The Art Institute was built as part of Chicago’s full-scale resurrection after the devastating fire of 1871. No other American city could boast such a range of innovative architecture, including the first skyscrapers. Louis Sullivan, with Dankmar Adler, had completed the Auditorium and the Old Stock Exchange.32 (At that time, his assistant and chief draftsman was the young Frank Lloyd Wright, born only eighty miles from Sun Prairie, who later became Georgia’s valued friend.) Following Sullivan’s dictum that “form follows function,” the architects emphasized simplified mass with Art Nouveau accents in their carved lintels and pilasters and their iron ornamentation. Daily exposure to such sinuous curves and decorative floral motifs on buildings throughout the city reinforced Georgia’s admiration for Art Nouveau design. Taking the train around the loop that transported three-quarters of a million people a day to the city center, Georgia was amazed by the glittering department stores on State Street, including Carson Pirie Scott, with its ornate iron front.
The art dealer S. Bing, originator of the term Art Nouveau, as well as the Parisian shop of the same name, published an article in the 1903 Craftsman calling for the “intuitions of taste and the natural laws of logic.” A year later, Art Nouveau was described in another article as “art pure and simple, untrammeled by convention, and therefore in a sense original. . . . [an artist] must feel rather than know, sympathize rather than study.” In Chicago, Georgia was exposed to the designs and concepts behind Art Nouveau, which would emerge later in her work.33
Chicago was a center for the Arts and Crafts movement as well. The Arts and Crafts Society, founded at Hull House in 1897, was inspired by the English Aesthetic movement, which promoted the idea of beauty as a worthy objective in itself. In a reaction against late-nineteenth-century industrialization, the Arts and Crafts Society advocated beauty entwined with utility as practiced by designer William Morris, whose fabrics and wallpapers were available at Marshall Field Company.
In the course of changing schools every year or two and moving around the country, Georgia had gained a certain moxie. But the bustling metropolis of Chicago seemed overwhelming, and she seems to have made few friends, at least none with whom she maintained correspondence. On the other hand, she never seemed to mind a sense of isolation from her fellows. As she had at Chatham, she directed her attention exclusively toward her art classes.
In keeping with the Beaux-Arts admiration for the glories of antiquity and the traditions of the French Academy, at the Art Institute, Georgia began by copying from plaster casts, as she had at Sacred Heart. Drawing was emphasized over the use of color, and composition was taught with mathematical precision. Her rendering skill improved quickly, and she drew black ink still lifes of native American pottery resting upon a striped Navajo rug on a table. Some twenty-five years later, O’Keeffe re-created similar still lifes while painting in New Mexico.
The mandate at the Art Institute was frankly conservative. In 1905 Henri Matisse had completed his landmark Luxe, calme et volupté and Pablo Picasso had begun his classical Rose Period pictures, but they were all but unknown to Art Institute faculty. Even the tamer scenes painted by the French Impressionists, thoroughly assimilated in Paris and collected by a few perspicacious Americans, were considered too controversial for study at the Art Institute, despite its claim that “the school is conducted upon the most modern methods.” The study of Art Nouveau was confined to the applied arts.
In the gallery of the Art Institute, Georgia could have seen exhibitions of mid-nineteenth-century paintings by the French artists of the Barbizon school, Jean-François Millet, Gustave Courbet, and Rosa Bonheur, representing the established taste of the period, especially in the heartland. More important, she could have seen the exhibition Hiroshige: Color Prints from the Collection of Frank Lloyd Wright. Woodblock prints by this nineteenth-century Japanese artist would have a significant influence on her art.
Meanwhile, Georgia obediently pursued the curriculum based on the atelier and concours methods of the French academy, where a student’s progress to advanced courses is based upon ability. The class drawings were evaluated each month and the better-ranked students were allowed to choose the better positions for their easels. In a vast basement studio with olive green walls and more than forty competitive students, it was crucial to achieve good placement.
Georgia proved to be conscientious and determined. Accustomed to being the best artist in small provincial schools, suddenly she was confronted by students of greater skill. She was encouraged when her pale, sensitive drawings of plaster casts—reflecting her training at Sacred Heart—received more praise than the dark, heavy style of one of her male classmates. There is refinement in her shaded drawings of a Roman God, the bust of Jesus Christ, and a baby. She kept all of these drawings.
On the other hand, she continued to have difficulty with the human figure. Doggedly, she pursued life drawing but was taken aback when she walked into the advanced class and saw the male model unclothed apart from a loincloth. She had seen boys in briefs while swimming in the York River, but this experience as a young woman in public was embarrassing. Despite being in a class of women—life-drawing classes were segregated—she blushed deeply and worried about whether the others would notice. She survived this challenge, but it made enough of an impression to be chronicled at length some seventy years after the fact in her autobiography. She went on to make drawings of the model along with the rest of the students, however, and by February, she was ranked first in her class.
She was fortunate to have as one of her teachers John Vanderpoel, the brilliant hunchbacked Dutchman whose book The Human Figure, published in 1907, is still considered a definitive text. His passion for anatomy was manifest in his nearly topographical descriptions: “A gully is formed in the otherwise full formation of the neck at the sides between the trapezius and the mastoid, which deepens into quite a hollow upon reaching the clavicle, where the bone makes a reverse curve to meet the shoulder-blade.”34
Vanderpoel’s lectures in the auditorium, demonstrated with black and white crayon on full sheets of tan paper, conveyed the principles of anatomy essential to representing the human figure. Georgia called him “a kind and generous little man—one of the few real teachers I have known.” By the end of the year, he ranked her as first in her class of twenty-nine women and gave her several honorable mentions. She still lacked Vanderpoel’s ability to bring spirit and character to the human form, but he inspired her to keep trying.
That winter, her sister Catherine was sent to Chicago to convalesce from a serious case of malaria. Perhaps her mother felt the southern climate too humid or just wanted to reduce the chances of contaminating other children. Georgia welcomed the company. She’d started to feel confident enough to criticize the school and her classmates. “She was getting better than the rest of them,” recalled Catherine.35 Georgia painted a watercolor of her ten-year-old sister looking like a fashionable Parisienne in a red coat and hat and slouching on a settee. A confusion of patterns, the painting is an excuse to attempt an Orientalist theme in crimson and emerald. Catherine’s quizzical stare denotes exasperation, yet it marks the first time that Georgia attempted a psychologically complex expression.
Catherine remained in Chicago and attended public school for a few months that spring before returning to Williamsburg with Ollie’s bizarre gift of a large red parrot. Georgia followed at the end of term, but once in Williamsburg, the months of anxiety took their toll. She contracted typhoid and was confined to her bed for four months. Many others in Williamsburg died from the disease that year. Far from a healthy climate, Williamsburg was tropical, moist, and conducive to many diseases, including the dreaded tuberculosis.
The fever caused Georgia’s hair to fall out, and she had to wear a lace cap until it grew back in short curls. Later, she could only remember reading Goethe’s Faust. “I was very sick when I was nineteen,” she said of that febrile summer. “(I) have such queer—sort of half memories of lots of things—specially of
things that happened just around that time—a couple of years before and after.”36
Slowly regaining her strength that fall, Georgia traded painting lessons for German lessons with a local girl. Neither party seems to have benefited from the arrangement. The student, now physician Dr. Janet Coleman Kimbrough, recalled that Georgia asked her to draw a group of poppies. “She just looked at it and gave a grunt,” she said. “That was the end of my studying art with Georgia O’Keeffe.”37
That fall, the older O’Keeffe siblings Francis, Ida, and Anita went off to school, and Georgia was left at home with the younger ones—Alexius, Catherine, and Claudia. It was a humiliating time as Georgia, her studies postponed, helped her aristocratic mother take in “tableboarders,” college students who paid to take their meals at the house. Though Georgia had little free time, she did drawings of her brother Francis and sister Ida, who are shown in silhouette without much expression. She did a few portraits of the neighborhood children by setting up an easel in the basement. A sensitive portrait of her friend Adah Mann, also in silhouette, shows how far she had come in her drawing ability, but her oil study of Claudia best captures personality and emotion. The little girl, in a white smock, her dark bangs pushed to one side, stares from round dark eyes with an expression of quizzical patience. It underscores the close relationship that the oldest and youngest O’Keeffe sisters would maintain throughout their lives.
By the spring of 1907, with no new business prospects, Georgia’s father was forced to sell Wheatlands. He kept a small strip of property along the road. The family purchased Travis House on Francis Street, a smaller colonial built in the eighteenth century, but financial pressure was mounting. Georgia bravely wrote to the Art Institute for a teaching recommendation. Originally, she intended to return for a second year at the school in the teaching course. Now she was going to try it without a second term. Given the brevity of her attendance, she received a surprisingly positive recommendation: “Miss O’Keeffe is a young lady of attractive personality, and I feel that she will be very successful as a teacher of drawing.”38
Willis, again, came to the rescue. She advised Georgia’s parents to have faith and enroll their talented daughter at Willis’s own alma mater, the Art Students League in New York City.
III
In September 1907, twelve hours on a train bound for the northeast proved a welcome relief from the chaos and disappointment that she had experienced in Williamsburg. Georgia knew her time in New York would be limited and therefore precious. Manhattan in 1907 was no less grimy and congested than Chicago, but her mood was elevated by the high spirits of her fellow students. Although the Art Students League did not offer teaching credentials, its students took themselves seriously as artists.
The creative offspring of wealthier families often opted for the Academie Julian, founded by Rodolphe Julian in 1868 in Paris. His own education at the renowned École des Beaux-Arts was passed on through his academy. He emphasized mastery of the fundamentals of drawing from classical models, similar to the system at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Art Students League, however, was the most advanced art school in the United States. Georgia would benefit from the year of education that her family could barely afford.
A certain esprit de corps had been present since the founding of the Art Students League in 1875 as an alternative to New York’s traditional art school, the National Academy of Design. The League was an immediate success, in part because of the unusual amount of educational freedom allowed students and faculty. By 1882, the League had joined forces with the New York Architectural League and the Society of American Artists to become the American Fine Arts Society, which erected a Beaux-Arts building at 215 West Fifty-seventh Street.
The League had no entrance requirements, no prescribed course of study, and no accreditation. Students chose their teachers and program of study, entering at whatever level they thought appropriate. “You could throw yourself right into the water and sink or swim,” one student recalled.1 Students registered and paid on a monthly basis, another attraction for financially strapped artists like O’Keeffe.
O’Keeffe studied with a faculty that included some of the country’s most respected and successful artists: William Merritt Chase, Frank Vincent DuMond, L. Luis Mora, and Kenyon Cox, all of whom were professionals who regularly exhibited and sold their paintings in the city’s galleries. Also teaching at the league were Robert Henri and John Sloan, members of a daring group of painters of urban life called The Eight, but O’Keeffe never took their classes. Later, she said that she regretted not studying with Henri, but she was struggling with her own poverty and had scant sympathy for the school of gritty realism. The flamboyantly successful Chase was more to her taste. Meanwhile, the faculty regularly engaged in their own philosophical battles over the direction of the curriculum, with Chase representing the somber-toned dramatic scenes favored by the painters of the School of Munich.2
O’Keeffe thrived in the League’s competitive yet convivial atmosphere. The hair lost to typhoid had grown back, still only chin length, a look unwittingly and charmingly in advance of the coming fashion of bobbed hair. For a few dollars a week, she boarded with fellow student Florence Cooney in a nearby room on Fifty-seventh Street. In the mornings, she attended the life drawing class of Mora, who had the annoying habit of proving a point by sketching the head or hands of his wife on the margin of his student’s drawing. Nonetheless, O’Keeffe quickly progressed to the level of fourth in her class. More important, she learned to prime her canvas a brilliant white before beginning a painting. Although the style of the period required her to cover that whiteness with penumbral shades, she soon learned to use white as a color.
She gleaned the significance of this while visiting a neighbor across the street and glancing out the window to see her own primed white canvas perched on her easel. “It looked so fresh and clean compared to the dingy things we usually did at the League,” she recalled.3 That whiteness of surface, so valued in her childhood watercolors, would assert itself as her trade secret. Even today, her paintings often glow with an undiminished radiance.
O’Keeffe was less enthusiastic about the clinical quality of Kenyon Cox’s anatomy classes. A tall, thin man in ill-fitting clothes, O’Keeffe recalled that his “face was very sour. The women in his Life Class were terrified of his sharp criticism.”4
It was a relief to get to Chase’s afternoon still life class, which O’Keeffe considered “much more fun.” “His love of style—color—paint as paint—was lively,” she said.5 Chase had been trained at Munich’s Royal Academy to work in the style of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish masters. From humble origins, he had grown to become one of the country’s leading society painters. A master of the shimmering, light-flecked landscape, he was considered a leading American Impressionist and celebrated for his scenes of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen taking their leisure in parks and cafes. Between 1891 and 1902, he ran a school for plein air painting in Shinnecock, Long Island. After nearly a decade’s leave of absence, he had returned to teach at the League during O’Keeffe’s first semester.
For Friday critiques, Chase arrived with a flourish, entering the studio, according to one student, “looking brisk, with big mustachios and beard, and the ring and the tie, well-dressed and a cocktail on his breath. . . . He stopped at each easel conscientiously. . . .”6
Under Chase’s direction, students made their own arrangements of bottles and fruit on a tablecloth and painted a different still life every day, one executed right on top of another in what was called premier coup, or first strike, a method developed by Manet as well as the Impressionists in the 1880s. The premier coup left little time for drawing or underpainting and encouraged a student to get the overall picture quickly. It broke through the students’ tendencies to fuss over a single detail. “He liked stylish brushwork . . . [yet] he never let it be considered that the brushwork would hide any sins.”7
After studying with Chase, O’Keeffe would continue to
paint a picture a day during the productive periods of her career so that themes could evolve in series. She learned to paint her way through a problem and let the process determine even her apparently controlled results.
Chase was a great promoter of those artists he admired. He not only believed in the potential of women artists, he overruled his colleagues to award the Gold Medal of the Carnegie Institute to Cecilia Beaux in 1898. Like John Vanderpoel in Chicago, Chase encouraged O’Keeffe’s professional aspirations. In addition, Chase inculcated an appreciation for Japanese art, a seed of influence that began to germinate in a few tonalist watercolors that O’Keeffe completed that year. In one dusky street scene she silhouettes figures and carriages against a russet sunset.
In her monotype—a unique print—of a woman dressed in white, seated and gazing out of a gold-toned window, blocks of dark and light establish a sense of space. Along with a monotype of a female artist at her easel, these pictures prove that O’Keeffe was familiar with the shortened perspective and asymmetrical composition of Japanese art. She could have seen Wright’s woodblock prints while attending the Art Institute or been shown such prints by Chase. In addition, she must have known the painting of the popular American aesthete James McNeil Whistler, whose work was deeply influenced by Japanese art.
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