Girl with Brush and Canvas

by Carolyn Meyer

  The situation was very painful, and when it became too much to bear, I went alone to Maine to paint. I stayed there for months and came back refreshed. Somehow we carried on. For years Stieglitz had been central to my life, and still was, as I was to his, no matter how many flirtations and affairs he indulged in. His health was declining. He had countless ailments, including many that were imaginary. Then he had a heart attack. Now he needed my care far more than I needed his.

  His obsession with Mrs. Norman went on for four years. We never spoke about it—not one word. We pretended that it did not exist. I wanted him to give her up. He would not. And I recognized, without the slightest doubt, that I would have to make my own life, a life that was separate from his.

  I did not know how I would go about that—until one day, I did.

  29

  Taos, New Mexico—Spring 1929

  HER NAME WAS MABEL GANSON EVANS DODGE Sterne Luhan, and she was a wealthy patron of the arts with an apartment on Fifth Avenue as well as a home in Taos, an artists’ colony somewhere north of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Mabel was a gregarious woman who made a habit of surrounding herself with interesting, creative people, and when I met her in New York she immediately invited me to come out west to stay with her in Taos.

  Mabel had been married four times, three of them to rich, successful men. Her third husband was an artist who had taken her to Santa Fe; she’d moved on to Taos, where she’d fallen in love with the landscape. When she also fell in love with a Taos Indian, she divorced Husband Number Three and married Tony Lujan. She changed the spelling of his last name to suit her and was now known as Mabel Dodge Luhan.

  I’d often recalled the trip Claudie and I had made to New Mexico the summer of 1918, always believing that someday I would go back. Maybe the time had come to do exactly that.

  I told Beck Strand about Mabel’s invitation. Beck knew Mabel, too. In spite of her flirtation with Stieglitz, Beck and I had become close friends. She had just survived another of her epic battles with Paul, and she was looking for an escape, or at least a respite.

  “Let’s the two of us make a trip out there together,” Beck proposed. “Mabel is very rich, and she’s also very generous. I know she’d welcome us both.”

  Predictably, Stieglitz resisted when I told him I was going, one minute shouting at me angrily, other times swearing that he adored me and only me, weeping that he would be lost if I left. He never said a word about Mrs. Norman, and neither did I, but she was the main reason I wanted to go away. He must have known that.

  I ignored his pleas and tantrums, and at the end of April Beck and I boarded a train and headed for New Mexico.

  For the next four months we were Mabel’s guests at Los Gallos in Taos. We shared a cottage known as Casa Rosita, and I had my own separate studio with a splendid view of the mountains. Mabel loved playing hostess and knew everybody who was anybody in Taos. Sooner or later they showed up at Mabel’s Big House for dinner, dancing, and lively conversation. When Mabel left for her hometown—Buffalo, New York—to have an operation, the merry evenings were discontinued, but we behaved like children whose mother had gone away and left them unsupervised.

  One day I came back from a walk on the prairie and found Mabel’s husband, Tony, polishing her sporty Buick roadster by the shed where it was usually parked. The auto gleamed like a black diamond in the late-afternoon sun. It was a beautiful machine.

  “Tony,” I said, “I want to learn to drive.”

  He carefully put away the wax and polishing rag before he answered. “Get in,” he said. “I will teach you.”

  I slid behind the wheel, and Tony patiently explained the throttle, the brake, the clutch, and the gears. It was more complicated than I expected, but I began to catch on and steered it slowly around Mabel’s Big House, stalling out a few times until I got the hang of it.

  “Let’s take it out on the road.”

  “All right,” Tony said.

  I drove cautiously at first, navigating the rutted lane toward the plaza and turning on the road leading to the pueblo.

  “Bridge ahead,” Tony said. “Take it slow.”

  I was exhilarated when we arrived back at Los Gallos after that first triumphant lesson.

  “Can we go again tomorrow?” I pleaded, and Tony nodded.

  But the second lesson did not go as well—there was that business with the posts at either end—and I had to pay to have the dented fenders and sagging bumper repaired. Mabel never said a word about it. I doubt that Tony told her.

  Two weeks after that unfortunate event, a former photography student of Paul Strand’s who was a regular guest at Mabel’s dinners mentioned that he was thinking of selling his Model A Ford before he went back to New York.

  I didn’t hesitate. I bought it.

  Beck took over the driving lessons. She wasn’t as patient as Tony, and she claimed that I didn’t pay attention. Nevertheless, I learned. I loaded up my easel and canvases, paints and brushes, and drove all over, exploring the magnificent New Mexico countryside, going wherever I wanted to go, stopping wherever I felt like stopping. I turned the back of the Ford into a studio, and painted whatever I wanted to paint—cow skulls, mesas, and an old mission church outside of Taos.

  I had made up my mind when I was a young girl, a student at Chatham, that I would live my life exactly as I pleased. It had been eleven years since I stepped off the train in New York and into Stieglitz’s world, an important decision that took my life—and my art—in a new direction. Now I’d made another important choice. I had taken control. Whatever happened between Stieglitz and me, New Mexico was the place I would always come back to, where I was finally at home. I knew with absolute certainty that here was where I would do my best work.

  Epilogue

  New Mexico—1929–1986

  GEORGIA O’KEEFFE WAS FORTY-TWO WHEN SHE staked her claim to New Mexico. She would call it home for another fifty-seven years.

  In 1939 she bought an old adobe house on a dude ranch and began knocking out walls and enlarging windows, keeping the light-filled interior spare with a minimum of furniture. But life at remote Ghost Ranch was primitive, and in 1945 she found a near-ruin of a house owned by the Catholic Church in the tiny village of Abiquiú (pronounced AB-ee-cue), about halfway between Taos and Santa Fe. The door in a long adobe wall attracted her, and she convinced the Church to sell the house to her. She remade that place, too, and divided her time between the two.

  O’Keeffe continued to live with the increasingly difficult Stieglitz in New York and to spend summers with him at Lake George, but she always returned alone to New Mexico. Although the marriage was over, somehow she and Stieglitz found a way to get along as friends and business partners until his death on July 13, 1946. That same year the Museum of Modern Art hung a retrospective of her paintings. It was the museum’s first solo exhibit of the work of a woman artist, a label she hated.

  Through the years Georgia experienced dark days that sometimes stretched into weeks when she was unable to paint. Her habit of concentrating single-mindedly for days and then not doing much of anything for long stretches had driven Stieglitz crazy. “I know what I’m going to do before I begin,” she explained, “and if there’s nothing in my head, I do nothing.”

  She worked methodically, making a drawing on a prepared canvas and studying color samples before mixing the pigments. Her goal was to finish a painting by the time the natural light had faded, stopping only long enough to grab something to eat. She claimed that her best pictures were the ones she’d painted the fastest. A fierce critic of her own work, she destroyed a batch of paintings she didn’t think were good enough to keep.

  “Of course I destroy my old paintings!” she snapped when someone protested. “Do you keep all your old hats?”

  Georgia traveled widely—to Mexico and the Grand Canyon, through Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and to South America—but always returned home to New Mexico. Assisted by her staff, she grew herbs and vegetables, tended the orc
hard, baked bread, and cooked healthy meals for herself and her friends. Although she craved solitude and was something of a loner, famous people flocked to visit her through the years, the photographer Ansel Adams and the poet Allen Ginsberg among them.

  O’Keeffe’s reputation continued to grow. In 1970, when she was eighty-three, her first major solo show at the Whitney Museum opened in New York. In 1977 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given to American citizens, was presented to her by President Gerald Ford.

  Within a year of the Whitney Museum triumph, however, she had begun to lose her eyesight. Most of her central vision had gone when a young man named Juan Hamilton came by the house in Abiquiú looking for work, and she hired him to take over a number of practical chores. In her advancing years, Georgia had become imperious, unpredictable, and difficult if she didn’t have her own way. Juan Hamilton knew how to get along with her, and his role and influence expanded. He showed her how to make pots—he had studied sculpture in college—and suggested that she try sculpture again. She found that when she worked with clay, her sense of touch was even more important than her sight, but she complained, “The clay controls me. I can’t control the clay.”

  Even with her eyesight failing, she began painting again, using watercolors. Juan made sure collectors knew about her new work, fulfilling the role Alfred Stieglitz had once played, and her paintings were again in high demand. Prices skyrocketed.

  Not everyone trusted Hamilton. Many felt that he was keeping her friends away from her and controlling her for his own benefit. But Georgia trusted him, and she wrote in her will that she was leaving him many of her paintings and most of her property.

  Georgia O’Keeffe often said she wanted to live to be a hundred. She had come close to her goal when she died on March 6, 1986, at the age of ninety-eight. Her body was cremated, and Juan Hamilton scattered her ashes from the flat top of Cerro Pedernal, Spanish for “flint hill,” the mesa that she had painted over and over during her years in New Mexico.

  Her story has been told in television productions, films, biographies, children’s picture books, and a selection from the more than five thousand letters that she and Stieglitz exchanged over the years of their relationship. In 1997, when the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe with 140 of her paintings on display, more than fifteen thousand people stood in line the first weekend to see her famous paintings. The museum is still a major attraction, with several new exhibits opening each year. The research center maintains a library and archives, and her Abiquiú home has a yearlong waiting list for visitors.

  Georgia O’Keeffe may be best known for her paintings of flowers on a large scale, as though they were being viewed with a magnifying glass. There are more than two hundred flower paintings, about a quarter of her work; other subjects are cow skulls, landscapes, shells, and abstractions, all in her unique style. One of her best-known flower paintings, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, painted in 1932, sold at auction in 2014 for more than forty-four million dollars. Her painting of a poppy was issued as a stamp by the U.S. Postal Service in 1996; Black Mesa Landscape was issued in 2014. The Tate Modern, in London, exhibited more than two hundred works, including Jimson Weed, in 2016, exactly a century after Alfred Stieglitz first showed her paintings at 291 in New York.

  Georgia O’Keeffe’s reputation as one of America’s most important painters remains undiminished, her work among the most recognizable. But she would not have been happy to be referred to as “the mother of American Modernism.” You can almost hear her insisting that her work had nothing to do with being a woman and everything to do with being an artist.

  Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe a few years before their marriage

  Author’s Note

  I ARRIVED IN NEW MEXICO, AT AN ARTISTS’ COLONY in Taos, in the late 1970s, intending to stay for a month, but the stunning beauty of the place had much the same effect on me that it must have had on Georgia O’Keeffe. I managed to stretch one month into nine, at the end of which the director informed me that it was definitely time for me to leave. I returned to Pennsylvania just long enough to pack my belongings and drove a U-Haul trailer across the country to Santa Fe. There I discovered O’Keeffe’s work—flower paintings, cow skulls, majestic Pedernal—on posters and prints on the walls of corner coffee shops and high-end tourist hotels.

  I met a man named Ben who claimed to be a great friend of Miss O’Keeffe and promised to take me to meet her in Abiquiú. That never happened, but a few years later I was invited to Ghost Ranch to teach a writing course, and I drove to nearby Abiquiú, a small village perched on a mesa, to look for her house. I had parked in front of St. Thomas the Apostle when a man with an enormous mustache, driving a pickup truck, chased me away. “This village is private property,” he growled. “And you are trespassing.”

  Years passed before I began to write a novel focusing on Georgia’s early years. While I was in the beginning research stage, I met Deborah Blanche, an actor and storyteller, who had developed a program on O’Keeffe that she presents to audiences in public venues around the country. In her one-woman performance, Deb transforms herself into Georgia with words, voice, dress, and mannerisms. Deb suggested a reading list of biographies from which I gained an understanding of the important events of Georgia’s life.

  Continuing the research, I pored over large-format art books featuring her best-known paintings, cookbooks with her favorite recipes, and a small book with some of the spare drawings and charcoal sketches she made while she was teaching in South Carolina. Deb also referred me to the research center, housed separately from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. I watched videos, as Deb had, to get a feel for the sound of Georgia’s voice.

  I had lunch with my friend Consuelo, who has spent her life in northern New Mexico and was once offered a job as an assistant to Miss O’Keeffe in Abiquiú. “I turned it down,” Consuelo said. “She was very imperious. She would have been much too difficult to work for.”

  When I write historical fiction, I don’t change historical facts, but I do invent fictional people and places to create an engaging narrative. And I spend a lot of time online searching for the bits and pieces to make daily life come alive for the reader. When Georgia made herself clothes, how would she have sewn the seams so the skirt and jacket could have been worn inside out? What did Amitola look like, and how long would it take to row across Lake George? When she left Leah’s farm in Waring, Texas, to go to San Antonio, how did she get there? If she went to an art exhibit in New York City, what would she have seen?

  In the process of my sleuthing, I found a major error in the biographies. Georgia fell ill in Texas in January 1918; her condition was serious enough that she took a leave of absence from teaching, and she remained sick throughout the spring. Her biographers called the debilitating illness “influenza,” which they said was sweeping the country. In fact, “Spanish influenza”—the flu—was first diagnosed in April of 1918 at an army base in Kansas, and it killed its sufferers in a matter of days, if not hours. Georgia had some sort of throat infection, but it was not influenza.

  I am often asked about my research methods, and I wish I could say that I approach it in an orderly manner—but I don’t. I read enough to figure out what direction the story will take, and I begin to write. The writing and the research proceed in tandem; there’s always something I want to look up, another layer I want to uncover, and that often leads to something else, and so on. The research is finished when the book is finished and the story has been told as fully as I can tell it.

  Carolyn Meyer

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  To View Georgia O’Keeffe’s Works

  The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Collections Online

  cdm16622.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/search/collection/gokfa

  A List of the Top Five U.S. Museums with O’Keeffe’s Work

  theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/the-5-best-places-to-see-georgia-o-keeffe-s-art/

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nbsp; Carolyn Meyer’s

  Other Calkins Creek Titles

  HC: 978-1-62979-584-3

  eBook: 978-1-62979-800-4

  HC: 978-1-62091-652-0

  eBook: 978-1-62979-059-6

  Picture Credits

  Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe / Art Resource, NY: 2, 312

  An Interview with Carolyn Meyer

  Q: Why do you write about the past?

  A: I don’t deliberately choose to write about historical subjects. In fact, when I was a student, I found history quite boring—all that emphasis on battles and generals and treaties. But then I discovered that history is really about people, and when you get to specific people, you discover very interesting stories.

  Q: Why did you choose to write about Georgia O’Keeffe?

  A: I’m often asked where I get my ideas, as if there were some magic formula, but the truth is that ideas are always out there, floating around like pollen, and I try to stay open to possible pollination. I have no idea why the idea of writing about the great artist, whom I’ve known about for years, suddenly bloomed. It just did.

  Q: How did you delve into the past for this book?

  A: Research is the easy part, much easier than writing! I started by reading biographies to get a handle on the main events of Georgia’s life, and then I began exploring the nooks and crannies of her world, playing detective and looking for clues in as many different places as I could. Then I started writing—but the research never really stops until the story is finished.

  Q: What is Georgia O’Keeffe’s relevance to today?

  A: Georgia had to deal with the attitudes of her time, about the kind of art she was creating and about the role of women in the art world, as all of us—regardless of our age--must deal with the challenges of our time. A story about how she met those challenges gives us guideposts for our own lives.