My Faraway One by Sarah Greenough

Author:Sarah Greenough
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300166446
Publisher: Yale University Press

3.

A Terrible Rightness

1929 – 1933

IN THE SUMMER OF 1929 O’Keeffe fell “into something,” as she wrote, “from which there is no return.”1 Still deeply in love with Stieglitz, she had been increasingly torn in the 1920s between her desire to work to “carry the thing I do further so that people are surprised again”2 and the obligation she felt to care for Stieglitz and his family, especially during their long summers at Lake George. Yet the exhilaration she discovered during her trip to Wisconsin in July and August 1928, coupled with the inspiration she derived from the midwestern landscape and the joy she received from reconnecting with her family, prompted her to explore other alternatives. During the winter of 1928 – 1929, she considered spending the following summer in Europe, but when the impresario Mabel Dodge Luhan and the painter Dorothy Brett came to New York, they convinced her to go to New Mexico. Earlier in the 1920s, Marsden Hartley, Paul Rosenfeld, and Paul and Beck Strand had all visited New Mexico and had frequently extolled its grandeur. They now helped her convince Stieglitz to allow her to go. He was, no doubt, also swayed by O’Keeffe’s promise to take Beck Strand as a traveling companion, her poor health that winter, their frequent arguments, and the fact that she was not “talking much to Stieglitz,” as she told a friend that spring.3

With wrenching force and unimagined consequences, the trip ruptured the life they had constructed together and laid bare the issues between them that had simmered throughout the 1920s. In her letters from the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe expressed her intense, visceral love of the southwestern landscape in an exuberant, free-spirited, but also decidedly independent manner that rankled the often overly sensitive Stieglitz. In his increasingly more numerous, lengthy, and agitated letters to her, Stieglitz poured forth his passionate love for her, but he also revealed his inability to conform his life to hers, his infirmities (both real and perceived), his need for someone to care for him with unquestioning devotion, and his tendency to obsessiveness, even hysteria.

As they unintentionally began to carve out separate lives, O’Keeffe’s 1929 trip, plus subsequent ones she made in the summers of 1930 and 1931, also tempted both of them with other appealing companions. O’Keeffe was captivated not only by New Mexico’s landscape but also by its people. Mabel Luhan’s Native American husband, Tony Lujan4; the dynamic, idiosyncratic, and charming doctor, scientist, and writer Gustav Eckstein; the heiress Marie Garland with her much younger husband, the filmmaker Henwar Rodakiewicz; and the deaf Honorable Lady Brett, with her large tin horn — all fascinated O’Keeffe with their charismatic personalities and unconventional lives. In her absence, Stieglitz and Dorothy Norman grew ever more enchanted with each other. Even though she was in her mid-twenties, he was forty-one years her senior, and both were married, their flirtation of the late 1920s grew into an ardent affair in the early 1930s that neither tried to keep from their spouses or anyone else.

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