Foursome Read online

  ALSO BY CAROLYN BURKE

  No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf

  Lee Miller: A Life

  Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Carolyn Burke

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library for permission to reprint text excerpts from letters by Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz, from Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Copyright © 2011 by Yale University. Reprinted by permission of the Yale Collection for American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. All rights reserved.

  Names: Burke, Carolyn, author.

  Title: Foursome : Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury / by Carolyn Burke.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | “This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018016794 (print) | LCCN 2018020035 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525655367 (ebook) | ISBN 9780307957290 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Artist couples—United States—Biography. | Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864–1946. | O’Keeffe, Georgia, 1887–1986. | Strand, Paul, 1890–1976. | James, Rebecca Salsbury, 1891–1968.

  Classification: LCC TR140.S7 (ebook) | LCC TR140.S7 B87 2019 (print) | DDC 770—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016794

  Ebook ISBN 9780525655367

  Cover images: (top) Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, 1936. CSU Archives/Everett Collection; (bottom) Paul Strand and Rebecca Salsbury at Lake George, c. 1923 by Alfred Stieglitz

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v5.4_r1

  ep

  For Robert Gottlieb, avid reader

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Carolyn Burke

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Opening: New York, 1921

  Lines and Lives

  Chapter 1 Born in Hoboken: 1864-1905

  Chapter 2 Portrait of 291: 1905-1913

  Chapter 3 The Direct Expression of Today: 1914-1917

  Chapter 4 A Woman on Paper: 1915-1916

  Chapter 5 Passion Under Control: 1916-1918

  Chapter 6 Squaring the Circle: 1918-1920

  Chapter 7 A Fine Companionship: 1920-1921

  Chapter 8 Twentieth-Century Seeing: 1922

  Chapter 9 Kinds of Living: 1923

  Chapter 10 Sensitive Plants: 1924

  Chapter 11 The Treeness of a Tree: 1925

  Chapter 12 Turning the Page: 1926

  Chapter 13 The End of Something: 1927-1928

  Chapter 14 How Closely We 4 Have Grown Together: 1929

  Chapter 15 New York in New Mexico: 1930-1931

  Chapter 16 Divided Selves: 1931-1932

  Chapter 17 Don’t Look Ahead or Behind: 1933

  Chapter 18 Another Way of Living: 1934

  Aftermath

  Alfred

  Rebecca

  Paul

  Georgia

  Envoi

  Acknowledgments

  Endnotes

  Selected Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Illustrations

  This book would not have come into being without the wholehearted collaboration of Lance Sprague. From the outset its interwoven narrative drew on his love of early photography and his insights as a practicing artist. In the seven years it took to write, he gave abundantly of his time, complementary talents, and irreverent sense of humor, particularly valuable on research trips. We often surprised each other, especially when processing the thousands of documents brought back from the archives. Together, we came to understand the convergences and divergences of our foursome’s lives: I learned as much from him about the impact of aesthetic choices on private life as I did from our subjects. His artist’s eye helped us select images to retell the story visually; our ongoing dialogue enabled us to grasp affinities in the foursome’s artistic practice and imagine ways for readers to experience those complementarities through the choice and arrangement of the illustrations. For this and many other reasons, including his role as writer’s accomplice, it is as much his book as it is mine.

  OPENING

  New York, 1921

  Alfred Stieglitz often said that taking photographs was like making love. The crowds that flocked to the Anderson Galleries to see his work in the winter of 1921 could not fail to note the entwining of creative zest and sexual desire in his portraits of an unidentified “Woman”: This study of his model, dressed and undressed, made up a third of the long-awaited exhibition. Within days, it became the most controversial artistic event of the year. “Never was there such a hub-bub about a one-man show,” a sympathizer recalled.

  In the aftermath of the recent Red Scare and Harding’s election to the presidency, Stieglitz’s prints looked like an affront to society. To some critics, they were all but un-American—the artist’s way of flouting Harding’s plan to bring back prewar standards. (The country’s greatest need, Harding had repeated during his campaign, was “not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration.”) In the current political climate, the photographer’s assertion of his right to display life uncensored was an act of defiance. “Stieglitz has not divorced his art from life,” a critic wrote. If one were to find fault with his show, it would be with its “lack of reticence.” Stieglitz, he concluded, “keeps nothing back.”

  * * *

  —

  On opening day, February 7, after braving the icy winds blowing down Park Avenue, Manhattan’s cognoscenti gathered beneath the skylights on the fourth floor of a neoclassical building on the corner of Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. Contemporary reports describe them standing as still as if they were in church. After the closing four years earlier of 291, Stieglitz’s gallery (where New Yorkers first saw the most provocative modern artists), some thought that he had given up photography and his role as a guiding force in American culture. Recently, word had gotten around that he had been reinvigorated by his love for the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, that his photographs of her—identified only as “A Woman”—were sensational. “His resurrection,” a critic announced, “is a staggering phenomenon, and in its éclat, dazzling.”

  Visitors entered the first room with a sense of anticipation. The photographer’s warm-toned blacks and whites glowed so intensely against the red plush walls that some wanted to touch them. Stieglitz was holding forth in a corner, telling spellbound listeners about his struggle to win acceptance of photography as an affirmation of life. Gazing at his prints of Manhattan—Fifth Avenue swirling with snow, cabdrivers watering their horses, Central Park on an icy night—people marveled at his way of “letting life be life,” as he was heard to say.

  Others were drawn to his scenes of modernity—backyards strung with clotheslines, half-finished constructi
on sites, railroad yards in the snow. His recent work went beyond what was called “art photography,” eschewing the pictorialist techniques then in vogue to reveal the subject itself. “They make me want to forget all the photographs I had ever seen before,” a critic declared.

  Moving into the next room, which was filled with portraits, visitors lingered over those recalling the great days of 291. Members of the Stieglitz group studied his prints of their circle: the artists John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Duncan; the critics Leo Stein and Paul Rosenfeld; and the West Indian writer Hodge Kirnon, who had run the elevator at 291. Stieglitz’s surrogate son, the photographer Paul Strand, stared back at those who stopped in front of his likeness on their way to the pictures of the notorious “Woman.”

  Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe—Torso, 1918

  They encountered her in a grouping that showed her before one of her charcoal drawings. Dressed in a trim black jacket and hat, she looked away from the camera—a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Moving around the room, visitors met her in more intimate poses—her hat off, her tailored blouse unbuttoned, her dark tresses undone. In a warm palladium print, she reappeared in a white kimono whose delicate pattern complemented the dark tones of her hair. Studies of her elegant hands and fingers were grouped as a single portrait, as if these parts expressed the woman as a lover and an artist. On another wall, her hands touched her voluptuous breasts, weighing their contours or pressing them together—in a group labeled forthrightly, “Hands and Breasts.” Another set of sepia-toned prints, “Torsos,” compared her body to sculpture while simultaneously drawing the gaze to the dark V shape of her pubic hair.

  Photographs marked by such intimacy had never been seen in public. They seemed to tell a story tracing the growth of the couple’s affections. Stieglitz’s portrait of this woman, one admirer wrote, “showed us the life of the pores, of the hairs along the shin-bone, of the veining of the pulse and the liquid moisture on the upper lip.” To some, these prints were love poems.

  Stirred by what they saw, visitors returned again and again; men asked Stieglitz if he would take portraits of their wives and sweethearts. But some found the photographs obscene. The group called “Hands and Breasts” offended one man, who ranted at the gallery’s director that such photographs did not qualify as art and should be taken down. The review in The New York Times was laced with innuendos: In these “psychological revelations,” it proclaimed, “a good deal of the primitive [was] getting the upper hand.” Those who feared what might be found in their psyches were warned to keep away from Stieglitz. Other critics were more forthright: “The spirit of sex permeates the entire body of photographs.”

  For the rest of the month, while critics debated the merits of Stieglitz’s prints and argued about photography’s status as art, the public flocked to the show. Even those who had not been in the know now understood that the subject of his composite portrait was the young art teacher whose affair with the photographer had led to his leaving his wife. Reactions to this record of his feelings for his mistress varied from outrage on the part of some, including photographers for whom such frank treatment of the female body was unthinkable, to the awed response of a young woman who left the gallery in tears. “He loves her so,” she said as she went out the door.

  Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe—Hand and Breasts, 1919

  Searching for more measured ways to express themselves, some compared the portraits to old master drawings. Stieglitz’s pictures of O’Keeffe were painterly, the critic Henry McBride observed; they put him in mind of canvases by Courbet or Rossetti. “He spends an immense amount of time making love to the subject before taking it,” McBride added. But he referred to O’Keeffe not as an artist, but as Stieglitz’s muse: “Mona Lisa got but one portrait of herself worth looking at. O’Keeffe got a hundred.”

  The gallery became a place to see and be seen. People returned in increasing numbers. The bolder among them joined the group in the corner where most afternoons Stieglitz held forth, explaining his desire to embody “universality in the shape of a woman.” He talked almost nonstop, gesticulating and shaking his thick white hair to emphasize his belief that it was in the New World that a truly modern art like photography had found its home. Moreover, he believed that in his “Demonstration of Portraiture,” there was “an interrelation of the parts to the whole and…a symbolism of all life.”

  Those who wondered what was being symbolized may have found some satisfaction in a review in The Nation by Herbert Seligmann, one of the Stieglitz clan. Stieglitz had “laid bare the raw material which…America has not yet dared to look upon,” Seligmann wrote. “Love of the world leads him to the purest expression of it, to woman.” Seen this way, his portrait of this woman evoked an innocence and receptivity “that have no home in [an] America” whose genteel standards kept it from embracing the truths of the body.

  Paul Strand took up the defense in terms that gallerygoers were more likely to grasp—by praising Stieglitz’s use of the camera. His essay “Alfred Stieglitz and a Machine” began circulating among New Yorkers keen to understand what the photographer was up to. His work was life-affirming, Strand wrote: “Stieglitz…accepted the machine, instinctively found in it something that was part of himself, and loved it.” It was also groundbreaking. “These amazing portraits, whether they objectify faces or hands, the torso of a woman, or the torso of a tree, suggest the beginning of a penetration of the scientific spirit into plastic media.”

  Strand could also be heard arguing that he and his mentor were cultural “workers,” that their works offered a means to identify “those hostile impulses of society which try to prevent every extension of the human spirit.” Understood this way, the camera was an expression of “young desire…facing a world and social system which fears and thwarts and destroys.”

  These were fiery words, out of keeping with Strand’s habitual reserve, but they appealed to Rebecca Salsbury, a vivacious young woman who accompanied him to the gallery to meet his mentor. In the throes of her own struggles with the social system’s—and her mother’s—opposition to the desires of strong-minded women like herself, Rebecca experienced their meeting as a turning point.

  She listened to Stieglitz talk nonstop until closing time, as they strolled along Fifty-ninth Street to Columbus Circle, and for the rest of the evening at his favorite restaurant. What Stieglitz and his work revealed to her, she believed, was “affirmation, life kindled.” Seeking to re-create herself as a modern woman, Rebecca would often compare herself to Georgia, as Paul compared himself to Alfred: He had just begun an extended portrait of Rebecca as his muse. But this sequence, which he never found satisfactory, was as much an homage to Alfred—and to his relations with Georgia—as a tribute to the woman who had just come into his life. The two couples would become “a tightly integrated foursome, with admiration, competitiveness, in-jokes, and alliances passing in every possible direction between them.”

  At this stage, Stieglitz held uncontested sway over his protégés. He molded those who, like Rebecca Salsbury, were awestruck in his presence. Yet it was also true that intimates experienced his wrath if they crossed him. Years later, O’Keeffe recalled, “There was a constant grinding like the ocean. It was as if something hot, dark, and destructive was hitched to the highest, brightest star.” In the interweaving of the two couples’ lives and work, these extremes coexisted. Constellations on the horizon of homegrown modern art, they prodded, inspired, irritated, and encouraged one another as they grew into modes of relationship that none could have foreseen.

  Their foursome became more entangled once Alfred began taking photographs of Rebecca—in an implicit rivalry with Paul, his disciple—and when Georgia told Rebecca that she and Paul had once been so close that they discussed living together. Without Rebecca’s encouragement, Georgia would probably not have discovered New Mexico as her chosen terrain, nor would Paul and Rebecca hav
e ended their marriage when he set out to attempt a more politically conscious photography in Mexico. And without Georgia as her model and surrogate sister, Rebecca would not have found her way to her own practice of art in the Southwest—the region that became, for both women, the antidote to Stieglitz’s New York.

  * * *

  —

  The idea for this book first took shape as I read through Rebecca’s letters, in which the person she became under Stieglitz’s tutelage sought to understand her role in the shaping of their foursome. Amplified by the correspondence in their respective archives, this narrative traces the relations of these four strong-willed people over several decades, in the hope of depicting the sometimes joyful, sometimes exasperated intermingling of their lives as artists, lovers, and friends. In the process of writing this book, I came to believe that my four characters’ search to conciliate the often contradictory pulls of personal and artistic life still speaks to us a century later. Their story could not have been told from this vantage point without the collaboration that first made it possible—with the artist Lance Sprague. While I was writing about them, our discussions and discoveries nourished the process in ways that might have amused the four could they have watched us reweaving the complex mesh of their lives.

  LINES AND LIVES

  In the relations of lines to each other [one] may learn the relation of lives to each other.