drawing room, and hung with modern paintings by Marin, Hartley, Dove, and O’Keeffe as well as photographs by Stieglitz. Throughout the twenties, Rosenfeld held soirees at which composers Leo Ornstein, Edgar Varèse, and Darius Milhaud played and poets Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore read their latest work. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were among those who attended these evenings, along with Florine and Ettie Stettheimer and the poet Alfred Kreymborg. The only visual artists he purchased or wrote about were suggested by Stieglitz.
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