Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  The show gave critics a chance to observe the evolution of her oeuvre. Mumford wrote that her pictures “are not derivations, they are sources.”

  Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, had taken up painting in 1924 and had a show that March at the gallery opened by Cary Ross on East Eighty-sixth Street. Zelda’ s nervous breakdown that year had led Fitzgerald to send her to Craig House, the same sanitorium where Kitty Stieglitz was treated. She was permitted to leave to attend her exhibition and O’Keeffe’s. She may not have known of O’Keeffe’s mental condition, but she later told her doctor that the artist’s pictures “are so lonely and magnificent and heart-breaking, and they inspire a desire to communicate, which is perhaps the highest function of anything creative.”19

  Stieglitz was unstinting, calling it an “extraordinary showing.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed and bought their first O’Keeffe, Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur. But O’Keeffe was less certain, complaining that the show “makes me tired of myself.”20 As the exhibition drew to an end, she speculated about the future of her relationship with Stieglitz. “I think that the average human being can not see the different sides to different situations,” she wrote, “so when another man disagrees with him he will step on him if he can—or even kill—the stronger will not give the weaker a right to his own way of being and doing if he can help it.”21

  In March, she chose to return to Bermuda rather than remain with Stieglitz, traveling with Alma Wertheim and her future husband, Paul Wiener. She told Toomer, “It was very difficult to leave him but I knew I could not stay.”22

  For two months, she lived at Garland’s house in Somerset. Her suite had an embracing four-poster bed and fireplace. She bicycled, walked, and admitted that the “young foolish things that laugh a lot and talk about nothing have amused me.”23 Tentatively, she began drawing the strange tropical foliage in charcoal and pencil. She completed five drawings of the conical banana flower hanging upside down from a grove of banana trees that grew on one side of the house. She was amused by the rings of tiny bananas growing like a crown around the top stem of each flower. “The flowers were dark purplish red, large and heavy—and hung down,” she recalled. “Each petal had a row of little white flowers under it. As the petal turns back and dies the little white flowers become bananas.”24 The heat prevented O’Keeffe from working outside for long periods. Her eight drawings of banyan trees were delicately rendered in pencil, documenting the play of light and shadow on the spiny leaves and sturdy trunks. But she called them “very dull drawings.”

  Far from dull was her drawing of the inside curve of a conch shell, with undulating lines suggesting the sensual connection between two bodies. Although she hadn’t titled her drawings “special” for over a decade, she called the conch study Special No. 40. In effect, O’Keeffe was reaching back to her past to express the feelings that she had for Toomer.

  On Valentine’s Day, she wrote him, “[I] want to lie in hot sun and be loved—and laugh—and not think—be just a woman—I rather imagine just a woman doesn’t have to think much—it is this dull business of being a person that gets one all out of shape.”25 Embattled by her feelings around the discrepancy between her role as a “woman” and her role as a “person,” O’Keeffe was beginning to doubt the possibility of compromise in her life. “I am moving it seems—more and more toward a kind of aloneness,” she confessed, “not because I wish it but because there seems no other way.”26

  Then, in a bizarre replay of her ambivalent correspondence with Strand some seventeen years earlier, O’Keeffe declared that she was unavailable, and told Toomer about a dream that revealed that he belonged with another woman.

  In May, when she returned to New York, O’Keeffe discovered that Toomer had taken her at her word; he was dating her friend Marjorie Content. O’Keeffe cried foul, claiming betrayal by both of her friends. She had expected him to pursue her, or wait for her, or adore her from a distance. Finally, she wrote to Toomer in a tone that was wistful and regretful, agreeing that it was best for all concerned.

  In June, she decided that a trip to New Mexico “would be the easiest way for me to get to work—and that I must do.”27 Putting aside her less generous impulses, she agreed to drive with Content in her Packard from Chicago to Alcalde, where they rented a small house on the H & M Ranch. Toomer would join them after a month. Although Dodge Luhan had invited O’Keeffe to Taos, the artist curtly replied, “I rather think you probably would not enjoy me any more now than you did then.”28

  In her first trip to New Mexico in three years, she arrived to find that Henwar Rodakiewicz had left the H & M Ranch after his marriage to Garland had dissolved, and had joined fellow divorcée Paul Strand in Mexico. In the wake of so much upheaval in the relationships of their intimates, Content and O’Keeffe settled into the simple pleasures of sunbathing, cooking, and gossiping. Confessing sadness and confusion over Stieglitz’s behavior, O’Keeffe startled her friend one evening at dinner by breaking down in tears.

  In New Mexico, working from what was at hand, O’Keeffe made two charcoal drawings and two watercolors of a kachina doll. Walking around the ranch, she found fossilized seashells and completed a charcoal of a spiral shell in the format of her earlier painting. She also finished two drawings of a black eagle claw and bean necklace that she had purchased during a drive through Colorado. “The eagle claws were graduated in size from a very large one to very small ones where the beans began for the back of the necklace,” she explained. “It is very different from any necklace that one would find in New Mexico.”29 In July, O’Keeffe was introduced to one of the country’s foremost supporters of Native American art, Mary Cabot Wheelwright, a former Bostonian who had moved to Alcalde in 1928. She was fascinated by comparative religions and was one of the first to record the sacred chants and songs performed by the Navajo. Her hacienda, Los Luceros, served as a social hub for lesbian women who felt that they could live more openly in New Mexico. Soon, O’Keeffe was invited for lunches and dinners, where the women discussed the preservation of the Native American arts of pottery, weaving, and jewelry.

  When Toomer arrived at the ranch in July, O’Keeffe set out with Charles Collier to locate a famed resort for wealthy easterners called Ghost Ranch. Located some forty miles northwest, it was so remote that on their first attempt to find it, they missed the driveway and got lost. O’Keeffe returned by herself the next day, and in the tiny hamlet of Abiquiu, a cowhand told her to go back up the road and turn at the cow skull.

  She drove through the parfait mountains of peaches and cream, coming out on a plateau facing the blue mesa called Cerro Pedernal and surrounded by the chalky Jemez Mountains. She felt at home. The geological strata bore the brilliant hues of her beloved Palo Duro Canyon in Texas. Once again, she found herself motivated by the unparalleled range of color provided by nature. After a trial watercolor and a few drawings, she painted three spectacular canvases of the flesh- and plum-colored landscape: Lavender Hill Forms, Purple Hills Ghost Ranch—2, and Small Purple Hills. She also painted swirling aquamarine currents in Chama River, Ghost Ranch, N. Mex.

  Ghost Ranch was a popular destination, with only some two dozen rustic adobe cottages for guests, who tended to make reservations in advance. O’Keeffe made regular visits from Alcalde to Ghost Ranch through the end of September.

  Ghost Ranch, the anglicized name for Rancho de Los Brujos, was rumored among locals to be inhabited by the ghosts of the original land grant owners. More recently, it had changed hands as a bet in a card game. In 1933, the gambler’s wife sold it to Arthur Pack, East Coast heir to a logging fortune.

  Pack ran the ranch on his own, and even during the Depression, he commanded the steep rate of eighty dollars a week. O’Keeffe was comfortable in the company of millionaires roughing it with unpretentious lodgings and no telephone. The food was good, the nights early, and the stable of horses and cowboys meant regular rides into the rainbow-colored rocky landscape. The only luxury was an airstrip to
accommodate private planes, including the one belonging to Arthur Pack.

  O’Keeffe admired Pack’s laconic eccentricity, and soon she had recruited a circle of friends from the Ghost Ranch regulars. She befriended David H. McAlpin, a nephew of John D. Rockefeller, who had bought his first Stieglitz photograph while still at Princeton. She kept up with McAlpin when she returned to New York. One evening over dinner, she said, “I want you to introduce me to some of your friends.” McAlpin recalled this story knowingly, adding, “She wanted to meet my rich friends.”30

  At that time, McAlpin was dating the lively and beautiful Margaret Bok, recently divorced from Edward Bok, son of the wealthy publisher of Ladies’ Home Journal. “Peggy” Bok developed a rare, genuine friendship with the artist. They got on so well that O’Keeffe suggested she and her children meet her at Ghost Ranch the following summer. On that trip, Peggy Bok met Henwar Rodakiewicz, who had returned from Mexico, and they married the same year.

  Other Ghost Ranch regulars were Robert Wood Johnson, of the eponymous pharmaceutical company, and his wife, Maggie, who built their own house at Ghost Ranch. Maggie, an amateur photographer, had once been an assistant to Steichen. O’Keeffe also met J. Seward Johnson, Robert’s brother, and his second wife, Esther Underwood Johnson, with whom she became close friends, receiving annual invitations to their farm in Oldwick, New Jersey, for the next forty years.

  In September, after attending the wedding of Content and Toomer in Taos, O’Keeffe went to the White Place with Pack’s wife, Eleanor Brown. In October, she drove back to Lake George accompanied by Spud Johnson, who had separated from Witter Bynner.

  O’Keeffe had fallen in love, but not with a fallible companion; she was in love with Ghost Ranch. Although vague about her future plans, she confided to Beck, who had moved to Taos in 1933, “I know that I do not wish to try to live among many people—they tire me more than anything.”31

  To celebrate Stieglitz’s seventieth birthday, Norman had spent the year working on a tribute book, a collection of essays called America and Alfred Stieglitz, edited by Frank, Rosenfeld, Mumford, and the educator Harold Rugg. Contributors to the book included writers, critics, and the artists Dove, Marin, Demuth, even Strand. Jean Toomer, like so many of the contributors, waxed ecstatic in his essay describing Stieglitz as “City Plowman”: “Ever since he discovered himself,” Toomer wrote, “Stieglitz has been working for truth and people. . . . It is rare to find anyone in whom the two attitudes—‘I will,’ ‘Thy will be done’—are so balanced.”32

  Although the book illustrated twelve of O’Keeffe’s paintings and Stieglitz’s portrait of her as a young woman with up-tilted eyes, a text by O’Keeffe is notably absent from the volume.

  Doubleday, Doran and Co. and the Literary Guild published the book in December. To coincide with the release, Stieglitz mounted an exhibition of sixty-nine of his photographs, many dating from the 1880s and printed from old glass plates that he had discovered that summer in the farmhouse attic. Prints of Lake George, grasses and trees, clouds and portraits of the gallery artists comprised what would be the final exhibition of his work at The Place. Although he continued to photograph Norman, portraits of her were embargoed from the show.

  The reviews of America and Alfred Stieglitz were lukewarm. The fawning and convoluted text struck readers as atavistic or irrelevant. Even an old friend like Edwin Alden Jewell wrote in the New York Times that the book amounted to tributes from “a cult . . . bemused by an endless flow of words.” Thomas Hart Benton—who was celebrated that same month on the cover of Time magazine as the star of the American Scene Movement—triumphantly dismissed his old enemy: “Stieglitz’ influence on art has vanished,” he crowed.

  Two months before the publication of the book, Gaston Lachaise, fifty-three, died of leukemia. A week later, on October 25, after fighting diabetes for fifteen years, Charles Demuth died in his sleep at his home in Lancaster. Worried that Stieglitz was not entirely committed to his work, Demuth pointedly left his oil paintings and drawings to O’Keeffe.

  The passing of his old friends, the dismissive response to his book and his show, and his estrangement from O’Keeffe amplified Stieglitz’s sense of his own frailty and mortality.

  O’Keeffe’s show at An American Place opened in January 1935 with a survey of twenty-eight of O’Keeffe’s works from 1919 to 1934, including the eight drawings of banana flowers and kachinas and the three canvases of purple hills at Ghost Ranch. The catalogue included effusive quotes from the usual critics. O’Keeffe was particularly amused to see herself so positively represented in a book called Men of Art by the conservative art critic Thomas Craven, who called her “the foremost woman-painter of the world.”

  Looking at the hesitant quality of her recent work, O’Keeffe realized that she had to get back to the studio. Mumford had compared her painting to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, who wrote, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” O’Keeffe needed to channel that formality of feeling into her painting.

  Stieglitz had tentatively scheduled a joint exhibition by Arthur Dove and Helen Torr for February, but he reneged at the last moment, claiming that there would not be enough space for the paintings of both artists. O’Keeffe, who maintained that Torr “would have flowered considerably if she had been given attention,” purchased six of Dove’s watercolors to make room for her friend’s work.33 But Stieglitz refused to relent and never again showed Torr’s work.

  Problems continued in the gallery that March when Stieglitz decided to depart from his mostly “Americans only” policy, and showed the caricatures of German artist George Grosz, who had moved to New York in 1932. Influenced by his experience of Weimar Germany, Grosz presented satirical renditions of the extreme wealth and poverty in a Depression-era America. Stieglitz asked Marsden Hartley, who had recently returned from eight months in Germany, to write the catalogue essay. (Although Hartley had joined the Downtown Gallery, he remained friends with Stieglitz, dining with him weekly at the Shelton.) But Hartley could not write negatively about Germany: he covertly admired Adolf Hitler as a fellow artist and a leader who could restore the country’s prosperity. After hearing of this, writer Ettie Stettheimer refused to receive Hartley and, with her sister Florine, protested the notion of his writing about Grosz.

  Stieglitz, too, was so devoted to Germany that it was difficult for him to comprehend the changes wrought by the National Socialists. During 1914 and 1915, when the German ambassador had been Selma’s guest at Oaklawn, Stieglitz had been opposed to U.S. intervention in World War I. Twenty years later, he remained in denial about the aggression toward Jews that accompanied Hitler’s rise to power. Norman, who followed civil rights issues and politics with interest and sophistication, tried reasoning with him, but with limited success.

  But Stieglitz’s views began to change that summer after he discussed events with Europeans staying at Lake George. Two years later, when the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus art and design school, Stieglitz sent funds to photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to come to the United States, where he joined Chicago’s New Bauhaus.

  In March 1935, O’Keeffe opened the farmhouse on The Hill as usual. Lizzie had gone to Europe with the Davidsons, so Lee and his new wife, Amanda, were staying at Red Top. Stieglitz was barely on speaking terms with his brother’s new bride.34 O’Keeffe, however, did not participate in the latest Stieglitzean drama. She concentrated on her own routine of going to Ghost Ranch for the summer, returning to Lake George in the late fall, and spending the winter in New York City, where she still took responsibility for Stieglitz’s day-to-day needs. After an attack of acute abdominal pain in April, she was admitted to New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital for an appendectomy. By May, she had recovered sufficiently to travel to Ogunquit, Maine, with Dorothy True, her former classmate at Teachers College, returning to Lake George in June.

  In July, she drove with artist Lauren Mozley to visit Arthur Dove and Helen Torr at their home in Geneva, New York, commiserating over Stieglitz’s decision to c
ancel Torr’s show. O’Keeffe and Mozley then drove on to New Mexico. O’Keeffe stayed at Garland’s ranch in Alcalde until August 2, when she moved to a rented room at Ghost Ranch.

  Shortly after, she went with friends to the towering rock formations of Canyon de Chelly; in September, she traveled through Navajo country, Chaco Canyon, Truchas, Trampas, and Taos. In October, she went with Robert and Maggie Johnson and Esther Johnson to Copper Canyon.

  All of the travel took a certain amount of time away from painting, though she did complete a number of rather modest, almost talismanic, paintings, including two watercolors, a drawing, and an oil of a kachina doll with a blue head and a red shirt.

  Four still lifes were composed of objects unmistakably associated with the Southwest: Two small oils depict a feather from a wild turkey lying next to a rusty horseshoe, upended for good luck. Turkey Feathers in Indian Pot contrasts the striped plumage with the gleaming black surface of the hand-polished vase. On a black and red blanket, she arranged symbols of her old and new life reclining together, Feather and Brown Leaf.

  She returned to her trademark flowers as well, with a pastel of a pink camellia and an oil painting of a red one. A drawing of a sunflower was followed by two oils of the leonine blossom raised boldly against a pale blue ground. Two moderately sized oils of blue morning glories led to the triumphant Blue Morning Glories, New Mexico, a 36 × 30-inch canvas of generous lavender blue and puce flowers exuding white light from their centers. She worked on the same scale for her painting of sunny prickly pear blooms, Yellow Cactus.

  Although the subject matter was mundane, O’Keeffe was reacquainting herself with the discipline of her craft.

  Around Ghost Ranch, she painted sanguine hills with celadon bands, Purple Hills and Red Hills, Series II, and a mountain in layers of orange and ivory staggered against a cerulean sky, Hill, New Mexico.