O’Keeffe’s transition was clear by the end of the summer. She told Charles Maphis, the director of the art program, that she would not be returning to the University of Virginia and recommended Pollitzer as her replacement. She was going to teach in Canyon, Texas: since their salary of one hundred and fifty dollars for summer school was fifty dollars higher than that offered by the university, she would simply stay out west. With her mother deceased, her father traveling and incommunicado, her siblings removed to other parts of the country, O’Keeffe felt no reason to return to Charlottesville.
IX
Before heading to Texas, O’Keeffe and a few friends drove west to Knoxville to see Tennessee’s Natural Bridge formation, then on to Asheville, to visit Katherine Lumpkin, a friend of Claudia’s who had worked for the Charlottesville YWCA. O’Keeffe called her “the finest thing I’ve found this summer . . . not like any YWCA person I ever saw before.”1 With Lumpkin, O’Keeffe visited the towns of Weaverville and Beech, North Carolina, the picturesque area that Macmahon had suggested going to earlier that year.
She so enjoyed Lumpkin’s company that she abandoned her plans to visit Atlanta. “Katherine is really wonderful,” she enthused. “The chief reason why I stayed with her was that she was very tired and I knew she wouldn’t rest unless I stayed and watched her do it.”2 Lumpkin inspired three portraits with just a few sweeping lines in the curvilinear manner of Art Nouveau illustration. With her uncommonly precise visual memory, O’Keeffe later recalled, “One morning before daylight, as I was combing my hair, I turned and saw her lying there—one arm thrown back, hair a dark mass against the white, the face half turned, the red mouth. It all looked warm with sleep.”3
It has been suggested that these remarks mean that O’Keeffe suddenly felt sexual longing toward Lumpkin, but exclamations over other women’s charms were common in the letters of the era. For example, in a letter written to O’Keeffe around the same time, Pollitzer raved about a new friend in Charlottesville, “She is so good to look at . . . [she] has offered to pose minus clothes at a minutes notice for me and she is so bully looking.”4
The two women hiked in the woods and camped until O’Keeffe took the last train that would get her to Canyon in time for classes. Armed with her Teachers College certificate, she arrived in Amarillo in mid-September 1916. The subsequent twenty-mile bus journey brought her to Canyon at sunrise.
The town was named after Palo Duro Canyon, a fissure of rainbow-striped rock cut into the earth some twelve miles to the east. “That is something I could paint,” O’Keeffe thought.5 Although it didn’t bristle with the rogues and cowboys who had made Amarillo so stimulating two years earlier, the town benefited from its strange, spectacular landscape. As O’Keeffe confessed to Pollitzer, “There is nothing here—so maybe there is something wrong with me that I am liking it so much.”6
O’Keeffe was in thrall to the featureless horizon, “where you could see the weather coming for a week.” The flatlands were carpeted in nappy buffalo grass that felt springy underfoot and graceful stalks of downy broom. The empty blue rising from the low horizon dotted by an occasional scruffy black mesquite or dusty locust tree filled her with exhilaration. The silence was complete but for bird calls—mourning doves, swallows, owls—and the lowing of cattle from miles away. In that desert of influence, O’Keeffe continued to search for the core of her authentic nature as she made watercolors “from inside my own head.”
Soon after arriving, she wrote letters to Stieglitz and others and walked west into a searing sunset to mail them. On her way back, she continued east beyond the end of town, past the last locust tree. There, she sat on a fence and watched jagged lighting tear apart the gun-metal sky. These sights would soon find their way into her art. Canyon brought about a significant shift from the interiority of her drawings in South Carolina to the landscape of light and hue, shadow and shape.
She was taken out to Palo Duro Canyon, known as the “Little Grand Canyon.” She stayed out until four in the morning watching the moon rise in the windless night. The cattle in the pastures at the bottom looked like “pinheads.” Long-legged jackrabbits hopped in front of her as she walked. Visiting the canyon again at dawn, she watched as deep blacks gave way to midnight blues, violet bleached to dove gray, and, at the distant edge of the canyon, subtle arcs of milky, fleshy white sky were revealed.
She emulated these effects in that fall’s series of watercolors of sunrises and sunsets. “It is absurd the way I love this country,” she said. “I am loving the plains more than ever it seems.—and the SKY.”7 Tempted by the ruby, turquoise, coral, and gold of Southwest atmospherics, she relinquished all attachment to gray charcoal and made dozens of dazzling watercolors during her fifteen months in Canyon.
O’Keeffe had begun a strategy of self-orientation. When she arrived in a new place, she familiarized herself by painting pictures of the local architecture. Toward the end of her spring in New York, she had painted a somber purple skyscraper against a nocturnal blue ground with only a couple of windows glowing orange. This first attempt at her oft-repeated theme of painting the city at night is nearly abstract, with none of the perspective or signage that occupy the later pictures.
In Canyon, she painted four watercolors of houses, three with pink snow tastefully arranged on sapphire roofs, including one titled Roof with Snow. In verisimilitude, these pictures owe less to observation than to Dow’s exercises on symmetry using squares and rectangles, verticals and horizontals. She continued this exercise in subsequent pictures of houses, churches, barns, shanties, doors, windows, and porches. The consistency of her attention to vernacular architecture is freighted with meaning beyond formal appearances.
By the end of September, Canyon was so whipped by northern winds that O’Keeffe marveled that the town was still standing. She was invigorated by the brutal weather and stood on the porch to soak up the pounding sound and bright lightning. One thunderous night when she was unable to sleep, she read through Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy not once, but twice.
In October, she received letters from Pollitzer, Macmahon, and Stieglitz. Of the latter, she noted, “I’m enjoying his letters so much. . . . Sometimes he gets so much of himself into them that I can hardly stand it.”8 Stieglitz included copies of The Seven Arts, a pacifist magazine to which he was advisor. Pollitzer confided that Stieglitz looked “much older than last year though and fire in him not so keen and crackling.”9
Canyon had won the honor of becoming the site of West Texas State Normal College in 1909. It was the only such institution for training teachers in the Panhandle region and a source of considerable local pride. Hired as the art supervisor to replace Olive M. Denman, who had recommended her, Georgia was paid one hundred fifty dollars for nine academic months and one hundred fifty dollars for teaching throughout the blistering heat of summer.
Four hundred and fifty students had enrolled at WTSNC in the fall of 1916. Despite its remote location, the town had a new movie theater showing features such as Satan’s Soulmate, with Theda Bara, and a Dodge motorcar could be purchased in Amarillo for $785. Despite these encroachments of twentieth-century civilization, Canyon still afforded Wild West excitement. (During a drunken fight in front of the drugstore, a prominent judge and a doctor shot one another dead.)
Rebuilt after a fire in 1914, the college had no dormitories for faculty. When she arrived, O’Keeffe rented a room that seemed to bombard her with its rose-covered wallpaper and matching rugs. It made her feel like “a pink pill with wheels in my head!”10
In short order, she moved to a room where the moon could be seen from her bedroom window and wind soughed in the trees. It was the only house in town with steam heat, and the owner, who ran the local waterworks, had a small, plump wife and a useful fourteen-year-old son who drove O’Keeffe to the canyon to paint. After one such excursion, she reported, “Slits in nothingness are not very easy to paint—but it’s great to try.”11
O’Keeffe took her meal
s a few blocks away at the home of Mary Elizabeth Hudspeth, the school’s first dean of women, who was said to have a “sincere love of the beautiful.” Encouraged by this reputation, O’Keeffe showed her one of her first sunrise watercolors. After examining it, Hudspeth asked if it were a watermelon, and burst into laughter upon being told that it was a landscape.
In October, the Randall County News, which chronicled the travels of its citizens to the comparatively big city of Amarillo, announced the arrival of Miss Claudia O’Keeffe. With her father on the road and struggling to make a living, Georgia assumed the responsibility of being guardian to her seventeen-year-old sister and enrolled her in the local high school.
Needing larger lodgings for herself and her sister, O’Keeffe found a brown two-story house that was still in the process of being built by Douglas and Willena Shirley. Douglas Shirley, the college physics teacher and athletics coach, was reluctant to accept borders. Somehow, O’Keeffe convinced him to rent her the top-floor room, which had windows looking east over the prairie and towards the canyon. In the late months of autumn, the plains turned the colors of cinnabar and flax, with lavender mists in the distance. O’Keeffe asked Shirley if she could paint the trim in her room with black. Her request was rejected but caused a certain amount of local amusement, for as it was reported, O’Keeffe wanted to paint the whole room in black.
The small community of Canyon afforded little privacy, a fact that O’Keeffe denounced as a source of irritation. Claudia, who was twelve years younger than her sister, remembered that they were not accepted by the locals, who considered them wild and not particularly well mannered. It was little wonder as the two sisters roamed the plains on their own, with rifles under their arms. In one week, Claudia shot and dressed five quail and a duck. In her flat, midwestern vernacular, Georgia complained, “It is a shame to disfigure anything as wonderful as these plains with anything as little as some of these darned educators.”12
In retrospect, her sentiments were no different than they had been in Sun Prairie, Chatham, or Columbia. Ostensibly, she wanted to be left alone, but anyone who has lived in a village knows that it is often easier to retain one’s privacy in a metropolis. Although she often proclaimed her fervent desire for anonymity, O’Keeffe dressed and behaved in ways that guaranteed notice and insured notoriety.
In Canyon, her black, tailored costumes drew many a raised eyebrow. One former student recalled, “We ladies thought she was the queerest dressed person we ever saw—her flat heeled shoes, her black long skirts.” When students asked O’Keeffe why she didn’t curl her hair, she curtly replied, “Probably not my style.”13
Another student remembered, “She said black made you look small . . . flowers on materials made you look larger. She liked A-style skirts and white shirtwaists with men’s collar and ties. She was very small around the waist. She showed us a buckram belt six inches wide she had made to ride on her hipbones to make a straight up and down look to her body. Then she would hang her skirt over that. She wasn’t very tall. She wore men’s type shoes with low heels and flat soles because she walked with long strides a lot on the prairie and in the canyons.”14
O’Keeffe avoided wearing clothing that would accentuate her femininity. Although writers have labeled her decision “cross-dressing” and even cited it as evidence of lesbian yearnings, this was the same period when she was writing tenderly to Macmahon, sending him kisses and caresses and inviting him to visit (all invitations that he ignored). She was corresponding regularly with Stieglitz and posting drawings to 291, and she was entertaining flirtations, at least, with a few of the men in Canyon. Whatever her clothing might have suggested, she was energetically interested in men.
O’Keeffe’s keen awareness of fashion has been underestimated. Indeed, she had considered a career in fashion illustration and was a crack seamstress who designed and made her own clothes out of the best available materials until she could afford to hire one of New York’s renowned tailors. She customized her look with pragmatic accessories including men’s flat shoes and hats. Nonetheless, a photograph of her taken in Canyon around this time reveals a distinctly feminine side of the artist: with her hair piled loosely atop her head, she is wearing a simple blouse with a white collar, a flowing, calf-length skirt, black hose, and low-heeled, pumps. She is posed in what can only be called a coy and flirtatious position, with one hand on her hip, the other held demurely at her neckline, smiling up at the camera. The photograph is frankly come-hither and must have been taken for, or by, a beau.
What would have been considered strange, even in a metropolis, was O’Keeffe’s preference for black, the color primarily associated with mourning. Decades ahead of her time, she wore black because it was flattering and practical. She did not own many clothes: each piece had to serve multiple occasions.
Fashion turned out to be an integral aspect of O’Keeffe’s duties as art supervisor. Her students were mostly home economics majors. She taught dress design, and her students made charcoal drawings of dresses and suits from models rather than copy patterns from books. She arranged still lifes but also taught her students block printing and tapestry work. Curiously, she used the method of grading that had so upset her as a student at Sacred Heart Academy—she made corrections directly upon their charcoal drawings.15
This attention to domestic and applied as well as fine arts might have thrown any teacher not drilled in Dow’s theories. His book Composition advocated the use of block printing and textile patterns to further erase the conceptual divide between design and fine art. O’Keeffe’s education had combined with her life experience, especially as an illustrator of women’s dresses and lace patterns, to facilitate her teaching and forge her unique design-based painting. At around this time, she painted an Art Nouveau–style illustration of a fashionable woman in a blue hat, maroon coat, and patterned scarf, flanked by pruned ficus trees and standing before an Italianate village. The execution and subject matter is so frankly at odds with her own painting of the time that it appears to be more of a demonstration of technique for her students. (Around the same time, she completed a watercolor of a woman in a blue dress that is more in keeping with her casually brushed portraits, but also appears to have been a part of her fashion work.)
In addition, O’Keeffe taught one class in costume design and another in interior design. “I have to laugh at myself—but I like it,” she said.16 When she found out the variety of subjects that she was to teach, she sent Pollitzer ten dollars of her own money to buy books on rugs and furniture, photographs of textiles, and “Greek pottery and Persian plates.” And when she discovered that she actually had a substantial budget—approximately five hundred dollars—she forwarded Pollitzer lengthy lists of books, photographs, and equipment that she might need.
O’Keeffe was a mystery to her colleagues at the college. While they belonged to a local church and made a habit of attending two to four times a week, she made no effort to attend services even on Sunday. Instead of socializing with her fellow teachers, she went walking with her class at the end of the day. Her colleagues were upset when she took off her shoes and socks and sat with students on her front porch. One day, she wrote on the blackboard, “Will all fools leave the room?” A student jokingly replied, “Well, Miss O’Keeffe, who would teach us class?” Instead of punishing him, she joined in the laughter.17 For in-class exercises, she arranged still lifes from the bleached cow skulls and bones that she picked up on her solitary walks across the desert, a subject she would later employ in her own paintings.
One student in particular attracted her attention. Ted Reid, a bashful, green-eyed nineteen-year-old, was considered a big man on campus, with interests in theater, sports, student government, and art. Although Reid was engaged to Ruby Fowler, whom he would later marry, O’Keeffe began spending much of her free time with him. In November, she helped him paint and build the sets for a student play. Together, they took long walks on the plains.
On Saturdays, Reid drove O’Keeffe to Palo Duro
Canyon and hiked with her to the bottom. O’Keeffe remembered these trips vividly. “The only paths were narrow, winding cow paths. There were sharp, high edges between long, soft earth banks so steep that you couldn’t see the bottom. They made the canyon seem very deep. . . . We usually took different paths to the edge so that we could climb down in new places. . . . Those perilous climbs were frightening but they were wonderful to me and not like anything I had known before.”18
She executed nineteen preparatory drawings of the cliffs and precipices, beginning with a fairly accurate representation of the scene and gradually paring away the details to find the most basic angles and ovals. She completed a charcoal, then two oils of the valley with a concave dip framing a globular hill. Special No. 21 is largely golden, with scarlet accents on the hilltops. Special No. 20 is in shadowy shades of green and blue. In both paintings a stream of red bumps, based on cattle but largely resembling molten lava, travels through the center. She painted two more oils of the deep red canyon mesas with rays of dusky light shooting around the rock formations. In the watercolor Hill, Stream and Moon, most of the paper remains unpainted around the large, tawny mound with a tiny moon peeking over the top, watery ripples and small bushes gathered at the base. A cross-hatch pattern of blue paint over white paper creates a grid of stars.
Special No. 13, a charcoal of four black eggs stacked vertically between jagged and wavy edges, was “simplified from the canyon landscapes” yet also returns to the imaginative forms developed in South Carolina. Along with an abstraction of parallel and horizontal mounds of blackish, rounded hemispheres, Special No. 13 shows that O’Keeffe continued to experiment with charcoal, and incorporate these invented elements into her landscapes. She was beginning to hone that twilight zone where her pictures traverse the boundary between reality and memory.
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