How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (9 page)

Back she went to Canyon. Now she had a new correspondent, the adorable and age-appropriate Paul Strand. He was bewitched by her and, moreover, their work bore striking similarities. They were a generation younger than Stieglitz, and their sensibilities were completely modern. After the 1913 Armory Show, Strand became interested in cubism. A few months after Georgia had made her charcoal
Specials,
Strand found a set of bowls in the kitchen and began photographing them in clusters in extreme close-up. The black-and-white pictures were hypnotic, the shadows as important to the composition as the objects themselves. Georgia had made the first abstract paintings, Strand, the first abstract photographs.

Georgia's second year in Canyon was not as magical as the first. Around Christmastime things began to go bad. In April America had entered World War I, and a shop in Canyon was selling let's-slaughter-the-Germans Christmas cards. When Georgia wrote a letter to the shop owner saying that this sentiment wasn't in keeping with the season, or, for that matter, Christianity, word spread that she was against the war. It was more than tiny, conservative Canyon could take.

Something happened in February upon which no one quite agrees: Either it was suggested she take a leave of absence, or else she came down with the flu. Even though the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was not quite under way, then as now, a lot of people said
flu
when they meant a really bad cold. Georgia left Canyon for the ranch belonging to her friend, Leah Harris, in Waring, Texas. She was allegedly recovering from her illness there, but in one letter she reports that after gardening, cooking, cleaning, and sewing, she walked to town and back.

In New York, Stieglitz, a hypochondriac of some renown, read the word
flu
in one of her letters and panicked. He started to obsess, something he had plenty of time to do because he'd been forced to close 291 for lack of funding. He was at loose ends, without a cultural battle to wage. He'd convinced the world that photography could be fine art, as well as the seemingly nonsensical cubes and lines of Picasso, the sinuous shapes of Matisse, Cézanne's rough-hewn apples and pears. Now, he was being nudged aside by younger artists. Now, modern art had a number of supporters. He was depressed. At home, his marriage had deteriorated. He was sleeping in the study.

Stieglitz knew that Strand was also smitten with Georgia. The only enjoyable moments of his day were spent comparing notes with Strand about Georgia. The more they discussed her and her “flu,” the more important it seemed to rescue her from Texas and bring her to New York. A plan was hatched: Strand would go to Texas and bring Georgia back, at Stieglitz's bidding. The old alpha dog had roused himself and decided it was time to act. Strand arrived in Texas and presented Georgia with an opportunity: Elizabeth, Stieglitz's niece, had a small studio where Georgia could stay, rent-free.

It's a mystery why Georgia and Paul Strand never hooked up. Perhaps things had already been put in motion with Stieglitz; they'd gone too far down that road to turn back. Or perhaps the fact that he'd come all the way to Texas as Stieglitz's errand boy made him less attractive. Maybe since they were both protégés of Big Daddy Stieglitz, she saw Strand more as a brother. Maybe it was simply fate.

At any rate, Georgia realized it was time to play her hand. Georgia's intuition was not only impeccable, but she also trusted it without reservation. The time had come for a change. She agreed to accompany Strand back to New York, a city she had never particularly liked, to see what lay in store for her.

When she arrived in New York in June, she was thin and tired.
¶¶¶
Stieglitz whisked her off to Elizabeth's tiny two-room studio on East 59th Street, where history was made. He put her to bed. The Victorian in him was roused by the sight of powerful, passionately alive Georgia languishing on the small cot in her kimono. She was sick! He would take care of her! He immediately found someone to teach him how to boil an egg.

June, 1918. The Russian Revolution was in full swing, as was World War I. The U.S. Postal Service had just invented air mail.
Out West,
starring Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle, was in the theaters. In the small, bright studio on East 59th Street (the walls were painted yellow, the floor, orange), Stieglitz dragged out his big box camera and tripod and began his epic photographic portrait of the woman who had become his lover. Each photograph required a three- to four-minute exposure. In 1917 he'd made some pictures of Georgia's sinuous hands, but that was just foreplay. Now he spent hours photographing her jaw and neck, her shoulders, breasts, rib cage, feet, back, torso, lady parts. She looked rakish in a black bowler and black cape, erotically androgynous in a man's suit, helpless and ravaged in her white kimono, her hair splayed around her shoulders. It was hard work, all the posing in the small, hot studio, all the sex that happened in between sittings.
***

Georgia was bowled over. She had been unsure what she looked like until she saw these pictures. It was 1918. Women didn't study themselves for hours in the mirror; indeed, Georgia had rarely had a mirror in her small rented rooms. “You see,” she would tell a reporter sixty years later, “I'd never known what I looked like or thought about it much. I was amazed to find my face was lean and structured. I'd always thought it was round.” She'd always said that the experience was worth the risk, and whatever she was risking here, it was worth it. She had never been made to feel this beautiful.

Eventually, the portrait would run to five hundred prints. The last one would be taken in 1937. Two hundred of them were taken here, during the first, heady months of the relationship. Stieglitz famously said, “Whenever I take a photograph I make love.” And so he did.

Which leads me to the final lesson:
If your boyfriend takes a naked picture of you, be prepared for the world to see it.

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. The 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.