How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (12 page)

Had Georgia become pregnant, everything in her life would have been different, but not in the way she imagined. Nature abhors a vacuum, or so we are told. One could make an argument that the moment O'Keeffe fully accepted the fact that she would never be a mother, the war of their marriage began, which made for brief spells of happiness amid a lot of misery, and which wound up propelling her art to even greater heights.

In fifth grade I wrote a paper on World War I in which, overwhelmed by the length of the World Book Encyclopedia entry, I said that the causes of the war were “too numerous to mention.” Here, now, I'm resorting to the same tactic. The fallout of Stieglitz putting the kibosh on a baby are too numerous to include here. Their relationship suffered a serious setback, in terms of grown-up behavior. If there is a lesson here, it's this: You might as well go ahead and have the damn baby. One way or another, you'll be dealing with the urge; if a baby isn't around to have temper tantrums and throw things, the adults will fill in the gap.
***
There will be babies in the house, one way or another.

1. Stieglitz made a fool of himself doting over someone else's two-year-old.

In the summer of 1923, Stieglitz invited his young secretary Marie Rapp Boursault and her two-year-old daughter, Yvonne, to Lake George for ten weeks. Boursault was also pregnant with her second child.
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Stieglitz doted on Yvonne, taking over fifty pictures of her. In addition, he fussed suspiciously over Marie. Georgia seethed, and referred to the child as a brat. If Stieglitz was so anti-child, why was she forced to mop up the strained peaches and projectile vomit of another woman's baby?

2. O'Keeffe developed a fierce and irrational hatred for a dumb lapdog.

O'Keeffe's least favorite Stieglitz sibling was Selma Schubart, Alfred's younger sister. She was the anti-O'Keeffe, a pretty dilettante who swanned around The Hill in chiffon gowns laden with big jewelry given her by male admirers,
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batting her eyelashes with coy helplessness. She owned a Boston terrier named Prince Rico Rippe
§§§§
that tore around the dining room during meals, yapping and nipping at people's heels. Georgia was appalled, then enraged, eventually refusing to stay in the house when Prince Rico was there.

3. O'Keeffe did something that was seriously uncalled-for.

More cyclical than the economy is the degree to which kids are welcome in the lives of adults-not-their-parents. When I was growing up in the '70s, no one wanted their kids hanging around; nothing ruined a party faster than having a kid in footie pajamas come downstairs and ask for a glass of milk. Now, however, to be an adult and
not
want children around is to advertise yourself as a hater of all living things. So it was in the Stieglitz summer home at Lake George during Georgia's time. The many children of Alfred's siblings showed up with their parents unannounced, to run wild and break things for weeks at a time. Once, when there were a half-dozen kids terrorizing the household and Georgia was at her wits' end, one of the three-year-olds who'd just arrived introduced herself and said, “How do you do, Aunt Georgia?” O'Keeffe slapped her across the face and said, “Don't
ever
call me Aunt.”

The Good Wife, O'Keeffe Style

December 11, 1924, was a bleak Tuesday, and also the day of the most cheerless celebrity wedding in modern history. In the office of a random justice of the peace in Cliffside, New Jersey,
¶¶¶¶
Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz were married. John Marin was their only witness. Several days earlier, driving to get their marriage license, they had crashed into a tree and had to walk the rest of the way in a downpour. At the ceremony, no rings were exchanged. She refused to say the words
honor
and
obey.
There was no reception. O'Keeffe had not wanted to get married. They had weathered the public disgrace of living together and were now accepted as a legitimate couple. What was the point? Especially since now there would be no children.

The point was the mental health of Kitty Stieglitz, who had not yet recovered after the birth of her baby. Her doctors thought that perhaps if Stieglitz and O'Keeffe got married, it would ease some of her anxiety. Her father would be safely married, even if it wasn't to her mother. Kitty was not Georgia's daughter, but she was Alfred's, and so she went along with it.

Georgia's own father, Francis, from whom she'd inherited her black hair, white skin, and droll sense of humor, had died in a fall from a roof he'd been repairing not long after Georgia had moved in with Stieglitz in 1918. As distraught as Georgia had been over her mother's death, the death of her father was the death of the heart of the family. Georgia was stricken. She had her siblings, but her sense of being an orphan was absolute. Not surprisingly Stieglitz had been there to fill in every possible gap. She said yes to marriage, even though she confessed decades later that she'd wanted to say no. In any case, their marriage had no effect on Kitty, and Stieglitz never saw her again.

This is so depressing, I'm tempted to forget about offering lessons from O'Keeffe's marriage and cut straight to home decorating. At least we can all agree that the interiors of her New Mexican houses were chic examples of mid-century design. I feel equally compelled to make an argument for the atypicality of their union, but every marriage is atypical, each one its own nation, with a population of two.

A few things O'Keeffe did that helped hers last:

1. By the end of the 1920s Georgia was able to support herself and Stieglitz with her art. She did not remind Stieglitz every chance she got that she was the breadwinner, like some people I know.
   
2. Once it was done, she never made herself crazy wondering how her life would have turned out if, say, she'd married Paul Strand, or stayed in Canyon to become the Official Eccentric Schoolmarm, or done anything else other than cast her lot in with Stieglitz. Despite his difficult personality, his possibly pathological gregariousness, his perfectionism, his need for control, his compulsion to make love with his camera to every female in their circle who would remove her blouse, there is no record that she ever met a girlfriend for an overpriced Cosmopolitan at an upper East Side watering hole and complained about having made the wrong choice. I suspect that Stieglitz was simply the man version of the hostile landscape and terrible weather that spoke to her soul.
   
3. She also found his foibles amusing. The Lake George farmhouse was usually packed with family, friends, friends of friends, and family of friends, plus the random colleague or ten from the art world. On the rare occasions when it was just the two of them, they sometimes found themselves together in the kitchen, doing the dishes. Stieglitz, who had no real life skills, could not manage this. He either dried the dishes and put them back in the dish strainer, or put them into the cupboard while still wet. Georgia found this to be hilarious, instead of a metaphor for their relationship.
   
4. She nurtured all that they had in common. It perhaps comes as no surprise that what bound them together was their love of art, their respect for each other's work, and at the beginning, the receptivity they had toward each other as influences, and their us-against-the-world pleasure. Headboard-banging sex at the beginning of a relationship is never enough, if the only other thing you share as a couple is paying the bills.
   
5. She didn't cook.
   

It's a Flower. Really.

Did O'Keeffe have any inkling when she laid her brush upon the canvas in 1922, aiming to paint a big orange-red flower, that she was creating the breakout image of her career? Her first flowers were also orange, immersed in a glass of water. She painted them in high school. O'Keeffe's love of flowers was complicated. “I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move,” she once said.

There are several stories about how the big flower canvases came to be. In one, she is influenced by the jazzy technological advances of the Roaring '20s. Radio was becoming popular. Middle-class families were purchasing Model T automobiles. Billboards were springing up along well-traveled highways. O'Keeffe, intrigued by the enormous size of the billboards, believed that in these modern times you needed to shout to be heard, and this meant visually as well. Flowers were so elegant and complex, so lovely. But they were also small—too small for those modern times. Her idea was simple: Make it big, and people will have to look.

Others believe that she was still smarting and furious over the critics' response to her earlier abstractions, in which she sang her one-note, one-line song: What every woman knows! What every woman knows! What every woman knows! Flowers were such a classic, representational still-life choice that they verged on cliché. The critics didn't know what to make of her previous abstract charcoals and watercolors? Fine. This is a petunia (
Petunia, No. 2
). This is a calla lily (
Calla Lily Turned Away
).

In her flowers you can see the influence of Paul Strand's mysterious close-cropped pictures of bowls, fence pickets, and typewriter keys, and Arthur Wesley Dow's belief in the power of pleasing composition and design. The flowers were luscious, feminine, and authoritative, rendered in outrageous hues: lavender, pink, and teal. O'Keeffe yearned to be taken seriously, and yet she refused to make her paintings somber and ugly. She still believed in the aesthetic she taught her students in Texas: that every aspect of our lives should be visually pleasing, even fine art. She stood behind pretty. She was proud, and unrepentant.

Stieglitz was not for it. Even though the flowers were part of nature, and thus approved for feminine rendering, he despised them every bit as much as the skyscrapers. With every year he grew more resistant to change of any kind. For most of his adulthood he frequented the same tailor, who always remade the same suit; he wore the same shirt, the same tie, the same socks, the same underwear. Every time Georgia ventured out in a new artistic direction, he sniffed with disapproval. He felt she should stick to small, deeply expressive charcoal abstractions like the
Specials
he had fallen in love with in 1917. He was like the husband of a woman I know who insists she wear her hair dyed and permed in the same tousled, crunchy mess that she sported on the day they met in 1987, and so she does.

Until the end of the decade O'Keeffe's shows were populated with big creamy calla lilies viewed from various angles, pink petunias whose stems were submerged in a white glass, orange and yellow cannas, black-bearded irises, white sweet peas, red poppies that fill the entire frame.

O'Keeffe was never not a minx. She loved playing pranks, even visual ones. While proclaiming that these were flowers, for God's sake, the most obvious of subjects, she painted their reproductive parts with her usual sensuality. But it wasn't just lady parts on not-so-secret display; the spadix at the center of her creamy calla lilies was never anything but a jaunty phallus.

By the mid-1920s her shows were attracting a lot of attention. It was hard for the critics to leave off talking about how everything she painted was, as Stieglitz had suggested years earlier, an expression of some secret feminine voodoo. Someone called her “the Priestess of the Eternal Feminine,” and reference was made in a
New York Times
review to her ability to channel the superheroish-sounding Mighty Mother. Lewis Mumford, writing in the
New Republic,
elevates her in a sentence that reads:

Miss O'Keeffe has not discovered a new truth of optics, like Monet, nor invented a new method of aesthetic organization, like the Cubists; and while she paints with a formal skill which combines both objective representation and abstraction, it is not by this nor by her brilliant variations in color that her work is original. What distinguishes Miss O'Keeffe is the fact that she has discovered a beautiful language . . .

And so on.

It seems that for about ten minutes after Mumford's review was published, O'Keeffe had achieved the kind of serious critical reception she desired.
****
But then something happened that would drum her out of the highbrow art corps forever: Women discovered her. And I don't mean just the occasional heiress who would spring for a picture of a petunia, but women on the street,
flappers,
who smoked in public and wore short skirts and rouged their knees, the better to leave people with the impression that they'd just risen from the floor after having given someone a blow job. And not only modern working girls, but
housewives
. O'Keeffe had gone from being the shy schoolteacher girlfriend of the studly (by art world standards) Stieglitz, who made esoteric abstract paintings that communicated to men, on behalf of Woman-Children everywhere, how moving and erotic it was to have sex with them, to a popular painter embraced by their wives and girlfriends. She painted chick art.

Cheeky
New York Sun
critic Henry McBride reported, “I do not feel the occult element in them [the paintings] that all the ladies insist is there . . . there were more feminine shrieks and screams in the vicinity of O'Keefe's [sic] work this year than ever before.”

Occult. Ladies. Feminine shrieks and screams.

There goes the neighborhood.
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I wasn't surprised to learn this. The higher O'Keeffe's stock rose with women, the lower it dropped with men, i.e., the educated purveyors of high culture. Fortunately, modern day O'Keeffe scholars have worked, and continue to work, tirelessly to redeem her reputation, to make sure she is revered and appreciated by the right sort of people,
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to make sure the people who tack O'Keeffe posters on their walls and buy pretty O'Keeffe calendars for their kitchens, and love the same paintings that the flappers and housewives loved, feel like the cultural riffraff they are.