How Georgia Became O'Keeffe

by Karen Karbo

  Georgia abandoned color. She’d been working in watercolor and hated the result. At her tenth attempt to capture one flower she wrote to Anita, speaking in the voice of the painting: “Am I Not Deliciously Ugly and Unbalanced.”

  Georgia abandoned painting. She went back to charcoal, a humble and impossible material. She unrolled cheap manila paper on the floor and had at it, late at night, after she was done teaching, tramping, and letter-writing. She wrote to Anita that she developed bad cramps in her feet from crawling around the floor. She worried that she was going insane, just drawing what she felt without censoring herself. Anita responded that she shouldn’t worry—that Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin were all “raving lunatics.” She embodied the wisdom I heard somewhere once, that to create something meaningful you must love the expression of your heart more than you love yourself.

  *Thought to be the oldest statue of the female form, dated 24,000 BCE–22,000 BCE. With her bad posture, back fat, huge boobs and belly, Venus makes you wish you could afford a personal Pilates instructor or lived 23,000 years ago, when such a figure was believed to be a thing of great beauty.

  †There is no other kind.

  ‡Ed Harris!

  §A personal favorite, I visit this painting every time I go to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I also recommend the gift shop, which has an eclectic selection of art books, notebooks, and witty erasers.

  ¶Red Canna (1923).

  **Loose pencil drawings of naked ladies, their limbs akimbo. Shocking on several fronts: the casual approach, the open legs, etc.

  ††Seven years younger than O’Keeffe, Pollitzer was small, dimpled, sparkly-eyed, enthusiastic, and cute as a damn button.

  ‡‡I can just see the ghost imprint of the second charcoal drawing on the backside of the first.

  §§What? She put them on the floor, where they were stepped on along with the discarded Playbills and dirty tissues?

  ¶¶It was Janet Malcolm, fearless journalist and staff writer for the New Yorker, who’s made a career of writing books that piss people off (In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, etc.).

  ***English writer guy famous in his time, now only read by PhD candidates.

  †††We will forgive her for this somewhat trite phrase, written in a letter to Anita Pollitzer. She was in love!

  Georgia O’Keeffe

  American (1887–1986)

  Blue Line, 1919

  Oil on canvas, 201⁄8 x 171⁄8

  Gift of the Burnett Foundation and the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation

  Photograph by Malcolm Varon, 2001

  The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM

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

  5

  EMBRACE

  As I came up the street into the sunset after supper—I wondered—can I stand it—the terrible fineness and beauty of the intensity of you—

  May 1916. World War I raged in Europe; Albert Einstein had just presented his General Theory of Relativity in Berlin; the formula for Coca-Cola was being readied for market; and Georgia had returned to New York, where she was enrolled in an art methods class at Teachers College.

  In January, days after Stieglitz had discovered her strange and moving charcoal Specials, Georgia had received a teaching offer from R. B. Cousins, president of the West Texas Normal College. Cousins asked her to head their art department with the proviso that she complete the required methods class at Teachers College. The course was taught by none other than Arthur Wesley Dow, the guru of Alon Bement, who’d rocked Georgia’s world with his revolutionary ideas on painting. Georgia was thrilled at the thought of returning to the vast, dusty plains of Texas, and even happier to be asked to make a lengthy detour through Manhattan. Even though Georgia had been toiling at her teaching job in the other Columbia, she was still broke. Then as now, teachers are poorly paid. To make it work, she borrowed a few hundred bucks, and took Anita Pollitzer up on an offer of a free place to stay—the spare room in her uncle’s apartment on East 60th Street.

  Arthur—yes, the same one who had inspired the Specials—taught poli sci at Columbia. Now they could be together! Except, it wasn’t that simple. Before Georgia quit her job in the other Columbia, she kept running into women who “knew” Arthur. Given that she lived at the tail end of the world, one wonders how this was possible. Did Arthur really get around that much? Did he really have more than one lady friend in Columbia, South Carolina? Several times Georgia would ask him to account for this blonde or that brunette, and he would offer some generic reassurance, and their relationship would struggle along like every long-distance relationship does, like a plant that’s stuck in a northern-facing window and watered just enough to keep it alive.

  She saw Arthur while she was in New York, but she also spent a lot of time visiting 291, where she saw some aggressive Marsden Hartley military-themed paintings, which she thought resembled “a brass band locked in a closet,” and also a small, moody John Marin watercolor, which convinced her that if his work could sell, then so could hers. The Marin was quiet and introspective, as was her own work. This was a revelation: Georgia had never given a thought to making a living as an artist. She was ambitious, but she wasn’t crazy. The only people who made a living with their art were men like Merritt Chase, society painters who were paid a lot to paint flattering portraits of dowagers and hunting dogs, not Wisconsin-born schoolmarms whose erotic swoops and zigzags predated abstract expressionism by thirty years.

  When O’Keeffe and Stieglitz Collide

  Stieglitz had talked about exhibiting Georgia’s charcoals, but Stieglitz was a big talker. In a letter dated January 20, in one of the first of the thousands of letters he was to write to Georgia‡over the next thirty years, he said, “If at all possible I would like to show them, but we will see about this.” Months passed, and then one day there was a movie moment. It’s possible this never happened, or it did happen, but not in such an obviously dramatic fashion. It’s possible this is an example of the old truism, “When legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

  One day Georgia was minding her own business, eating lunch in the cafeteria at Teachers College, when another young woman rushed up and asked her if she was Virginia O’Keeffe.

  “I’m Georgia O’Keeffe,” she is said to have said.

  “There’s a new exhibit by someone named Virginia O’Keeffe up at 291 right now,” said the young woman.

  Georgia stood up, left her tray sitting there (maybe I’m embellishing), and marched down to 291. She was determined to give Mr. Stieglitz a piece of her mind. How dare he show her work without her permission? She strode into the gallery and was taken aback to see her small drawings on their cheap paper hung with care on the gray walls of the famous gallery. She was told that Stieglitz was at jury duty. (They should add jury duty to death and taxes as things you can count on in life.)

  Georgia showed up again several days later so they could have the argument that would define their relationship. She’d already adopted black as Her Color, years ahead of beatniks, hipsters, artists, and every woman in New York who has to go to a dressy function after work. She wore her dark hair pulled straight back off her face. It was still round and Irish-looking; the angular jaw that would become part of her iconic persona was not yet in evidence. O’Keeffe was arresting, as beautiful as she was eccentric. She had blue eyes, pale skin, and enormous dimples. She tried to downplay them in photos by refusing to smile. Some of her legendary sternness sprang from simple self-consciousness; she despised those dimples. Still, she liked to laugh. As her friend, famed photographer Ansel Adams, would say of her, “When Georgia O’Keeffe smiles, the entire earth cracks open.”

  But she wasn’t smiling that day. She was livid . . . and also flattered. As always
, she was enlivened by her mixed emotions. She was outraged that Stieglitz would show her work without consulting her; on the other hand, she was thrilled that Stieglitz was so captivated by what she’d done that he exhibited her work without consulting her.

  Before this day in 1916, Stieglitz and Georgia had exchanged some letters and chatted a bit at 291, but they’d never squared off before, never stood toe-to-toe and looked directly into each other’s eyes.

  I realize that in an earlier chapter I was a little hard on Stieglitz. It perhaps says more about me that I think he suffered from narcissistic personality disorder than it does about Stieglitz. Then again, I can think of no other explanation for his behavior over the years, especially when it came to the ladies.

  An example, from a few years hence: Stieglitz and O’Keeffe summer, as they do every year, at the Stieglitz family compound at Lake George, New York. Stieglitz likes to have people around, lots of them, all the time. This summer the parade of visitors includes Alfred’s brother Lee and his wife, Lizzie; Stieglitz’s niece Elizabeth and her husband, Donald; art critic Paul Rosenfeld; a German artist named Arnold Rönnebeck; Rebecca “Beck” Strand, the wife of photographer Paul Strand (more about him in a minute); and Katharine Nash Rhoades, also a painter, and the woman Stieglitz loved before Georgia.

  By this time Stieglitz and O’Keeffe have been together for six years. He’s fully aware of Georgia’s immense need not only for privacy, but also for routine and order, as well as her squeamishness in the face of emotional turmoil, something upon which the gregarious, talkative, boundary-free, self-­dramatizing Stieglitz family thrived. Still, he invites Beck Strand, whom he has been photographing in the nude,§ and Katharine Rhoades to visit at the same time. He harbors a belief that all the women he loves should all love one another and enjoy one another’s company,¶ and also enjoy the awkwardness and emotionally freighted behavior that results (empty places at the table; heavy silences; doors slammed with a little too much oomph; secret crying jags). That Georgia feels distress over this arrangement mystifies him. Her unhappiness is simply more evidence of the high-strung irrationality that is an expression of her feminine nature.

  But, at this moment in time, in May 1916, his charisma and role as high priest of modern art were irresistible. He was handsome. His head was nicely shaped, his nose had authority. He had a low hairline, and thick graying hair full of cowlicks. Long before Einstein made mad-scientist hair a style, Stieglitz had a head of sticking-up gray tufts, and perhaps it’s this crazy hair that made him look more demented than he was. It always sounds like an exaggeration to say someone is impossible to resist. It’s absolutely on par with always and never, and therefore likely to be untrue. But if anyone was impossible to resist, it was Alfred Stieglitz.

  Georgia appeared at 291, and their conversation went something like this:

  Georgia: Take my pictures down right now! [Not really; see how amazing they look?]

  Stieglitz: That’s impossible. [It’s my opinion that they should stay right where they are, and since I am always right, so they shall.]

  Georgia: I didn’t give you permission. [I know how respect works, buster. If I don’t respect myself, you won’t respect me.]

  Stieglitz: You have no more right to withhold those pictures than to withdraw a child from the world. [I will wear down your resistance with my bizarre hyperbole.]

  Georgia: *glares* [What?]

  Stieglitz: Do you have any idea what you’ve done here, child? [Even though I’m one of the nation’s first modernists, I’m still a Victorian at heart, and think women and children are interchangeable.]

  Georgia: Of course! Do you think I’m an idiot? [Does he think I’m an idiot?]

  This disagreement, their first, illustrated a little-remarked-upon truism about any long-term relationship: The first thing a man does to annoy you will always annoy you, and become more annoying over time. It’s possible that the annoying thing does not, in fact, become more annoying, but that everything about him with which we’re besotted—the slight space between his front teeth, the way he writes important phone numbers on the back of junk mail he then recycles, his devotion to the elderly gas guzzler he drove in college, his undying enthusiasm for Pink Floyd and his compulsion to lecture on the unsung genius of the guitar work in “Money,” his habit of making a gargantuan Saturday-morning breakfast,* the way, after a shower, he sits on the end of the bed and, buck naked, looks between his toes as if seeking an answer to one of life’s most burning questions—diminishes over time, leaving that first annoying thing sticking out like Octomom’s belly.

  It should go without saying that this applies to women as well. That is, if you’re a straight guy and you’re reading this (unlikely, since there’s a flower on the cover and the only thing more man-repellent is a high-heeled shoe, unless the book is entitled The Collected Letters from Penthouse), you can apply it to the woman in your life: The first thing she does to annoy you will always annoy you, and become more annoying over time.

  From this moment on, Stieglitz would always know best, even when he knew nothing (like most relationships, it became both more and less complex over time). A large part of his role was self-appointed representative of Big Concepts that He Felt Compelled to Capitalize. Art. Love. Sex. Womanhood. Because he had unshakable faith in his own ideas, and because, admittedly, so many of those ideas had proven revolutionary, prescient, and, when it came to “his” artists,† career-making, and because O’Keeffe, the mystical, earthy, innocent genius from America’s heartland, was his idea, Georgia couldn’t help but embrace his interest, his friendship, and, eventually, his love. Stieglitz would become Georgia’s faithful, devoted champion, showing her work in his various little galleries year after year, through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Second World War, through good productive years of staggering creativity and bad years of illness, misery, and crapola.

  Georgia would pay a price for his devotion: In exchange for being perceived by the world as a complex, intelligent woman, a genuine intellectual who had recently immersed herself in Ibsen, Dante, and Nietzsche, for God’s sake, and who had absorbed all on her own a number of unlikely, disparate, and rarified influences and, pressing them through the sieve of her deep emotional life, and in the process basically invented abstract art, she would accept his simple, unoriginal Victorian version of her as Woman-Child. She was the Eternal Feminine, an earthy and unschooled ingénue from the Midwest, at one with both the land and her lady parts.

  Aside from all this heady business, they had few things in common that make it possible for people to spend more than a weekend together: He was a city mouse and she was a country mouse. He loved trading ideas, arguing, and debating. She ran in terror from all that nattering. She loved to travel, tramp, and get lost in the wilderness. He despised traveling, and the only natural setting he could abide was the one at Lake George, where the Stieglitz clan would retire for months during the summer to argue and get on each other’s nerves while their servants waited on them. She had never had a servant. He was immobilized without them.

  And yet, they would go on to enjoy one of the epic marriages of the twentieth century.

  Meanwhile, on May 1, 1916, Ida O’Keeffe, the cultured and cool-hearted mother who had scrimped pennies so that her girls could have art lessons, died. It happened around the same time the above conversation at 291 took place. Georgia’s mother and the younger O’Keeffe daughters were barely making ends meet in Charlottesville. Ida’s tuberculosis, which she had contracted in Williamsburg (where Frank O’Keeffe had moved the family specifically to flee the tuberculosis he felt sure he would contract in Sun Prairie), had steadily worsened. The women were behind on the rent. The landlady came to collect it. When Claudia, the baby of the family, answered the door and said her mother wasn’t feeling well, the landlady was unmoved. She’d apparently heard this excuse before. She refused to budge. Distressed, Clau
dia called for Ida, who dragged herself out of bed but collapsed on the way to the front door, dead of a pulmonary hemorrhage. She was the same age as Stieglitz.

  Georgia received word of her mother’s death by telegram in Manhattan. She was surprised by the depth of her grief. Frank Jr. had been her mother’s favorite. Anita was the prettiest, and Ida, the most artistically gifted. Georgia was quirky and willful. In a letter to Stieglitz, she said she and her mother were so different; she had essentially raised herself, “wriggling up alone—bumping my head and thinking it was worth it.” It never matters, does it, that we were not our mother’s favorite? Georgia was not the kind of woman to eat her way through a chocolate cake to make herself feel better. Even in the face of grief, something most of us spend a lifetime trying to dodge, she was in thrall to her emotions. She submitted to her sadness with Midwestern stoicism. She dreamt about touching her mother’s face, massaging her temples with her thumbs. She sometimes wept in private, but mostly she trudged through her days at the University of Virginia, where she was once again teaching summer school. It was a measure of her despondency that nature—in this case, the spunky bright green of early summer, the rolling wooded hills—left her cold.

  Work had become both a habit and a source of solace (sublimate!), and when she returned to it, she also returned to working with color. Her charcoal-only days died with Ida. She began a calligraphic series of lines, rendered first in charcoal, then black watercolor, and finally, her spirits lifting, blue. Two deep blue lines travel up the page from a horizontal pond of blue; two-thirds of the way up one line zigs down, zags back up, then continues along its way, once again parallel to its mate. She sent it to Stieglitz, who was so smitten by its self-assurance and austerity that he hung it on a wall where he could gaze upon it from his office, so that he could look at it whenever he pleased.