It did prove impossible. She was bitterly disappointed to receive his next letter, postmarked Paris, reporting that he’d stayed up all night thinking about her but ultimately set sail without so much as a visit.
O’Keeffe no longer seemed the independent, high-spirited girl he’d met in New York. When Dannenberg wrote from the Latin Quarter to express his longing (“You stunned me into a daze that I simply can’t shake off”), O’Keeffe replied in a fit of self-pity that she’d given up painting. Dannenberg would not be manipulated. While offering assurances that she would always be an artist, he cautioned, “They always frighten me, your letters.”9
O’Keeffe applied for but did not obtain a teaching position in the Williamsburg public schools. In the spring of 1911, her teacher at Chatham Episocopal Institute, Elizabeth Willis, hired her to teach art at Chatham for six weeks. This opportunity introduced O’Keeffe to the possibility of earning a living in an occupation less grinding than commercial illustration.
She happily returned to Chatham’s familiar hills, small-town life, and a school handsomely rebuilt after the 1906 fire. Former classmates like Susan Young were welcoming and she felt redeemed by their admiration. Knowing that O’Keeffe made her own clothes, Young complimented her white lace blouse with its delicate stitching. O’Keeffe wrapped it up and gave it to her as an early wedding present, apologizing that she couldn’t afford more. Young said that O’Keeffe felled seams so perfectly that her clothes could be worn inside out.
At the end of the term, O’Keeffe joined her mother and siblings in Charlottesville. Shortly thereafter, the concrete block home sold and Frank joined his family for the first time in two years. The proximity of the University of Virginia had led Ida and her daughters to operate a boardinghouse for students. Ida rented a red brick home fronted by white colunms at 1204 Wertland Avenue, which she described in her advertisement as “one of the prettiest residence streets.”10
Their neighbor Ethyl Holsinger recalled, “It was about the most select street in Charlottesville in 1912.” The street boasted the lavish residences of the university dean and president among those of the more established families. “They had places that stretched for acres,” Holsinger added. “It was a heavenly place to live. It may sound barbaric but everybody in Charlottesville who knew each other stuck together. We didn’t know the O’Keeffes.”11
To “know” in this case meant to be comfortable with a person’s reputation and respectability. Since Holsinger was only a young girl in 1912, her remarks must recall suspicions harbored by her family and a clique of prosperous neighbors. Despite their comfortable origins, by the time they arrived in Charlottesville, the O’Keeffes appeared destitute and shabby. There was no money for clothes or carriages. Though acceptable in their roles as boardinghouse proprietors, they were not invited to tea by the Holsingers and their ilk. Ida’s emerald earrings, the link to her noble Hungarian heritage, were no longer enough to impress strangers.
As in Williamsburg, the O’Keeffes responded to this wary society by insulating themselves as a self-sufficient clan. They had pressing reasons for their withdrawal. At that time, tuberculosis was the primary cause of death in the United States. There was no cure for the disease, which was transmitted through contaminated milk or the carrier’s saliva. Fear of the “white plague” was such that Virginia passed laws prohibiting consumptives from letting apartments. Certainly, boarders would have avoided room and meals at Mrs. O’Keeffe’s if her condition were known, so her illness was kept a secret. The family’s code of silence and distrust of others were qualities essential to their survival, qualities that were etched deeply onto O’Keeffe’s character. Cheerful Patsy of the Art Students League grew suspicious and frosty, finding it difficult to trust her own emotions or the affection of others. At the age of twenty-five, the world had come to seem to her a profoundly unfair place.
Despite its old-fashioned, tightly knit society, Charlottesville was struggling to embrace modern developments as record numbers of people moved there. Most important for the O’Keeffes, in 1912 the venerable University of Virginia began admitting women for the first time, though only during the summers. Ida and Anita immediately enrolled. After her first week of literature, music, and drawing classes, Anita came home full of enthusiasm for her art instructor from New York, Alon Bement. His unconventional approach was certain to appeal to her depressed older sister.
After the debilitating years of commercial illustration in Chicago and the comparatively more pleasant time spent substituting for Willis at Chatham, O’Keeffe was newly amenable to the fate of becoming an art teacher. In any case, she felt her interim training could be appealing. She walked with her sisters to the university, admiring the stately red brick buildings with white porticos designed by Thomas Jefferson in 1825. Sitting at a desk in the art class, she too was struck by the originality of Bement’s remarks. He said that the function of art was “to fill space in a beautiful way.” O’Keeffe soon learned that Bement was espousing the theories of his mentor Arthur Wesley Dow, professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Dow’s theories, as explained by Bement, introduced O’Keeffe to a method of making art that allowed her to take advantage of her own vocabulary of visual forms, which had been influenced equally by her fine arts training and her experience in illustration. Dow espoused the notion that fine art should follow principles of design and confronted the notion that academic oil painting should be at the apex of the art historical hierarchy. He praised the significance of so-called minor arts such as textiles and ceramics, which were dismissed by the academy as the province of women. He advocated the influence of Pre-Columbian, African, and Native American art. In 1891, Dow discovered a book of Japanese illustrations in the library and saw the prints of Hokusai and realized that Whistler was emulating the Japanese artist. “One evening with Hokusai gave me more light on composition and decorative effect than years of study of pictures,” Dow said. In the techniques of Japanese art, specifically the woodblock print, he saw freedom from what he termed the decadence of Western art. Guided by her intuition, O’Keeffe sensed the liberty available in an aesthetic that was not dominated by the artistic accomplishments or patronage of men. Dow said, “The power is within, the question is how to reach it.”12
Dow’s reputation has faded, but a century ago his subversive ideas were widespread, promulgated by arts educators as well as artists. His theories may have suffered because his own picturesque paintings and prints never received great critical acclaim. (When collectors and scholars rediscovered the American arts and crafts movement in the 1980s, Dow and his theories attracted a fresh audience.)
Instead, Dow gained renown for the quality of his students. His theories influenced pictorialist photographers Gertrude Kasebier, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Paul Strand, and Joseph T. Keiley; artists Pamela Colman Smith and Max Weber, all of whom showed at 291. Alfred Stieglitz was sufficiently impressed by Dow to publish his writing in Camera Notes. Dow himself was a photographer and active member of the Boston Camera Club. His own pictorialist photographs served as studies of light and dark tones, though he used them only as the basis for his prints and paintings. He was enthusiastic about photography as an art form, however, and was among the first to incorporate photography in the art curriculum by hiring Clarence H. White at Teachers College in 1907.
Dow’s theories offer a comfortable transition between the pre-modern and modern eras, whereby the nineteenth-century aesthetic sensibilities of Art Nouveau, Orientalism, and Symbolism were drawn upon to produce stylized arrangements of landscape or still life. The human figure largely evaded his concern.
In 1899, Dow compiled his ideas in a textbook simply titled Composition, which proved to be so popular that it has seen thirteen editions, the most recent being in 2001. Dow’s rules of composition—opposition, transition, subordination, repetition, and symmetry—coincided with John Ruskin’s ten rules in his 1857 Elements of Drawing but also reflected his preference for Chinese and Japanese a
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Compositional rules were nothing new to O’Keeffe, who had studied with the Prang series. However, Dow visualized composition less as an assemblage of objects accurately represented than as a harmonious interrelationship of forms. He insisted that flat, decorative design was an art of everyday life and deserving of praise. “Teach the child to know beauty when he sees it, to create it, to love it, and when he grows up he will not tolerate the ugly,” Dow said. “In the relations of lines to each other he may learn the relation of lives to each other; as he perceives color harmonies, he may also perceive the fitness of things.”13
Thanks to Bement’s clear understanding of Dow’s teachings, the suggestions quickly made their way into O’Keeffe’s art. The first chapter of Composition deals with the “drawings of lines as the boundaries of shapes,” as practiced by the Japanese Zen Master Sesshu. Another chapter endorses the notion of “Variations.” Dow noted that variation on a theme was a valued practice in music, textile design, and Japanese art, though not in Western art. “The designers and painters lack inventive power and merely imitate nature or the creations of others,” Dow wrote. “. . . [N]o work is of value unless it expresses the personality of its creator.”
O’Keeffe, who had recognized the limitations of painting in the style of the masters, was thrilled to read these words. “The most important fact relating to a great work of fine art is that it is beautiful,” Dow insisted. “The modern arbitrary division of Painting into Representative and Decorative has tended to put into the background that which we here call Composition, and to bring forward nature-imitating as a substitute.”14
Dow’s late nineteenth-century language may cloud the implication, but he was calling for abstraction, whereby the arrangement of color, line, and shape on canvas were as significant as the subject matter being represented. Although Dow himself never painted an abstract picture, it was through his theories that O’Keeffe approached abstraction within representation, often by using the aforementioned “variation on a theme.”
O’Keeffe could have seen the Hiroshige prints exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, where, after 1900, Dow’s theories were taught. In the intervening years, she had learned about line drawing and the compression of space while working as an illustrator and was in a better position to comprehend Dow’s theories. “This man had one dominating idea: to fill a space in a beautiful way—and that interested him,” O’Keeffe explained. “After all, everyone has to do just this—make choices—in his daily life, even when only buying a cup and saucer. By this time, I had a technique for handling oil and watercolor easily; Dow gave me something to do with it.”15 This point of view girded her seamless integration of art and life and provided an aesthetic common ground for her future relationship with Alfred Stieglitz.
O’Keeffe received a ninety-five in her first class with Bement, Advanced Drawing IV. He asked her to be his teaching assistant for the next summer semester at the University of Virginia. Although this vote of confidence was gratifying, Bement insisted that she must first log teaching experience at the high school level.
A teaching position was suggested to her by Alice Peretta, the classmate whose antipathy Georgia had reversed during their years at Chatham. Peretta learned of her friend’s dilemma and recommended her for a job as drawing teacher at the new public high school in Amarillo, Texas, where she herself taught. O’Keeffe saw the position as an opportunity to escape from oppressive conditions at home, acquire the necessary teaching experience, and embark on a true adventure. She called it “something I’d wanted to do all my life.”
“The Wild West, you see. I was beside myself. The openness. The dry landscape,” she said. “The beauty of that wild world.”16
On August 15, 1912, the Amarillo Daily News reported the arrival of Miss Georgia O’Keeffe, noting that having trained at the Pratt Institute, she had “the highest degree known to her profession.” The claim was untrue, and O’Keeffe or Perretta may have concocted the story to land the job of supervisor of drawing and penmanship.
Amarillo presented a stark contrast to the rolling Blue Ridge Mountains and genteel propriety of Charlottesville. Named after the nearby lake Arroyo Amarillo, the town was situated on the Texas Panhandle, a major shipping center for cattle. The West Texas locus of the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad as well as the Santa Fe and Rock Island lines, Amarillo had a population of fifteen thousand by 1912. Under a bowl of blue sky, where the horizon was marked by puffs of brown dust from cattle being driven to town, it was a rough and barren terrain. The winds ripped across the plains and howled at night. “That was my country,” O’Keeffe later said. “Terrible winds and a wonderful emptiness.”17
Known downstate as “the gambling and horseplay capital of Texas,” Amarillo was populated largely by cowboys, and many local businesses, including stables and hotels, hardware and livery stores, and saloons, catered to their needs. Amarillo’s boom-town ambience was accompanied by local yearnings for civic progress: roads had been paved with brick, and an electric streetcar ran along Polk Street. Ranchers whose properties encompassed half a million acres were erecting fancy Victorian homes on the south side of town. Recent amenities included an opera house and the new high school. The school’s budget included salary for one drawing teacher.
Shortly after her arrival, O’Keeffe learned that Peretta had contracted a sudden illness, probably influenza, and died. Alone in this strange town, O’Keeffe checked into the Magnolia Hotel, a sprawling white clapboard building on Polk Street. It was not the first choice for a respectable woman on her own, but she feared being discredited before she got her much-needed teaching experience. At the Magnolia, O’Keeffe could observe cowboys who drove fifty-thousand-head herds of cattle to the stockyards. One night she watched in awe when a cowhand came in and ate three steak dinners, one right after the other.
Though Dannenberg was then on his way to an adventure of his own on the French Riviera, he announced plans to visit O’Keeffe in Virginia the following summer. “The Georgia O’Keeffe that I appreciate exists only for me,” he wrote. “You will realize it when you are forty. The frank, simple truth will easily disintegrate that funny little shell of doubt and uncertainty that you love to crawl in and out of.” But the man from the “Far West,” as O’Keeffe had thought of him, seemed dramatically less exotic now that she lived there. Her “shell of doubt and uncertainty” was disintegrating on its own, without his aid and at the age of twenty-six, not forty.
Since the high school building was still under construction, O’Keeffe taught a class of teenagers in a small house in town. From the outset, she rejected the lessons in the Prang workbook, such as drawing an orange, in favor of the Dow exercises. She asked students to imagine ways to put a door into a larger square. “Anything to start them thinking about how to divide a space,” she explained.18
O’Keeffe’s students responded well to her simple exercises because they could integrate the seemingly alien notion of fine art with their own quotidian activities. “I liked to convey to them the idea that art is important in everyday life,” O’Keeffe said. “I wanted them to learn the principle: that when you buy a pair of shoes or place a window in the front of a house or address a letter or comb your hair, consider it carefully, so that it looks well.”19
O’Keeffe’s popularity with students did not translate to high marks from the school administrator. When the superintendent confronted her about not using the Prang manual, O’Keeffe argued that her students were too poor to afford the books. Instead of requiring texts, O’Keeffe used what was at hand, once asking a student to use his pony as a life drawing model and prodding the creature onto a table. In the spring of 1913, the Texas legislature voted to require the use of textbooks, including the dreaded Prang.
When O’Keeffe returned to Charlottesville in the summer, she was experienced both in teaching and in the politics of educational bureaucracy, and Bement required her assistance in his two intermediate classes for high school teachers. One of O’Keeffe�
��s students, Margaret Benton, recalled her as “a charming person, all wrapped up in art.” Benton clearly remembered the thrill of being introduced to abstract painting. “Modern art was just beginning. She asked us to do something that would be like wallpaper with no special picture in mind. I had red, orange and green crayons and I let it go wild on the paper. She held it up to the class and said, ‘This is exactly what I am talking about.’ It pleased me so that I was doing what she suggested. It was all wavy shapes and colors.”20 Inspired by Dow’s theories, O’Keeffe must have experimented in her spare time and definitely painted one watercolor of her backyard hollyhocks, though she later destroyed it. No work survives from this period.
O’Keeffe’s position as a teacher at the university seems to have enhanced her social status, and she was befriended by Anna Barringer, daughter of a prominent doctor at the medical school. The two women would paint together, but O’Keeffe found it tiresome listening to Barringer’s concern with the affairs of Charlottesville society. Referring to Barringer, O’Keeffe opined, “I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected.”21
O’Keeffe enjoyed solitary walks in the forested hills surrounding the city but was equally pleased to have her family reunited. In 1912, Frank O’Keeffe had moved to Charlottesville and, using the proceeds from the house sold in Williamsburg, opened a creamery. One sultry summer day, O’Keeffe and her sisters picked up ice cream from their father’s store and, eating quickly as it melted in the summer heat, joined friends to take the streetcar to Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, three miles outside of the city.
O’Keeffe encouraged her sisters to attend the classes that she was teaching, and once observed that her sister Anita “had the real talent.”22 Anita ultimately chose the more pragmatic profession of nursing. Ida considered herself to be the most talented painter of the family, but after caring for their ailing mother, she too decided to become a nurse. Making a living had become an essential concern for all of the O’Keeffe progeny, and an artist’s life did not offer much security. Looking back on this period, and her sisters’ decisions, O’Keeffe remarked, “I don’t think I have a great gift. It isn’t just talent. . . . It’s mostly a lot of nerve, and a lot of very, very hard work.”23
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