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IV. Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge Sees Art By "A Schoolteacher Out West"
Flashback:
In the Fall of 1915 Georgia O'Keeffe was teaching at Columbia College
in Columbia, South Carolina where she started working on a series of
charcoal drawings. She tried out new techniques she had learned from
her NY teacher Arthur Wesley Dow, especially a new way to treat light
and dark, and the resulting work was like nothing she had done before.
She sent some of these drawings to her close art school friend, Anita
Pollitzer, who in turn showed them to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291
Gallery on January 1, 1916.
Every artist could use an Anita
Pollitzer. The daughter of a wealthy Charleston, South Carolina family,
Pollitzer could turn on the Southern charm. A burgeoning artist in her
youth, she later made a name for herself as a suffragette and activist
for the National Women's Party. Showing charcoal drawings of an unknown
artist friend to someone as established as Stieglitz takes a great deal
of panache.
Stieglitz
loved the drawings and exhibited them without O'Keeffe's knowledge. She
was angered that he did not ask her consent, but after talking it over
with him, she agreed to let him exhibit her work. In August of 1916 she
moved to Canyon, Texas to teach at West Texas State Normal College.
Mabel
Dodge didn't often leave her place at 23 Fifth Avenue, but the 291
Gallery, a mile or so up the avenue, was "one of the few places where I
went." One day in 1916 she met painter Marsden Hartley at the gallery,
and Stieglitz "showed us some curious black and white drawings by a
schoolteacher out west. Presently he hung them on the walls...This was
the first work we saw of Georgia O'Keeffe." (Movers and Shakers)
The
moral of this story, for all artists in the audience, is to find a nice
flirtatious Southern friend who will brazenly show your work to dealers.
Image: Georgia O'Keeffe, Drawing No. 13, 1915. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alfred Stieglitz Collection.
V. Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge and The Paterson Strike Pageant
From the walk, Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe and New York City.
The walk explores the worlds of Dodge and O'Keeffe, their intertwined
biographies, and their individual decisions to leave New York for New
Mexico. Several stops along the way need to be imagined, as the
buildings in which events took place do not exist any longer.
In the late spring and early summer of 1913, Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman, John Sloan and his wife Dolly, the Harvard-educated radical journalist John Reed (see Warren Beatty's Reds),
I.W.W. leader Big Bill Haywood, and others worked tirelessly to
organize the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913. Over a thousand workers
in the silk mill industry who had walked off their jobs earlier in the
year took part in the elaborate staging of their plight.The venue was
Madison Square Garden, when the Garden was located off Madison Square
Park.
Dodge writes, "No one realized the fun of having placed
the letters I.W.W. ten feet high on each of the four sides of the
Madison Square Tower in bright red electric lights, so that they could
be seen from one end of town to the other." (from Movers and Shakers)
In
recounting the events of the pageant, Dodge acknowledges, "Everybody
worked except me." Dodge's job, as she saw it, was to inspire her
then-lover, John Reed, and raise money. Dodge, as a wealthy Fifth
Avenue heiress, spent a lot of energy trying to convince the anarchists
in her circle that she was a good capitalist. The most humorous parts
of her autobiography, although I don't think she saw them as funny,
involve her worries that her friend Emma Goldman might possibly kill her.
VI. The Building that Would Glow at Night: Raymond Hood, Georgia O'Keeffe, and the American Radiator Building
Whenever
I come upon the Radiator Building on 40th Street on the south side of
Bryant Park I am immediately struck by its drama. It's unusual to see a
building made of black brick, much less one with gold trim. Designed by
Raymond Hood, the American Radiator Building of 1924 fit the bill of
the clients - it was massive, solid, and it would glow at night. While
Hood wanted the building to look like a cathedral, he knew that the
many window openings would overly lighten the heaviness. He solved the
problem by making the facade black. He didn't want lights turned on in
the building after dark but directed the upper floors to be illuminated
with floodlights.
O'Keeffe not only painted the Radiator
Building at night but with all the windows illuminated. The painting is
one of several O'Keeffe made in the mid 1920s in response to the
changing New York skyline. At the time she and Alfred Stieglitz lived
on the thirtieth floor of the Shelton Hotel at 49th and Lexington, and
O'Keeffe frequently walked near the new building.
Her painting of the Radiator from 1927 (the same year as Fritz Lang's Metropolis,
tellingly) is remarkable for its color and for the depiction of the
artificial light of the city night - the purple/blue tints of
floodlights and the fluorescent whites of the office towers. There's a
touch of warm incandescent in windows here and there. The stylized
smoky steam arising from the building at the right echoes the flipped
curved cornices of the Radiator's top floors. It's pure theater.
After
Stieglitz died in 1946, his personal art collection of some 1,000 works
was divided up among six museums. One benefactor was Fisk University in
Nashville, a university Carl Van Vechten suggested to O'Keeffe. Among
the artworks in the bequest was O'Keeffe's painting, Radiator Building–Night, New York.
For a couple of years, the cash-strapped university has tried to sell
the painting, now valued around $20 million, and at one point worked
out a co-ownership deal with a new Walton-backed museum in Arkansas.
The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico is attempting to
legally block the agreement, and the matter is scheduled to go to court
next month.
See Fisk university struggles to make cash from an art collection donated by Georgia O'Keeffe (Albuquerque Tribune)
The Radiator Building now houses the Bryant Park Hotel. The hotel's website makes my head hurt.
Images: (l) photo by Walking Off the Big Apple, January 2008. and Georgia O'Keeffe. Radiator Building–Night, New York. 1927.