A spiral of passion

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, a frequent contributor to The Times, spent more than a decade researching Georgia O’Keeffe. The most famous female artist of the 20th century is renowned for her passionate relationship with photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz and for her paintings of enlarged flowers. While reading the artist’s correspondence, Drohojowska-Philp was struck by the intensity of O’Keeffe’s relationships with the men she had known before Stieglitz, when her painting was largely abstract. In spring 1917, O’Keeffe, 29, was teaching art classes at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, Texas. She was entertaining the attentions of Arthur Macmahon, a Columbia University political science professor, as well as those of Ted Reid, one of her students. When she finished the semester, she took the train to New York City to see the first solo exhibition of her work at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery on Fifth Avenue. She arrived unannounced and her work had been taken down, but Stieglitz was so pleased to see her, he rehung the show and photographed her in front of some of the paintings. It was the last show at the historic gallery, which closed after America entered World War I. What follows is excerpted from chapters X and XI of “Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe,” to be published in September.

*

INFLUENCES

During her whirlwind trip to New York, Stieglitz introduced O’Keeffe to a few of the artists who had recently entered his circle, including Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, inventors of what they termed the synchromist style of abstract painting.

No one, however, was as influential as Paul Strand, who had a terrific impact on her art and no little impact on her life. The attraction between the younger artists was palpable and immediate. At twenty-seven, Strand was Stieglitz’s most recent acolyte. Eager to impress, he showed O’Keeffe his photographs of bowls, chairs, and fruit-subjects that he enlarged and cropped to enhance the abstract shapes. O’Keeffe was felled by their luminous rigor, and intrigued that Strand also admired the raw beauty of the Texas Panhandle.

Born in 1890 to middle-class Jewish parents in New York, Strand attended public schools until the age of fourteen, when he enrolled in the Ethical Culture School. Classes in math, science, and language were buttressed by courses in crafts and photography. Strand’s teacher was the socially conscious Lewis Hine, who photographed the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and the exploitation of children as laborers.

In 1907, when Hine brought his photography class to visit 291, he introduced Strand to Stieglitz. Strand was thrilled to meet the man who had done so much to establish pictorialist photography and the Photo-Secession. Strand began reading [the magazine] Camera Work and the following year joined the Camera Club of New York, where Stieglitz’s support for pictorialist photography still held sway.

For the next five years, pictorialist soft-focus technique and nostalgic subject matter dominated Strand’s own work. On a trip to Europe in 1911, he took pictures of Venice canal scenes that were indebted to Stieglitz’s photos of the 1890s. By the time he was introduced to O’Keeffe, he had made his break from pictorialism.

Although he was a generation younger than most of the 291 artists, Strand thought that they “all talked the same language” in their desire to validate American modernism, but Strand’s understanding of Cubism -- that it embraced formal analysis over symbolism -- was well advanced. After the Armory Show, [the first major U.S. exhibition of modern art] Stieglitz claimed that it was meaningless “to go on doing merely what the camera does better,” and determined that the mission of photography must be the same as that of modern art: to invent, not imitate, in order to reveal emotional, psychological, or spiritual conditions.

During the summer of 1916, Strand was staying at his parents’ vacation home in Twin Lakes, Connecticut. In an attempt to clarify for himself the abstract methods of the Cubists, he photographed still lifes of ladder-backed chairs and stacks of bowls. By taking the pictures up close and at dizzying angles, bowl rims, porch shadows, and chair rungs were reduced to pure ovals and angles: his own brand of “anti-photography.”

Strand was a pioneer in applying his understanding of Cubism to what he called “photographing in the real world.” By that fall, he had completed works like The White Fence. Bracing white pickets march across the frontal plane of a traditional picture of barns and houses to meld a modernist sensibility with the symbolism of a quintessentially American domestic architecture.

Stieglitz called Strand’s photographs “the direct expression of today.” He exhibited them at 291 in 1916 and featured them in the last two issues of Camera Work, the same issues that contained reviews of O’Keeffe’s shows.

Although it is certain that O’Keeffe had seen them reproduced, Strand’s prints felt like a Great Plains wind to O’Keeffe. Intuitively she identified the influence of Japanese art in his use of an uptilted picture plane, and admired his use of fractured abstraction. With uncharacteristic candor, she admitted, “He showed me lots and lots of prints -- photographs. And I almost lost my mind over them -- Photographs that are as queer in shapes as Picasso drawings.... He is great.”

But it was not just the work that excited her. As O’Keeffe revealed to [her friend Anita] Pollitzer, “Dorothy (True) and I both fell for him.” O’Keeffe’s feelings for Stieglitz at this point were friendly, perhaps idolizing, but not romantic. After all, Stieglitz was married.

True bowed out of a Decoration Day outing to Coney Island with O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, and Strand, and the threesome went with Stieglitz’s friend, Henry Gaisman, who had invented the Autograph Camera.

Stieglitz and Strand fell all over themselves showing off for their visiting artist. On the way home, Stieglitz wrapped O’Keeffe in his great loden cloak. She proclaimed it a “great party and a great day,” rare words in her ever-cautious apportioning of enthusiasm.

O’Keeffe returned to Canyon convinced that her ten days in the city had been a success. She felt more a part of 291, and Vanity Fair had purchased her illustration of a reclining debutante, largely due to Stieglitz’s friendship with editor Frank Crowninshield.

It looked to be a slow, hot summer of teaching. She completed two realistic watercolors of the Canyon landscape, one of the orange and green canyon with crows and another of the red mesa. As was her habit, she was warming up for another foray into abstraction. Then, in early June, a letter arrived from Strand. She wrote back breathlessly,

“I knew you would write, knew ... that I meant something to you -- it was just a look in your eyes that made me turn away quickly -- and wonder in a wild way ...

Then the work -- Yes I loved It -- and I loved you -- I wanted to put my arms around you and kiss you hard.... Its so funny the way I didn’t even touch you when I so much wanted to. I don’t know why but it seemed that I mustn’t -- that it wouldn’t be fair to you -- I don’t know why. And afterward I was almost afraid to be alone with you.”

Strand, who was similarly smitten, had included one of his prints with his letter. She coyly remarked, “I think I’ll love your print more than you do.... I felt that I ought not touch you -- Still am telling you that I wanted to.”

The sober-minded photographer had given O’Keeffe his copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot to read on the train trip west and she wished he had been there to read it to her. “I’ve been wanting to tell you again and again how much I like your work,” she wrote. “I believe I’ve even been looking at things and seeing them as I thought you might photograph them -- isn’t that funny -- making Strand photographs for myself in my head.... I think you people have made me see -- or should I say feel new colors -- I cannot say them to you but I think I’m going to make them.”

In fact, such pictures were painted only days after she wrote those words. “The moon seems very near full tonight -- and quite near it is a very little star. The straight line where the ground and sky meet tonight is very wonderful as I see it out my window.”

O’Keeffe produced her boldest and most direct watercolors to date, a series called Evening Star. Intense rainbows are wrapped around a point of light like a vibrant, celestial target. Bold strokes of beryl and jade run along the bottom of the paper, pure ruby is rolled around in circles of mandarin and citrine. These watercolors bear witness to the startling force of modern painting, especially the unfussy compositions of modern photography as practiced by Strand. The stacked bowls, among Strand’s own favorite prints from 1916, is likely what he sent to O’Keeffe. It was a print she would have known from her trip to 291 and from Camera Work. This photograph is the likely source for her seven Evening Star watercolors with their stacked circles, one inside the other, replicating the shapes in Strand’s photographs. (The first in her series, simple tangerine sky and horizon, doesn’t feature the circular forms.) This was the second instance of photography directly affecting the composition of O’Keeffe’s painting, but it would not be the last.

She also painted Strand’s portrait in three entirely abstract watercolors of a strong, dark tubular shape surrounded by washes of yellow, blue, and red. O’Keeffe wrote, “I sang you three songs -- in paint. I’d like you to hear them. I don’t know why -- but I would -- it’s all the same song sung different ways.... I feel you took me with you -- even though I’m not there at all.”

O’Keeffe wanted to write to Strand but was hesitant. She told him, “Write me so I’ll know where to send those letters to. I don’t know why -- but I have a notion not to send to 291.”

O’Keeffe could hardly have been unaware that Stieglitz’s interest in her was bordering on the obsessive; he had written to her nearly every day for the past year and a half. But she did not want to jeopardize her professional relationship with him by calling attention to Strand’s interest in her. She made it apparent to Strand that she was granting secrecy to their correspondence, and that her feelings for him must be kept from Stieglitz, whom she considered more of a father figure. Unbeknown to O’Keeffe, Strand and Stieglitz were comparing notes.

Strand’s next letter provided his home address, so they no longer corresponded care of 291. His letter put what she called “wheels in her head,” and, that evening, she walked in preoccupied silence until her sister complained that walking with her was “just the same as being alone.” Lying down upon the hard, desert soil, O’Keeffe watched heat lightning make “wonderful zigzags flashing all round of the edge of the sky.”

On a Sunday morning, after breakfast, she collected the mail and received another packet of small prints from Strand.

“I picked them up again and again -- and found myself unconsciously looking off into space every time before I put them down.... It’s almost as though you are sitting by me -- silent -- yet telling me so many things I want -- just to reach my hand out to you and let you hold it. Can you understand that -- its different from telling you in words what they say to me -- in a way it is much more real. Maybe that’s why I want to touch people so often -- its only another way of talking.... The little prints make me conscious of your physical strength -- my weakness relatively but that in spite of

The look in your eyes that startled me so ... I had just run from eyes -- I had run like mad only to find a glimmer of the same thing in new eyes -- So I looked away -- wondering. Wasn’t there any place to get away from that look -- from folks that feel that way about me. My fault -- yes. Maybe.”

Strand’s letters to O’Keeffe have been lost or destroyed, but it appears that, like Macmahon, he was taken aback by the frankness of her emotions. He must have made some such protest, because her next letter was defensive. “If you knew more of me you would probably be disappointed.... You need not write me anymore if you don’t want to. I feel that in a way I am spoiling -- maybe -- a person you had made up that gave you pleasure. Honesty is a merciless thing.”

With that same disconcerting honesty, she carried on, “So many people had kissed me in such a short time -- and I had liked them all and had let them all -- had wanted them all too -- It simply staggered me that I stood there wanting to kiss someone else -- another one I thought -- for goodness sake -- What am I getting to -- It wouldn’t be fair to you.”

O’Keeffe’s vacillating between dependence and independence had the desired effect of keeping her suitors confused. She seems to have suffered from feelings of insecurity whenever she was confronted with relationships or the prospect of commitment. “I seem to like many people enough to make them miserable -- No one enough to make them happy. I am not fine -- nothing fine about me. And I’m not sorry about it either. I’m only what I am -- and I’m free to live the minutes as they come to me -- If you know me at all you must know me as I am.”

In a punitive tone, she added that men

“never understand me -- unless maybe Stieglitz does -- don’t know that I understand myself -- It’s really thinking a great deal of many -- wanting to give much to many -- because I some way seem to feel what they feel -- never wanting to give all ...

As a woman it means willingness to give life -- not only her life but other life -- Nobody I know means that much to me -- for more than a moment at a time -- I cannot help knowing that -- the moment does not fool me -- I seem to see way ahead into the years -- always to see folks too clearly. It’s always aloneness.”

When Strand told her that this last letter was unkind, she turned meek and apologetic. “I wanted to take the unkindliness away by putting my arms around your neck and asking you not to mind.” O’Keeffe had started to hate Canyon, the place that she had loved just a few months before, and she told Strand that her favorite picture was no more than a black piece of fabric in a black frame echoing the black view from her window.

“I want to be out under the stars -- out where there is lots of room,” she sighed. During one of her nocturnal rambles, she thought that the cities of Amarillo and Canyon “sparkle like black opals on the plains.”

The nets of stars that so sharply illuminated the darkness of the desert prompted her to return to the technique of making a grid of navy-blue watercolor -- the gaps revealing white paper that created the effect of stars in blue sky. Starlight Night so pleased her that she later had it reproduced as her Christmas card.

Staying up all night, she watched dawn radiate in auras above the horizon. “The light would begin to appear and then it would disappear and there would be a kind of halo effect, and then it would appear again,” she said. She captured that halation in three watercolors, Light Coming on the Plains, Nos. I--III. The circles within circles, this time rendered in livid monotones similar to the silvery neutrals of photography, once again recall Strand’s influence on O’Keeffe’s work.

And so it went for many weeks as O’Keeffe encouraged Strand, discouraged Macmahon, dated Reid, and corresponded with Stieglitz. She dedicated sheaves of correspondence to the inadequacy of language. To Strand, she complained, “Queer that two folks have such a hard time to get acquainted.” Blaming Stieglitz, she added, “It wouldn’t have been so hard if nobody else had been in the world -- that is -- if other folks hadn’t scared us so.”

Then, abruptly, O’Keeffe’s letters stopped coming. Strand was staying in Twin Lakes when he wrote to Stieglitz at Lake George [New York] to see if he had heard from “Canyon” lately. “I haven’t,” Strand wrote. “I suppose there is something that makes it impossible -- something perhaps that I said or left unsaid -- I don’t know.” Stieglitz reassured Strand, “Letter writing of all kinds to anyone -- would have been forced -- and as you know Canyon does not force.”

Stieglitz’s own position was constrained, as it had been with other women. “Of course, my own trouble is purely the family question -- the same trouble I’ve had for so many years.” He wrote that his photography was stagnant.

After the lengthy wait for a letter, Strand hardly was comforted by O’Keeffe’s next confessional, in which she announced that Reid had proposed: “He is like this country.... I believe I’d like to live with him -- for a while anyway but I hate the idea of being tied -- It seems I have never seen anyone with such damnable nerve -- I don’t see how we could possibly make it anything.... We have laughed over it -- and talked over it -- both saying it looks impossible but that doesn’t phase him at all.”

After delivering her surprising news, O’Keeffe left for a month’s vacation in the Rocky Mountains with [her sister] Claudia -- leaving Strand in an uncomfortable state of limbo.

A flood had washed out bridges along the most direct route through Denver, Colorado, so the two sisters bought passage on a train that traveled through Albuquerque, New Mexico. Georgia, who had never visited any of the Southwest except the flat terrain of the Panhandle, gazed out the window at a passing mosaic of rosy soil and blue-tinged mountains covered in pinon and fir.

Upon arrival in Colorado, the sisters took a truck along a road so rutted that it took them five hours to travel twenty miles. Georgia sat in the front passenger seat, insisting, “I don’t like second hand scenery.” During the trip she resumed her epistolary flirtation with Strand, (avoiding any mention of Reid) and invited him to New Mexico, where “the nothing ness is several times larger than in Texas.”

The sisters returned by way of Santa Fe, an artists’ colony of eccentrics and sophisticates from around the country. The light of the town was lucid and the colors scintillating. “I loved it immediately,” O’Keeffe recalled. “From then on I was always on my way back.”

Still, the Texas plains remained, “like a marvelous song too lovely to sing -- to wonderful to try to sing.”

Upon her return to Canyon, O’Keeffe found that Strand’s letters had piled up. Impetuously, she decided to end her relationships with Reid and Macmahon and wrote to Strand, “I feel as though I’ve just wiped my hand across the table they were all on and tumbled them all off.... They are all gone from the present anyway. And it’s a great feeling that I have of being gloriously free. Some would call it fickle -- a ridiculous word. With me, it’s more a feeling of mastery of myself. I always feel like a sort of slave when I’m liking anyone very much.”

In the same letter, she wrote a lengthy fable of a chestnut tree that stops sharing its nutrients with its fellow trees in order to grow above them into cleaner air with better light to produce larger fruit. The taller tree is resented by other trees, but its fruit endures as theirs does not and its seed produces another lovely tree of equal quality. O’Keeffe explained that the tree was being “unsentimental.” It was a warning that her own survival depended upon her ability to be unsentimental.

President Woodrow Wilson had called for a declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917, and Canyon was abuzz with patriotic enthusiasm. Although Americans had been divided on the merits of intervention, after Wilson assured them that “the world must be made safe for democracy,” a juggernaut of patriotism rolled across the land.

Despite Wilson’s assurance that “We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities ... no material compensation,” Stieglitz believed America’s intervention to be commercially motivated. He was convinced that the German people were victims of the war.

Stieglitz later observed, “Much of the enthusiasm that had existed at 291 gradually disappeared because of the war.” After taking his daughter [Kitty] to Smith College in September, he returned to Manhattan. With the closing of 291, for the first time in two decades Stieglitz had no magazine to publish, no gallery to run, nowhere to go. Unable to bear the idea of being home all day with [his wife] Emmy, he took an office in the Anderson Galleries, where he conducted business and correspondence. Housed in a neo-classical building on Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, the Anderson Galleries was one of the preeminent auction houses in the city for the sale of rare books, furniture, decorative art, and paintings.

A few weeks after the declaration of war, O’Keeffe, en route to New York, stopped in Chicago to visit her brother Alexius. The twenty-five-year-old engineer had enlisted in the Officers Corps of Engineers and was expected to be among the first to go to France. She was stunned by the effect of the uniform on her lively brother: “A sober -- serious -- willingness -- appalling. He has changed so much--it makes me stand still and wonder--a sort of awe--He was the sort that used to seem like a large wind when he came into the house.”

The experience of seeing Alexius in uniform combined with the antiwar sentiments voiced by Stieglitz, Strand, and Pollitzer, led the usually apolitical O’Keeffe to become an unpopular opponent of the war in a highly patriotic community.

O’Keeffe seethed with impatience over the conformity and pettiness of the Canyon community. By the end of October, she told Strand, “Everything seems to be whirling or unbalanced -- I’m suspended in the air -- can’t get my feet on the ground -- I hate all the folks I see every day -- hate the things I see them doing.... There is no one here I can talk to -- it’s all like a bad dream.”

Hearing of her unhappiness, Stieglitz prodded his niece Elizabeth to offer O’Keeffe her New York studio. Stieglitz could not have extended such an invitation himself. O’Keeffe was somewhat baffled by Elizabeth’s solicitation but by December, started to consider it. At two in the morning, unable to sleep, she wrote to Elizabeth asking, “would you get up and leave these stupid maddening sort of folks ... or would you stay and fight it out?”

O’Keeffe’s insomnia may have been the result of the latest scandal. She had told the drugstore owner that his Christmas cards depicting the Statue of Liberty with a printed suggestion that America “wipe Germany off the map” were not in keeping with the Christian spirit. Her heretical opinion got out to the Canyon populace and back to her. “It’s amazing to see what is in their heads,” she mused. In retaliation, a few months later, she painted The Flag, a watercolor of a blood-colored flag disappearing into a storm of roiling blue.

Although she wrote Strand that she had broken up with Reid, fifty years later O’Keeffe bitterly recalled her student’s “dropping me like a hot cake.” Reid cut off their relationship abruptly after he was visited by a group of faculty women who warned him that he would not receive a diploma if he continued to see O’Keeffe. Without bothering to inform her of the faculty visit, Reid ended their relationship. O’Keeffe’s flirtation with a teenage student and her less than patriotic point of view had combined to make her persona non grata around Canyon.

O’Keeffe turned thirty in November in an atmosphere of considerable alienation. She stuffed paper down the front of her dress to buffer the blistering winds. Claudia was away, working as a student teacher in Spur, Texas. Georgia spent Christmas feeling vulnerable and weak. She developed a sore throat that grew so painful she wrote to the president of the college to take six weeks off. On February 21, 1918, the Randall County News announced that she had taken a leave of absence due to illness. She had contracted Spanish flu, an epidemic that was sweeping the country.

News of the illness sent Stieglitz into a panic, and he urged her to come to New York to be cared for by his brother Lee, the physician. O’Keeffe was too sick to travel such a distance, though she managed to take the train some six hundred miles south to Waring, the considerably warmer southeastern corner of Texas. She was invited by her friend Leah Harris, who had taught home economics at West Texas State Normal College, to stay at a boardinghouse called Oaks Ranch. (She had visited Harris six months previous, on the return from her Colorado trip.) The Oaks attracted guests who needed “health cures,” especially consumptives who could benefit from the warm and dry climate of the hill country. Harris’s brother-in-law, a physician, probably made the arrangements and helped O’Keeffe recover from her flu before it progressed to tuberculosis.

For two months, Stieglitz and Strand discussed O’Keeffe’s future on a daily basis. In May, without consulting O’Keeffe, Stieglitz gave Strand funds to take a train to San Antonio. Neither Strand nor Stieglitz knew what to expect from the trip west, and Stieglitz specifically instructed Strand not to encourage O’Keeffe but to allow her to make her own decision about coming to New York.

EMISSARY

Stieglitz sent Strand to rescue O’Keeffe, but at the same time he harbored his own feelings for her. In essence, Strand was sent to discover whom, if anyone, O’Keeffe could love.

Affection was expressed between the artists in an epistolary appreciation of one another’s work. To compliment the art was to honor and even to court the artist. The passion of these convictions was evident in their correspondence. Stieglitz told O’Keeffe, “Your drawings ... would not be so living for me did I not see you in them

Strand arrived in San Antonio on Sunday, May 12, and took a one-dollar-a-night room at the Hotel Lanier. Nearly two hundred thousand troops were stationed nearby, and most of the soldiers seemed to be swarming the streets that night. The following morning, Strand called O’Keeffe, who was staying in town with friends and must have been greatly relieved to hear from him. O’Keeffe arranged a rendezvous in a nearby park. Sitting on a bench by the bandstand, he watched the approach of her tiny figure in a long black dress and black hat and felt as though he were in a dream.

Rarely given to verbosity, O’Keeffe talked ceaselessly in her excitement, guiding Strand around balmy San Antonio, where pecan trees and tropical flowers bloomed along the banks of the river.

O’Keeffe was pleased that Strand had come, not realizing, of course, that he had been sent by Stieglitz.

At the Cafe Del Rio, the couple sat by a window overlooking the river, eating enchiladas and beans and talking until three in the afternoon. When Stieglitz’s name came up, O’Keeffe remarked casually, “Oh, I would like to talk to him.”

Strand mentioned a return to the east, but O’Keeffe protested that she had to teach summer school in Canyon because she had no money.

Strand moved into a local boardinghouse a few doors away from O’Keeffe’s lodging. For several days, there were more strolls through town, followed by long lunches at the Mexican cafe. O’Keeffe took Strand to the barrio, where the Mexicans from south of the border lived in low adobe houses decorated with flowers. She stopped to paint watercolors of the picturesque scenes, and the locals gathered around her to watch.

When Strand brought out his camera to photograph La Villita, as the area was known, the locals ran away. But Strand did manage to shoot a dozen plates in the first three days, many of O’Keeffe, though they have since been lost. “She is just like a child,” he wrote Stieglitz. “Stopping to look at something ... everything giving her such a good time.” Strand confessed that they’d been together every day and every evening. It was hard to find time to write: “She is very wonderful -- very beautiful. I know pretty well now that it isn’t an idea. No, it’s all very real.”

Remembering the purpose of his visit, to discover O’Keeffe’s feelings, and whether she would be returning to New York City, he assured Stieglitz, “I am saying very little -- neither urging or the reverse. Just trying to let things clarify -- as they will freely. She is very much mixed up and it ought to unravel without pressure of any kind -- for the present.”

On Wednesday morning, Strand met Leah Harris, whom he described as “a tall, thin girl -- a Jewess, very nice but not at all good-looking.” Harris’s brother-in-law was the local doctor and, as a favor, treated O’Keeffe for free. Harris, who still took treatments for the tuberculosis she’d suffered a year before, told Strand that O’Keeffe had veered dangerously close to contracting the illness. Strand learned that tuberculosis ran in the O’Keeffe family.

After speaking with Harris about O’Keeffe’s health, Strand determined that Harris was more stable than O’Keeffe. They agreed that she needed someone to take care of her.

Neither Strand nor Stieglitz knew the true state of O’Keeffe’s poverty before Strand’s visit. Having associated mostly with middle- or upper-class women with independent or family income, they were uncertain how to proceed. O’Keeffe mentioned the need for money several times to Strand. “She certainly doesn’t need very much -- that isn’t what she means -- but I fancy she hasn’t anything left to speak of,” he reported to Stieglitz.

On Sunday, May 17, Strand mailed what he called “letter X” (so Stieglitz could refer to it and identify it from the others sent previously). In it, he told Stieglitz,

“Georgia is a child and yet a woman but there is a clash. Leah said she didn’t think anyone could satisfy her -- She can’t stand anyone for long -- and that he would have to be a millionaire. “Georgia needs money.” Of course, that is largely true. I’ve seen it very well and if we weren’t going out to Waring tomorrow, I’d soon be broke.

Not of course that she wants the money itself but it doesn’t mean anything to her. There are so many things she would like to do and it’s really a wonder that she paints at all. But there is no stability of living to match the stability of fineness and spirit.

I don’t believe she could keep a home because she couldn’t do any work.... She would have to be done for practically all the way thru. When you said it takes money -- you are right. But I’m not certain she has found herself yet -- not at all -- The relative importance of some values in living are not clearly crystalized. Leah herself said

Confronted with this portrait of O’Keeffe as financially and emotionally dependent, Strand had to face the limitations of his own circumstances. A young artist of modest family origins, he could hardly support himself, let alone another artist. He wrote to tell Stieglitz that he was bowing out. “If I had some money I might be able to help her -- I know I wouldn’t be afraid despite all the difficulties of living with such a person. But I haven’t,” he wrote. “So it is all very clear that I am not the one.” Then, in a surprising declaration, Strand told Stieglitz that he felt his two friends were destined for one another: “So it seems that you and she ought to have the chance of finding out what can be done -- one for the other.”

He added, “New York may clarify things for her and may even lead to at least some consummation. I think before she could go with you -- there would be many things to be given up.... She may be able to do it because she is seeking -- deep down -- something with finality in the sense of a tangible solid living basis.... She really looks wonderful -- and she is wonderful ... I love her very much -- You know my feelings for you.”

Before receiving Strand’s remarkably honest assessment of their situation, Stieglitz had worked himself into a manic state of anxiety. “Of course I’m human and I suffer terribly at moments ... life -- death -- I want her to live -- I never wanted anything a much as that -- She is the Spirit of 291 not I -- That’s something I never told you before -- that’s why I have been fighting so madly for her life -- She really doesn’t know me.”

Realizing that O’Keeffe was too much of a responsibility for him, Strand urged his mentor to carry on. “The spirit of 291 -- yes -- she is -- throu you -- now -- I don’t see how it can ever really take form in her until you or some man can give her the necessary stability -- There is no stability now -- just a more or less formless drifting -- she is a woman -- hysterical -- cruel -- and yet so lovely -- so like you fundamentally if it could only take form in a stability of living.” Strand told Stieglitz to save his energy for her arrival in New York, noting, “You will need all of your vitality for that.”

Strand accompanied O’Keeffe and Harris back to the Oaks Ranch in Waring. Harris allowed Strand to photograph her nude, an allowance that led him to alter his initial opinion of her physical attributes. “Very wonderful,” he enthused to Stieglitz. “You can imagine how free things must be for anything like that to have happened.... She is long and slender, very beautiful white skin.” A few days later he sent a hastily scrawled note to further tantalize the older photographer: “I am in a state -- photographing Leah -- nude -- body wet, shining in the sunlight ... Georgia painting Leah ... wonderful days -- yesterday -- and today -- All of us happy.”

After settling in at the ranch, Harris informed Strand that a neighboring rancher named Zoeller had been spying on her and slandering her reputation. She had filed a complaint but wanted Strand to have a talk with him. The beleaguered photographer wrote Stieglitz, “You know this Southern attitude which expects somebody to go and beat up the offender.” He was especially reluctant after learning that the neighbors had beaten another interloper only weeks before.

O’Keeffe regarded Strand’s reticence as cowardice. In their ensuing argument, she learned the extent to which her two friends were discussing her mental and physical health, her finances, and her future.

Most important, she discovered that Strand had come to see her as Stieglitz’s emissary. Referring to Stieglitz’s habit of speaking through others, she snapped to Strand, “First Elizabeth and now you.” Infuriated by these covert arrangements, O’Keeffe also felt romantically betrayed, since her feelings had grown more passionate toward Strand, who had encouraged her attention. He admitted, “She lets me touch her -- wants me to -- But with me at least ... no passion -- except in a far off -- very far off potential ... all a nightmare.”

[Stieglitz] wrote Strand, “I don’t know what made me do it but I have just sent a wire.”

Stieglitz’s formal invitation to O’Keeffe to come to New York provided her exit line. As Strand and O’Keeffe readied to return to New York, their discussions took on a franker tone. It appears that O’Keeffe still hoped to elicit a commitment from Strand. She wondered if he really wanted her to come to New York, and hoped that they might stay together out west. In a rash moment, he capitulated to her urging. “I ... told her -- simply because I thought it -- felt it and meant it -- that if she wanted it -- I would take care of her as long as she wanted it -- a job anywhere she wanted to be -- without expecting anything in return except the joy of doing it,” he told Stieglitz. “Perhaps naive -- but I could do it if it were to be -- But it isn’t -- which I knew long ago. Still I felt it was only fair to say it and to tell you that it has been said.”

Despite her strong feelings for him, O’Keeffe accepted that Strand was unable to support a relationship.

As the train hurtled northeast and she tried to absorb the life-changing circumstances of the past three weeks, she relapsed into illness. From Charlotte, North Carolina, Strand wired Stieglitz with the date and time of their arrival.

Reprinted from “Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe” by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, copyright 2004 by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company Inc.