Waldo Frank had met Toomer in 1920 in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he was researching the subject of lynching for his novel Holiday. Toomer, who had been raised in a Washington, D.C., mansion, and whose grandfather had been the governor of Louisiana, wrote about the black experience though he had spent only two months in a black neighborhood. His 1923 novel about slave life, Cane, was praised by supporters of the Harlem Renaissance like Carl Van Vechten.
Like many of Manhattan’s intellectuals and literati, Frank and Toomer shared a fascination with the teachings of Gurdjieff. (When Toomer visited Mabel Dodge that winter in Taos, she gave him fourteen thousand dollars for Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in France.)
Two years earlier, however, when Toomer visited Frank in Connecticut, he had seduced his wife, Margaret Naumburg. A few months later, Naumburg left Frank to live with Toomer in New York. That fall, they turned up together at Lake George. O’Keeffe confessed to Anderson that she was struck right away by Toomer’s sensual good looks, noting that he was so light-skinned that he could pass as white. Stieglitz took fifteen photographs of him stylishly dressed in a top coat, light cardigan, and open neck shirt.
Stieglitz refused to invite Ida to the lake until the end of October, after Rosenfeld had left. After the previous summer’s flirtation and their time spent together in New York, Rosenfeld had proposed marriage to Ida that spring. Ida refused him. But, having a change of heart, she reconsidered and asked Stieglitz to convey her changed feelings to Rosenfeld. Stieglitz decided that it was not in their best interests. He told Ida that Rosenfeld needed “to get clarity about himself—& he can get that only in working & keeping away from petticoats and all they signify.”17
Perhaps Stieglitz thought he was protecting Ida. In any case, Stieglitz never bothered to convey Ida’s message to Rosenfeld. He announced this sabotage as a great accomplishment.
If O’Keeffe knew of Stieglitz’s hand in determining Ida’s future, she did not intervene. Nursing an elderly man in Norwalk, Connecticut, Ida was not happy with Stieglitz. She had a long weeping spell, confessing that she always used a white silk handkerchief for her crying jags, as her grandfather, the count, must have done.
During that summer and fall, after recovering from her allergic reaction, O’Keeffe rose before dawn to row a boat across the lake, where she could best observe an old birch tree with several trunks connected at the base. When Stieglitz photographed trees, he often focused on the sculptural trunks and the relationships between angles of branches, as in Dancing Trees of 1922. O’Keeffe picked up on this notion and painted half a dozen canvases, each 24 × 36 inches, of the white tree trunks twisting and writhing amid foliage verdant in spring and bronze in fall. White Birch is sprayed with a halo of gold. The series of seven trees culminated with Grey Tree, Lake George, its trunk and leafless branches wrapped in a prism of cubist greens and grays. Although O’Keeffe drew from Stieglitz’s photographs, her interest in trees initially came from Dow, who wrote, “A tree trunk with its branches is a good type of this kind of harmony, unity secured through the relation of principle and subordinate, even down to the veinings of leaves—a multitude of parts organized into a simple whole.”18 O’Keeffe often referred to her copy of W. A. Lambeth’s 1913 text Trees and How to Know Them.
O’Keeffe’s fascination with trees seems to have diminished her interest in the lake, of which she painted only two pictures including Grey Lake George, a bleak winter view of silvery waves and clouds. In the style of the past two years, O’Keeffe painted two modest arrangements of autumn leaves, and Red and Brown Leaves: a 24 × 18-inch canvas of a glorious golden elm leaf superimposed upon a crimson and mandarin maple on a brassy ground. Stieglitz told Seligmann that when O’Keeffe had been experiencing a difficult time, an earlier version of Red and Brown Leaf had been painted for him. “All paintings are fine, but some come out of a certain kind of moment, and those for some reason one feels to be exceptional, they cannot be repeated.”19 Along with Canna Leaves, her narrow and vertical rendering of two viridian ovals veined with scarlet, Red and Brown Leaves reveals that O’Keeffe’s view had been altered profoundly by the photographic techniques of enlargement and collapsed space that she had been using in her flower pictures. O’Keeffe had clearly taken notice of the photographs of leaves that Strand had included in his spring show.
She had experimented with the idea that her abstract paintings could be hung vertically, horizontally, or upside down. Stieglitz now brought this approach to his photographs of clouds, so that lines of cirrus might appear as vertical smoldering stripes. He abandoned the music analogy, declaring his cloud prints to be representative of his emotions. He called them Equivalent, and two years later changed it to Equivalents. He may have borrowed the notion from O’Keeffe, who said, “I had to create an equivalent for what I was looking at—not copy it.”20
In November, when the weather at Lake George discouraged visitors, Stieglitz stood in the freezing darkroom, his hands chapped from the icy water, making three hundred and fifty prints of the Equivalent series. He tore up over three hundred of them. “It’s really great to be able to put in 18 hours a day and feel the energy still left of 17 stallions,” he exulted.21
But O’Keeffe may have held a less optimistic view. That fall, she completed Little House with Flagpole, a considerably less cheery interpretation of the white building with the door open to the darkroom than the one in her paintings from a few years before. In Little House with Flagpole, dusk settles over the building and the pole droops as though bent in sorrow. A half-moon radiates a large circular shadow over the scene, perhaps a reference to the camera lens, and the weathervane points downward. Compared to the ecstatic aura of the 1921 and 1923 pictures, Little House seems rather gloomy.
When they returned to the city, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe moved into a new apartment in the Shelton Hotel, the city’s first highrise residence, on Lexington Avenue and Forty-eighth Street. Although it was primarily a gentlemen’s residence, O’Keeffe proved persuasive, negotiating to move in by the middle of November.
The Shelton was the ne plus ultra in progressive luxury housing. Architect Arthur Loomis Harmon, who also designed the Empire State Building, was among the first to incorporate setbacks so that light and air circulated around the upper floors. Elegantly decorated with vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, and a grand staircase, the Shelton also boasted an Olympic-sized swimming pool, where Houdini performed one of his underwater escapes from a twelve-foot casket.
A cafeteria with a fireplace offered breakfast and dinner. Apparently, the cafeteria was economical and Stieglitz and O’Keeffe dined with a few of the residents. Blanche Matthias introduced them to architect and author Claude Fayette Bragdon, who had written a book on the fourth dimension and who fascinated them with his knowledge of theosophy.
The hotel staff performed all the housekeeping, and O’Keeffe was eager to be rid of chores that interfered with her time for painting. This was especially true after taking on much of the daily maintenance at Lake George. Accustomed to a cook and a housekeeper, Stieglitz never expected O’Keeffe to carry out such chores. Yet the move to the Shelton signaled a fresh boundary, making clear that marriage did not imply domestic burdens for O’Keeffe. Equally important, they paid rent only for the winter months that they stayed there, and since it was furnished, they had few things to put in storage in the summers.
Although the Shelton was foreign territory for Stieglitz, he was thrilled to be participating in such a modern development. He wrote, “We live high up. . . . We feel as if we were out at midocean—All is so quiet except the wind—& the trembling shaking hulk of steel in which we live—It’s a wonderful place.”22
The eleventh-floor suite consisted of a modest bedroom, bath, and a sitting room. O’Keeffe documented her surroundings in eight pencil sketches of the busy skyline and a charcoal of the view west to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, subjects that quickly made their way into her paintings. At night, the colored s
igns atop the buildings and headlights from the constant flow of traffic appeared as a graphic illustration of the future. “Today the city is something bigger, more complex than ever before in history,” she said. “And nothing can be gained from running away. I wouldn’t even if I could.”23
When she was not at work, she covered her painting in progress with a sheet. Bits of coral, shells, pebbles, or dried grass in a vase were scattered through the apartment. Considering the depth of their collections, relatively few works of art made it to the Shelton. “I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it,” O’Keeffe said.24
Among the exceptions to this rule was Dove’s poignant assemblage Rain, poised on the mantle. O’Keeffe had purchased it for one hundred and fifty dollars, noting later that she was the first person to buy one of Dove’s controversial assemblages and that she turned down a subsequent five-hundred-dollar offer for it from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The spare apartment contained another surprise in the portrait that Ida had painted of her sister. “It is quite wonderful,” O’Keeffe admitted with unusual good will. The portrait was the result of the paint box and canvas Stieglitz had sent Ida, perhaps as an apology for derailing her prospects with Rosenfeld.
Journalist Frances O’Brien, who visited the Shelton, was one of the few who ever saw O’Keeffe at work. She described this scene:
A tall slender woman dressed in black with an apron thrown over her lap. Beside her is a glass palette, very large, very clean, each separate color on its surface remote from the next. As soon as a tone has been mixed and applied to the canvas its remains are carefully scraped off the palette, which thus always retains its air of virginity. Although it is dusk, O’Keeffe continued painting and when the phone rang, she said, “Would you mind calling up a little later after the light goes?”25
O’Keeffe wrote out the colors that she used in a painting on cards. She set up technical problems for herself, painting pictures that could be hung from any side, or completing a canvas from the upper left corner to the lower right without going back. She attempted to paint falling snow, as she had as a child. When she was painting a flower, she refused to let people see the picture until the bloom had faded. After a day’s work, she would reward herself with a long walk.
With sizable rent to be paid, O’Keeffe grew more calculating about the importance of sales. Seligmann wrote that Stieglitz “had a terrible time getting O’Keeffe accustomed to the idea that she must let them go out into the world. . . . When [her] first picture was taken away it had taken her ten days to get over it.”26 His remarks must be the result of Stieglitz’s elaborate staging since they are contradicted by O’Keeffe’s own comments on sales and her hard-won realism about the need to market her work. One day, after picking up her pictures at the framers, she mused, “There are so many paintings I feel quite horrified—when I think how hard it is to get rid of them.”27
Actually, that was not the case. As McBride put it, she was a success. Subsequent to her move into the Shelton, her pictures sold regularly and less effort was spent getting rid of the paintings than in keeping them, especially with Stieglitz at the helm of his newest venture, the Intimate Gallery.
VII
The Intimate Gallery, housed in Room 303 of the Anderson Galleries, was only twelve by twenty feet, and soon known simply as “The Room.” Since his was no longer the only modern art gallery in town, Stieglitz delineated his unique position with a credo: “The Intimate Gallery is not a Business nor is it a ‘Social’ Function. The Intimate Gallery competes with no one nor anything.”1
Despite the fact that Brancusi sculptures and other treasures were on regular display, Stieglitz never bothered to lock the door. He assumed that it would be the rare thief who would know the value of such things and if one did, he would be welcome to them. Stieglitz considered himself a “volunteer” who directed the “spirit” of the gallery.
In addition to the usual assortment of friends and relatives, Stieglitz continued to find supporters for the gallery among his brother’s wealthy patients and friends like Maurice and Alma Wertheim, and Aline Meyer Liebman and her sister Florence Meyer Blumenthal. These patrons contributed to the rent fund and the costs of printing catalogues in exchange for photographs by Stieglitz or other works of art. In this familial environment, Stieglitz had unusual control over the whereabouts of his inventory. In the event of an actual sale to an unrelated party, he deducted 20 percent for the rent fund, unless the artist was destitute. In that case, the artist received the full amount and would reimburse the rent fund whenever he could.
At 291, Stieglitz and Steichen had been intent upon introducing to Americans the radical developments in modern art from Europe. The atmosphere was experimental. Stieglitz thought of it as a laboratory for ideas with virtually no emphasis on turning a profit. But he and his circumstances had changed over two decades. He saw the artists of the Intimate Gallery as extended family and felt responsible for their financial and emotional well-being.
Ignoring the mixed reviews of his debut show, Stieglitz redoubled his efforts in promoting his “Seven Americans”: Marin, Strand, Dove, Demuth, Hartley, O’Keeffe, and himself. He reserved “X” as a slot in the gallery calendar to be filled spontaneously, and over the years he would use it to show artists ranging from German Expressionist George Grosz to photographer Ansel Adams. Except for this wildcard position, the gallery artists had regular exhibitions while O’Keeffe showed annually, and some years twice, more than any other artist.
O’Keeffe didn’t entirely swallow Stieglitz’s ideas about his artists being the true spirit of America, dryly pointing out that she was the only one of the “Americans” who had been west of Chicago. “One cannot be an American by going about saying that one is an American,” she said. “It is necessary to feel America, live America, love America and then work. They would all sit around and talk about the great American poetry, but they all would have stepped right across the ocean and stayed in Paris if they could have. Not me. I had things to do in my own country.”2
Yet, as critics had noted of his 1925 show, it was no longer possible to codify the characteristics of being American, and for every generalization about purity or spirituality, there were abundant exceptions. But Stieglitz needed a cause to celebrate, and despite his deeply European upbringing, he had adopted “Americanness.” The atmosphere around the Shelton penthouse grew volatile as he tried to shepherd yet another art movement into acceptance. It was, as O’Keeffe put it, “like taking part in a sustained and violent love affair.”3
Although fashions and customs had changed, Stieglitz had not. He wore his old-fashioned black loden cape and a flat porkpie hat, and he carried a walking stick. In his battle for the rights of his American moderns, he tried to refuse lending work to any museum that had not bought pictures by them. He asked prices equal to those of the European moderns. Never a very flexible personality, age only added to his rigidity. “It was his game and we all played along or left the game,” O’Keeffe recalled.4 “If they crossed him in any way, his power to destroy was as destructive as his power to build—the extremes went together.”5
O’Keeffe collaborated in the design of the new gallery. Unable to do anything about the black carpet, she tried to enlarge the appearance of the place by installing white muslin over the dark stamped-velour wallcoverings. She also supervised the framing and the hanging of exhibitions, cheering her husband’s return to the role of dealer after an eight-year hiatus. She was indispensable in shaping the gallery, but not all of her fellow artists appreciated her efforts. “At first, the men didn’t want me around,” she recalled. “They couldn’t take a woman artist seriously.”6
Since she painted in the living room of their apartment, her motivation for helping Stieglitz with the gallery was partly selfish: she wanted the apartment to herself during the day. Stieglitz could indulge his monologist tendencies with “the men” at The Room. As Seligmann once observed, “Privacy in the ordinary sense seemed hardl
y to exist for Stieglitz. He was on call, seemingly at any hour, any day, for anyone who chose to participate in the experience he was having.”7
Since Marin had received more positive reviews than his fellow artists, a retrospective of his watercolors and oils opened the Intimate Gallery on December 7, 1925. “There is not artiness,” Stieglitz said of his tumultuous seascapes, “just a throbbing pulsating being.” The Brooklyn Museum bought two pictures, a triumph for Marin and a tacit endorsement of Stieglitz’s new venture.
Although critics were divided over Dove’s work in the 1925 show, he had his first solo exhibition since 1912 in January. The impoverished artist earned seventeen hundred dollars, mostly from Washington, D.C., collector Duncan Phillips, who became his principal patron that year. Phillips eventually bought more than sixty pictures.
On February 11, fifty of O’Keeffe’s canvases were leaned against the walls or propped on shelves and chairs in the tiny Intimate Gallery. From the outset, her flower paintings sold easily, and Stieglitz employed his gambit of denying the canvases to various collectors. One collector who wanted a pansy painting was deemed unworthy, while Stieglitz wrote to a second collector—pleading with him to save the picture from its potential fate and offering to throw in another, smaller picture to sweeten the deal. Of course, there was no proof that a first buyer existed, but the second collector bought both the story and the paintings.
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