Though she had only been seen in a few exhibitions, by 1925 O’Keeffe’s reputation earned her a commission for two paintings to promote the Cheney Brothers silk company. Both paintings were entirely abstract and reproduced in the company’s advertisements. One picture of folds and angles was rendered in soft grays, whites, and blacks and captioned “Quiescent repose is the key-note of this O’Keeffe painting which symbolizes the spirit of the Gray tones now in favor.” The other was painted in melting, liquid shapes and shades of purple and dark red. In the advertisement, it was reproduced in warmer tones of peach and orange red with the caption, “The Reds of fashion suggest the restless, fickle movement of flames—a color quality captured in this painting by Georgia O’Keeffe.” In effect, Cheney Silks was providing compensated advertising for the artist, a commercial enterprise that even Stieglitz could not oppose, especially since they needed the money.
Despite his annual exhibitions and occasional promotions, Stieglitz was more eminence gris than a major player in the New York art world. In January, after his sixtieth birthday, he was awarded the Progress Medal by the Royal Photographic Society. Ironically, he had been the first American elected to The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, a group of British photographers who had rebelled against the conservative outlook of the Royal Photographic Society in 1894. Being honored thirty years later as an elder statesman reminded him that he was no longer a young Turk.
To compensate, he pointed out that more than twenty-five hundred viewers had come to his and O’Keeffe’s show and that he expected to clear several thousand dollars. Excited by this success, he decided to open a new gallery. He reserved a room in the Anderson Galleries building for the following season at two thousand dollars a year and told Hartley to start painting for his 1925 show.
Stieglitz also invited Charles Demuth to join the gallery. Three years earlier, the artist had had a falling out with his dealer, Charles Daniel, over financial matters. Demuth had known Stieglitz since 1914 and been photographed by him several times but never exhibited at 291, probably because his earlier work drew from many of the same sources as Marin. Demuth’s style had radically changed, however. As he put it: “John Marin and I drew our inspiration from the same sources. He brought his up in buckets and spilled much along the way. I dipped mine out with a teaspoon but never spilled a drop.”56 With aristocratic control, Demuth used color to animate his refined compositions as well as his erotic eccentricities. His light-hearted approach to the many weighty issues considered by Stieglitz and his artists endeared him to O’Keeffe, who called him “a better friend with me than any of the other artists.”57 Both took pleasure in the double entendre of their libidinous paintings of innocent flowers..
Demuth was from a prosperous and proper family with a tobacco shop and snuff factory in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but suffered a frail childhood. Around four, he contracted Perthes, a degenerative hip disease that left him lame, so he had to carry a cane. At the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts he studied with William Merritt Chase, director of the school until 1909, but preferred the more controlled realism of Thomas Anshutz.After his father died in 1912, he returned to Paris to study at the Academie Moderne and Academie Julian. Around that time, he befriended Hartley, who was living there.
He had cultivated an attitude of fin-de-siècle aestheticism and a taste for the Orientalism of Whistler. The quintessential dandy, slightly built, with dark eyes and glossy black hair, Demuth maintained the flamboyant posture of the artist. After returning to the states in 1914, he integrated a modernist vocabulary with delicate, effervescent watercolors of floral arrangements, circus acrobats, and studies of well-endowed sailors. In 1921, he was diagnosed with diabetes. At the time that Stieglitz offered to show his work at the Intimate Gallery, Demuth was employing his jeweled glazes and precise technique on pictures of the humble silos and factories around the Pennsylvania countryside.
O’Keeffe had impressed upon Stieglitz the need for financial independence: by fall of 1924 they would require lodgings of their own. Because he could no longer manage the stairs after a minor heart attack, Lee Stieglitz had sold his Sixty-fifth Street house. Finances had become such an issue with O’Keeffe and Stieglitz that the brief catalogue for their joint 1924 show included O’Keeffe’s admission, “Incidentally, I hope someone will buy something. I have kept my pictures small because space in New York necessitated that.”58
V
At thirty-seven O’Keeffe had lost the starstruck awe of the first years of her relationship with Stieglitz. She referred to him affectionately as “a funny little soft grey creature” and moaned to Anderson about the packing and preparations that preceded their departure for Lake George:
Stieglitz has to do everything in his mind so many times before he does it in reality that it keeps the process of anything like moving going on for a long time. The poor little thing is looking for a place in [the world] and doesn’t see any place where he thinks he fits. Well—I don’t know whether I fit or not but I do know that if I don’t cook the dinner we won’t have any and when it is eaten if I don’t wash the dishes—Well Stieglitz always tries but he is so absent-mnded he throws the left-over scraps . . . back into the bread box and wipes the dishes and puts them back into the draining rack as though they were still wet. . . . I have to laugh—He tries to help because he has a theory about doing things for yourself—But it isn’t really worth putting his mind on it—He just doesn’t know how. . . . He walks around like a forlorn lost creature.1
When she learned that Lee and Lizzie were planning to construct a separate cottage on the Lake George property, O’Keeffe suggested that they, too, build a house of their own on The Hill. The ever-social Stieglitz couldn’t comprehend why O’Keeffe would want such privacy.
In the summer of 1924, The Hill lost the last stalwarts from the old regime. Fred Varnum, aide de camp for thirty-eight years, passed away, and his wife, Ella, who had been the Oaklawn cook, retired. Sad as these developments may have been for Stieglitz, O’Keeffe was elated to be alone—despite certain complications.
Arriving at The Hill in the pouring rain, they discovered there was no water in the house. They spent an hour digging in the mud only to discover that one of Fred’s last chores had been to remove the main valve.
Once this crisis had been resolved, O’Keeffe had her first opportunity to take over as head of the household. Stieglitz observed that she was “in her element.” She sent the boats to be mended, had the garden plowed, planted it with vegetables and flowers, and was thrilled to find that she and Stieglitz were “masters of the house.” Stieglitz, on the other hand, was “worn out” and took to his bed with James Joyce’s latest novel, Ulysses, smuggled to him by a friend after the U.S. Post Office had confiscated the first five hundred copies of the provocative text.
After photographing O’Keeffe’s abstract paintings for more than five years, Stieglitz had been translating their forms into cloud photographs, Songs of the Sky. O’Keeffe said admiringly, “He has done consciously something that I did mostly unconsciously—and it is amazing to see how he has done it out of the sky with the camera.”2
As they had with the apples, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz continued to share their subject matter quite self-consciously, carrying on a pictorial dialogue in paint and film. After seeing his latest prints of nimbus and cumulus, she answered with A Celebration, a painted stack of swirling, whorling, frilly clouds on a celestial blue. Long arabesques of cloud were rendered in hot, southwestern colors in Red, Yellow and Black Streak. Flower Abstraction incorporates cloud-shaped ruffles as part of a gladiola. She completed three paintings, each titled Portrait of a Day, of slightly changing muddy green and earth tones, like a flowing river with a single leaf floating on its surface. In their flowing forms, free of shoreline or horizon, they borrow from Stieglitz’s views of the sky.
Being in charge of the household had generated within O’Keeffe a fresh enthusiasm for painting. The planting of corn in the garden at The Hill probably brought back
memories of sharp green fields in Sun Prairie and her prized watercolor of corn that she reluctantly had given to the Chatham Episcopal Institute. That summer, she executed three oils of stalks of corn. With the affection of a devoted gardener, she observed, “The light-colored veins of the dark green leaves reaching out in opposite directions. And every morning a little drop of dew would have run down the veins into the center of this plant like a little lake—all fine and fresh.”3
Autumn Leaves features orange oak leaves in a tidy arrangement similar to those painted in 1923. But her other paintings of leaves went in a fresh direction. Pattern of Leaves portrays a burgundy maple leaf, ripped in the center, atop a few leaves of ashen gray. Flat and confrontational, and depicted in such a way that the tear is as compelling as the leaf, the painting was purchased by Duncan Phillips. Leaf Motif No. 1 is a bronze and ivory abstraction contrasting the positive space of an oak leaf with the negative space between the scallops in the leaf’s edge. It was purchased by her brother-in-law George Herbert Engelhard. Leaf Motif No. 2 further breaks down the forms into arcs within arcs of earth tones. The careful placement of each form within its confined space reiterated the way she had composed the simplified still lifes the previous year.
On a more metaphorical level, O’Keeffe’s paintings of crumbling leaves could have resulted from Stieglitz’s complaints about aging. That spring, shortly after being honored by the Linked Ring, he had exhibited Spiritual America, his photograph of the belly, haunches, and genitals of a gelded horse that his father had bought some thirty-five years before. The traces of the horse’s harness are hooked up as though it was no longer in a position to be useful. The title was meant to deride what Stieglitz perceived as the materialism of the society, yet it is impossible to overlook the picture as a wry self-portrait.
In June, Stieglitz took to his bed with painful kidney stones. The old cow painted by O’Keeffe had been sold. In a nostalgic mood, he observed, “It is difficult to believe the barn really empty—specter of all the years. Even the old chestnut tree on the upper hills is singing his swan song.”4 He had photographed the ancient tree while O’Keeffe painted The Chestnut Red and The Chestnut Grey. The two paintings are identical but for their coloration, with their thick trunks and leafless branches silhouetted against the hills at different times of day. Photography contributed to the choice of subject matter but also to the notion of repeating the same picture, changing only the element of color. The trunks of trees as photographed by Stieglitz led O’Keeffe to paint Autumn Trees—The Maple using the branches of a tree as a web of support for shades of gray and garnet. Autumn Trees—The White Birch is less abstract, with white trunks enfolded in veils of topaz.
Once Stieglitz had recovered, he invited Beck to spend the Fourth of July holiday at The Hill; she answered that she’d love to be rolling in the buttercups “sans negligee” but complained that O’Keeffe, who was a “crabbed wench,” would spoil any such visit.
Indeed, when the Strands came to The Hill together, memories of Stieglitz’s inappropriate behavior threw O’Keeffe into a depression. Soon after they left, it was O’Keeffe’s turn to take to her bed. Stieglitz professed great concern, calling himself “useless,” but refused to make any connection between her illness and his own behavior. Instead, he invited Beck for a return visit, suggesting that she take one meal a day at The Pines. “I don’t want Georgia in the kitchen over an hour a day,” he wrote. “I wouldn’t say ‘come’ unless it were ‘right’ all around.”5
But it wasn’t right. O’Keeffe didn’t believe Beck’s intimacy with Stieglitz was innocent—she knew from experience what could happen between Stieglitz and his nude model.
Beck returned in August, but Stieglitz made arrangements to keep her away from O’Keeffe, and she slept and ate at The Pines.
After she returned to the city, Stieglitz sent her prints of his latest photographs of her. Beck provocatively compared herself to a “music hall queen” who could end up “by leaving my faithful consort to take up with my large-eyed leading man!”6
Stieglitz snatched up the bait: “I do see all I missed doing I would so liked to have done with La Beckalina, das Beckchen! A G.D. Shame. Of course, my own complex—No one to blame but yours truly.” He apologized for all the “unnecessary unpleasantnesses,” caused by O’Keeffe. “I just wish I were a bit ‘wiser.’ . . . Life would be smoother for others near me I know.”7
Beck answered acidly, “I am glad it is at last peaceful [on The Hill] and sorry that Das Beckchen is apparently not one of the people that is complementary to others. If I can be honest I must say that my feeling . . . is not unmixed or free from regret that something has happened which has showed me that what I prized so much before—a feeling of freedom—has been interferred with.”8
Stieglitz consoled her, “You really had nothing to do with the, let’s call it unrest—inner of G.—as I see it. But we won’t go into that. You have too much sense—and there is today and tomorrow and . . . you and I. . . . Paul doesn’t quite know how to ‘let go’ and well, never mind.”9
O’Keeffe was particularly sensitive to Beck’s flirtations because Emmy had granted Stieglitz his request for a divorce, which would be final in September. He wanted to marry O’Keeffe to legitimize their financial and social status, having altered his will to benefit her four years earlier. O’Keeffe was ambivalent. She admitted, “I have to keep some of myself or I wouldn’t have anything left to give. . . . Living is so difficult—almost too difficult.”10
Worried that marriage would interfere with her fight for her own identity, she noted, “I’ve had a hard time hanging on to my name, but I hang on to it with my teeth. I like getting what I’ve got on my own.”11 She also had concerns about Stieglitz’s failing health: one October night, he had fallen down the stairs for the first time in forty-seven years at the lake.
When Ida visited Lake George in the middle of September, O’Keeffe’s life was eased in practical ways as her sister arranged wildflowers in vases around the house, made the beds, and otherwise satisfied visitors and family. Ida flirted with Rosenfeld, who had returned from Europe. Along with the Engelhards and the Davidsons, Stieglitz led them up Prospect Mountain only to get them all lost on the way home. The moonlit night inspired a certain intimacy between Rosenfeld and Ida, who continued to see one another when they returned to New York.
Despite all the distractions, Stieglitz noticed, “Georgia has done some amazing canvases. Intimately related to the early drawings which so overwhelmed me when brought to me the first time back in 1916.”12 Having let go of her shyness over the meaning attached to her abstractions, she let her impressions of the landscape assert themselves as marks, daubs, and planes of subtle hues. Dark Abstraction posits two black forms, separated by a line of teal and russet with a faint halation at the top of the picture. From the Lake No. 1 interweaves the shapes of waves and clouds in aqua and ultramarine, chartreuse and charcoal, cut with rays of white and black. From the Lake No. 3, with flowing earth colors veined by lines of black and dots of white, could be a microscopic close-up of a riverbed, a view from a mountaintop, or an arrangement of patterns. Even a traditional view of the mountain and lake, Lake George, is simplified to planes of green, blue, and gray.
Such experimentation was in keeping with O’Keeffe’s great breakthrough of the year. Planting seeds and picking flowers led to a bounteous abstraction of delphinium blossoms, freesia, and ogive leaves called From the Old Garden, No. 2. She painted a good-sized oil of the flame-colored canna and two pictures of a trio of calla lilies. Petunias, however, engaged her fullest concentration. She painted five lavender blossoms artfully arranged on an oval canvas, Petunias in Oval. She followed with a 36 × 30-inch canvas, with a pink flower hovering in the center above some burgundy and brown leaves, Petunia and Coleus. In a subsequent painting, Petunia No. 2, two giant violet blossoms float on a pulsing purple sphere. Photography contributed to O’Keeffe’s decision to enlarge, crop, and remove background distraction. She had pai
nted flowers for many years but never inflated to such dimensions. In so doing, she imposed twentieth-century scale and graphic power onto one of the oldest genres of painting. At first, Stieglitz did not comprehend the undertaking. He dismissed them as “silly but lovely—her kind of silliness—her kind of loveliness.”
O’Keeffe was understandably invigorated by this new work. “I am very much excited over my work this year,” she said. “It has given me a great time and some of it I enjoy much—and I really don’t often enjoy my own things.”13
Indeed, O’Keeffe had a triumphant year: learning to detach from Stieglitz’s antics, she funneled her energy into that which gave her the deepest sustenance—her painting. Her sense of competition was also a driving force: she knew that this work would be exhibited in the coming year with that of “the men”: Hartley, Marin, Dove, Strand, Stieglitz, and Demuth. The flowers of this period, as much as any other pictures, prove O’Keeffe’s insistence at remaining true to her own instincts.
In October she penned some of her most lucid feelings about the challenge of creativity:
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you. Catching, crystalizing your simpler clearer vision of life—only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead—that you must always keep working to grasp.14
One warm evening at The Hill, after a sumptuous dinner, Ida offered to read everyone’s palm. Squinting over the lines on his upturned hand, she told Stieglitz that he lacked talent but had a great will: he was an incurable flirt, he followed a false philosophy, and a new life was about to begin for him.
A new life was indeed to begin. In November, Republican Calvin Coolidge, the incumbent since the death of Warren G. Harding, won his second term as president. It was a time of dizzying change and opportunity in an America fueled by the prosperous postwar economy and soaring stock market. Moving pictures were the rage, and Freud’s writings on the subconscious and the incomprehensible devastation of World War I led artists to embrace the irrational in the art movement Surrealism. Yet artists also sought signs of progress and hope in the Machine Age. Precisionism, a style of meticulous rendering of industrial buildings and machinery, was appearing in the paintings of Demuth and in the photographs of Strand.
Full Bloom Page 27