10 The New York Review
1918, the field was more or less clear for
him. He separated from his wife and
lived with O’Keeffe in New York City
and at the Stieglitz family’s summer
place at Lake George in the Adiron-
dack foothills until 1935, when, feeling
smothered by Stieglitz and his large
family and resentful of interruptions
to her work, O’Keeffe began to spend
part of each year in New Mexico. (“I
don’t know why people disturb me so
much,” she once wrote.) They married
in 1924, after his divorce.
When they were together, they
couldn’t keep their hands off each
other. Even during much of Stieglitz’s
long affair (from the late 1920s on)
with Dorothy Norman, a New York ac-
tivist and art patron, he and O’Keeffe
made love often, and their letters are
full of references to their intense sex-
ual connection. “It even seems to be my
only memory of you,” she wrote to him
in 1922, “two bodies that have fused—
have touched with completeness at both
ends making a complete circuit.... The
circle with two centers—each touching
the other.” The earliest nudes in Stieg-
litz’s composite portrait of O’Keeffe,
created before the two became lovers,
were part of their courtship: “I’ll make
you fall in love with yourself,” Stieglitz
told her.
These frank images contributed
to the lasting critical perception that
O’Keeffe’s paintings were representa-
tions of female sexual anatomy and de-
sire. When they were first exhibited in
1921, they made her a celebrity. “From
the beginning,” Rose writes, “Stieglitz
sexualized her work and she allowed
it.” Critics seemed to relish alluding
to women’s sexuality as openly as the
times permitted. O’Keeffe was hardly
acknowledged as an artist, so thrill-
ingly was she a Woman. “Her great
painful and ecstatic climaxes,” wrote
one critic, “make us at last to know
something the man has always wanted
to know.... The organs that differen-
tiate the sex speak.” (The visual anal-
ogy of O’Keeffe’s close-up flowers to
female genitalia sometimes obscures
their other obvious analogy: the photo-
graphic close-up.) Annoyed, O’Keeffe
fell back on pragmatism: “One must
sell to live,” she told a friend, “so one
must be written about and talked about
whether one likes it or not.”
Both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe could be
melodramatic. O’Keeffe would have
run a sword through anyone standing
between her and her easel, yet Stieglitz
“liked to think of her as frail,” Rose
points out. He used the excuse of her
occasional breakdowns and exhaus-
tion from work to talk her out of hav-
ing children. Although they remained
emotionally enmeshed, O’Keeffe came
to feel that she had ceded too much ter-
ritory to him. Her annual decampment
to New Mexico redressed the balance.
Stieglitz was forced to accept her inde-
pendence, but it shook him.
For readers of Foursome new to the
Stieglitz/O’Keeffe legend, the big
surprise may be Rebecca Salsbury—
“Beck”—who practically climbs out
of the book and gallops off. Strand
met her during the war, and they mar-
ried in 1922. Beautiful and adventur-
ous, with a boyish streak, she had felt
stifled in the wealthy New York circles
in which her widowed mother moved.
She longed to do something important.
Her paternal roots were in the West:
her father had managed and toured the
world with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
Show. Rebecca and her twin sister were
born in 1891 during the show’s London
engagement.
Being among artists intoxicated her.
At repeated intervals in Foursome, Re-
becca moans that she is not an artist.
Strand complains to Stieglitz that Re-
becca is not an artist. Stieglitz throws
up his hands. She tried poetry, photog-
raphy, watercolor still lifes. Comparing
her own fledgling paintings with those
of O’Keeffe, propped up after a day’s
work at Lake George, did not help.
But everyone around her maintained
that art was the highest calling, and
Salsbury needed a cause. She
modeled for both men. Strand
often brought his camera un-
usually close to her in these
portraits, and she felt that their
long, grueling sessions together
were collaborative. She missed
them when Strand moved on to
other ideas. Rose argues that
“Strand’s work seems to have
shown to both O’Keeffe and
Stieglitz, among other things,
the abstracting potential of
the close-up.” But his portrait
series of Beck struck the other
couple as too close to their own
cherished portrait project.
Stieglitz did not mention his
bruised feelings over the se-
ries, though a sense of betrayal
seems to have lingered. Beck,
increasingly alert to Stieglitz’s
prickly nature, later suggested
that Strand develop new images
of her at home rather than at
the club, where Stieglitz could
have seen them. Burke teases
out these moments of conflict
and irritation between the men,
while Rose emphasizes the cre-
ative spur they gave Stieglitz.
His photographs of Salsbury
swimming in Lake George in
September 1922 are almost as erotic as
his nude portraits of O’Keeffe, though
without the impression of postcoital
languor. He had thought these outdoor
shots were just experimental, and they
do seem playfully improvisational; but
while printing them, as he told a friend,
he realized they were extraordinary:
“Eye- openers. Am surprised myself
because while she was here I imagined
I had totally failed.”^3
Now it was Stieglitz and Salsbury
who indulged in a clandestine corre-
spondence. Salsbury did not allow the
flirtation to go further. Instead, she
made herself a handmaiden to Stieg-
litz—typing, organizing, donating
money, running errands for O’Keeffe.
Salsbury provided essential support at
Stieglitz’s second gallery, the Intimate
Gallery (1925–1929), but the presiding
spirit of his third gallery, An American
Place (1929–1946), was Dorothy Nor-
man, O’Keeffe’s bête noire. Normanadmired O’Keeffe and Strand as art-
ists, but guarded her turf at the gallery.
Despite her intimacy with Stieglitz
and the placating letters she wrote
him on Strand’s behalf, Salsbury was
much more interested in cultivating her
friendship with O’Keeffe, who dazzled
her. Aloof by nature and wary of Stieg-
litz’s followers, O’Keeffe warmed to
Salsbury over the years. During the
summers at Lake George they painted
and did chores together. O’Keeffe in-
cluded some of Salsbury’s pastels in
the April 1928 show she curated at the
Opportunity Gallery. (Like O’Keeffe,
Salsbury chose to exhibit under her
maiden name.) She told Beck her ar-tistic world had beauty and power in
it, though she could probably see the
work was stylistically indebted to her.
The pinnacle of their affection was a
1929 trip alone together to the home
of Mabel Dodge Luhan, patron of the
avant-garde, near the art colony in
Taos, New Mexico—an idyll of paint-
ing, drinking, and mild mischief that
O’Keeffe took pains to conceal from
her elderly husband. Salsbury taught
O’Keeffe how to drive.
Strand’s increasing social engage-
ment after the mid-1920s bored
Stieglitz: he had little patience for pho-
tography as a political tool. He told one
critic who had praised Strand’s 1929
show at the Intimate Gallery, “You
would not have written about Strand as
you did if you had seen my work first.”
In 1932 he offered Strand and Salsbury
a two-person show at An American
Place, but failed to promote the exhi-
bition or print a catalog. He even left
Strand to hang the prints himself. They
had been shown the door. Typically,
Strand felt liberated, while Salsbury
wrote to Stieglitz and tried to reconcile
the men.
Some biographers have assumed
that Salsbury and O’Keeffe were lov-
ers. There is no evidence for this. But
O’Keeffe’s pinched heart did expand a
little, here and there, in her letters to
Salsbury, especially when Salsbury’s
marriage to Strand came apart in the
early 1930s. “Imagine that it is two
years from now,” O’Keeffe wrote,and in the meantime don’t do any-
thing foolish. Only time will make
you feel better—and don’t talk
about it to people if you don’t want
to.... Why should you be expected
to explain your personal life to
anyone—It is rather difficult to
even explain it to oneself.Salsbury remained in New Mexico after
her divorce, happily remarried, and be-
came something of a Taos character,
as well as a successful painter. Like
O’Keeffe, she felt deeply inspired by the
culture and landscape of New Mexico.
Marsden Hartley had introduced her to
reverse oil on glass, which became her
métier. From the 1930s to the
early 1960s, she exhibited her
work throughout the West. She
was an artist, after all.
O’Keeffe honored Beck’s
friendship with one last favor.
At eighty, she drove the body
of Bill James, Salsbury’s sec-
ond husband, to Albuquerque
for cremation, then brought
the ashes back to Taos to be
scattered. Salsbury had be-
come disabled by rheumatoid
arthritis and could never have
undertaken the six-hour drive:
“Nobody else has come any-
where near that unforgettable
act of friendship.”
The other women artists
Burke has written about—Mina
Loy, Lee Miller, and Edith
Piaf—struggled for autonomy
and sometimes sank into al-
coholic despair. O’Keeffe and
Salsbury managed their rela-
tionships more successfully, in
both cases by living separately
(partially or completely) from
the powerful men they had mar-
ried. After Strand’s death, his
third wife, the photographer
Hazel Kingsbury Strand, said
of his prints, “They were his
women, they were his children, they
were the love of his life.” O’Keeffe in-
herited a modern art collection worth
$150 million from Stieglitz and sur-
vived him by forty years. After his
death in 1946, she told Dorothy Nor-
man to clear out of An American Place.
She closed the gallery and poured her-
self into the effort of gathering and
sorting Stieglitz’s immense archive and
donating its contents to carefully cho-
sen institutions throughout the country
(a fascinating story in itself), eventu-
ally giving the Key Set—the best prints
of his 1,600 best images, as she saw it—
to the National Gallery in Washington,
D.C. Then she moved full-time to New
Mexico.
In her eighties, she published a mem-
oir, followed by a selection from Stieg-
litz’s composite portrait of her. In her
introductory essay, O’Keeffe described
her husband as “a very exciting person,”
later clarifying, “He was either loved or
hated—there wasn’t much in between.”
Finally, she burst out that she preferred
his artwork to Stieglitz himself:I believe it was the work that kept
me with him—though I loved him
as a human being. I could see his
strengths and weaknesses. I put
up with what seemed to me a good
deal of contradictory nonsense
because of what seemed clear and
bright and wonderful.Paul Strand: Rebecca, 1922Paul Strand Archive /Aperture Foundation(^3) Rose studied photography for several
years, and her discussion of Stieglitz’s
and Strand’s work is sensitive and
well-informed. But Burke can be quite
alert: while most historians reiterate
that Stieglitz included no portraits of
Dorothy Norman in his 1934 retrospec-
tive, ostensibly to mollify O’Keeffe,
who had been sickened by the af-
fair, Burke catches sight of an “odd”
double- exposure of Norman’s face en-
titled Dualities, which echoed the title
of Norman’s recent book.