Georgia (15 page)

H
E DECIDES THAT
my 1924 exhibition in March will be staged as a joint show, his work and mine. My paintings will be in the larger room, and his tiny cloud prints will be in the two smaller rooms of the Anderson Galleries. He is thrilled. I find it hard to feel the same level of excitement after the fiasco of last year's show of my work and the tone of the reviews.

Carefully, I pick the paintings to be shown. Conservative pieces—no more than three abstractions—the rest as objective as I can make them. I want them seen as I intend them to be seen.

In the
Brooklyn Eagle,
a woman I knew at the Art Students League writes of the girl she knew there. How they called me Patsy. How I modeled for other artists. And while she praises the precision of my brushstrokes, she focuses more on the girl who is now a woman, “no longer curly-haired and boyish, but an ascetic, almost saintly appearing, woman with a dead-white skin…capable of great and violent emotions.” She contends that “psychoanalysts tell us that fruits and flowers when painted by women are an unconscious expression of their desire for children.”

In almost every other review about my art that spring, there's a reference to Stieglitz's discovery of me. The comparison is glaring, our work described in such different terms: His cloud photographs are “a revelation.” My paintings are “the work of a woman who after repressions and suppressions is having an orgy of self-discovery.” I hate it every which way. The words. This leaden weight in my chest. Learn not to care, I tell myself. Let them say what they say or figure out how to change it.

But my work sells. We clear several thousand dollars. Coomaraswamy, the curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, requests a donation of Stieglitz's photographs. He is irked that they don't offer to purchase them. But he gives them twenty-seven of his best prints. He mats them himself, not trusting even Coomaraswamy to do it as he wants it done.

I keep thinking about the money my paintings brought in. Enough for a space of our own. Before we leave for the Lake, I drag Stieglitz to look at apartments. There's one on East 58th I particularly like, the top floor of a four-story brownstone. I would have a studio to work in. I leave our number with the landlord. He can't promise it will still be vacant by the time we return in November, but I tell him that if it is, we'll take it.

Stieglitz grumbles about the rent after we leave. I point out that he's not used to paying much, if anything at all, for rent.

“I'll have a show once a year,” I say slowly. “You can sell my paintings. That will cover our rent.”

“With art, you can never know what will sell,” he said. It strikes me as peevish—the way he says it.

“I'll figure out that part,” I answer. “You can do the rest.”

M
Y SISTER
C
ATHERINE
writes from Portage. She has given birth to a daughter—a baby girl. I write to tell her how it must be nice to have her way of living, a nice banker husband, a normal everyday sort of life. Halfway down the page, I stop. I ball the letter up tight in my fist, tighter, then take a fresh sheet and start again.

W
E ARRIVE AT
Lake George that April in a downpour. But I am happy—for the first time in months it seems—happy to be here again in this soaking-wet nature away from the city. I have the boats fixed. I plow the garden and plant it with vegetables. I get everything in but the potatoes. And I feel a thrill of joy, dirt under my fingernails, my body wrung to physical exhaustion. No room to think, I sleep soundly.

One morning, walking past the old garden, the explosion of color stops me. Delphinium and freesia in bloom, their petals deeply hued, the sunlight washes them to fire. I remember a small still life by Fantin-Latour I saw once. A quiet vase of flowers on the table. The mind and scale of it suggested a quiet domesticity. But what if I took that simple delicacy of a flower and kicked the shape open? What if I made it not life at arm's length, not constrained, but altogether different?

I make a small sketch there in the garden, and back in the shanty, I go through my canvases until I find a large one—vertical—thirty-five by eighteen. One strong driving line up the center, abstract forms curving off it, the background erased so it is only the warm curves of those flowers and their leaves—yellows startlingly bright, pale crimson, violet, green. Pendant heads of lily of the valley. Forget-me-nots. Blue spills in around—no stems, no roots—as if the forms bloom out of the sky.

For the next few weeks, I paint flowers. On canvas-covered board, I paint petunias—such a simple household flower, arranged as one would expect a still life to be, but cropped, without a vase or background—just blooms. Then I take those same flowers and translate them onto a thirty-six-by-thirty canvas. Massive. Inflated. Their edges soft, like they're just coming into form. Teal lines for shadows, a layer of white for the luminosity in the petals. One bloom is central. Then another below, extending past the bottom edge. It's fun—this play with flowers—like nothing I've done. Smudge in pinks and blues—edges blended where the colors meet. The flower no longer in its proper role. It's not living in the world as we know it. It grows out of a celestial hill, the light deepening toward dusk, toward the darker curve of the horizon. Past it, the sky rises—surreal, abstract—another flower massing inside it, on the verge of rushing over the hill.

I'm nearly finished when Stieglitz comes in. He stops when he sees the canvas.

“What exactly do you think you're going to do with that?”

I smile at him. “I'm just painting it.”

“I don't see where it will take you.”

“You mean if it will sell?”

“I just don't see the point.”

“I want to paint a flower. That is the point. I want to paint it so big that people will have no choice but to stop and look and really see it—as it is. The way I want it to be seen.”

He pauses, my words registering in him. “And I love that about you.”

“What?”

“That you know what you want. How you are so magnificently lovely when you're clear. And that is lovely.” He points to the flower. “I may think it's silliness to paint a flower that way, but it is also lovely, as you are.”

“Well, I'll be in soon,” I say.

He hesitates. It takes him a moment to realize I am asking him to leave.

I
DO NOT
stop painting the flowers. He asks me to explain my reasoning. But I don't want to explain, and I tell him I'd rather just do it.

I want to show them—my giant flowers—in the group exhibition we're planning for next winter.
Seven Americans,
he's already titled it, the show will feature all of his artists plus himself: Demuth, Strand, Marin, Hartley, Dove, and me. He's made arrangements with Kennerley. The Strands, his niece Elizabeth, and Rosenfeld have created a collective rent fund that will keep our rooms at the Anderson Galleries open through the year.

B
Y THE FIRST
of July the heat is stifling—the air filled with a yellow dust that coats the house. When I come out of the shanty one afternoon, I find him on the porch in his wicker chair writing a letter to Strand. His black folder of my work is on the table across from him. I pick it up. He glances at me, wary.

“Don't you think I'll be careful?”

He gives a little harrumph, then he bends back to the letter he is writing, he dips his pen, his script flows in fluent lines. I turn the pages of the folder slowly, through my watercolors, colors bright and sharp, mounted on black paper, then the charcoals. I keep turning, until I come to his favorite.
Special No. 13.
A drawing of the Palo Duro Canyon. His pen has stopped, his eyes are on my hands at the corners of the folder.

“You love this piece,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He does not answer right away. In the distance from the dock, I hear voices, the joyful shrieks of Elizabeth's daughters, then Elizabeth's calm voice—the voices changed, caged by water.

“Because it is you,” he says.

“Isn't everything I do, me?”

“This is how I met you first.”

“But it wasn't the first one you saw.”

“Maybe not. That doesn't matter.”

I was teaching in South Carolina when I made that drawing of the canyon. I'd already been out to visit Texas several times by then, seen the country and the vastness of the sky out there, and I missed it. I remember how sharp the feeling was—the ache of wanting to go back.

He draws the folder away from me now, not harshly, but as if he cannot keep himself from doing it. He runs his fingers just above the paper, not touching.

“Who else would see a canyon like this?
Who else
would see a stream like this, or the backs of cattle?” he says, a flinch of sadness in his voice.

“Why is my early work more real to you than what I am making now?” I ask.

“I'm not saying it is.”

“You are.”

“No,” he says. “But when I look at these drawings, I see that entirely free creature you were before you came to me.”

I look down at the picture. I remember the night I made it—this
Special No. 13.
The stub of charcoal and cheap paper laid out on the floor, my knees digging into the wood as I leaned over it, my body tense, elbow held in place until the joint ached, I drove my hand across in long unhindered strokes. There were moments that fall of 1915 when it possessed me so fully I was sure I'd lost my mind, my mind swirling with those shapes—my heart broke for weeks as the charcoal swept across the page, broke through everything I had read or learned in class, everything I had been told that art should be.

W
HEN
E
LIZABETH COMES
up from the dock, she asks me to go for a walk. The grass feels overwhelming—the noon sun beating down.

“You don't seem yourself,” she says gently as we head up the hill.

“Life isn't quite my strong point these days.”

She glances at me. She has a light-blue dress on, with a sailor collar. She always wears simple clothes, more practical than any other Stieglitz.

“Your work is going well, though.”

I nod. We've reached the upper meadow.

“Hasn't it been so unthinkably hot this summer?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Everyone gets so crabby when it's this hot.”

I laugh.

“He loves you, Georgia.”

“I know.”

“He's desperate to marry you.”

“Did he send you to work on me?”

“No,” she says. “You know I'm neutral. As close to you as I am to him. I know he can be difficult.”

She watches the ground pass under our feet.

“He wants to marry as soon as his divorce goes through this fall,” I say.

“And will you?”

“I don't know. I've stopped thinking about it, really. The divorce has just dragged on so long.”

“Well, that was Emmy's doing.”

“I know.”

We step into the shade. The long shadows of the trees fall across us as we walk.

“Let's look at it from a different angle then,” Elizabeth says. “Why wouldn't you marry?”

“I just don't see the reason to.”

“I told Donald the other day that I feel like you're unsure because of that funny business with Beck. You know that meant nothing.”

I look up.

“I just don't see the point, Elizabeth. We're fine as we are.”

“He loves you, Georgia. Everything became alive for him when you came.”

“It just seems easier to keep things as they are,” I say.

A bird calls in the trees. I stop, she stops, and we listen. It does not call again.

H
IS DIVORCE GOES
through. Again he brings up the marriage question. He cites all sorts of reasons—little reasons, bigger reasons, legal, financial, tax penalties, estate planning, the challenge of something as simple as signing a lease. And then there's poor Kitty. Her doctors have told him that if we marry, it might banish her delusions that her father will return. He is sixty this year. I am thirty-seven.

“I couldn't change my name,” I remark to him one morning when he raises it again.

“What does that mean?”

I shrug. “After all we've done to fashion ‘Georgia O'Keeffe,' it would lose its value to change it.”

He looks at me, uncertain. “I never said anything about changing your name.”

“And love?”

“What about love?”

“Is that a reason as well?”

“You never seem to quite understand what you mean to me,” he says slowly. “Even when you think the worst of me, Georgia, to me, you'll never be anything less than Absolute.”

“Are you trying to win me back?” I say.

“Sometimes I feel like I'll spend my entire life trying to win you once, all of you, just for an instant.”

“That's ridiculous.” I say, and laugh.

“No. It's true. And I just wish you knew it. I've never been more committed to any person or thing as I am to you. I sometimes wonder how you don't seem to know.”

M
Y FLOWERS HAVE
gone by. I paint a landscape abstraction instead. Dark red, just a sliver of blue.

When he comes into the bedroom and sees the abstraction, he is elated. “Extraordinary!” he exclaims. “On the old order. Do you feel that?”

I shake my head. “I don't think it will find a buyer, nor am I sure I want to show it.”

“It's good enough to keep,” he says. I look at the painting. It could be the hills across the lake, which is how he sees it. It could be the walls of the Palo Duro canyon.