How Georgia Became O'Keeffe

by Karen Karbo

  A Few Modest Lessons on Falling in Love

  You must write to one another.

  After Georgia left for Canyon, Texas, and West Texas State Normal College in late August 1916, she and Stieglitz struck up a correspondence that was so lively, consistent, and increasingly intimate‡‡ that it could have only ended in bed. Every thought that entered their heads was fit to be part of their communication. From a letter dated September 3, 1916, in which Georgia complained that the narrow-minded citizens of Canyon were like “petty little sores” on the plains, described the locust-sound of the prairie wind, expressed fear and loathing of the pink roses on the wallpaper of her rented room (“Give me flies and mosquitoes and ticks—even fleas”), and made coy, passing reference to being naked, she writes:

  You know—I—

  I waited till later to finish the above sentence—thinking that maybe I must stop somewhere with the things I want to say—but I want to say it and I’ll trust to luck that you’ll understand—

  She reports that she prefers to wear her coat buttoned, and how the sound of her pen scritching along as she writes drives her mad.

  He details every cloud that drifts overhead, the feeling of ice on the tips of his mustache, his thoughts about the drawings and paintings she sends to him on a regular basis (“Gripping”), his conversations with other artists, advice on how to cure a sore throat. The more they wrote to one another—sometimes two or three letters a day—both adopting her manic use of dashes in place of standard punctuation—intoxicated by the romance they were creating and the depth of their communication—by the connection they were developing—the more their letters became a richly textured work of art that belonged to no one but them.

  Now that letter-writing is dead and e-mails are on life support, how do we develop this kind of rich, multifaceted attachment to someone we’re interested in? I’m probably being unrealistic in assuming that most people still think this is an effort worth making. After all, when Georgia and Stieglitz began their passionate correspondence, people didn’t even have radio, much less six seasons of Lost to catch up on (available on DVD and for instant streaming on Netflix). A lot of this mad letter-writing was also something that passed the time. It was fun, 1916-style. It was Angry Birds and I Can Has Cheezburger and American Idol and retail therapy, and everything else we moderns like to do. Also, when Georgia and Stieglitz began, they weren’t looking to fall in love. Stieglitz was older and long-married, and Georgia was still technically seeing Arthur Macmahon. They were merely messing around.

  Nowadays, we simply don’t have the time to mess around, to bounce ideas off each other, chase each other’s thoughts, and in the process create a private world built of ideas, feelings, and language. One day we’re single, the next we’re on Match.com. In a perfect world, we would be able to go straight from being “winked at” to a meeting with the wedding planner. We don’t want to futz around e-mailing someone about the sound of the rain on the roof, or how we took the dog for a walk around the block and admired the plum trees in bloom, or how our sister came to visit and made her special lasagna. A friend of mine§§ who’s an avid online dater said that she’d made a policy to write off any potential suitor who e-mailed her for more than two weeks without making a coffee date. Such foot-dragging was a sure sign that either he wasn’t interested, or he had intimacy issues. The idea that maybe her online crush wanted to flirt a little, throw out a few jokes to see if she got them, reference a book he’d read or a movie he’d seen, or test the political waters to see if they both avidly supported/mutually loathed the president had never occurred to her. She was busy and wanted to get busy. She wanted to dispense with the niceties of getting to know what goes on inside her potential beloved’s head and get straight to the cha cha cha and ooh la la.

  The only people left in the world who build and nurture the sort of deep, complex connection that is created via correspondence do so because they have no other choice: They’re either in love with a soldier serving a tour of duty in a developing country with unreliable Internet, a Peace Corps volunteer, or someone serving a long prison term.

  And lucky them. Because they’re forced to communicate via writing they’re able to ascertain, over time, their beloved’s true character. I’m not talking about discovering his likes and dislikes or most embarrassing moment in middle school. I mean learning whether he possesses the ability to see and love them for who they are, support them in their goals to do whatever, and make them laugh.¶¶

  It’s essential to know this about anyone you think you might be serious about, and really, the best way to gauge this is over time, without the interference of pesky hormones. This shouldn’t need to be said, but there is no correlation between a guy’s washboard abs and his ability to champion your fondest hopes and dreams. I wish I could find a more elegant way of saying this: People in passionate long-term relationships put up with a lot of shit from one another. That’s just the way of it. You can learn how to communicate better, or add spice to the bedroom, or make time for weekend getaways that feature a hotel with en suite hot tub, but people can’t escape their essential personalities. And neither can their significant others.

  I’m belaboring this point so you can see why O’Keeffe loved Stieglitz, and continued to love him once he started behaving badly. For all of his off-putting qualities, no one on earth believed in her vision and her genius more profoundly than did Stieglitz, and because of that he was irreplaceable.

  But how, you may ask, with letters long dead and e-mails about to exhale their death rattle at any moment, can you begin a meaningful correspondence with someone? What is the would-be writer of love letters to do? There is an answer, but I suspect you won’t like it: video games.

  I met Jerrod, my own Glorious Bit of All that’s Human, playing EverQuest.** I played a high elf magician and he played a wood elf bard, and one day our avatars “met” in a zone called The Estate of Unrest, where we were each killing ghouls, zombies, and reanimated scarecrows. There’s a heavy chat component to these games. In between slaying two-headed ogres and raising your sewing skill by “making” the same cloth hat four hundred times in a row, there are hours of typing back and forth. Not letter-writing, but just as time-consuming. “Mozi” and I quested together and chatted every night for months. The courtship was Victorian even by Stieglitzian standards. In the event he was an unemployed pothead in a stained T-shirt living in his mother’s basement, I was reluctant to give him my real name. I was smitten by his sense of humor (on many occasions I really did LOL), his California roots (like me, he grew up in a tragically dull suburb), and the clincher, the fact he knew that “a lot” was two words.†† Finally, I told him my name. That was ten years ago.

  The greatest aphrodisiac is vitality.

  By the time she’d settled in Canyon, Georgia was a full-blown eccentric. You’d be hard-pressed to find a woman so astoundingly herself, not just of that time, but of any time. In a bit of fashion synergy that echoed what was going on in the same decade in the atelier of Coco Chanel, half a continent and an ocean away in Paris, Georgia wore only straight, sheath-like black dresses. She tromped around wherever she pleased in flat, mannish shoes. The only time she changed her footwear into something more dainty and acceptable was when she wanted to resist the urge to hike for miles out into the prairie, or scramble up and down the rocks at nearby Palo Duro Canyon; high heels were for self-hobbling only. She was known for the spot-on impersonations she did of other teachers, her biting wit, and her knowledge of something called cubism.

  She was as on the fringe as they came, and yet, she attracted a variety of men. They weren’t afraid of her oddness, her competence, her lack of bows and small talk. George Dannenberg, The Man from the Far West, was still writing to her, as was Arthur, her first lover. For a time Arthur wanted to marry her, but she wasn’t interested enough to encourage him to press his hand. There was also her student, Ted Re
id, and of course, Stieglitz.

  She was not yet the famous O’Keeffe. She was merely the local bohemian. And yet, all these men, all of a different stripe (the arty San Franciscan who loved to dance; the handsome, straitlaced political science teacher; the local football hero; the equally eccentric Father of Photography), couldn’t stay away.

  Her secret? Loving her own life. Finding the things that came her way of immense interest and animating them. No matter what was going on, it was great to be her, starring in her own true-life adventure. My mother, who knew about these things, advised me when I was thirteen and boy-crazy to ignore the boys and focus on my schoolwork, swim team, horseback riding (which I could never get enough of), making macramé plant hangers, and keeping up with The Man from U.N.C.L.E. She said that loving things in life makes people love you. She said, it’s like how we trained the dog Smitty to come. We didn’t stand there and holler Come! We didn’t entice him with a dog treat. Instead, we would ignore him, then rush over to the other side of the room and pretend we’d found something exciting. Then he would rush over to see what the fuss was about. It didn’t take long for Smitty to rush over to me every time I entered the room, so sure was he that I was up to something interesting.

  Resistance is futile.

  After the end of spring term, 1917, O’Keeffe hopped on a train and went to New York. To buy the ticket, she convinced the banker to open the bank on Sunday so she could withdraw her savings. This was not something people routinely did, hopping on a train at the spur of the moment. When she showed up at 291, Stieglitz was both impressed and titillated by what he thought of as her girlish “American” spontaneity. On April 3, 1917, he had opened her first solo show, including some of the charcoal Specials, some watercolors from Canyon, and the esoteric and elegant Blue Lines (1916), but by the time she arrived it had been dismantled; he insisted on rehanging it for her private pleasure.

  During her ten-day stay she met Paul Strand, a young photographer and one of Stieglitz’s recently acquired disciples. Stieglitz loved nothing more than having a new disciple. A decade earlier the Belgian-born photographer Edward Steichen had sought him out during a trip to New York in 1900. Stieglitz immediately pegged Steichen as a fellow photographic visionary. Steichen designed the logo of Camera Work, and Stieglitz dedicated several issues to Steichen’s photographs. Even though Stieglitz had been born in Hoboken, the two men shared a European sensibility. It was Steichen who had turned Stieglitz on to Rodin, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Brancusi.

  But inevitably, Steichen betrayed his mentor by committing the unpardonable sin of inventing fashion photography,‡‡‡ then further rubbed salt into the wound by proving his youth and manliness by joining the army after the United States entered World War I, where he commanded a photographic division of American Expeditionary Forces. Stieglitz was both too old and too conflicted about the war to join in.

  Acolytes came, then disappointed and left, so there was always an opening for a new one. Paul Strand was the latest and brightest. He discovered photography in high school, when his class at The Ethical Culture School took a field trip to 291 in 1907. Like Steichen before him, when Strand met Stieglitz§§§ he was dazzled by possibilities and dared believe that he could make a career of photography. Strand was handsome in the way of the cutest male high school teacher, and the moment Georgia met him she fell for him, and he for her.

  On Memorial Day, Stieglitz, Strand, and some other photographer who isn’t important to the story took a trolley to Coney Island. Georgia was in a swoon. At twenty-nine, the Patsy O’Keeffe part of Georgia’s personality, the fun-loving Irish girl who liked to dance and pull pranks, had been allowed to atrophy. Years earlier Georgia had realized that there were only so many hours in the day, and that if she stayed out late dancing, she wouldn’t be able to paint the next day. She’d begun to understand both time and emotional energy were art supplies, every bit as important as fine brushes and high-quality paint. She simply never allowed herself to have fun like this. On the trolley ride home, Stieglitz wrapped O’Keeffe in his heavy loden cape to keep her warm. Georgia couldn’t help but view Stieglitz as avuncular. He was old enough to be her father, with iron-gray hair and a well-upholstered marriage made in the last century.

  Back she went to Canyon. Now she had a new correspondent, the adorable and age-appropriate Paul Strand. He was bewitched by her and, moreover, their work bore striking similarities. They were a generation younger than Stieglitz, and their sensibilities were completely modern. After the 1913 Armory Show, Strand became interested in cubism. A few months after Georgia had made her charcoal Specials, Strand found a set of bowls in the kitchen and began photographing them in clusters in extreme close-up. The black-and-white pictures were hypnotic, the shadows as important to the composition as the objects themselves. Georgia had made the first abstract paintings, Strand, the first abstract photographs.

  Georgia’s second year in Canyon was not as magical as the first. Around Christmastime things began to go bad. In April America had entered World War I, and a shop in Canyon was selling let’s-slaughter-the-Germans Christmas cards. When Georgia wrote a letter to the shop owner saying that this sentiment wasn’t in keeping with the season, or, for that matter, Christianity, word spread that she was against the war. It was more than tiny, conservative Canyon could take.

  Something happened in February upon which no one quite agrees: Either it was suggested she take a leave of absence, or else she came down with the flu. Even though the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was not quite under way, then as now, a lot of people said flu when they meant a really bad cold. Georgia left Canyon for the ranch belonging to her friend, Leah Harris, in Waring, Texas. She was allegedly recovering from her illness there, but in one letter she reports that after gardening, cooking, cleaning, and sewing, she walked to town and back.

  In New York, Stieglitz, a hypochondriac of some renown, read the word flu in one of her letters and panicked. He started to obsess, something he had plenty of time to do because he’d been forced to close 291 for lack of funding. He was at loose ends, without a cultural battle to wage. He’d convinced the world that photography could be fine art, as well as the seemingly nonsensical cubes and lines of Picasso, the sinuous shapes of Matisse, Cézanne’s rough-hewn apples and pears. Now, he was being nudged aside by younger artists. Now, modern art had a number of supporters. He was depressed. At home, his marriage had deteriorated. He was sleeping in the study.

  Stieglitz knew that Strand was also smitten with Georgia. The only enjoyable moments of his day were spent comparing notes with Strand about Georgia. The more they discussed her and her “flu,” the more important it seemed to rescue her from Texas and bring her to New York. A plan was hatched: Strand would go to Texas and bring Georgia back, at Stieglitz’s bidding. The old alpha dog had roused himself and decided it was time to act. Strand arrived in Texas and presented Georgia with an opportunity: Elizabeth, Stieglitz’s niece, had a small studio where Georgia could stay, rent-free.

  It’s a mystery why Georgia and Paul Strand never hooked up. Perhaps things had already been put in motion with Stieglitz; they’d gone too far down that road to turn back. Or perhaps the fact that he’d come all the way to Texas as Stieglitz’s errand boy made him less attractive. Maybe since they were both protégés of Big Daddy Stieglitz, she saw Strand more as a brother. Maybe it was simply fate.

  At any rate, Georgia realized it was time to play her hand. Georgia’s intuition was not only impeccable, but she also trusted it without reservation. The time had come for a change. She agreed to accompany Strand back to New York, a city she had never particularly liked, to see what lay in store for her.

  When she arrived in New York in June, she was thin and tired.¶¶¶ Stieglitz whisked her off to Elizabeth’s tiny two-room studio on East 59th Street, where history was made. He put her to bed. The Victorian in him was roused by the sight of powerful, passionately alive Georg
ia languishing on the small cot in her kimono. She was sick! He would take care of her! He immediately found someone to teach him how to boil an egg.

  June, 1918. The Russian Revolution was in full swing, as was World War I. The U.S. Postal Service had just invented air mail. Out West, starring Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle, was in the theaters. In the small, bright studio on East 59th Street (the walls were painted yellow, the floor, orange), Stieglitz dragged out his big box camera and tripod and began his epic photographic portrait of the woman who had become his lover. Each photograph required a three- to four-minute exposure. In 1917 he’d made some pictures of Georgia’s sinuous hands, but that was just foreplay. Now he spent hours photographing her jaw and neck, her shoulders, breasts, rib cage, feet, back, torso, lady parts. She looked rakish in a black bowler and black cape, erotically androgynous in a man’s suit, helpless and ravaged in her white kimono, her hair splayed around her shoulders. It was hard work, all the posing in the small, hot studio, all the sex that happened in between sittings.***

  Georgia was bowled over. She had been unsure what she looked like until she saw these pictures. It was 1918. Women didn’t study themselves for hours in the mirror; indeed, Georgia had rarely had a mirror in her small rented rooms. “You see,” she would tell a reporter sixty years later, “I’d never known what I looked like or thought about it much. I was amazed to find my face was lean and structured. I’d always thought it was round.” She’d always said that the experience was worth the risk, and whatever she was risking here, it was worth it. She had never been made to feel this beautiful.