by Karen Karbo
Palladium print, 95⁄8 x 75⁄8 in.
Alfred Stieglitz Collection. Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource NY
6
BARE
If I stop to think of what others—authorities—would say . . . I’d not be able to do anything.
On a cold day in February, 1921, Georgia walked INTO the Anderson Galleries to view the photographic retrospective of Alfred Stieglitz (145 prints from 1886 to 1921). He was fifty-seven years old. His hair was iron-gray. The artists and intellectuals of his circle thought he’d put down his camera for good. Instead, he’d discovered Georgia O’Keeffe, her art, passion, and comely buttocks, and made not just a comeback, but a masterpiece.
Of the 145 pictures, 45 of them featured Georgia. I won’t make you do the math: That’s a little less than one-third. The care and devotion with which Stieglitz had documented her body was boggling. Thousands of viewers poured into the tiny space to check out every hollow, knuckle, knob, and pore. Moreover, Georgia was a babe. Without Zumba or Pilates or whatever exercise craze is trending when you read this, she was lithe and well-formed.
Among the forty-five pictures, there was a notable amount of bosom-clutching. Fully dressed in a black suit, simple white blouse, and black bowler, she clutches her bosom; with matted hair, goofy postcoital daze, in slinky white kimono opened at the front, she clutches one boob; presumably naked, fresh from a skinny dip, her long black hair tucked into a bathing cap, a white towel held to her midriff—where are her hands? Where else. In the straight-up naked torso pictures where she is either standing or reclining, the photo cropped so that she is headless and legless, she holds her arms at her side; to boob-clutch here would nudge the picture over the line into erotica, the white-tablecloth name for porn, which Stieglitz, that rascally genius, knew all too well. There is one picture that still takes the breath away: O’Keeffe, her kimono open, sits with her legs apart, her crotch in soft focus, the hair an indistinguishable mass of deep blackness; a black cave of mystery, a temple of doom which men, so I hear, spend their entire lives in fear of getting sucked into, like a sci-fi villain whose execution entails being shoved into the mother ship’s airlock, then sucked into outer space.
Stieglitz was a pioneer of modern photography, but he was not the first guy to take a nude photograph. Whatever day it was in 1835 that French chemist and artist Louis Daguerre perfected his first daguerreotype, the world’s inaugural mainstream photographic process, by the end of it the first naked lady had been photographed, probably reclining against a pile of tasseled throw pillows.
But these first Playmates were generally nameless prostitutes or artists’ models. Stieglitz’s photographs of Georgia were unprecedented: Not only was he the high priest of fine art in America, but she was also his (much younger) protégée, who had already gained some critical notice for her own one-woman show at 291. The gossip surrounding the exhibit was scorching, as was the affair to which the pictures bore witness. Wasn’t she young enough to be his daughter? Wasn’t he still married? Weren’t they living together in sin?
What did Georgia think as she stood in the gallery that day? What could she have been thinking as she surveyed the scene—the heavy-breathing men, the teary-eyed women?† Was she pleased, mortified, or some irrational combination of both? We know that, unlike most of us, she liked the way she looked on film, never having realized she was composed of such fetching lines, that she possessed such a fabulous jaw or slim, girlish waist. Still, she was a private person in an era when decent folks were expected to cherish their privacy.
Oh, I know. Times have changed. These days, the only girls (as grown women insist on being called) who don’t believe that having an oft-downloaded sex tape is résumé-worthy are members of a strict religion or A-list actresses whose reputations rather touchingly rest on their saying no to full frontal nudity. We are living in an age where couples across the land argue because he did not make the private pictures or tapes public, and she sobs tearfully, Am I not hot enough? Is it because I wouldn’t dress up as Princess Leia? But in 1921, the naked pictures of O’Keeffe were scandalous.
There is no official record of O’Keeffe’s response, but if the 2009 made-for-TV biopic Georgia O’Keeffe is to be believed,‡ she was humiliated and coldly furious. Joan Allen, best known, at least in our house, for her snappy portrayal of CIA officer Pam Landy in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, shows O’Keeffe moving impassively through the galleries, absorbing the pictures and the whispers around her, then roaring at Stieglitz (Jeremy Irons) in private, so enraged that a vein sticks out on her forehead.
One of the things I love about O’Keeffe is that for all the ways in which she was a one-of-a-kind genius—busy giving birth to abstract expressionism while Jackson Pollock was still in kindergarten, while also demonstrating how women, who still didn’t even have the vote, might live a life of both passionate connection and equally passionate independence—she still made a lot of the same errors in judgment the rest of us do. If you’ve ever logged on to the Internet to find the private sex tape you made with your boyfriend “leaked” and merrily streaming along online, displaying for all the world to see your dimpled bum and “orangutan face” (you thought that was a private joke, didn’t you?), take comfort in the fact that the esteemed Miss O’Keeffe was there before you. She said yes yes oh yes baby yes yes to Stieglitz; then she said WTF?§
She was a woman in love, which meant that wherever Stieglitz would lead, she would follow. She was dazed and confused. She struck every last pose willingly. She trusted him to do her justice. She had no idea, if she’d even given it a thought, that one day strange men with beefy, be-dandruffed shoulders would be examining the image of her thick pubic hair and wondering how Stieglitz got his blacks so dark and velvety.
I should stop for a moment and confess that I have no experience of anything remotely like this. I despise having my picture taken. At a tender age I realized the only possible way to look while having your picture taken was mysterious and slightly stoned—what I imagined one of Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon looked like. I pulled my hair into my face and stared moodily into the lens of my mother’s Instamatic. My mother told me I looked like a Polish dock worker who’d just lost his job and, indeed, when we picked up the pictures at the photo department of Sav-On Drugs a week later, I appeared to be the world’s saddest sixth grader.
To remedy this, my mother told me every time someone wanted to take my picture, I should scrunch up my face the way you might if someone was going to throw a bucket of water on you, then release it into a joyous smile, lips slightly parted, eyes a-sparkle. This technique was guaranteed to make me look cute and fun. Need I number the times the photo was snapped while I was mid-unscrunch: lips bunched, brow furrowed, eyes half-open? The net result has been a lifetime of paralyzing self-consciousness so profound that when someone says “Let me take a picture,” I feel the same way I do when the doctor says “You’re going to feel a slight pinch.” If there’s a nearby bathroom in which to lock myself, or a shrub to hide behind, so much the better.
Which isn’t to say that I’ve never yearned for a guy to suggest he take some private photos, but by the time we reached the sheet-rumpling stage of the relationship, he already knew that I preferred to be behind the camera,¶ and didn’t dare pursue the matter. Which, paradoxically, has made me feel a little forlorn over the years, and offers a clue as to why Georgia not only said yes to Alfred, but cooperated with zeal. He pushed past whatever resistance she might have had—she was shy, self-conscious about her dimples, the least attractive sister in the O’Keeffe family—and made her a thing of beauty. Who can say no to that?
What Every Woman Apparently Knows
Stieglitz was well aware that his pictures of Georgia, as elegant, stunning, and fine-arty as they were, would make her an immediate household name among New York’s culturati. T
he man was a genius not just of photography, but also of marketing. He made Georgia an “instant newspaper celebrity,”* then devoted himself to keeping her in the limelight until he died of a stroke in 1946. For Georgia—who yearned to be recognized as a serious artist, while at the same time felt nauseated at the thought of other people looking at her work, much less purchasing it—life became complicated.
I don’t think O’Keeffe had any qualms about being seen naked. She used to like to paint in the nude in her tiny studio, built on the edge of the property at the Stieglitz summer house at Lake George, and she enjoyed sunbathing in the nude during her first summer in New Mexico. What she minded deeply was that in one fell swoop Stieglitz had both made her name and determined how she would be perceived. He had an idea about who she was, and worked hard in his overbearing, Stieglitzian fashion, to make sure everyone else agreed with him.
Every year, beginning in 1923, two years after the fateful photo exhibit, Stieglitz mounted an exhibit of O’Keeffe’s work.†† For thirteen years O’Keeffe lived in the midst of preparing for a major show. Some years were richer in nervous breakdowns than masterpieces, but the net result was a staggering amount of new work, and an endless opportunity for art critics to write long, feverish reviews about what they presumed was O’Keeffe’s one and only subject: sex.
The world of modern art was tiny, and the Men, as Georgia called the writers, critics, and fellow artists who would come to their apartment to talk until three in the morning, or meet Alfred for cheap Chinese at a poorly lit restaurant on Columbus Circle, still took their cues from Stieglitz. Her paintings and drawings were abstract. They were voluptuous and arousing, trafficked in the colors and shapes of private parts. Still, the Men had no real idea what was going on. Stieglitz schooled them. He’d thought long and hard about who this woman was—Georgia O’Keeffe, American: an untutored‡‡ genius from the heartland, an intuitive§§ girl¶¶ who had escaped sexual repression,** and created from the center of her pure††† Woman-Child core. It was hard to argue with Stieglitz. He’d championed Picasso and Cézanne, and now their paintings hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Her art is gloriously female,” wrote someone who, were he still alive, would thank me for allowing him to remain nameless. “Her great painful and ecstatic climaxes make us at least know something that man has always wanted to know. For here, in painting, there is registered the manner of perception anchored in the constitution of the woman. The organs that differentiate the sex speak. Women, one would judge, always feel, when they feel strongly, through the womb.” Another critic wrote that her paintings were “one long, loud blast of sex . . . sex bulging, sex tumescent, sex deflated.”
There are reams of this stuff. Georgia felt by turns confused, embarrassed, and enraged. The simple form inspired by the curving neck and scroll of her violin didn’t escape woman-centric interpretation (it was a fetus), nor did the powder-pink and turquoise-blue arches inspired by her love of music (it was something up there in the neighborhood of the uterus). Her alligator pears, as avocados were then called, were pendulous breasts. Her stalks of corn, penises—or vaginas. It hardly mattered. It got people riled up. Between the lines of the reviews you can sense the hand of the panting critic.
The Men, Stieglitz included, could hardly be blamed. Even geniuses are doomed to live in their times. By the early 1920s Freud’s theories were on everyone’s lips. Stieglitz and his circle were true believers, embracing and endlessly discussing Freud’s basic theory—that sexual repression was the prime motivator of human behavior. For these forward thinkers, everything was about sex. In 1923, when Stieglitz opened Alfred Stieglitz Presents One Hundred Pictures: Oils, Water-colors, Pastels, Drawings, by Georgia O’Keeffe at the Anderson Galleries, well-regarded Fifth Avenue shrinks sent their women patients to view the O’Keeffes to gauge the level of their sexual repression. O’Keeffe, it was said, had somehow managed to escape it.
When I was a sophomore in high school in the mid-1970s, a tall, quiet boy who’d skipped two grades and was rumored to be a genius wrote a short story that he volunteered to read aloud to the class. No one ever volunteered; the teacher was forced to offer extra credit to get students to read their work aloud. Steve, the boy, stood in front of the class and read for half the period about the adventures of a butler who worked for a man named Mr. Bates. This allowed Steve, every few moments, to intone, Is there anything else, Master Bates? How are you today, Master Bates? Shall I open the blinds, Master Bates?
I had never heard anyone say the word masturbate aloud, except one of the singers on the soundtrack to Hair.‡‡‡ If the stillness in that room was any evidence, no one else had either. We were sixteen. The more advanced among us knew about blow jobs. Steve had the class’s full attention—even the boys at the back of the room who would later be moved into the class for people with learning disabilities. Our teacher, Ms. Dodd—who was not one of those hip English teachers who thought rock lyrics were poetry, but one of the old school, Ethan Frome–assigning ladies who wore her glasses on a chain around her neck—was too stunned to interrupt him. In writing about “the loud blast of sex” that was O’Keeffe’s work, I imagine the Men felt the same thrill Steve did, saying over and over again what had been forbidden to say aloud in mixed company, with no one to stop them.
At first, O’Keeffe argued. She’d tried to disabuse the world of the fact that she was some primitive Midwestern goddess of female genitalia by giving an interview to the New York Sun. She talked about her theories of art. She portrayed herself, she thought, as careful and intelligent. Still, the journalist cooed about her work as being first and foremost “the essence of womanhood.” It was that, yes, but so much more. Her forms were the forms of the natural world, her colors part of an inner, genderless vocabulary. Still annoyed, O’Keeffe wrote a piece for Manuscripts,§§§ claiming, “I have not been in Europe. I prefer to live in a room as bare as possible. I have been much photographed. I paint because color is a significant language to me.”
It’s unknown how many people read her proclamation, but exactly no one took it to heart. As we’ve learned from hundreds of stand-up comedians over the years, the more hotly you deny being it, doing it, thinking it, the more obvious it is that you are being it, doing it, thinking it. The more O’Keeffe protested that, for example, Blue Line (1919), even now still Not Safe for Work, is merely an expression of feelings for which she had no words, and not the cunnilinguist’s point-of-view, the more people believed that not only was she a sex maniac, but a sex maniac in denial.¶¶¶ Eventually, O’Keeffe stopped reading reviews and stopped commenting on them. For the rest of her life she went on the offensive, claiming in interviews that what people saw in her pictures was more about them and their issues than about her, thereby using another defense mechanism, projection, to her own advantage.
“Look what you come to if you let yourself be photographed like this.” She was in her eighties when she said this to C. S. Merrill, a poet who was caring for her on weekends. O’Keeffe had become, in the last decades of her life, a wizened, white-haired mystic in black communing with the beautiful, inhospitable wilds of Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico. She meant: Look how serious and no-nonsense I am; look how austere and humorless; look how my sleeves extend to my wrists, my hem to my ankles. She meant: Look how I have spent my life creating a self directly opposed to the one created by Stieglitz.
Meet the Stieglitzes
During the early summer of 1918, when most of the pictures were taken, Georgia stayed alone in Elizabeth’s studio, in bed. Stieglitz tended to her during the day and returned to his wife, Emmy, at night. Their marriage was one in name only; despite Alfred’s avant-garde aesthetic, he was an old-fashioned Victorian who, in his heart of hearts, didn’t believe that being miserable in a marriage was a reason to leave it. He and Emmy had been estranged for years; he slept in a dressing room. Who knows how long this would have gone on if O’Keeffe hadn’t sent him her drawings?
One day while Emm
y was out, Stieglitz, resorting to a time-honored technique favored by people who want out of a relationship but can’t bear to think of themselves as someone who would initiate a break-up, brought Georgia to the apartment for a photo shoot. Emmy returned from her errand and “surprised” them while Georgia was posed before Alfred’s lens. Emmy demanded to know what was going on, in that slightly insane way betrayed lovers always want to know what’s going on, when, of course, they know exactly what’s going on. Stieglitz was incensed: Couldn’t she see they weren’t doing anything but making some pictures? Emmy, less savvy about how to play this game than O’Keeffe would be when it was her turn to be the betrayed wife, succumbed to her outrage, ordering them both out.
Later that night, Emmy’s behavior illustrated a good life lesson: Never allow yourself to be provoked into issuing an ultimatum. The only time you should ever issue an ultimatum is if you can easily accept the worst outcome. This is a conundrum; if you can accept the worst outcome, you usually aren’t moved to issue an ultimatum.
She said, “Get rid of that O’Keeffe woman or it’s over, Alfred!”
He said, “Okay.”
In less than two hours it was done: Stieglitz packed up his stuff and fled to Georgia’s tiny studio, euphoric over his coup: He could now tell everyone “My wife threw me out over nothing. I am a photographer, and I was simply photographing Miss O’Keeffe.”
The next day Emmy relented, begging him to come back, but it was too late. Alfred and Georgia, for better and much worse, were the love of each other’s lives. They gave themselves to one another, but they also gave each other a new view of themselves. She was the red Porsche purchased by his middle-aged man; he was the football hero who falls in love with her awkward new girl in school. Anne Roiphe, in Art and Madness, speaks of “the thing of insanity that makes for both trouble and excitement” that’s necessary for great, enduring love, and Alfred and Georgia were rich in this regard.