New York critics and collectors were eager to see the art produced by this thirty-six-year-old artist, especially since more than half a dozen stories had appeared in major publications before the opening of her show. During the exhibition’s two-week run, another nine articles and reviews appeared. One newspaper reported that five hundred people attended each day. The Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, who was friendly with Stieglitz through the salons of the Stettheimer sisters, came to the show and, after looking around, quizzed O’Keeffe, “But where is your self-portrait? Everyone has a self-portrait in his first show.”2 O’Keeffe, who thought Duchamp a most elegant man, just laughed. It may not have been her first show, but it was effectively her debut.
Nearly two years had passed since O’Keeffe’s work had been seen as background to Stieglitz’s portrait of her. Rosenfeld’s assertion that the “Essence of very womanhood permeates her pictures” had acted as a stone in a still pool, and rippling concentric waves of criticism reiterated his opinion.
Four critics reviewing her show quoted directly from Hartley’s essay in the catalogue.3 Women reviewers often came to the same conclusions as men when writing about her pictures. One woman wrote, “To me they seem to be a clear case of Freudian suppressed desires in paint. . . . Whether you like some of these very obvious symbols is a question of taste.”4
All writers saw the show as a comeback for Stieglitz as art dealer. “His belief in the authority of her work and his unbounded enthusiasm are as contagious as his cheering for Matisse in the old days,” one wrote.5 Stieglitz saw the show that way himself. He told the Brooklyn Eagle, “Women can only create babies, say the scientists, but I say they can produce art—and Georgia O’Keeffe is the proof of it.”6
McBride referred to her work as “B.F.,” Before Freud, meaning that both the artist and her work were without inhibitions and this freedom had been accomplished without the aid of analysis. But, he went on to write, “It is reasonably sure that [Alfred Stieglitz] is responsible for Miss O’Keeffe, the artist. . . .”
Making reference to the sexual innuendo of the work, he continued wryly,
It was one of the first great triumphs for abstract art since everybody got it. In definitely unbosoming her soul she not only finds her own release but advances the cause of art in her country. . . . She will be besieged by all her sisters for advice—which will be a supreme danger for her. She is, after all, an artist, and owes more to art than morality. My own advice to her . . . is, immediately after the show to get herself to a nunnery.7
O’Keeffe viewed McBride as the only critic who was both unpretentious and knowledgeable. She thanked him for his review in a way that revealed her ambition for him as well as her awareness of the liability of her gender: “I was particularly pleased—that with three women to write about you put me first. My particular kind of vanity doesn’t mind not being noticed at all . . . but I don’t like to be second. . . . I like being first.” Unless she was up against Marin, that is. “I must add that I don’t mind if Marin comes first because he is a man—its [sic] a different class.”8
One week into her exhibition, O’Keeffe took to her bed with a cold and severe depression. Increasingly, she was aware that references to her body and her sexuality were undermining her credibility as a serious artist. She felt doubly powerless knowing that Stieglitz encouraged such views.
When she finally made it back to the gallery, O’Keeffe ran into the writer Sherwood Anderson. Having moved to New York from Chicago the previous year, Anderson had become another of Stieglitz’s devotees. Stieglitz considered Anderson’s vernacular and spare style of writing, especially the characterization of small-town life in Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919, to be consummately American. O’Keeffe came to trust Anderson thoroughly, and she corresponded with him in an unusually candid and intimate manner for many years.
If reviews were harrowing for O’Keeffe, the sales were heartening. Twenty works were sold for a total of three thousand dollars, mostly to family and the Strands, and one to Anderson. Even the impoverished Dove, who had recently left his wife to live with artist Helen “Reds” Torr on a houseboat on the Harlem River, traded his own work for one of her paintings.
O’Keeffe knew that if her work started to sell, an apartment would become an option, along with other freedoms. During the three years that she had spent with Stieglitz, she had come to recognize the liabilities of her financial dependence.
Stieglitz appeared at the Anderson Galleries daily to indoctrinate visitors to O’Keeffe, American. Though Marin, Hartley, and Dove were American, their aesthetic debt was so obviously to European modernism that Stieglitz asserted this claim most vigorously for O’Keeffe.
If exhibitions were a “necessary evil,” O’Keeffe felt the same way about reviews. “I say that I do not want to have this exhibition . . . but I guess I’m lying. . . . And I presume, if I must be honest, that I am also interested in what anybody else has to say about [it] and also in what they don’t say because that means something to me too.”9
Nonetheless, six months after her show had come down, O’Keeffe was “full of furies.” She was tired of critics writing about her gender instead of her art. “I wonder if man has ever been written down the way he has written woman down—I rather feel that he hasn’t been,” she told Anderson.10
Eight weeks after O’Keeffe’s exhibition, Stieglitz showed over a hundred of his own prints, most of them made since 1921, at the Anderson Galleries. Many were portraits—the nudes of O’Keeffe hung alongside those of Beck Strand.11 Most important was the debut of Music—A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs. In March, he had previewed this series and earlier photographs to Ananda Coomaraswamy, curator of Indian and Islamic Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. An amateur photographer himself, Coomaraswamy pronounced them “absolute art” and requested a donation of the prints for the museum. Although Stieglitz would have been happier had they been purchased, he took pleasure in the fact that, at last, twenty-seven of his photographs had made their way into the collection of a respected fine arts museum. One condition of his gift was that the photographs be exhibited at least once every five years.
Stieglitz’s photographs were increasingly contributing to O’Keeffe’s paintings, and vice versa. After she had painted the little house that he used as a darkroom, Stieglitz was inspired to photograph First Snow and the Little House, which shared a view of the building blanketed under pristine white snow. At the same time, O’Keeffe completed what she considered to be one of her best paintings: The Flagpole. Dramatically different from its 1921 predecessor, this dreamy abstraction reveals the form of the house entirely subsumed under a mound of lilacs, yet the black door is open and there is a single cloud and a sun in the sky, symbolic of the Photo-Secession. The flagpole wiggles skyward, power lines shoot down, and the weathervane angles upward diagonally. The Flagpole was purchased from the show by the redoubtable art dealer Joseph Duveen for his daughter. When Georgia met Duveen’s daughter years later, she remarked that she had never seen The Flagpole. To this day, the painting’s disappearance is mysterious. Only a black-and-white photograph of it survives.
A third rendition of this view of the little house, titled Spring, was painted later that year. O’Keeffe placed the phallic flagpole in front of the house, the arrow-shaped weathervane and the taut electrical lines around the open door to Stieglitz’s darkroom. Again, she uses the image of a door for its symbolic connotations. The black door is the source of Stieglitz’s creativity, but the image is emblematic of creative activity at large. Stieglitz’s sexual power resided in the place where he made his art and is represented in the bold flagpole. Clouds, the subject of his most recent photographs, fill the sky. The blooming lilacs surrounding the house convey a sense of abundance and delight. O’Keeffe recreated this picture again in 1925 and in 1959, each time with different overtones. Stieglitz photographed the house again in 1930.
In the spring of 1923, O’Keeffe incorporated Stieglitz’s cloud motif into a pair of abstracti
ons redolent of her earlier interest in Art Nouveau, Pink Moon and Blue Lines and Red Lines. Pink Moon and Blue Lines returns to a palette of magenta, lemon, and aqua arrayed in vertical waves on either side of a pink moon on a deep blue ground. She knew she was breaking down aesthetic barriers. Later, she said, “When I entered the art world . . . you weren’t supposed to paint yellow . . . and pink pictures.”12 Red Lines shows vertical waves of pale blue and buttressing columns of deep red divided by a thin pink line. Both compositions derive from O’Keeffe’s bisected canvases of the Lake George horizon, but upended. This technique began in her show with the vertical display of Lake George Reflection, a predictable landscape except that the horizon line runs up and down and is enlivened with pastel bubbles. Collector Peggy Guggenheim admitted that she could not decide which way to hang it. Studying photographs taken from various perspectives was enhancing O’Keeffe’s ability to paint pictures that could be interpreted in multiple ways—paintings that could be hung vertically or horizontally.
Stieglitz’s schedule had been so hectic in preparation for his and O’Keeffe’s shows that it had kept him from dwelling on his mother’s death. His pent-up grief led O’Keeffe to remark, “He was just a little heap of misery.” She added, “In a way he is amazingly tough but at the same time is the most sensitive thing I have ever seen.”13
It was when he was in this fragile state that Stieglitz received another blow. At the beginning of the summer, Kitty had given birth to a son, Milton Stearns Jr. A few days after the birth, she lapsed into a severe state of postpartum depression and was hospitalized.
Doctors assured Lee, who was most familiar with the implications of the case, that postpartum depression was common enough and women usually recovered. Emmy’s own mother had suffered from depression after delivering her daughter.14 Milton Stearns was hopeful and devoted to his wife and new son. After Stieglitz visited Kitty in the hospital, he decided to go ahead with his plans to spend the summer at Lake George, but not without feelings of guilt.
He berated himself, “I realize with every new day what a child I have been and still am.—Absurdly so. It sometimes disgusts me with myself.”15 Given the sad circumstances of his daughter’s depression, and his distance from her, Stieglitz could no longer tolerate any suggestion from O’Keeffe or anyone else that he father another child.
In 1922, Elizabeth Davidson had had a second baby girl; she and her family lived on a farm in Westchester. The Davidsons had offered to help care for any child of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe’s. If O’Keeffe still clung to any hope, Kitty’s fate rendered that option obsolete.
Still, a child was to be very much a part of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s lives that summer. Stieglitz’s secretary Marie Rapp Boursault and her two-year old, Yvonne, stayed at Lake George for ten weeks, one of the longest visits for a nonfamily member. Marie’s husband, George Boursault, was having difficulty finding a job after his return from the war. Marie was pregnant with their second child, and the stay at The Hill was a generous offer. But she was an inexperienced mother, and her undisciplined daughter cried and chattered so much that Stieglitz dubbed her “Twenty-One-Cats-On-The-Back-Fence.”
Despite her constant carrying on, Stieglitz adored her to the point of taking some fifty photographs of her, more than he had taken of his own daughter or any of his own relatives. This nearly obsessive behavior led some to wonder whether his devotion to Marie and her daughter wasn’t exceeding the boundaries of a purely professional relationship. Stieglitz’s portraits of Marie tend to make her look considerably more glamourous than clerical.16
O’Keeffe must have sensed some intimacy between Stieglitz and Marie, and she could not bear the “brat.” It was galling to have Stieglitz cooing over Yvonne while he denied her a child of her own. Burdened by the extra dishwashing and cooking generated by the little girl, O’Keeffe barely disguised her dislike of both mother and daughter.
Despite Hedwig’s death, O’Keeffe did not become head of the Lake George household as one might assume based on her relationship with Alfred, the eldest Stieglitz son. Fred Varnum said that he’d “be damned to take orders from any woman but Mrs. Stieglitz.”17 It took three years of cajoling before O’Keeffe got him to move three birch trees closer to the house.
Nor did O’Keeffe have much control over Stieglitz. He, for his part, feared the solitude that she increasingly craved. A friend observed of him, “291 is a man who lives through company, a crowd busy expressing a man.”18 In contrast, O’Keeffe said, “I don’t know why people disturb me so much—they make me feel like a hobbled horse.”19
Over the next few months, guests at Lake George included the Seligmanns and the Schaufflers, Pollitzer and Rosenfeld, all in addition to Rapp Boursault and her daughter. O’Keeffe was inundated by complaints and chores. Stieglitz lamented that he was unable to help out due to his many ailments, his sore feet and arms, burning eyes, and hurt nose. Cheerily, he noted that O’Keeffe was a “very busy lady with cooking, gardening, making one handsome (but very sad) painting, retouching a few photos—reading about art—and above all worrying much about T.L.F. [The Little Fella].”20
But Stieglitz must have known the difficulty of O’Keeffe’s position: he confessed, “When I look at her, I feel like a criminal.”21 His disregard for O’Keeffe’s needs, his insistence on constant company and the upsetting effect the art reviews had had on her, all contributed to O’Keeffe’s emotional withdrawal from her relationship. Stieglitz responded to her retreat by turning his attention toward Beck, who was still full of unflagging admiration. Following Beck’s brief visit in June, when she modeled for him unclothed, Stieglitz’s letters to her grew more affectionate; he addressed her as “Beckalino Strandina Molta Bella Carissimia Mia.” He commiserated when she had the “curse”—when he passed the news on to O’Keeffe, she sarcastically asked if he kept tabs on all the women he knew.22
Stieglitz repeatedly and plaintively invited Beck to return to the lake for the month of August. She replied that she must work to support not only herself but her husband.
Around this time, Stieglitz seemed to be punishing all those he perceived as disloyal. The year before, Steichen had returned from France to work for Condé Nast publications. Stieglitz tried to take credit for getting him the job despite the fact that Crowninshield had long been Steichen’s outspoken fan. As Steichen became the highest-paid photographer in the world, taking pictures of celebrities for Vanity Fair, Stieglitz accused him of prostituting his art. Steichen never lost his respect for Stieglitz, but their friendship cooled, and they were never as close as they had been during the heady years before the war.
In the middle of July, Stieglitz had a falling out with Waldo Frank. Rosenfeld had written a negative review of Gorham Munson’s book Waldo Frank: A Study. When Stieglitz backed Rosenfeld’s opinion, Frank wrote him a scathing letter, asserting, “You are incapable of a relationship of equality with anyone.” He stated that Stieglitz maintained his power over artists and writers in part because of their own immaturity. When they wanted to grow to independence and adulthood, they were dismissed. Frank announced that he was leaving the orbit of planet Stieglitz. Rosenfeld displayed his loyalty to Stieglitz by deleting the chapter on Frank and adding a chapter on his ex-wife, Margaret Naumberg, in his book Port of New York. Stieglitz remained chilly toward Frank until 1927, when he wrote an appreciation of the photographer for McCall’s.
Strand went to The Hill alone at the end of July, and commuted to Saratoga to document the races. He had written a thoughtful review of O’Keeffe’s show, crediting O’Keeffe’s work with “the power and precision of genius.” Unlike other reviewers, he did not ally her imagery with her sexuality, but with her skill as an artist: “The finest and most subtle perceptions of woman have crystallized for the first time in plastic terms, not only through line and form, but through color used with an expressiveness which it has never had before.”23
During his stay at the farmhouse, Strand cooked enchiladas to remind O’Keeffe of her ti
me in Texas. She reciprocated by making ice cream for him and getting up each morning to walk him to the trolley. When he said that he missed Beck, O’Keeffe assured him that his wife was enjoying her time alone.
As Strand and O’Keeffe reacquainted themselves, Stieglitz wrote daily to Beck. His letters grew overtly flirtatious as he described developing his nude photographs of her. “I have been tickling up your rear into most perfect condition of delight.”24 He was “sublimating something good society thinks too naughty for words—even for words poetic.”25 When Beck made a negligee for O’Keeffe, Stieglitz queried, “Do you wear such things?”26 He complained that O’Keeffe’s long toenails scratched his legs at night.
When Beck asked Stieglitz for reassurance about her husband’s career, his compliments were laced with hostility. “He has the ability. He isn’t afraid of work. . . . Of course, the more real the artist, the less chance I suppose he has, these days particularly.”27 The implication was that Strand was a loser either way—not a real artist if he succeeded commercially, but a failure if he did not.
After Strand returned to the city at the end of August, Beck came to stay at Lake George by herself. She confided to Stieglitz (not having done so with her husband) that she had lost her job. On September 8, shortly after Beck’s arrival, O’Keeffe left abruptly for a month’s stay at York Beach. She explained to Elizabeth, who was expected at The Hill, “I assure you it is much pleasanter for you than my staying there would have been.”28
After she left, the Davidsons and the Engelhards confronted Stieglitz about the expense of maintaining The Hill, since neither he nor O’Keeffe was contributing to the upkeep. The suggestion of selling part of it or using more for farming met with Stieglitz’s wrath. His relatives fled back to the city, leaving him alone with Beck at the farmhouse. During the day, she posed in the nude for his camera and in the evenings, he came to her room saying he was unable to sleep. She wrote her husband, “I wish I could take him to my broad bosom and comfort him.”29 Such remarks could not have been reassuring to Strand, who had lost one woman to Stieglitz already. It seems that Stieglitz and Beck enjoyed some intimate moments, perhaps a love affair.
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