O’Keeffe chose to represent the church as a voluptuous sculpture in the middle of nowhere. She made three drawings emphasizing the irregular lines and massive volume. Then she made two paintings of the rear of the church as chalky forms against the blue sky, Ranchos Church, No. II, N.M. and Ranchos Church No. 1. She shrunk the space around the church’s rear walls to accentuate their inflated, bulging mass, imbuing the modest adobe with a modernity worthy of Brancusi. In O’Keeffe’s hands, this simple structure appears to have grown out of the earth.
Finally, she painted a right-angled detail of the rear wall with a puff of cloud huddled in a corner of the sky, Ranchos Church, No. 3, the painting that she considered to be her final statement on the matter.
I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well [as] or better than the whole could. And I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing that I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at—not copy it. I was quite pleased with the painted fragment of the Ranchos Church.22
Before painting what she called “one of the most beautiful buildings left in the United States by the early Spaniards,” she had to come to terms with the fact that many other artists had previously attempted the subject, just as “the men” had painted Manhattan. She made decisions that established her paintings as a new way of seeing the church. And in fact, her perspective became the standard for how Ranchos de Taos Church would be represented by many future artists, including Paul Strand and Laura Gilpin.
Although she did not paint the cross at Ranchos Church, O’Keeffe did paint the brown wooden cross at its gate and the white cross atop its roof; she called the work Gate of An Adobe Church, New Mexico.
With Luhan’s aid, she was allowed entrance into his native village to paint the oldest indigenous dwellings in the western hemisphere, Taos Pueblo. Around the northeast edge of the pueblo, a grove of cottonwood trees captured her attention. Trees at Glorieta, New Mexico is presented as a cluster of gray trunks swathed in copper, silver, and sage.
Driving south to Alcalde, O’Keeffe came across hills as barren as sand dunes and punctuated with the odd mesquite. She made four drawings emphasizing their softly rounded tops, then painted an oil of the mound against the sky, Soft Grey Alcalde Hill. Two small studies of sandy shapes against a sliver of blue are untitled but represent the sand hills. Another drawing of a nearby hill and mesa is transformed in oil as New Mexico Near Taos. The folds of the hill are washed in celadon under a clouded sky.
This landscape was so foreign or so challenging that she had returned to the habit of making preparatory drawings for the first time since she had left Canyon to move to New York. In addition, O’Keeffe was operating in an area where she did not share subject matter with Stieglitz, and therefore his photography was less of a consideration. Unlike with the New York City skyline or the shore of Lake George, O’Keeffe did not have to make substantial alterations to remove her paintings from their photographic equivalents. She retained the simplicity of form in her work but without a photographic sense of spatial compression. Her painted landscapes look pretty much like the actual New Mexico landscapes, where abstraction is imminent.
Meanwhile, Beck had developed a faux-naïf style of painting. Although she was less skilled, she had original ideas. At the market, she bought cloth flowers that locals used to decorate headstones at the cemetery. She painted them as primitive still lifes in a reverse glass technique, whereby the artist paints on the back of the glass so the image appears luminous. The effect is appealing, though limited by its fragility. Only a few dozen of her paintings have survived.
The following spring, O’Keeffe used the cloth flowers in her still lifes, though she never gave Beck credit for the idea. In fact, the two paintings of flowers from the summer of 1929 were probably based on cloth models. In Yellow Cactus, a pair of blooms with full, rounded petals looks suspiciously like it is outfitted with a hand-crafted corolla. Similarly, White Flower has a golden corolla in the center of the picture with white petals running off the edge of the canvas.
In the last week of May, while Dodge Luhan was in Albuquerque, O’Keeffe and Beck moved from the big house to the little Pink House. They didn’t socialize with many of the Taos painters, but Andrew Dasburg, a modernist who had known Dodge Luhan since the Armory Show, was an exception. One night, Dasburg and painter Bob Walker invited the women to a movie in Taos, followed by dancing at the town hall. Beck and O’Keeffe gracefully accepted. When it turned out that Dasburg didn’t dance, the women exhausted Walker before dancing with each other. “Can you imagine Georgia’s emancipation? Driving a car, dancing, even smoking a cigarette once in a while,” Beck wrote incredulously to her husband. O’Keeffe, who rarely drank, was taking wine with dinner and eating like a field hand, and repeating her amazement, “Nobody ever told me how wonderful it is.”23
At the end of June, when Dodge Luhan was told that a hysterectomy was unavoidable, she returned to Buffalo for surgery. Beck and O’Keeffe grew closer in her absence. “We have had a beautiful relationship together,” Beck wrote to Strand. “I am entirely myself in her company. That is what she needs most in a person—that they are not ‘careful’ with her and she resents tremendously the way most of the people around Stieglitz swallow whole whatever he says, particularly about her. . . .”24
Beck’s sentiment in this letter underscores an escalation of the women’s burgeoning friendship and a feeling of exultation in their unusual state of freedom. They sunbathed in the nude, played cards, and drank liquor—none of which happened in the presence of their controlling husbands. Undoubtedly, traveling together for two months and confiding feelings of dismay and anger over their husbands’ behavior had inspired a bond.
Throughout the summer, O’Keeffe attempted to repay the many kindnesses of the Luhans by acting as secretary for Tony, who could not read or write English. He dictated his letters to her, and she wrote and mailed them to Mabel. O’Keeffe then read the responses out loud to Tony. This system inevitably resulted in misunderstandings.
In the spring of 1929, before O’Keeffe and Beck arrived, Dodge Luhan had become convinced that her husband was having an affair. She had written to the woman she suspected, telling her to “take responsibility . . . in other words, take him or leave him.” When she received a letter from the woman disavowing herself of blame, Dodge Luhan admitted to being oversensitive.25 She then turned her jealousy toward her husband’s ex-wife, Candelaria, who still lived in the pueblo. She accused Luhan of returning to her, and threatened him with divorce.
Well-connected in Manhattan society, Dodge Luhan knew of Stieglitz’s infidelities. With her usual lack of tact, she solicited advice on her marriage from O’Keeffe. “What I want to know from you is whether Tony really cares for me as I do for him or not. . . . If I have to amputate him, I guess I can—if—I know he doesn’t really care in that central and important way . . . so let me hear your real opinions.”26 She was fearful of the implications of the hysterectomy but admitted that things would be better “once this uterus is out because it has been absorbing my life and my attention and standing between me and reality.”27
In a misguided attempt to ease her anxieties, O’Keeffe wrote Dodge Luhan, “For God’s sake—don’t try to squeeze all the life out of him—I know from experience that it isn’t a pleasant sensation. Next to my Stieglitz I have found nothing finer than your Tony. I feel you have got to let him live and be his way—however much it might hurt you. . . . Even if he goes out and sleeps with someone else it is a little thing.” Then, O’Keeffe added, “I owe you what Tony gives me.”28
O’Keeffe’s plaintive defense led Dodge Luhan to believe that her friend was sleeping with her husband. She scolded, “I wouldn’t leave Tony except to die—don’t you see that! . . . I don’t care who he sleeps with . . . so long as he and I are one.”29
Later, O’Keeffe would rem
ember this unpredictable and emotional summer: “Mabel had periods of minding and periods of not minding. She really knew there was nothing to mind,” she said. “I didn’t have any of those feelings for him, but she would get very upset just the same.”30
In late June, Tony Luhan started taking O’Keeffe and the others on camping trips. Dodge Luhan told her guests about the whereabouts of new camping equipment from Abercrombie’s and which Indians to take as porters, advising, “Others are nice but not so useful. More given to singing than working.”31
Tony Luhan took O’Keeffe riding horseback and then camping at Bear Lake in the Taos Mountains, an experience that led her to draw and then paint the haunting scene of a silvery, leafless tree spiraling upward against the dim nocturnal forest. Dead Tree Bear Lake Taos is so desolate and lifeless a painting, one wonders at its meaning compared to the vibrant Lawrence tree. Luhan also drove O’Keeffe and Beck on a camping trip to Mesa Verde, Colorado, with stops at Gallup, Acoma, and Inscription Rock.
With four other pueblo men, and some bootleg whiskey, he took O’Keeffe and Beck on a four-day excursion to Las Vegas, New Mexico. O’Keeffe described the dancing at the ceremonies: “I quite lost my head over the perfect thing that [Indian] John is. . . . His dance was so beautiful . . . the change from almost stolid indifference to that great aliveness.”32 Such sensations inspired a canvas with ruby, emerald, and sapphire spirals around a flaming eye of yellow, a whirling dervish of a picture titled At the Rodeo, Las Vegas. In another painting, Grey Blue & Black—Pink Circle, the concentric loops of cornflower blue, jade, and quartz pink contain half a dozen churning pistons in shades of blue and black and based on a kachina.
While O’Keeffe was happily reconnecting with the West, Stieglitz was coping with the loss of the Intimate Gallery, which had been torn down with the rest of the Anderson Galleries building at the end of June, with Kennerley returning to England. Stieglitz’s final show featured Demuth’s landmark painting The Figure 5 in Gold, based on the poem of the same title by William Carlos Williams. Williams had dropped by Hartley’s studio one evening for a drink. He heard the “clatter of bells and the roar of a fire engine passing . . . down Ninth Avenue.” The impression of the number on the red background of the fire truck led him to compose the poem.
Demuth decided to incorporate its imagery into a symbolic painted portrait of carnelian, topaz, and the giant number five rendered three times to recede into a vortex. The painting embodied the spirit of Stieglitz’s intentions for his gallery, where artists, writers, and intellectuals would galvanize one another with their ideas and their art. But that gallery had ceased to exist.
Late May and early June 1929 were spent putting the Intimate Gallery’s inventory in storage. Strand, Zoler, and Seligmann helped Stieglitz, who grumbled incessantly about O’Keeffe’s absence. Stieglitz was uncomfortable with Beck’s growing friendship with O’Keeffe. He attacked her in a letter, calling Beck “absolutely unseeing.” Stieglitz resented Beck’s insinuations that O’Keeffe’s enjoyment of Taos was the result of a newfound freedom from his own controlling nature.
He reminded her of their earlier liaison. “How about your being here when Georgia went to Maine & how you felt about me—& were willing to do anything for me because of my suffering? . . . I hope you will be a truer friend to her than you have been to me.”33
Once he arrived at Lake George on June 14, Stieglitz became manic with worry over her adventures in Taos. He stayed up for days on end until Lee finally gave him a sleeping pill. “The first real sleep in 10 years!” he said.34 In a calmer state, he tried to be expansive about her journey. “I knew the Southwest . . . was the thing for her,” he said.35 “Freedom is necessary to sincerity.”36
Zoler stayed with Stieglitz for four weeks, and his presence stabilized Stieglitz’s mood, but even he couldn’t prevent the black depression that led the photographer to destroy much of his past. Stieglitz built enormous bonfires and stoked them with whatever reminded him of his photography. “Negatives, prints, over 1000 copies of Camera Work, including a complete set—nearly a library of books—just to get rid of things,” he wrote after cremating the dreams of his youth. “It was a great sight watching all these things disappear in the starlit night.”37
In the middle of July, Strand came to visit with director Harold Clurman, a founder of the Group Theatre, which was committed to drama rooted in populist politics. The two men were shocked to hear about the bonfires, and to witness Stieglitz’s jealousy over Beck and O’Keeffe’s camping trip with Luhan, whom he described as “a magnificent specimen physically.” For eighteen hours, Stieglitz harangued his guests with his laments. During his stay, Stieglitz felt a renewed kinship with Strand, noting that common suffering “does bring souls closely together.”
Around the same time that her husband was visiting Stieglitz, Beck learned that she had to cut short her trip and return to Atlantic City to care for her mother. Strand met her at the train station in Albany, leaving Stieglitz alone at The Hill. In a panic, he sent frantic letters to O’Keeffe. At the end of July, he received a reassuring wire from her. “She feels as I feel,” he said. “Exactly. . . . [T]he first coming together in purity—on a much higher plane!”38
After O’Keeffe’s heartening wire, Stieglitz chartered a private four-seater plane and had himself flown to New York. The journey was so thrilling that he promptly hired another plane to repeat the exercise. After receiving “four wonderful letters” from O’Keeffe, he exulted, “I know all is all right. . . . I know my Great Love is but a form of Faith. . . . My vision is clear once more—I know what separated us—it is The Room! It came first—and I believed G. understood the Room was another form of her—but A Woman accepts no Equivalents—yet she needs them without knowing! Man is so unequal to his job—Woman.—At least that is my job. For Woman is Love to me—& Love is God.”39
O’Keeffe had been receiving Stieglitz’s alternately adoring and neurotic ramblings for months. She confessed to Dodge Luhan, “I am about decided to go back to Stieglitz next week. . . . He seems to be in a bad state and I feel I have little choice in the matter. I can’t tell you how it grieves me.”40
Swinging into action, Dodge Luhan shot off a note to Stieglitz saying, “Nearly all suffering is ego-suffering,” and insisted he wire O’Keeffe to stay. Stieglitz obeyed the command, assuring his old friend, “I am beyond all ego now.”41 Dodge Luhan triumphantly informed her guest, “It is making him happy to make me happy and do the right thing by you. Nice.”42 The hostess, however, had to remain through the month of August at the Albuquerque hospital to recover from complications due to her operation.
Toward the end of her stay at Los Gallos, O’Keeffe accepted an invitation to go camping in the Grand Canyon with filmmaker Henwar Rodakiewicz and heiress Marie Garland, Spud Johnson, and Charles Collier. After riding in Garland’s Rolls-Royce, O’Keeffe said, “It’s not a car . . . it’s a dream.” Others followed in a Packard. “We drove with the tops of the cars down most of the time,” she added, “greased faces and peeling noses—and everybody loved it.”43
Meanwhile Stieglitz’s torment over O’Keeffe’s absence fueled his relationship with Norman. Their correspondence with one another grew more impassioned, and Norman clearly saw O’Keeffe’s absence as an opportunity to solidify her position. When Stieglitz complained about O’Keeffe’s trip to the Grand Canyon, Norman underscored his disapproval: “I rather felt something out of key about the canyon trip. . . . Plenty of things one wants to do but altho one calls them living still there is the reality keeping one from the more attractive for the more permanent. Farsighted pragmatism as against nearsighted. Is spoiled the word—or what? The only positive force is really positive love—Oh, I wish I could do something for you. Oh I do, I do, I do.”44 And she did do something: she paid for him to take another plane ride.
Stieglitz may have harbored safety concerns on the flight sponsored by Norman because he instructed Lizzie to forward Elizabeth all of his mail (especially the le
tters from Norman). “Under no condition do I want Georgia to have anything to do with it. She is not for that. The summer has proven it.”45 As Stieglitz circled airborne over the bustling streets of Gotham, O’Keeffe sent a wire that she’d be home in a few days. Kalonyme, who was staying at The Hill, sensed a potential crisis. He quickly forwarded O’Keeffe’s telegram to Stieglitz so that he could be home for her arrival.
One of the ironies of that hectic summer lay in Stieglitz’s constant state of denial. Although he was consumed with fear that O’Keeffe would abandon him, he scarcely missed a day in writing passionate love letters to Norman, who was convalescing at Woods Hole after a miscarriage. By August, Norman’s letters were full of longing for him, and she dismissed his wife by saying, “I wouldn’t be surprised if O’Keeffe were a success—all the damn moralist direction (for self or for anyone else.)”46 In her eyes, Stieglitz was always in the right, but was surrounded by unworthy companions. In a twenty-one-page letter written to him on August 29, Norman criticized Marin, the Strands, Mumford, and Clurman, not one of whom was worthy of the saintly Stieglitz.
Stieglitz’s greatest weakness was an unquenchable thirst for adulation. Minutes before the long-anticipated arrival of his wife, he wrote to Norman, calling her Y.L., his nickname for Young Lady. “I think (know) the Y.L. ‘sees’ me more truly than any one else. There is that purity of seeing (feeling)—that purity of relationship which gives and receives when both are identical. And that relationship will continue to exist for there is no expecting on either side.”47
O’Keeffe left Taos in a rush, scattering thank-you notes to the Luhans and wishing personal goodbyes to the staff. On August 25, she arrived at the Lake George train station a little after six in the morning. Stieglitz was waiting for her as he had when she arrived in New York eleven years before. She was “beautiful” and “radiant.” “I do know that our relationship is sounder than before,” he admitted, “maybe . . . a bit more mature.”48
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