“I want you to come to Texas with me, Claudie,” I said. “You can go to the college and study whatever you want. But it’s your choice.”
She didn’t hesitate. “I want to be with you, Georgie,” she said, and flung her arms around me.
“Why don’t you come, too, Ida?” I asked. “Maybe we can persuade Auntie as well. The O’Keeffes will take over Texas.”
Ida didn’t hesitate either. “No. Auntie and I will stay right here. Charlottesville suits me, and Auntie is happy here, too. You may want to come back here someday. You never know.”
But I did know, and when I left Charlottesville I felt sure it would be the last time.
PART VI
“Deep reds, delicate pinks, rich ochers, orangey yellows. This is something I could paint.”
22
Canyon, Texas—Fall 1916
The dusty, windswept town of Canyon, Texas, was a quarter the size of Amarillo, with a population of some twenty-five hundred souls. It took its name from Palo Duro Canyon—Spanish for “hard wood”—a deep gash in the earth, about a dozen miles from town, that you couldn’t see until you were at the very edge of it. Long lines of cattle, silhouetted like black lace against the sunset, were driven in from the range to be loaded onto trains. Not much else happened from one day to the next.
There is nothing here, I wrote to Anita, who was still in New York. But I was not complaining. That nothingness appealed to me.
In the middle of this nondescript town was the college, a huge, new, yellow brick building, replacing the old one that had burned down, and the pride of the citizens with its swimming pool and central heating system.
The administration had arranged for me to rent a room in a teacher’s house, notable for the hideousness of the wallpaper, pink roses enclosed in dark green squares that covered all four walls. Roses bloomed even in the carpet. I moved out the following morning.
The next place I found was more suitable, but I kept my eye on a house being built for the physics teacher, Mr. Shirley, and his wife. When it was almost finished, I went to see about renting a room from them. I especially liked the attic room with dormer windows and a view of the endless prairie, and it would be big enough for both Claudie and me. Mrs. Shirley, a nervous little woman, was reluctant. They didn’t have money to decorate it, she said. I tried to convince her that I didn’t object to the absence of curtains and other decorations, because I wanted to fix it up to suit my own taste. I asked if I could paint the woodwork black.
Mrs. Shirley looked at me as if I were completely mad. “Black? You want to paint the room black?”
“Just the woodwork. I think the effect would be interesting.”
“Yes, I suppose it would,” she said, pursing her lips. “I’ll speak to Mr. Shirley about it.”
I wasn’t surprised when Mr. Shirley said no to the black paint, and of course I had no choice but to do as they wished if I wanted the room. But that was not the end of it. Mrs. Shirley was a gossip, and in no time at all it seemed everyone in town had heard what I proposed to do. The story grew from black woodwork to a whole room painted black, even the ceiling, a rumor that earned me the reputation of being eccentric. After the last pieces of white furniture were carried in, I tried to minimize all that prettiness by hanging a long strip of black cloth down the middle of one wall.
Once I was settled at the Shirleys’, I sent for Claudie. In October, she stepped off the train, just as wide-eyed as I’d been when I first arrived in the Panhandle. I enrolled her in the college, and we took our meals with Miss Hudspeth, the mathematics teacher, who ran a boarding house.
As long as the weather stayed hot in the Texas Panhandle, I wore my white skirt and white shirtwaists, and when the temperature dropped I switched to black. I must have been the only woman in town who wore black. It wasn’t the fashion in Canyon. I certainly hadn’t been seen as stylish in South Carolina among all the Southern girls in their pretty pastels and lace and ruffles, but they had been polite enough not to comment. Black hadn’t been fashionable in New York either, but no one in a city as cosmopolitan as New York cared enough to comment. The way I wore my hair, pulled straight back, was also not the style, nor were the men’s low-heeled shoes. I bought myself a man’s hat and wore it almost all the time out of doors, to keep my white Irish skin from scorching.
If people thought I looked odd, I shrugged it off. I dressed only to please myself.
Eventually I became friendly with Leah Harris, a practical, forthright woman my own age who taught home economics. Many of her students took my morning class in clothing design, in which I taught how to make dress patterns and sew French seams, the way I made my own clothes. I rattled them by advocating simplicity and straight lines in place of ruffles and lace. What really floored the girls was my opposition to corsets.
“They’re afraid they won’t look like women if they follow your advice,” Leah reported. “All of us have been brought up since we were twelve or thirteen to believe that a corset is an absolute necessity.”
“But a straight line is so much more pleasing,” I said. “And it’s natural.”
“They also worry about wearing black. Only people in mourning wear black.”
“Black is so practical,” I pointed out. “It’s also an aesthetic choice.”
I’d been trying to teach my students, both male and female, what I’d learned from Arthur Wesley Dow’s theories: that every choice needed to be an aesthetic one—how you comb your hair, which teacup you choose, what you want your clothes to say about you.
“If you want to follow the fashion and look like everyone else, then you make one kind of choice,” I told the girls in the design class. “But if your main goal is to please yourself, then you make another kind of choice and go your own way.”
Straight lines and a minimum of decoration were my choices. But I knew the girls were startled when I showed them how my clothes were made—a shirtwaist with a plain collar and French seams, a wool skirt lined in patterned silk.
As head of the college art department, I was free to pick the books I wanted and decide how to teach. I taught five classes, including costume design and interior decoration, and I asked Anita Pollitzer to send me photographs of Egyptian art and Greek pottery. On my walks out on the prairie, I found the bleached bones of cattle and brought skulls and ribs into the classroom to show my students the beauty of those shapes. My goal was to teach them how to see. But I also taught them skills such as how to use blocks of wood and other carved surfaces to print on paper and cloth.
Claudie was a dozen years younger than I, but she turned out to be a fine companion. Every Sunday we went exploring. Our favorite place was Palo Duro. We’d get a ride out to the canyon and set up a camp near the rim. You couldn’t see the bottom. The narrow paths worn by cattle were so steep that we hung on to tree roots or opposite ends of a stout stick, to keep from pitching over. We loved the challenge. I bought us each a shotgun and some bullets and taught Claudie to shoot—I’d learned how growing up in Sun Prairie. We bagged wild ducks and quail and roasted them over a campfire.
For months I had been drawing in charcoal the shapes I imagined inside my own head, but when I discovered the canyon and layer upon layer of rock, deep reds and delicate pinks, rich ochers and orangey yellows, I told Claudie, “This is something I could paint,” and I did.
It wasn’t only the canyon that was influencing my work—it was the great bowl of the sky with the moon rising and the zigzags of lightning and the storms I could see coming for a week before they arrived. I was also affected by what I could hear—mostly silence, but also the sharp calls of birds, the relentless scrape of the wind that rubbed my nerves raw, and the mournful lowing of cows that had been separated from their calves in the holding pens. It went on hour after hour, and it was especially haunting at night, sad enough to break my heart.
I showed one of my canyon paintings to Mrs. Shirley. “I don’t understand this at all,” she said, her brow furrowed. “I don’t even know
top from bottom. Seems to me you could hang it upside down and it wouldn’t make one bit of difference.”
“It isn’t supposed to show what the canyon looks like,” I said. “It shows how I feel about what I saw.”
Mrs. Shirley let out a bark of laughter. “Must have had a stomachache when you painted it!”
Even the mathematics teacher, Miss Hudspeth, who claimed to be deeply interested in art and beauty in all of its forms, failed entirely to grasp what I intended. When I showed her my painting of a blazing sunset, she concluded that it was a watermelon and laughed heartily when I explained it.
At a party at the college president’s house I met a local lawyer, Joe Sommer. Whenever I turned around, Joe seemed to be hovering there. Before I left the party, he asked if he could call on me. He hadn’t made much of an impression, and I hesitated, until I saw his hangdog look and relented. After Joe’s first visit, during which I had served him tea and we had discussed the election of President Wilson for a second term, Mrs. Shirley found out that I had entertained a gentleman in my room. The college had a rule against a student receiving male visitors in her private room, and Mrs. Shirley insisted that the rule applied to me as well.
There were plenty of rules in Canyon, Texas, both written and unwritten, and I was expected to observe them to the letter. Joe proposed that next time we take a moonlight drive in his auto. But according to the student handbook, there was a rule against that, too: Auto rides at night are an unpardonable impropriety. We decided to ignore that rule, but after I burst out laughing when he attempted to put his arm around me, Joe abandoned the courtship, if that was what it was, and I was not disappointed.
I continued to upset the good citizens of Canyon. For some reason, faculty members weren’t supposed to socialize with students. I often spent time with my students, because I believed that some of the best teaching happened when we were out of the classroom and the art studio, just talking informally. One particularly hot day in Indian summer, I had been sitting on the front steps of the Shirleys’ house, chatting with a group, and without giving it much thought I kicked off my shoes and peeled off my stockings, exposing my naked feet for all the world to see, and apparently to be shocked by. It became the talk of the town.
I thought often of Arthur, wishing he were there with me. After I’d finished teaching the summer course in Virginia and gone on a camping trip, I’d hoped he would come with me, but he had not. Then I allowed myself to hope that he would come to visit me in Texas, perhaps to stay for a while. Arthur, it’s great out here, it’s like another world, I wrote. I described the wind and the lowing cattle and the gorgeous colors of Palo Duro, but I didn’t tell him about the paintings I was doing of the canyon and the sunsets, and only briefly mentioned the classes I was teaching. Although he replied to my letters, he never seemed much interested in my work. His interests were entirely academic.
In spite of his reticence, I still poured out my feelings in my letters, making no secret of my longing for him and wanting to tell him that I loved him. Love is great to give, I wrote. You may give as little in return as you want to—or none at all.
As much as I wished for a reply, there was none—and so I had my answer. Yet I clung stubbornly to the belief that I loved him and hoped, perhaps foolishly, that he would love me back.
At the same time, I was receiving a flood of letters—wonderful, amazing letters, sometimes four or five a week—from Mr. Stieglitz. I’d been sending him my drawings and watercolors, and he responded to them so passionately that I found it a little unsettling. I learned that he had hung some of them in a show with the work of artists like John Marin.
Every time I sent pictures to Mr. Stieglitz and read one of his letters, I felt as though I was betraying Arthur. How could I feel that way about one man and at the same time be drawn so strongly toward another?
My feelings frightened me. I didn’t know what to do, and so for a long time I did nothing.
Late in the winter Mr. Stieglitz wrote that he was arranging a solo exhibition of my paintings of Palo Duro and the blue watercolors, along with a couple of oils and some charcoal drawings—one of a train as it rounded a curve, a great cloud of smoke billowing from the tiny locomotive. It was a train I saw every day from my classroom window. I sent Mr. Stieglitz the plaster figure of the grieving woman, the piece I’d done immediately after my mother’s death—the only sculpture I’d ever done—and he promised to put that in the show, too. This would be the first solo exhibition of my work, and I was giddy with excitement.
The show opened on the third of April. Three days later, on April sixth, the United States declared war on Germany. To make the world safe for democracy, President Wilson said.
Suddenly the war was all anyone in Canyon was talking about. And it was what Mr. Stieglitz wrote about in his letters. Although he was born in the United States, his parents had emigrated from Germany, and he had spent most of his early years there as a student. He loved Germany, he said, but he was also a loyal American. The mood of his letters became dark and gloomy. He no longer wanted to take photographs.
Mine would be the last exhibition at 291, he said. He was closing the gallery. The owner of the old mansion had plans to tear it down. He sounded so dispirited, so bleak, that I yearned to go to New York—to see my work displayed and to see him. It was a completely impractical idea—my classes did not end until the final day of the exhibit, and I would begin teaching summer classes three weeks later.
I asked Claudie her opinion. “The trip would cost two hundred dollars, and that’s exactly the amount I have in the bank. What would you do?”
“If I felt like you, I’d go,” she said.
But it was impossible. I was reconciled to that, and I tried to put thoughts of it out of my mind.
As the spring wore on, I taught my classes and flouted the rules of both college and landlord by going for long, unchaperoned walks—and drives, too—with a student named Ted Reid, a popular football player and the president of the drama club. I’d gotten to know him when we were building sets for a student play. Ted was a tall, lanky Texan with intense blue eyes and a disarming grin who’d grown up herding cattle. We were drawn together by our love for the landscape. As often as we could make time for it, we took long walks together, away from the town, the school, the prying eyes and gossips.
Although nearly ten years younger than I, Ted claimed he was in love with me. “Come away with me, Georgie!” he begged. “You must!”
Here was a man who was not afraid of his own feelings and not afraid to tell me how he felt. This was so unlike Arthur, who either could not or would not tell me he loved me, that I actually considered going away with Ted as soon as the term ended in June. But the more I pondered it, the more foolish it seemed, and when Ted pressed the issue I made a sensible decision and told him that I could not.
But two days after my last class, I made an impulsive decision—not a sensible one. I went to the home of the local bank manager on a Sunday afternoon, convinced him to open for me, and withdrew the two hundred dollars.
“I’m going,” I told Claudie, and on Monday morning I boarded the train for New York.
23
New York—Summer 1917
I WENT STRAIGHT TO 291 FROM THE TRAIN STATION. Edward greeted me warmly, smiling as he opened the gate on the top floor. When I stepped out of the elevator, I saw that my work had been taken down. The walls were bare. Several people stood in the otherwise empty room, and Mr. Stieglitz, his back to me, was talking animatedly. He broke off in midsentence and turned.
“Mr. Stieglitz,” I said.
“Miss O’Keeffe.”
Time seemed to stop, both of us unable to say another word.
Mr. Stieglitz recovered first. “You must see your pictures,” he said. “I’ll hang them again.”
His companions murmured goodbyes and left. Mr. Stieglitz opened the boxes stacked in a corner, unpacked the pictures and began to arrange them on the walls. “I want you to see them exactly
as they were for the exhibit.”
One of the paintings had been sold, the charcoal of the locomotive and the billowing cloud of smoke. “Two hundred dollars,” Mr. Stieglitz said. “A gift for the collector’s wife.”
My first sale! Two hundred dollars! I wanted to put my arms around him, embrace him, even kiss him, but I stopped myself. He was a married man, much older than I, and it would not have been the right thing. “Thank you,” I said, all I could think to say.
“It is only the beginning, Miss O’Keeffe.”
When all of the pictures had been hung, Mr. Stieglitz set up his tripod and camera and insisted that I pose in front of my work. I did as he asked. After he had taken a half dozen photographs, he put away the camera. “Now we will go and have something to eat, and you will tell me everything,” he said.
We talked and talked. So much to say, but we understood each other so well that much could be left unsaid. The connection between us was deep and strong and irresistible. Hours must have passed, but whether it was noon or night, I had no idea.
I’d wired my old friend Dorothy True when I left Canyon, and she invited me to stay with her in her tiny studio. I visited as many people as I could. Dear old fuddy-duddy Alon Bement had married an actress and seemed blissfully happy. Charles Martin, who had allowed Anita and Dorothy and me to arrange our own still lifes behind a curtain in his drawing class, confessed that he was disheartened and felt that the critics misunderstood his work.
I wanted to see Arthur. He had no idea I was coming—I told him I’d had no idea either, until I actually went—and he seemed glad enough to see me again. As I expected, he had a great deal to say about the war that America was now part of, but he had not gone to see the exhibit of my work at 291. The two evenings we spent together were unsatisfactory for us both. I confided to Dorothy how I felt.
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