Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Writer Edmund Wilson characterized Rosenfeld’s relationship with Stieglitz as “filial.” Rosenfeld had lost his mother at the age of ten and his father had abandoned him to his maternal grandparents and military boarding school. Wilson explained, “The group around Stieglitz became for him both family and church.” The older man was “accepted and revered as a prophet. . . . If Stieglitz had excommunicated a refractory or competitive disciple, Paul, following the official directive, would condemn him, not merely as an artist but as a reprobate who had somehow committed an unpardonable moral treason.”28

  When Rosenfeld arrived at the lake in October, he volunteered his only domestic skill—preparing scrambled eggs. After a two-week stay, he sent a note thanking the couple for having “given me the opportunity of observing you at close range and for such a length of time.”29 Rosenfeld’s observations during his stay would have repercussions in his reviews of O’Keeffe’s painting.

  After a summer filled with the distractions of socializing, swimming, and hiking, the first signs of autumn brought about greater productivity for both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz. In one day, Stieglitz developed seventy-two photographs. The arrival of fall foliage had an effect on O’Keeffe’s painting, and instead of the daring nonobjective pictures like Series I, she stayed rooted in her observations of nature, painting tangerine and crimson tree tops against the sky in The Red Maple, Lake George and turbulent red and dark green trees in Maple and Cedar. A serpentine trunk with a singular stump supports a veil of limbs and leaves in Tree with Cut Limb. Like the apple pictures, these paintings seem far less ambitious than her earlier abstractions. One can only wonder whether Stieglitz had discouraged O’Keeffe’s more challenging pictures.

  After Donald and Elizabeth Davidson’s first daughter, Peggy, was born, O’Keeffe brought up the issue of having children. Barely speaking to his daughter Kitty and without an official divorce from Emmy, Stieglitz could not entertain the idea of having a child. Although she wanted children, O’Keeffe believed her lover’s claim that she would not be able to continue painting with a baby craving her attention. Stieglitz referred to the thirty-three-year-old O’Keeffe as “such a kid”. She was his child, and he knew that a baby would alter the dynamic—he had witnessed it in the bond between Kitty and Emmy. Stieglitz claimed the difficulties of his advanced age would prevent him from becoming a father for the second time. When Elizabeth pressed her uncle, perhaps acting covertly for O’Keeffe, Stieglitz remained firm, and O’Keeffe gave up the argument. “His mind was quicker than mine. . . . When I really knew I was right I could often wear him down,” she recalled. “I seldom argued with him though. He was the sort of person who could be destroyed completely if you disagreed with him.”30

  In early December, the artists returned to New York and moved into their new quarters with Lee and Lizzie. Out of deference to Lizzie’s ninety-year old mother, who was also in residence, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe kept rooms on separate floors. They shared a sitting room with their own telephone line. Stieglitz set up a rudimentary darkroom.

  Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt lived across the street, with his mother, Sarah, at 47-49 East Sixty-fifth Street. Roosevelt had been the Democratic vice-presidential candidate the previous fall but had lost to Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. In 1921, he would be stricken with polio while Eleanor’s political acumen would be honed through her growing role in their increasingly public life. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe watched their neighbors’ transformation with interest during the four years that they lived opposite them.

  To retain a semblance of autonomy, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe prepared their own modest breakfasts and dined at cafes like Joe’s Spaghetti Restaurant at Third Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street. Stieglitz had few other options. Although he occasionally sold art to Lee’s patients, money was so tight that O’Keeffe convinced him to accept a $1,500 photography commission.

  As usual, O’Keeffe documented her new living arrangements. Her charcoal of the view from their window, Backyard at 65th Street, depicts a quartet of structures nearly blocking the dim patch of sky. One building features two shadowy windows and a ledge, curved slightly upward like a smile, lending the appearance of a cartoon face. Perhaps she felt that the city was leering, making fun of her growing feelings of claustrophobia.

  III

  On the morning of March 4, 1921, after the first presidential election in which women voted, Warren G. Harding was inaugurated as president the United States. The country’s rejection of Woodrow Wilson reflected a fundamental change in outlook. Wilson had represented a sense of responsibility and moral accountability that led the country to enter into the war against Germany. Although America had suffered some fifty thousand casualties, compared to the millions left dead in Europe, many U.S. citizens were left doubting the point of such carnage. A president of soothing platitudes, Harding encouraged citizens to put the war behind them.

  Citizens were more than willing to shed the restrictions of the past and enjoy the postwar economic boom—an era that saw the expansion of chain stores and automobile sales, advertising agencies and revolving credit. The Prohibition amendment that became law in 1920 brought about a vast black market in alcohol, rampant racketeering, and clandestine parties that appealed to college students and socialites alike. Women restricted from public bars before the war, were drinking in illegal speakeasies, smoking cigarettes, going uncorseted in short dresses, and dancing the Charleston.

  Moral certainties were shifting—the discoveries of Freud and Einstein were undermining beliefs that had been presumed safe and sacred. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the Roaring Twenties, “America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.”

  What did the younger generation vigorously embrace? Sex. With the revolutionary advent of birth control, notions of free love, psychiatric theory, and jazz, sex was the subject of cartoons, editorials, and art.

  Into this milieu, Stieglitz launched his most successful campaign. On Sunday, February 6, he previewed a retrospective of his photographs to friends in rooms on the top floor of the Anderson Galleries building. In his first show since 1913—when he had trumpeted the cause of photography during the Armory Show—one hundred and forty-five of his black-and-white prints were hung upon the red velvet walls. Given Stieglitz’s high profile as a photographer, it was surprising that one hundred and twenty-eight of the photographs—taken between 1886 and 1921—had never been exhibited before. Stieglitz’s desire to go public with his own work ultimately stemmed from his relationship with O’Keeffe, which was renewing his interest in being a practicing artist.

  In the show’s catalogue, he boldly declared his allegiance to American modernism. “I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.” Over the course of two weeks, about three thousand people came to witness the return of the master. Among the pictorialist studies of New York and Europe, the array of portraits of his artist and writer friends, and recent landscapes of Lake George, there were forty-six tantalizing photographs of O’Keeffe, many of which revealed her partially or fully nude, under the collective title “A Demonstration of Portraiture.” In the portraits of O’Keeffe wearing her demure black dress and often posed in front of her own art, she appeared as the charming young schoolteacher. In the nude photographs, her face was cropped but her identity was hardly a secret.

  Stieglitz’s show introduced O’Keeffe to the larger New York art world. As New York Herald critic Henry McBride noted, “It put her at once on the map. Everybody knew the name. She became what is known as a newspaper personality.”1

  Knowing that the nudes would cause a sensation, Stieglitz made certain that his loyal following of critics and writers were in on it. Critic Lewis Mumford wrote that in the photographer’s endeavor to “translate the unseen word of tactile values as they develop between lovers not merely in the sexual act but in the entire relation of two personalities—to translate this world of blind touch into sight . . . Stieglitz achieved the exact
visual equivalent of the report of the hand or the face as it travels over the body of the beloved.”2

  Rosenfeld was certain to write a glowing account. Since he had witnessed the development of the composite portrait, his review for the Dial concentrated on those photographs. Rosenfeld proclaimed that Stieglitz had done much more than document his lover’s hands and face. “He has based them on the navel, the mons veneris, the armpits, the bones underneath the skin of the neck and collar. He has brought the lens close to the epidermis in order to photograph, and shown us 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.” In his heated prose, he described the photographs as capturing “the regard of ineffable love out of lucent unfathomable eyes, the gesture of chaste and impassioned surrender.”3

  For Stieglitz, it seemed that the glorious past had returned. He spent every day in the galleries talking, as “copious, continuous and revolutionary as ever,” noted McBride, and it felt as though the spirit of 291 had been resurrected. Just as public interest in the show was waning, Stieglitz announced his price of five thousand dollars for a nude photograph of O’Keeffe, unique because its plate had been destroyed. Stieglitz’s unprecedented asking price for a photograph was aimed at establishing a market equivalent with painting and at churning the embers of the smoldering controversy. The strategy worked: viewers returned to the gallery, with an especially large crowd gathering around the expensive nude. Of the hundreds of visitors, Stieglitz claimed, “All seemed deeply moved. There was the silence of a church.”4

  Unlike Stieglitz, O’Keeffe found all the attention from the press to be deeply disturbing. “I almost wept,” she said. “I thought I could never face the world again.”5 She was ashamed of the subtle implication that she was Stieglitz’s mistress. Rosenfeld and Hartley viewed her largely as a sexual being since she had no role as a wife.

  Undoubtedly, O’Keeffe was naive in her underestimation of the critical and public reaction to the portraits. Understanding Stieglitz’s photographs primarily as works of art, she could not anticipate that they would be interpreted in such personal terms.6 She had cooperated with her lover’s suggestions, acting as his model while still in the throes of infatuation. Lying exhausted and perspiring after making love in the cramped studio, O’Keeffe could scarcely have imagined the repercussions of those strenuous photo sessions, that her private sexuality would be made public—therefore, embarrassing.

  Stieglitz, on the other hand, was eager to capitalize on this unique joint venture, and only the protests of his own family prevented him from exhibiting the franker studies of O’Keeffe’s pubic area and buttocks. For fifteen years after the exhibition, critics influenced by Stieglitz’s suggestive remarks alluded to O’Keeffe’s art as sensual and spiritual, abiding by a Lawrentian belief in the elevating nature of uninhibited sex and the view of women as a gateway to a prelapsarian state of sensual awareness. In simplest terms, Stieglitz and many of his colleagues saw themselves as analytical and scientific while women were idealized as being closer to nature and therefore intuitive—even primitive.

  O’Keeffe’s 1916 show at 291 had received modest attention from the press. Five years later, critics rushed to report on her rejuvenating effect on the aging master. McBride, the most forward-thinking of the American critics of the time, drolly observed that the show “was a new effort in photography and something new in the way of introducing a budding young artist.”7

  The critics’ sexual innuendo was not lost on viewers. Art collector Albert Barnes said, had he been Stieglitz, he would have felt obliged to defend O’Keeffe’s honor.8 Painter Florine Stettheimer invited O’Keeffe to tea and remarked, “I was pleased to see her whole, as so far I only knew her in sections.” She noted with disapproval that Stieglitz “spouted all sorts of indiscretions.”9

  In April 1921, three of O’Keeffe’s paintings, including The Black Spot, were shown in the “Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings Showing the Later Tendencies in Art,” held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. O’Keeffe recognized the prestige of being included in this show of mostly male painters.

  “It was hard going, as a woman,” she later said. “Arthur B. Carles of Philadelphia came in to Stieglitz and wanted him to hang a group show there. ‘But I don’t want any goddam women in the show,’ he told Stieglitz. ‘Take it or leave it,’ Stieglitz said. ‘There’ll be no show without her.’”10 In the end, Stieglitz prevailed.

  That spring, exhibitions of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art were held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. Although they were met by the predictable outcries by some of the old guard trustees, the shows were actually the result of pressure from far-sighted and socially prominent collectors like Agnes Ernst Meyer, Lillie Bliss, John Quinn, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe visited both exhibitions, and after seeing the works by Gauguin, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and Matisse, Stieglitz entertained a moment of doubt about American art, especially the American Impressionists. “What ailed us—us the supposedly freest of peoples? . . . Are we afraid? If so, of what? Ourselves?”11

  One American artist unafraid of his boldest tendencies was Marsden Hartley. Still glowing in the success of his recent revival, Stieglitz learned of Hartley’s financial crisis. Perennially destitute and depressed, Hartley had confessed thoughts of suicide to Stieglitz. During dinner at the Far East China Garden, he thrust a penny at his dealer, threatening, “This is all that stands between me and starvation.”12 Hartley needed twelve hundred dollars to go to Florence because as he said, he could no longer tolerate New York and Americans who wouldn’t support modern art. Stieglitz tried to sell more than a hundred of Hartley’s paintings for ten dollars each to art dealers Charles Daniel and N. E. Montross, both of whom had shown Hartley in the past. When they refused, Stieglitz approached Kennerley, who agreed to auction the Hartleys along with another collection of paintings on the evening of May 17. Stieglitz put the paintings on view a week beforehand to stir up publicity and curiosity for the event. Bargain-hunting collectors packed the galleries. Dr. Barnes bought three, Charles Daniel bought several for collector Ferdinand Howell, poet William Carlos Williams paid one hundred and five dollars for a New Mexican pastel. In the end, Hartley grossed nearly five thousand dollars. Kennerley waived the usual commission, and Stieglitz took one thousand dollars for the artists’ fund, which Hartley had drawn heavily on in the past. Hartley returned to Berlin, where he lived modestly for two years before finally going to Florence.

  Hartley left before the publication of his collection of essays Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville and Poets. The critic Herbert J. Seligmann was drafted to proofread Hartley’s galleys while visiting Stieglitz at Lake George that summer. He gave O’Keeffe the essay on women artists, where she was grouped with such diverse stylists as Sonia Delaunay, Marie Laurencin, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Mary Cassatt, and Berthe Morisot. Hartley described O’Keeffe’s paintings as “probably as living and shameless private documents as exist. . . . By shamelessness, I mean unqualified nakedness of statement.”

  Embarrassed by his insinuations, O’Keeffe contemplated deliberately losing the essay, knowing that it was the sole copy. Instead, she went to Stieglitz for advice, and protested the implications in the hope that he would elide the offending remarks. But Stieglitz defended the essay as exposure that would be helpful to sales. The book was dedicated to him and he was to be its most active promoter when it was released in September. Little by little, O’Keeffe was starting to realize that Stieglitz had devised a campaign to promote her art though he never asked her opinion on such matters.

  O’Keeffe accepted the double life led by most professional women of her day, taking responsibility for many of the household chores in addition to finding the time to pursue her career. Before leaving for their summer home each year, she had to pack the contents of their New York apartment—including a complete china
service for twelve—to be shipped by train. “I would rather have been painting but I did what was expected,” she recalled. “[You] don’t complain about protocol—entertaining for guests. Do it right.”13

  When they arrived, the farmhouse was full of family. Walls were so thin that each member could hear whatever was taking place in the next room. There were endless problems: Stieglitz’s sister Selma complained for a month because she wanted to change desks with O’Keeffe. Once the desks were finally switched, she changed her mind and spent the subsequent weeks demanding that the desks be changed back.

  Partially paralyzed since the stroke and suffering spasms of pain, Hedwig turned sour when it became difficult for her to run the household. Stieglitz, who was terrified by the prospect of his mother’s death, complained endlessly of his own ailments and illnesses.

  When Herbert Seligmann came in July, he noted that O’Keeffe’s job seemed to be to “soothe all the temperaments,” a task without much allure. She indulged her sense of humor with a painting of the old cow’s head inclined skyward, its tongue extended to lick apples on a tree near the shed. The apples, however, are out of sight, and the emphasis is on the obscene thick, pink, bovine tongue.

  Of O’Keeffe’s efforts at painting, Stieglitz observed, “There is not much to inspire her this summer. . . .”

  Indeed, a number of her paintings from the summer appear distinctly half-hearted, such as the three anemic zinnias and two attempts at a single sunflower. Two pastels of water lilies floating in a black tray look like experiments in asymmetrical composition.

  O’Keeffe, who valued her eyesight above all else, complained that bright light hurt her eyes. To avoid the sun, she pursued her plein-air painting at dusk. Lake George with Crows captured the scene from a bird’s-eye view, with the lake surrounded by threateningly dark hills and a few trees fuzzed with autumnal color.