It was not just European artists who were breaking all the rules—the Americans were too. I wanted to learn more. I’d seen a reproduction of a pastel called Leaf Forms by an American, Arthur Dove, and I was excited by its bold, abstract forms and vibrant colors. In the spring a new show opened at 291: four dozen watercolors and oils by John Marin, mostly seascapes and landscapes, but I was just crazy about his watercolor of the Woolworth Building, so full of energy it looked as though it was flying!
The work Mr. Stieglitz exhibited was intriguing, but I was put off by Mr. Stieglitz himself. When I had traipsed down to his gallery with my League friends, I hadn’t liked Rodin’s scribbles, and I hadn’t liked Mr. Stieglitz much either—so pugnacious and argumentative. And he hadn’t changed! Whenever Dorothy and Anita and I went to 291, Anita always got into intense conversations with him—she was the kind of girl who got into intense conversations with everybody—while I went off by myself to look at the paintings and ignored whatever the two of them were going on about.
“Mr. Stieglitz truly appreciates the work of women artists,” Anita said to Dorothy and me one day as we left the gallery. “He’s shown Marion Beckett and Katharine Rhoades when no one else paid attention to them because they’re not men!”
“They may be women, but I’m not sure they’re really artists,” I said. “I didn’t think much of their work. They paint the way somebody told them to, not the way they really want to.”
Anita was surprised by my reaction, but Dorothy wasn’t. “I think Mr. Stieglitz’s interest in Beckett and Rhoades is more romantic than aesthetic,” she said dryly.
“Oh, you two!” Anita said, laughing. “Let’s go get something to eat. I’m starving!” She must have noticed my hesitation, because she added, “My treat!”
My New York year was finished, and I returned to Charlottesville. I had new confidence in myself and my work, but I didn’t yet have a teaching certificate. I could not bear to go back to Amarillo and engage in constant warfare over teaching materials and heaven knew what else. I could, I thought, return to New York and look for work. I loved New York, and I loved the excitement of the art world. But if I could find a job that paid enough to live on, I would not have time to paint—and painting was the most important thing. Not to paint was not to be alive. I would have to find another way to support myself.
Back in Virginia that summer, I taught again as Mr. Bement’s assistant. There were eighteen students in my class, and I decided to introduce them to the idea that art doesn’t try to present an accurate picture of reality, in the way that a photograph does, but uses colors and shapes and forms to convey the idea of reality.
Most of them had never seen anything like abstract art, and as I expected, most rejected it. I wanted to change that.
“Pick up some colors that appeal to you, and show what you’re feeling on paper,” I told them. “Don’t think, just do. It doesn’t matter what—just do.”
They looked at me as if I were half mad, but one girl boldly snatched up red, orange, and green crayons and began making big wavy shapes on the paper.
“That’s it!” I cried, and showed the paper to the class. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
The others looked at her as though she were half mad. A few made some feeble attempts, but I was fairly certain that only one student in that room would ever suggest such an exercise to her high school class. The others were Prang people, working by the book of chromos, and they weren’t about to change.
My friendship with Anita Pollitzer continued to deepen even after I’d left New York. Her letters always lifted my spirits. I found time to paint, and the colors in my paintings were bright, glowing, full of life—the opposite of how I felt, which at that point was drab, dull, lifeless, with my mother ill, my father seldom at home, my brothers gone, my sisters involved in their own lives. I rolled up my old watercolors and drawings in cardboard tubes and mailed them to Anita, mostly because I felt that keeping old work around took up too much breathing space. At the same time, I always felt that sending out my work, even to my closest friend, was a huge risk. As much as I craved a response, I felt exposed, as if I were walking around completely naked.
Then I met Arthur Macmahon.
Arthur had come to Charlottesville to teach summer courses in political science. Three years younger than I, he had graduated at the head of his class, won prizes in oratory, earned a master’s degree, and was already a professor at Columbia. Besides being brilliant, he was also an avid outdoorsman—and desperately good-looking! Someone at the university had organized walking excursions into the mountains nearly every weekend, and that was where we met.
Arthur gave me many new things to think about. He described his liberal political theories—he was interested in feminism and the women’s suffrage movement, which demanded that women have the right to vote—and recommended books that he thought I should read on the subject. Mostly he talked and I listened, but he also let me rattle on and on about new ideas in art and why I’d stopped paying much attention to Mr. Bement’s suggestions.
By the time the summer courses finished in August, Arthur and I had become great friends. He stayed on for four extra days, and we tramped through the woods, completely at ease with each other. One hot day when we stopped beside a stream to eat the picnic we’d brought along, I boldly peeled off my stockings and put my bare feet into the cold water. I wondered if he might be put off by my daring, but he could not have been too shocked, because he took off his shoes and socks and put his bare feet in the water, too. It seemed funny when fish swam up and nibbled at our toes, but with Arthur everything was amusing and delightful. Things never got slushy between us, and we had a beautiful time. When Arthur left for New York, we promised to write, but that was the only promise that had been made.
I still had not made up my mind about what to do next. At the end of the summer a letter arrived offering me a position as the art teacher at a small college in South Carolina that trained girls to be music teachers. There would be plenty of free time for my own work—I was to teach only four days a week—but I wasn’t sure if Columbia College was the right place for me. The college was small and the town was small—remote, isolated, far from a big city.
I could see Mama growing weaker and weaker, and I wavered. She sensed my hesitation and lectured me firmly. “You have a career ahead of you as an artist, and your father and I sacrificed so that you’d have the training you need. You are twenty-seven years old, and you will be letting us down if you don’t go where your talent takes you. I have all the help I need here. Go, Georgie.”
But there was another reason I delayed making a decision. I hoped that Arthur would ask me to come to New York. When time passed and I didn’t hear from him, I decided to write to him. It would be bold of me to write first—I knew it was not proper for a woman to take the initiative—but not to write seemed like playing a game, and I refused to do that. I wanted to write to him, and so I did.
Arthur’s reply was warm, but there was no invitation to come to New York. That was a disappointment, but it pushed me to make up my mind. Four days before classes were to begin, I sent a wire accepting the position in South Carolina. I would earn enough to support myself, and I would have time to paint. My mind would be freer there than in New York or Texas, and it would be good just to work alone for a year.
That’s what I told Anita Pollitzer, and what I told myself.
20
Columbia, South Carolina—Fall 1915
DURING MY FIRST WEEKS IN SOUTH CAROLINA I explored my new surroundings. The architecture of Columbia, the state capital, was handsome, and the campus of Columbia College was a short trolley ride from the center of town and surrounded by pretty countryside. I was in an optimistic mood: I would be able to do so much for my students, and the change would be stimulating for my own work.
But disillusionment set in quickly. The town was even duller and more backward than Williamsburg and Amarillo, and the pace ranged from sluggis
h to half dead. It may have been livelier in good times, but these were not good times. This was cotton country, and the demand for cotton had almost vanished because of the war raging in Europe. This was the first evidence I’d seen of the effects on people here of the fighting on the other side of the Atlantic. My students were the daughters of cotton growers, girls whose families could no longer afford the tuition. Enrollment had plummeted to one hundred fifty. Half the teachers had resigned—there wasn’t enough money to pay them.
I’d been hired, I realized, because they wouldn’t have to pay an uncertified teacher much—a tiny salary, a sunless room in a dormitory that had seen better days, and three tasteless meals a day in the gloomy dining hall. But far worse than the financial poverty of the college was the intellectual poverty of faculty and students. There was no interest in art or literature or ideas or much of anything. Mediocrity lay like a thick layer of dust over everything. It would take a huge amount of effort for me not to wither away entirely.
The young ladies, who supposedly wanted to be music teachers but more likely wanted to be brides, showed no curiosity about what I was trying to teach them. I attempted in the first weeks to introduce them to ideas of abstract art. I showed them lithographs of what Matisse and Picasso were doing. “Interpretation is more important than representation,” I said, quoting Arthur Wesley Dow. I showed them photographs of Brancusi’s egg-shaped sculpture of the sleeping head and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and John Marin’s watercolor of the Woolworth Building that I found so exciting. The girls stared at the pictures in utter boredom.
“That’s supposed to be art?” asked one young lady, curling her lip. “It doesn’t look like much of anything.” The others nodded.
I thought of my summer school student in Charlottesville who had snatched up red, orange, and green crayons and gone joyfully wild when I’d instructed the class to do something crazy with nothing in mind but a feeling. There was no one like her in my classes.
I didn’t mention any of this in my letters to Arthur, who was teaching at Columbia University, but poor Anita—also in New York, at the Art Students League—caught the full force of my disappointment and misery. I feel all sick inside, as if I could dry up and blow away, I wrote, feeling very sorry for myself.
Anita urged me on, warning me not to slacken. Just grit your teeth and bear it. Ordinariness might actually be good for you for a change, Patsy!
Tramping in the piney woods allowed me to escape from my listless students and find myself again. In November, when the wild chrysanthemums were in bloom, I came back from a walk with my arms filled with flowers, and arranged bunches in my dormitory room and the classroom and my little studio next to it. When my students admired the flowers, I was suddenly moved to announce, “Tomorrow we shall go for a walk. I want you to see how important it is to pay attention to the world around you.”
The next day was sunny and warm, and I led the girls along the banks of the Broad River. The wood ducks were migrating from the north. As we walked deeper into the woods, we stopped to listen to the breeze singing high up in the tall pines. I learned that a few of the students were more interested in local history than they were in art. Melanie told me that General Sherman had marched through the town in 1865. The school, called Columbia Female College then, had to close. Fanny, a talented violinist, chimed in that the college was saved from being torched when the professor of music stood in the doorway where Union troops could see him.
The walk did not transform the girls into art lovers, but when I showed that I was interested in their stories, they became more willing to hear what I had to say about art.
Being alone agreed with me. I painted every day, even when I didn’t feel like painting, and the foul humor I’d been in drained away. I’d imagine abstract shapes that were like nothing I’d seen, nothing I’d been taught, and then I’d paint what I imagined, the same picture over and over, trying it first one way, then another. I was developing a new language, a new form of expression that had never existed before. Those abstract forms came to me in bursts, almost like music, surging in a bold crescendo and then subsiding in a sensual melody, and that music was what I painted. For days on end I taught, painted, slept—and woke up with more imaginings.
Letters arrived every few days from Anita, and almost every letter had something exciting to report—usually another visit to 291, with raves about Mr. Stieglitz and how important it was for her to “breathe his air.” Although I could not imagine wanting to breathe Mr. Stieglitz’s air, I did subscribe to the magazine, named 291, that he’d begun to publish. Anita had shown me copies of his older magazine, Camera Work, that had originally been devoted entirely to photographs but had gradually changed to include drawings as well. The new magazine had just four or six oversized pages, with drawings by Picasso, the French artist Braque, and other modernists, and poems and essays about art. There were no photographs, except for one in the October issue. Mr. Stieglitz had inserted a large reproduction of his photograph The Steerage, showing passengers on the lower decks of a steamer.
The more I heard from Anita about the exhibitions at Mr. Stieglitz’s gallery, the more I began to wish that I could somehow get his opinion on the direction my work was taking. If I ever painted something that satisfied me even a little, I would find a way to show it to him and ask if he thought it was any good. But I knew I was a long way from making art that would satisfy me enough for that.
At about this time I experienced one of those random moments when I stopped thinking altogether and simply started feeling. I had always loved color, but now I felt that I must stop using color until I could not get along without it. I put away my watercolors and began to work only in charcoal. I spread large sheets of the cheap sketch paper used by students on the floor and crawled around on my hands and knees, drawing and drawing the shapes that came straight from my imagination. I had no teacher to please, no one else’s ideas of what made good art, no one to satisfy but myself, and it was exhilarating.
I worked until my hand ached so much that I couldn’t do any more. And I promised myself that I would continue until I knew—felt—that I had said everything I could possibly say in black and white, even if that took months. Only then would I use color again.
I had no close friends among the faculty and only one or two who were casual friends. There was no one at the college with whom I could share my ideas about art, and I found myself relying more and more on my correspondence with Arthur. He was constantly on my mind. His beautifully written letters sustained me. Arthur was not much interested in art, certainly not passionate about it in the way that I was. In fact, he was rather cool to it. He didn’t see things the way I did, although we thought about things in much the same way. His approach to life was intellectual, and mine was purely emotional, yet the attraction between us was powerful.
My growing feelings for Arthur may have had something to do with my decision to work only in black and white. What I felt for him was an explosion in every primary color, every secondary color, and every shade and hue in between. I worried that the intense emotion might eat me up and swallow me whole. But did he experience that same intensity of feeling? Sometimes I believed he did; other times, not.
I was falling in love with him, I wasn’t sure I wanted to, and yet it was happening and I did nothing to stop it. That filled me with happiness, and it frightened me, too.
A few days before Thanksgiving he wrote that he had been invited to give lectures in Virginia and North Carolina the week after Thanksgiving, and he wanted to spend a few days with me in Columbia. There had been no hints that he was even considering making a trip south, and so nothing could have been a bigger surprise—like a thunderbolt out of a cloudless sky.
Be calm, I cautioned myself. But then I wrote to him immediately, throwing caution to the winds, telling him, I’m the gladdest person in the world! Then, my pen practically scribbling off the page, I wrote to Anita, I am so glad about something that I’m almost afraid I’m goi
ng to die.
Three nights in a row I stayed up late, stitching a new shirtwaist, adding bits of lace. Sewing helped to keep me calm. It was a wonder that I slept at all.
Arthur arrived Friday morning, having spent the night on the train after a Thanksgiving Day visit with his parents in New Jersey. I stood waiting at the depot with a ridiculous grin on my face as the train pulled in. I wanted so badly to kiss him, but we greeted each other with a comradely handshake, and I escorted him to a boarding house near the college.
“You must be exhausted,” I said. “Probably you’d like some time to rest.”
Arthur laughed. “Do you think I’m going to waste one minute resting when I can be with you?”
Exactly what I wanted to hear.
We had four whole days together, walking and talking. We took photographs of each other in the woods outside the city and ate picnic lunches by the river. And we made plans. He would come back in the spring, his mother and brother would come with him, and we would rent a rustic mountain cabin that I’d heard about. It was wonderful to have something to look forward to!
The time came to say goodbye, and Arthur boarded the train for New York. And yes, we kissed for the first time. I made the first move, put my hands on his face and drew it to mine. Later I wrote to him, apologizing for being so forward. He wrote back, reassuring me that I had not behaved badly, that it was perfectly fine, he was so glad I had done it.
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