I should have known the battle wasn’t over. The superintendent called me into his office and ordered me to buy the drawing books. “It’s the law, Miss O’Keeffe,” he informed me, as if I were weak-minded.
“The law is based on ignorance, and it’s wrong,” I insisted.
I simply “forgot” to order the Prang books for the rest of the school year, and my memory never did improve.
Every now and then I’d received a letter with a French postmark. George Dannenberg, my Man from the Far West, continued to write to me, although we had not seen each other in more than three years—not since we were together at Lake George. In February he reported that he was enjoying the celebration of Mardi Gras in Paris, with music and dancing in the streets, and from there he would travel to the Riviera. I doubt that anyone in Amarillo had the slightest idea what Mardi Gras was—and I wrote back about the desolation that I found exotic in its own way. In his next letter he said that he planned to return to America early in the summer, and he would come to Virginia to see me.
I saved his letters. I thought of George often and wanted very much to see him again, but we had chosen such different lives that I doubted we could ever again share a common one, as we had at Lake George.
I had fallen in love with the wild, free openness of the Texas Panhandle, so different from the Midwest, where I felt I could reach out and touch the horizon, and certainly from the suffocating closeness of the East. That vastness was influencing even my small watercolors. But I’d become weary of Amarillo. I was thought odd for my dress, for my insistence on living at the Magnolia Hotel, for my unorthodox teaching methods—I was in a standoff with the school superintendent.
The small-mindedness of the town was the complete opposite of the exhilaration I’d found in the land, and I was desperate to leave it when in June I boarded the eastbound train headed back to Virginia.
18
Charlottesville, Virginia—Summer 1913
THE O’KEEFFES WERE AS CLOSE-KNIT AS EVER, and the chilliness of our Charlottesville neighbors reinforced our clannishness. These families had been Virginians practically since the Creation, and we would always be newcomers of dubious background and questionable status. I’d been a misfit in Williamsburg, a misfit in Amarillo, and of course a misfit in Charlottesville, too. It didn’t bother me.
I began my summer position as Mr. Bement’s teaching assistant at the university, assigned to two classes for high school teachers.
I began painting again. Our house had no garden or grassy lawn to speak of, only a few hollyhocks blooming bravely in the mean little yard, but they were inspiration enough. I painted them over and over, always seeing something new in them, something I hadn’t seen before, or trying another combination of colors, or altering the perspective. It was a habit I’d developed the summer before, when I painted trees and shrubs on the university campus and then painted the same tree or shrub a different way.
Francis was working in New York and Alexius had begun studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin, but my four sisters were still at home, Ida and Nita teaching, Catherine finishing high school; Claudie, the baby of the family, was just fourteen. My sisters and I kept to ourselves, mainly by choice but also because no one else chose to include us. Sometimes we picked up ice cream cones from Papa’s creamery to enjoy on our walks out into the rolling green hills, so different from those wide-open spaces in Texas! We avoided discussing Mama’s condition—she was obviously getting worse—or Papa’s business, obviously getting worse, too. I worried about our parents, and I’m sure my sisters did as well, but we were a family who rarely talked about unpleasant subjects, preferring to pretend they didn’t exist.
For a time I thought I had made a new friend, Miss Anna Barringer, who also taught art classes at the university. Her father, a prominent member of the faculty at the medical school, had a marvelous greenhouse where he raised orchids, and she invited me to set up my easel there. It was thrilling, because I’d had no idea so many varieties of orchid existed, so many shapes, sizes, and colors—dozens of them, each exotically beautiful in its own way.
But Miss Barringer turned out not to be serious about art, or even her own painting. She was more concerned with the social life of her small, exclusive circle.
“Oh, Miss O’Keeffe!” she rhapsodized. “My friend So-and-So is being courted by the handsomest fellow, and she is so hoping that So-and-So will ask her to marry him. She’s been dropping hints about the kind of engagement ring she’d like, and we’ve been secretly planning the wedding sometime next—”
On and on prattled Miss Barringer, but I had stopped listening. I was concentrating on the colors of a particular orchid, a pale green with dark red spots, imagining how I might capture that particular blood red, and her endless chatter about who was courting whom and whose family had just purchased a new carriage horse or automobile didn’t interest me. That we really had nothing in common except our watercolors and brushes must have been as plain to her as it was to me, and soon we didn’t bother to try to paint together.
The student in my class who showed the most promise was my own sister, Nita. She had always been talented, and I felt that she drew on a far larger reserve of natural ability than I did. I gave her a high grade, of course, because she worked hard enough to earn it, but Nita lacked boldness, daring—nerve. She painted beautifully, but she took no risks. I knew she would never become an artist. Talent was not enough; it is never enough. She recognized it, too.
“Georgie, you’re the artist, we all know that. We’ve known it all along. I couldn’t choose the path you’ve chosen, any more than you’d choose mine.”
The path Nita chose when the class ended was to go into nurses’ training at a hospital in New York City.
I heard from George Dannenberg several times that summer. His letters were always warm, always dangling possibilities of something more. He’d promised to visit me in Virginia, but the months went by, summer was coming to an end, and George did not appear. There was a time that the broken promise would have mattered a great deal to me, but no longer.
In September I made the long train ride back across the country to Amarillo. I was welcomed at the Magnolia Hotel like an old friend by the manager, who believed that I brought a certain amount of civility to the rowdy clientele, and by Max, the cook. “How can you eat so little, Miss O’Keeffe, and stay alive?” he marveled. “You’ll turn into a skeleton!” It was true—I was leaner than ever, and my hair had grown out straight and was now long enough to wear pulled back in a bun.
Day after day the cowboys stomped into the Magnolia, coated with dust, sunburned and bleary-eyed. Max had spent years as a cook for the cowboys driving cattle from ranches all around Texas, and he knew from experience that when a new crew arrived in town, he’d better have plenty of beef on hand to feed them. More than once I observed a tableful of cowboys plow through their platters of thick steaks, order another round, and then go for a third! After the serious drinking began, they were a boisterous bunch, and I was glad my room on the third floor was in back, away from the ruckus and racket.
I loved the landscape; I even loved the whip and whine of the relentless wind. I loved my young students, their enthusiasm undimmed, open to the wonder and joy of creating art, starting with just the merest suggestion from me. If I put the egg I’d brought for my midday meal on the table and said, “Let’s talk about this egg,” we’d have a discussion of the elegant shape, and then they’d draw it, or make it part of a larger arrangement, and we’d talk about what made the composition better, or not.
I got along with the townspeople, even those who weren’t afraid to tell me they thought I dressed oddly and had peculiar ideas, but I did not get along with the Texas state legislature, the bullheaded board of education, and the implacable superintendent.
When I went home to Charlottesville at the end of the spring term, I was unsure what I would do next. Mama was frailer than ever. Auntie tried to keep on taking in table boarders, as Mam
a had, but word had gotten around that Mama was consumptive and no one wanted to eat food from our kitchen. Papa had finally decided to give up the creamery venture. He found work as a construction inspector for the government, but he was required to travel and was away a great deal. I had once been close to my father, but he had changed so much—and I suppose I had, too—that we had little to say to each other when he did come home.
The previous summer, fussy Mr. Bement had tried to convince me to go back to New York. “Miss O’Keeffe, I urge you, beg and implore you! Please, please, enroll at Columbia Teachers College and earn your teaching certificate.”
“I would love to do that, Mr. Bement, but I have no money,” I told him then. “And I do love Texas and the West. I believe it’s where I need to be, to explore the kinds of painting I want to do.”
But after I had again encountered the obstinacy of the educational system in Texas—the superintendent’s office ordered the books, but they sat unopened in the box—I came home in the spring discouraged and worn out. And I’d done hardly any painting.
Now Mr. Bement resumed his crusade to convince me to go to New York. He must have spoken to Nita, who must then have spoken to Mama. My mother spent most of her days in her bedroom and left it only in a wheelchair. She was so weak that talking was hard for her, but one morning when I carried in her tea and toast before I left for class, she asked me to stay for a minute or two.
I sat down on the bed beside her and took her hand. I could feel the bones in each finger. “Please, Georgie,” she whispered, “I’m going to ask you a favor.” I nodded. “Will you promise me that you’ll take care of Claudie when I’m gone?”
I started to protest that she was a long way from dying—although that was not the truth—but she shushed me.
“She’s very young, only fifteen, and she’ll need someone. Auntie is getting old, and Papa is gone. Will you do it? Make sure Claudie’s all right?”
“Yes, Mama, I will. I promise,” I said, although my own life was so uncertain that I had no idea how I would keep my word.
Mama mustered a weary little smile. “Something else. I decided to ask Ollie if she’d lend you the money you need to go to New York.” She laid her finger on my lips before I could protest. “I’ve already written to her. I’m sure she’ll agree. I want you to do that—for me.”
I was wiping away tears when I hurried off to teach my class. A week later I had a letter from Aunt Ollie, offering me the loan. “At no interest and with no repayment,” she wrote. “Since that year you spent with Charley and me when you were at the Art Institute, I’ve felt that I’m partly responsible for you becoming an artist.” The check she enclosed wasn’t huge, but I knew I could make it last.
At the end of the summer of 1914 I sent my resignation to the superintendent of the Amarillo schools. I loved my students, but I despised the small-mindedness of the officials, who pretended to want an education for their students and then resisted any attempt I made to provide exactly that.
And then I left for New York for the second time. It would be the third year of my education as an artist, and I was ready.
PART V
“I felt that I must stop using color until I couldn’t get along without it.”
19
New York—Fall 1914
I STEPPED OFF THE TRAIN IN NEW YORK AND KNEW that this was exactly where I wanted and needed to be.
Newspaper headlines screamed the start of a war in Europe, one country after another declaring war on the others—Germany, Russia, France, England. But the war seemed far away and of no concern to me. The city was humming with new ideas about art, and that was the conversation in which I was swept up.
Artists and art students were still talking about an exhibition that had taken place the year before, the Armory Show, with work mostly from Europe. I would have given anything to see it, especially the most controversial work, Nude Descending a Staircase, painted by a Frenchman, Marcel Duchamp, in ochers and browns. The image was splintered, so that it looked as though it was in motion. A critic described it as “an explosion in a shingle factory.” A lot of people, many of them American artists, were furious about Matisse’s Blue Nude, because she really was done in blue, and not in natural skin color.
I was a little shocked that Robert Henri, who had despised Rodin’s drawings, had also entered a nude in the show—not splintered or blue, but looking so very real that it was as if she was about to step right out of the canvas. Kenyon Cox, the instructor who never had a good word to say about anybody, proclaimed that it all looked like the work of savages. And some were demanding that the exhibition be shut down because it was a menace to public morality.
I’d missed the show, but I hadn’t missed my chance to hear about it. It was so controversial, so radically different from everything we’d been taught, it was still being hotly discussed for many months afterward.
I was different, too: I had changed since my first arrival in New York seven years before, nervous and unsure of myself, believing that the men in my classes knew so much more than I did, so easily intimidated by the likes of Gene Speicher. Someday I’ll be a great painter, he’d said, and you’ll be teaching art in a girls’ school somewhere. I’d painted and painted, and I knew my work was good and getting better all the time, but I wasn’t yet sure what my ideas were. I was experimenting, still finding my way.
I enrolled at Columbia Teachers College, where I met Anita Pollitzer in a drawing class. Anita was just twenty, seven years younger than I, and bursting with energy and enthusiasm. She was sometimes disorganized, apt to misplace things or lose them entirely, but that was part of her charm. We got to know each other well. Her spontaneity and the variety of her interests attracted me, and I wondered if Anita could afford to indulge her whims because she had no money worries—her father was a cotton broker in South Carolina, and her family was quite well off. My situation was so different—I had to be very careful of my expenditures. I could stretch Aunt Ollie’s “loan” for a year in New York, but after that there would be no more.
I did not want a roommate; I’d become much too accustomed to living alone in Texas, and I found a room for four dollars a week. I looked up Dorothy True, a friend from my year at the Art Students League—she was one of the Fakirs—and she soon became part of a tight little trio with Anita and me. Anita and I had been calling each other “Miss Pollitzer” and “Miss O’Keeffe,” as was customary in those days, but when she heard Dorothy call me Patsy, my Chicago nickname, Anita began calling me Patsy as well.
The three of us signed up for a drawing class with Charles Martin, who was my age; he’d studied at the Teachers College and also with Arthur Wesley Dow, Mr. Bement’s mentor. This was his first year of teaching. Since we were advanced students, he allowed us to have a private corner in his studio and to arrange our own still lifes. We could draw whatever we wanted, while on the other side of the curtain Mr. Martin’s regular students were drawing those abominable plaster casts of heads of Greek gods with perfect ringlets of hair. Oh, we were so proud of our advanced status and the freedom it gave us!
In a printing class I experimented with monotypes, painting directly on a glass plate and then transferring the image by pressing a sheet of paper on the inked surface. I made monotype portraits of redheaded Dorothy and dark-haired, brown-eyed Anita, and both girls pronounced them brilliant. Anita called the one I did of her a masterpiece.
I took a color class with Arthur Wesley Dow, who had a show of his paintings of the Grand Canyon. His bold use of color was breathtaking. Mr. Dow was a nice man, and everybody in the class fell all over themselves flattering him, but I could not bring myself to be so worshipful.
I saw Mr. Bement often—he taught there during the fall and spring terms—but I didn’t take his courses. I liked some of his ideas, but I wasn’t going to let him tell me what to paint, much less how to paint. I wanted to move forward on my own.
All I thought about was art and painting and drawing. There wasn’t r
oom in my head, or in my life, for anything else. This was a problem, though, because I had enrolled at Teachers College to earn a degree in fine arts education, and although I was immersed in the “fine arts” part of the degree, I was not interested in the “education” part. I’d already taught at Amarillo High School and the University of Virginia, so I simply ignored “Principles of Teaching.” The instructor liked me and gave me a grade of C. I barely passed the English course; my abominable spelling had not improved one bit since my days at Chatham.
Anita and Dorothy and I made the rounds of the galleries and art shows, to see what was happening in the art world and to compare what we saw with what we were trying to do. The fall show of the American Watercolor Society seemed dull as dishwater.
“It would be no problem at all to paint something as good as any of these,” I snorted.
A few days later I painted a girl in black next to some red flowers, and that winter, when the Society asked for submissions for the spring show, I entered my painting. It was accepted, as I’d known it would be. When the show came down, I reclaimed my picture, ripped it to shreds, and dropped them in the trash bin.
Anita and Dorothy stared at me, appalled. “Why on earth did you do that?”
“Because that picture was as boring as everything else hanging in the show. Ten years ago when I graduated from boarding school, I destroyed most of my student work. I didn’t want to be associated with such mediocre work in the future, and I still feel that way. Now let’s go have tea somewhere.”
When Alfred Stieglitz opened a show of new work from Europe at his gallery, 291, the three of us naturally went to see it. There were abstract drawings by a Spaniard, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque, a Frenchman, so similar that I could hardly tell which was which. Mr. Stieglitz also exhibited sculpture by a Romanian artist, Brancusi. One piece, titled Sleeping Muse, was a large marble egg lying on its side with only the suggestion of a face with closed eyes. There was almost nothing to it, yet it was so elegant and so simple that I could not stop looking at it. I really didn’t know what to make of this radical new style.
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