Girl with Brush and Canvas

by Carolyn Meyer

  We continued to exchange the tenderest messages—there was nothing I couldn’t say to him—and I knew that my deepening feelings for him were the source from which so many of my drawings were coming. I sent one, all rounded shapes and swirls, to him with a note: I said something to you with charcoal.

  All the students and nearly all the teachers had gone home at Christmas, and the campus was nearly deserted. Arthur and I had talked of meeting at Christmas—I would go home to Charlottesville, and he would come there to visit—but in the end I knew that I could not afford the expense of the travel. I made up my mind to enjoy the solitude, embrace it—it would give me time to work, with nothing else to think about. Nothing else but Arthur, of course, and I thought of him a great deal. I wrote to him boldly, I want to touch your face and kiss you, not on your lips but your forehead.

  One night I was sitting on the floor in front of my closet with a stick of charcoal and my rough sheets of paper, and my head began to throb. I had such a ferocious headache that I couldn’t do another drawing. And then I thought, I might as well do something with this headache, and I drew it.

  I had done dozens of charcoal drawings, and a few days later I chose several of them, spare but sensuous shapes, and mailed them to Anita in New York. I hadn’t really planned to do that, but I found I wanted her reaction. I had always told her I didn’t want her to show my work to anyone else, but, without consulting me, she took the drawings to 291 and showed them to Mr. Stieglitz.

  It was New Year’s Day, Anita wrote to me later, and he was alone in the gallery:

  I unrolled them, two earlier ones and the ones you just sent. The room was quiet, with one small light, and his hair was mussed—you know how he looked, you’ve seen him. It was a long while before he said anything. And he kept looking at them, squinting at them, analyzing. After he stared at them for a long time, Stieglitz said, “Finally, a woman on paper.” Then he added, “Tell this girl they’re the purest, finest, sincerest things that have entered 291 in a long while. They’re genuinely fine things, and I wouldn’t mind showing them one bit.”

  I read Anita’s letter, and reread it, over and over. My whole world suddenly shifted.

  Nobody at Columbia understood my drawings or what I was trying to do. One of the professors whom I considered a friend had looked at one and exclaimed, “Why, it’s as mad as a March hare.”

  But Mr. Stieglitz didn’t think they were mad, and impetuously I wrote to him. It took all my nerve to ask why he liked the charcoals and what they said to him. I make them just to express myself—things I want to say—haven’t the words for.

  I was nervous when I sealed and stamped that letter, jittery when I stuck it in the mailbox, on edge wondering if he’d bother to reply. When an answer came, Mr. Stieglitz seemed to have succumbed to the same kind of wordlessness that I’d felt when I made the drawings. If you and I were to meet and talk about life, possibly then I might make you feel what your drawings gave me. He made no promises about showing them, though. He ended his letter, The future is hazy—but the present is very positive and very delightful.

  That answer was even more than I had hoped for—it left me struggling for breath. When I’d calmed down, I wrote to Anita, I just like the inside of him.

  21

  New York—Spring 1916

  I WAS IN A DILEMMA. AFTER ANITA’S LETTER ABOUT the drawings, another letter arrived, this one offering me a position in the fall as head of the art department at West Texas Normal School in Canyon, about twenty miles south of Amarillo—beyond the reach of the wretched superintendent of the Amarillo schools but still in that wonderful empty Panhandle. I was delighted.

  But there were problems. I could not accept the offer unless I left South Carolina and went back to Teachers College to complete one more course for my teaching certificate. Just one more course! But I would need a place to stay plus two hundred dollars to cover expenses in New York, money that I did not have.

  What a temptation! Arthur was in New York, and I wanted to see him. I’d written to him, saying that I wanted to kiss him. I knew that I loved him, and in a letter I had even told him so. I was the bold one! Sometimes I believed he loved me; more often I doubted. In some letters he would come very close, but in others he seemed to pull away. If I went to New York, I would be with him—and we would talk, and I would see and hear and feel just how close or how far away he was, and then I would know.

  Anita solved one of the problems when she offered me a place to stay with her uncle and aunt. Then she solved another by offering to lend me two hundred dollars.

  Still I could not make up my mind, leaning first one way, then the other. The second term was beginning at Columbia College, and I had to make a decision.

  My dilemma would soon be resolved. Within days after students returned from the Christmas holidays, several of the parents complained to the president of the college about the outlandish things they had heard their daughters were being taught in art class. It took a few weeks for the complaints to percolate through the system, but in mid-February, while I was still considering the offer from Texas and debating whether or not to go to New York, the college president, the Reverend Mr. Gladstone, called me into his office.

  “Miss O’Keeffe,” he began in a fatherly tone, “the mothers and fathers of our young ladies expect their daughters to learn to paint pictures of flowers and landscapes and perhaps to make drawings of people and buildings. Not the sort of scribbles in charcoal and splashes of random color that look like nothing at all or are in some cases possibly indecent. The Methodist ministers on the board of regents have made objections as well, suggesting that some of this so-called ‘art’ you’re teaching is a travesty of God’s marvelous creation.”

  My face was burning, and I’m afraid I lost my temper when Mr. Gladstone delivered an ultimatum: I must agree to teach traditional methods of painting and drawing or tender my resignation. It was a near-repeat of my experience in Amarillo with the superintendent and his insistence that I use a textbook I abhorred.

  I didn’t waste a minute thinking it over. “I cannot teach what I do not believe. I resign, effectively immediately.”

  The usually placid Mr. Gladstone reared back in his chair and stared across the desk at me. “Please do not make a hasty decision that you may come to regret, Miss O’Keeffe.”

  “It is not hasty, and I assure you, I shall not regret it. I’ll begin immediately to collect my belongings, and I’ll be on the northbound train Monday morning.”

  “You’re leaving us without an art teacher!”

  “It should be easy enough for you to find someone who will teach the mindless kind of art you prefer to have taught here.”

  Mr. Gladstone’s face turned red. “You understand, Miss O’Keeffe, that if you break your contract I shall be unable to furnish you with a positive recommendation for any future position.”

  “I think you would be unable to do that in any case. Good day, sir.”

  Those were my final words to the Reverend Mr. Gladstone. I marched out of his office and back to my room, wrote a letter of acceptance to West Texas Normal College, and started packing. It didn’t take long, for I had very few things to take with me.

  I was going to New York.

  How wonderful to escape from South Carolina, beautiful and somnolent as it was, and to jump into the taut nerve and kick of the city! I arrived in New York at the beginning of March—I’d already missed the first weeks of Arthur Dow’s “Methods of Teaching” course—and settled quickly into a big, bright room on the top floor of Dr. Pollitzer’s elegant brownstone on East Sixtieth Street. I arranged to eat all my meals in the cafeteria at Teachers College and went out of my way never to bother the family. The only one I got to know was Anita’s nineteen-year-old cousin, Aline, who by coincidence was enrolled in a political science class at the university with Professor Arthur Macmahon. I took care not to let Aline know about my relationship with her professor.

  I’d written to Arthur as soon as I k
new I was coming to New York, and of course he was the first person I wanted to see when I arrived. From then on we saw each other often, although, for me, it never seemed to be often enough. He took me to lunch with his mother, an interesting woman deeply involved in the suffrage movement, and the three of us had a lively discussion about what the effects on society would be if women could vote. I liked Mrs. Macmahon, and I was sure she liked me. Arthur and I met in Central Park for long walks that usually ended at a coffee shop on Columbus Avenue. Sometimes he accompanied me to galleries, but Arthur’s interest in art had never been nearly as intense as mine—how could it be? And I did not care much about political issues that absorbed Arthur. He supported the reelection campaign of President Woodrow Wilson, who was running on an “America First” platform to keep the country out of the war raging across Europe.

  I had not seen any of my family since I left Virginia for South Carolina in September, but I corresponded regularly with Ida, who was teaching art at the high school. I worried about Mama, of course, as her health steadily worsened, but she always insisted to all of her children that our duty was to go on with our lives, and we had all obeyed her. At the end of April Ida wrote to me with upsetting family news—not about Mama, but our sister Nita. Nita had left nursing school and begun taking courses at the university, where she had fallen in love with a nineteen-year-old student and eloped with him. Nita was twenty-five.

  His name is Robert Young, Ida wrote, he is from somewhere in Texas, they met in class and they have been seeing each other secretly for several months. Now they’ve moved to New Jersey, and Nita says he’s working for a chemical company.

  I could hardly believe that Nita had done something so foolish. Whatever could she have been thinking? I wrote back, asking what Mama had to say about it, but my letter had not yet reached Charlottesville when I had a second letter from Ida:

  Our dearest Mama is gone. The landlady, Mrs. Philips, came to collect the rent. I explained there was no money to pay her right then. Papa promised to send it. Mrs. P demanded to see Mama and refused to leave until she did. Claudie and I went in to Mama and helped her get out of bed and walk to the front door where the awful Mrs. P was waiting. Mama didn’t make it. She coughed up blood, collapsed, and died.

  No matter how prepared I thought I was for this news, I was not. I felt as though I was drowning in grief.

  Our family was in many ways no longer a family. My father traveled constantly and was completely absent, Francis was an architect in Cuba and was rarely in touch, Alexius was working in Chicago, Catherine had become a nurse and was back in Wisconsin. And now Nita, married and gone! The only ones still living in the rented house were Ida, Claudie, who was still in high school, and dear old Auntie.

  The letter had been delivered in the morning, and I decided to leave for Charlottesville that night. I needed to be there. Maybe it was where I should have been at Christmas, or at other times, in spite of Mama’s insistence that what she wanted was for me to go on with my life.

  Before I left New York, I went to the sculpture studio and began to work the clay, softening it in my hands, looking for an outlet for my feelings of loss and regret. Slowly the shapeless mound of clay began to take on form. The elongated figure of a woman emerged, her head bowed in sorrow. I left the sculpture on a shelf with a note, asking that it be cast in plaster.

  That night I took the sleeper to Charlottesville, and although I’d barely slept, I wrote to Arthur the next morning to tell him what had happened. I confessed how afraid I was of what the coming days would be like, and how I dreaded them. I laid my heart bare to him as I never had before: I wish you would love me very much for the next few days.

  Arthur responded with a proper note of condolence, but not much else—not the love I had asked for, begged for.

  After Mama’s funeral—only a handful of people attended; my father was not among them—I dragged myself back to New York to finish out my required course. Feelings of overwhelming sadness were followed by a long period of emptiness. I continued to meet Arthur for walks in Central Park and coffee at little restaurants, but he might as well not have been there at all, leaving me bleak and alone.

  Toward the end of May I had just begun my noon meal in the cafeteria when a student I didn’t know approached my table and asked, “Are you Virginia O’Keeffe?” I told her that I was not. “Well,” she said, “a new show opened at 291 gallery with drawings by someone named Virginia O’Keeffe, and I thought perhaps it was you.”

  I was sure that “Virginia O’Keeffe” was me! I’d made it a habit to go to 291 whenever I heard that a new exhibit had opened, but I hadn’t heard from Mr. Stieglitz since he’d written to me about the drawings Anita had shown him. I had no idea that he was planning to hang my work, and he had done it without my permission. I leapt up from the table, leaving my meal unfinished. It was quite a long journey from the college at Morningside Heights all the way down to Thirty-First Street, but I was still angry when I reached 291, ready to give Mr. Stieglitz a piece of my mind.

  Edward, the elevator operator, recognized me from my former visits. “Mr. Stieglitz is not in today,” he informed me in his lilting West Indian accent. “He has jury duty, but I’ll take you up anyway. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

  I stepped into the silent room. My drawings hung on the muted green walls. They were beautifully mounted, and filtered light from a skylight lit them perfectly. How elegant those charcoals looked in this setting!

  I left, furious at his boldness, his effrontery, yet deeply pleased, too—a curious mixture. The next day I went back, still angry but calmer. Mr. Stieglitz was there. His disheveled hair was longer than I remembered and streaked with gray, his eyebrows even bushier—he was much older than I, but still quite handsome. This was the first time I had actually spoken with him.

  “Who gave you permission to hang these drawings?” I demanded.

  “No one,” he said, unperturbed, as if he didn’t need anyone’s permission.

  “You have to take them down.”

  “You are mistaken about that,” he said calmly.

  “Well, I made those drawings,” I informed him. “I am Georgia O’Keeffe.”

  “You have no more right to withhold those pictures than to withdraw a child from the world,” said Mr. Stieglitz.

  Did he think he had the right to make such a pronouncement? “You apparently take me for a fool, Mr. Stieglitz!” I snapped.

  “Not a fool, Miss O’Keeffe,” he said. “Not at all. But I think you don’t understand intellectually what you’ve done here.”

  I caught my breath and allowed him to lead me into the back room that served as his office, dingy except for what hung on the walls: a pastel by Arthur Dove and a small blue crayon drawing by John Marin, whose watercolor of the Woolworth Building I so admired. Mr. Stieglitz wanted to talk about my drawings. When I balked at answering his questions, he tried a different approach and invited me to lunch. “It would be so much more pleasant to discuss your work at a quiet restaurant over a nice meal,” he said.

  We went to a little French café, and after he’d ordered a quiche and salad and wine, he calmly defeated all of my arguments. I found him difficult to resist. I left my drawings at 291.

  At the end of May I finished my course at Teachers College and left New York for Charlottesville. The house seemed terribly empty now without Mama. Mr. Bement had once again asked me to teach summer courses at the University of Virginia. I accepted, but I could barely muster the strength to do it. Every morning after teaching my early class I climbed back into bed and stayed there until I had to get up again to teach the next class.

  I could not get Mr. Stieglitz out of my mind; he had left a powerful impression. He photographed the nine charcoals he’d hung at 291 and sent them to me—and I was crazy about them, even though I sometimes thought I hated those drawings. And I learned that he’d decided to keep them on display a month longer than he had planned, into July.

  I asked him why. “Becau
se, Miss O’Keeffe, your pictures have provoked so much discussion and speculation and argument about what the pictures mean that I have no choice.”

  Art critics were scandalized, saying the drawings were about sex, but women seemed to like them. A lot of people were horrified that a schoolteacher nobody had ever heard of had her work on display in a gallery where Picassos and Cézannes had been shown.

  “People are asking, ‘Is it really art?’” Mr. Stieglitz explained, obviously enjoying the controversy. “And I think that’s a triumph for abstract art.”

  When I felt strong enough, I painted. I was experimenting with very spare, simple lines, like Japanese calligraphy. First I did them in charcoal, then five or six times in black watercolor, and then—because I really couldn’t do without color any longer—in blue. I made a whole series like that. I wasn’t doing landscapes or anything representational. Everything I painted was abstract. By the time summer classes ended, I had completed almost fifty drawings and watercolors.

  Late in August I went camping with friends in the Blue Ridge Mountains—the mountains where I had tramped with Arthur—and sat in the tent looking out at the deep velvet night. Here, in these mountains, I had first begun to believe that I loved Arthur, and that night, sitting under the stars, I believed I still did. He was affectionate when we’d said goodbye in New York, and his letters were tender and caring, but they were not passionate, and passion was what I wanted from him.

  Later I painted the curves of the opening to the tent in black, blue, and light gray watercolor, simple shapes and wavy lines. I titled it Tent Door at Night.

  I told the man in charge of the art program at the University of Virginia that I would not be coming back to teach summer school the following year. West Texas Normal School had offered me fifty dollars more to teach in their summer program, and I had agreed to do it.

  Before I left Charlottesville, my sisters and I went for a walk out into the lush countryside. Claudie, seventeen, had just graduated from the high school where Ida was teaching. I had promised Mama that I would look after my youngest sister. It was the one thing I could do for Mama, and I believed it was the right thing for Claudie.