How Georgia Became O'Keeffe by Karen Karbo

Author:Karen Karbo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: skirt!
Published: 2011-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Meet the Stieglitzes

During the early summer of 1918, when most of the pictures were taken, Georgia stayed alone in Elizabeth’s studio, in bed. Stieglitz tended to her during the day and returned to his wife, Emmy, at night. Their marriage was one in name only; despite Alfred’s avant-garde aesthetic, he was an old-fashioned Victorian who, in his heart of hearts, didn’t believe that being miserable in a marriage was a reason to leave it. He and Emmy had been estranged for years; he slept in a dressing room. Who knows how long this would have gone on if O’Keeffe hadn’t sent him her drawings?

One day while Emmy was out, Stieglitz, resorting to a time-honored technique favored by people who want out of a relationship but can’t bear to think of themselves as someone who would initiate a break-up, brought Georgia to the apartment for a photo shoot. Emmy returned from her errand and “surprised” them while Georgia was posed before Alfred’s lens. Emmy demanded to know what was going on, in that slightly insane way betrayed lovers always want to know what’s going on, when, of course, they know exactly what’s going on. Stieglitz was incensed: Couldn’t she see they weren’t doing anything but making some pictures? Emmy, less savvy about how to play this game than O’Keeffe would be when it was her turn to be the betrayed wife, succumbed to her outrage, ordering them both out.

Later that night, Emmy’s behavior illustrated a good life lesson: Never allow yourself to be provoked into issuing an ultimatum. The only time you should ever issue an ultimatum is if you can easily accept the worst outcome. This is a conundrum; if you can accept the worst outcome, you usually aren’t moved to issue an ultimatum.

She said, “Get rid of that O’Keeffe woman or it’s over, Alfred!”

He said, “Okay.”

In less than two hours it was done: Stieglitz packed up his stuff and fled to Georgia’s tiny studio, euphoric over his coup: He could now tell everyone “My wife threw me out over nothing. I am a photographer, and I was simply photographing Miss O’Keeffe.”

The next day Emmy relented, begging him to come back, but it was too late. Alfred and Georgia, for better and much worse, were the love of each other’s lives. They gave themselves to one another, but they also gave each other a new view of themselves. She was the red Porsche purchased by his middle-aged man; he was the football hero who falls in love with her awkward new girl in school. Anne Roiphe, in Art and Madness, speaks of “the thing of insanity that makes for both trouble and excitement” that’s necessary for great, enduring love, and Alfred and Georgia were rich in this regard.

A few weeks later, the couple was summoned to Oaklawn, the Stieglitz estate in Lake George, by Hedwig, Stieglitz’s mother and the family matriarch. After Edward, Stieglitz’s late father, made his riches in woolen goods, he bought a “cottage” in the country, twelve acres of waterfront property*** on Lake George, in the southern Adirondacks.

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