Although Paris was the mecca of the budding modernist movement, Georgia O’Keeffe did not travel to France until 1953, when she was 66 years old. The zeitgeist of Paris would nevertheless visit her through a small, apparently humble, gallery in New York City, Fifth Avenue No. 291.
At 291 she would be introduced to paintings by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, John Marin, and others. In 1908, as a 20-year-old art student, she visited the gallery with a group of fellow students from the Art Students League to see drawings by Auguste Rodin.
‘… I thought they were just at lot of scribbles. It wasn’t anything like what I’d been taught — to draw ‘.1Quote from the documentary Georgia O’Keeffe, 1977, produced and directed by Perry Miller Adato.
In 1915 — seven years later — her friend Anita frequented the gallery regularly, and she would often mention the gallerist in her letters to Georgia O’Keeffe, who now lived in Columbia South Carolina, where she was teaching art. They both knew that the gallerist was a man of considerable authority and of ground-breaking influence in the art world.
In her book about their friendship, Anita Pollitzer wrote: ‘At certain moments in our lives we know what we must do, and when I saw Georgia’s drawings, it was such a moment. (…) I knew after looking at them, in spite of her bidding, that there was one person who must see them.’2From A Woman on Paper, by Anita Pollitzer, Touchstone, 1988 p. 46.
The gallerist was a sublime photographer. As a young student, living in Germany for education, he had found his passion, followed his heart, and chosen a different path from the one pointed out by his father. When Neptune and Pluto were moving into alignment in the mid-1880s, he had bought his first camera and travelled through European countries photographing people in all kinds of scenes from everyday life. It was said that he could see into the soul of others with his camera. He won several prizes for his excellent works, and he also began contributing articles to magazines about photography in England and Germany.3From article in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz
He would challenge the standards for what could be done with photography. The nature of Pluto as an archetypal force is to break down forms that no longer serve the soul in order for the energy to transform, and prominent art critics of the time saw photography as a threat to the art of painting — another expression of the Neptune-Pluto conjunction.
‘The photographer has discovered a machine to make his masterpiece of art FOR him by sticking his head into a black box and letting a machine do everything.’ 4Quote from the documentary Alfred Stieglitz, The Eloquent Eye, by Perry Miller Adato.
The gallerist was an honorary member of The Linked Ring, a society of British colleagues whose aim it was to elevate photography into the company of the fine arts. This society was founded in 1892, also during the Neptune-Pluto conjunction, and the gallerist had taken up the noble task in the United States through his personal artworks, through collaborating with and supporting other avant-garde photographers, through exhibitions, and as the editor of exclusive magazines about photography.
His name was Alfred Stieglitz. A Capricorn with the Sun trining Pluto in Taurus and forming a cardinal T-square with Saturn in Libra and Neptune in Aries. A personality of great intensity, sensibility and inner power — and he was to be considered ‘The Father of Modern Photography.’5Ibid. See note 4.
On New Years Day 1916, Anita Pollitzer carried the roll of Georgia O’Keeffe’s charcoal drawings to the gallery 291. The gallerist remembered her saying: ‘They seem to belong to you’.6Ibid. See note 4.
The drawings completely lifted his spirits on that day, which was also his 52nd birth day. After having watched them all spread out on the floor in front of him, he allegedly exclaimed the famous words:
‘ “Finally a woman’s feeling on paper”, was what he kept saying. He felt that these drawings were a contribution to creative art; that at last a woman was sensitively seeing and expressing in visual form her own relation to the universe (…) ‘. 7Quote from Abraham Walkowitz in A Woman on Paper, by Anita Pollitzer, Touchstone, 1988 p. 48.
He fell in love with Georgia O’Keeffe’s works, and he asked Anita Pollitzer to tell the artist that they were ‘the purest, fairest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while’ and that he ‘wouldn’t mind showing them’ (…).8From A Woman on Paper, by Anita Pollitzer, Touchstone, 1988 p. 120.
Anita Pollitzer wrote to Georgia O’Keefe about her meeting with Stieglitz, and Georgia wrote her first letter to him asking why he liked her charcoals and what they had said to him. He answered her very politely saying that it was impossible for him to put into words what he saw and felt in her drawings.9Ibid. – See note 8.
A few months later her attention was drawn to the fact that drawings by an artist, supposedly called Virginia O’Keeffe, were exhibited at the 291, and she knew instantly that her works had been hung without her consent.
She went downtown to the gallery ‘to make a fuss about it’ only to find that Stieglitz was not present, and she had to return another day.10Georgia O’Keeffe interviewed in the documentary Alfred Stieglitz, The Eloquent Eye, by Perry Miller Adato.
When they finally met, the following conversation took place between them:
Georgia O’Keeffe:
– Who gave you permission to hang these drawings?
Alfred Stieglitz:
– No one
– You will have to take them down
– I think you are mistaken
– Well, I made the drawings. I am Georgia O’Keeffe
– You have no more right to withhold these pictures than to withdraw a child from the world, had you given birth to one…11Stieglitz quoted in the documentary Alfred Stieglitz, The Eloquent Eye, by Perry Miller Adato .
Stieglitz remembered her having a ‘Mona Lisa smile’ when she came and demanded her drawings be taken down. A lifelong correspondence developed between the two, and eventually they would fall in love with each other too. At first she had felt repelled by his manners, because she had witnessed him asking people, he hardly knew, very personal questions. However, the drawings stayed up, and many years later when asked why they had stayed, she answered:
‘Listen, you try arguing with him and see where you get.‘ 12Quote from the documentary Georgia O’Keeffe, 1977. See note 1
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The gallery 291 was a forum for works of artists — all of whom would contribute to the modernist movement. It was in their company that Georgia O’Keeffe was introduced to the public. The first one-person show of her works was opened on 3. April 1917. She was 29 then and into her first Saturn-return, meaning that the transit of Saturn had made a full circle in her birth chart. This happens to everybody around the age of 28-31, and it is a threshold inviting us to becoming ever more conscious co-creators of our life — and a time for deeper commitment to our soul’s journey and mission, if we choose so.
In Georgia O’Keeffe’s life, transit Saturn was accompanied by Neptune — the two moving into a conjunction culminating in the late summer of 1917 where they conjoined her natal Saturn. Neptune being the archetype of imagery, imagination, dissolution of boundaries and — in the company of Saturn — a transpersonal force seeing through ‘realism’, or blurring reality, would thus highly illuminate her first Saturn-return and her entrance into the public as a very gifted painter.
Modernist artists often created works that would provoke the establishment and even become subject to censorship for many years. This also happened for Georgia O’Keeffe when she was in the final stages of her first Saturn return. The year was 1918, where she painted The Flag, which remained hidden from public view until 1968, fifty years later. This was due to an Act, passed in mid-1917, declaring anti-war expression criminal.
The painting was her response to the United States’ involvement in World War One. She was still teaching art at that time. Like many others she was deeply concerned about the war, and she would recommend that her students finished their education rather than choosing warfare when they were given the option of leaving school prematurely to join the army. Personally she was anxious on behalf of her yonger brother who was sent to France in the fall of 1917. Later in life he died from war injuries. About The Flag, she wrote to Alfred Stieglitz that she, for the first time, had felt compelled to paint out of necessity — a very Saturnian statement.13Source: Wikipedia
The Flag
Watercolour 1918, by Georgia O’Keeffe
To be continued….
Image at the top: Photo (by Alfred Stieglitz, 1906) of the Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence H. White exhibition at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession — the original name of Gallery 291.