by Karen Karbo
Visiting 291 was not like visiting an ordinary gallery, where the gallerist sits at a desk in the back in his Italian loafers, glancing up only long enough to see if you look as if you have the money to buy anything. Stieglitz was more of a lying-in-wait kind of guy. He’d position himself in the middle of the small, square room and pounce on his visitors, goading them into saying something ignorant about the art so he could educate them. It was not unusual for his impromptu lectures to last an entire afternoon.
No one who visited 291 escaped Stieglitz’s notice. He was extremely interested in young women, except for Patsy O’Keeffe, who was lanky, reserved, standoffish, and nobody’s fool. She was a laconic daughter of the Midwest. She believed in doing, not saying; she believed in making art, not blathering about it. Stieglitz, in her opinion, was a blatherer. Plus, if his behavior toward her friend Anita Pollitzer†† was any indication, he also stood too close and asked too many personal questions, somewhat creepy for a guy who was twenty-four years older than O’Keeffe, thirty-one years older than Pollitzer. Yes, yesterday’s lecher is today’s sex addict.
I realize I haven’t portrayed the father of modern photography (also the father of a daughter, Kitty, with whom he had a troubled, distant, and tragic relationship) in a favorable light. I’m leaving that to whoever writes How Alfred Became Stieglitz. We are on Team O’Keeffe. He can find his own apologist.
Still, O’Keeffe knew that when it came to art, Stieglitz’s opinion was the one that mattered. There’s a mini lesson in here: Always aim high. In October 1915, while Georgia wondered, fought, and thought alone in South Carolina, she wrote in a letter to Anita, “I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like some thing—anything I had done—than anyone else I know of.” It’s astonishing how one poorly punctuated sentence can change a person’s life.
During this time Georgia had a habit of sending drawings to her friends. She was working in charcoal at the time. Every biography of O’Keeffe mentions this, the sending of the pictures, but there are no details about how this was accomplished. Charcoal is sidewalk chalk for the arty, the smearyest art material there is. Did she send them in a flat envelope between two pieces of cardboard, protected by a sheet of nice vellum? Anita spoke of receiving the “batch”‡‡ and swooning with joy at Georgia’s breakthrough—tucking them under her arm (!) and hurrying out to a performance of Peter Pan at the Empire Theater,§§ after which she re-tucked them under her arm and raced over to 291, where she found Stieglitz. It was New Year’s Day and his birthday, so naturally he was working.
What happened next is the stuff of modern art lore: Anita, whom Stieglitz once called my dear little friend in a letter he wrote in response to her letter to him (asking whether he might send some issue of Camera Work to her friend, Miss O’Keeffe), gazed at Georgia’s voluptuous and otherworldly swirls and pronounced, “Finally, a woman on paper.” What he meant was, there was no doubt that Georgia was expressing something essentially feminine. People have argued whether he did or didn’t actually say that. Clearly, based on everything that happened afterwards, he said something along those lines. My question is whether his enthusiasm was calculated to mirror Anita’s, and thus was a hookup ploy, or whether what he was really saying was, “You can tell a woman sent this because it was stuffed in an envelope without any cardboard or nice protective vellum.”
No matter. It changed everything. In that batch of charcoal drawings, which Georgia called, simply, Specials, Stieglitz saw the future of American art. Georgia was twenty-eight, nearly penniless. Stieglitz was fifty-four, restless in his marriage—and frankly, a little tired of promoting avant-garde European art. Since The Armory Show had been such a cause célèbre, modern art had gained a few more defenders, which, for Stieglitz, was a few too many. He was arguably the oldest and first sufferer of what we now call Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which for most people resolves itself before high school graduation night. But by the time Stieglitz saw Georgia’s charcoal drawings, photography had become respectable, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Stieglitz loathed museums) had purchased its first piece of post-Impressionism, Cézanne’s Hill of the Poor (View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph); clearly, it was time to forge ahead into another realm. Like maybe a woman-on-paper realm; an American woman on paper; an old maid schoolteacher from the tail end of the world on paper. Who among Americans had ever seen art that expressed what went on inside a woman’s heart?
How Georgia Found Her Voice and Changed the History of Art, Not to Mention Wall Calendars: Some Lessons on Creativity
Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.
I wish I’d said this,¶¶ but in the spirit of this lesson, I’m stealing it. The best art comes from knowing the best stuff to steal from other people. This is known as having influences, and Georgia had a ton, even though later in life she would deny she’d had any. She was a magpie. She had a natural habit of absorbing anything and everything that would prove useful to her in her quest to express that for which she had no words, for making her “unknown known.” Her influences were far-reaching and random:
Alon Bement (a teacher who was a disciple of someone else)
Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (a book)
Art Nouveau (a craft movement)
Music (another art form, which she felt was superior to painting)
The neck of her violin (a common shape)
The bright white primer the neighbor in the apartment across the way used to prime his own canvases (the fruit of voyeurism)
Whatever nature thing was currently floating her boat (trees, stones, mountains, sunsets, etc.)
The thing is not to try to do something brand-new, which is impossible, but to steal the best stuff—defined as that which really speaks to you—then toss it into the VitaMix blender of your consciousness, take a walk (O’Keeffe was a big fan of what she called tramping), and then come back and have at it.
And while I’m on the subject of having at it:
Paint the headache.
I’m relieved to report that Georgia did not work every blessed day of the Lord. Sometimes you read about these people. They do their thing seven days a week for forty-seven years. They show up in their studio at seven a.m. and don’t leave until midnight, even on Christmas. I’m convinced that the only reason people no longer read Trollope*** is because they hear about how he wrote every morning before he went to work at the post office, and how, if he finished one epic novel during his writing hours, he simply grabbed a new piece of paper and started a new one. His productivity is so off-putting that we’d rather see what’s going on over at gofugyourself.com.
But Georgia was a proto slacker. She would go through phases when she would work every day, but there were days and weeks when she would read, spend hours tramping around outside, write letters, sew, and play dominoes with the cowboys. When she was at the height of her fame, she spent an inordinate amount of time doing housework, as Stieglitz’s domestic skills were diametrically opposed to his genius for discovering great artists.
But when Georgia worked, she worked her ass off.
During her first stint at the Art Students League, when she was a mere babe of twenty, she learned and absorbed a lesson from William Merritt Chase that would serve her well for the length of her long life: Paint a picture a day. The idea was a multifaceted lesson of genius. Painting a picture a day trains you to:
a) not take your work or yourself too seriously;
b) capture the energy that led you to paint this particular thing in the first place;
c) loosen up (you’ve only got a day, so no fussing around);
d) remember there are more where this one came from (there’s always tomorrow); and
e) love the process; the enjoyment you had painting that kitten in a basket is more valuable than the painting itself.
I learned (e) when I took a life drawing class at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. The only thing I remember about it, aside from the fac
t that the teacher looked like Tom Petty (to the degree that now, in my memory, the class was taught by Tom Petty), is that at the end of every class, we threw away everything we’d drawn that day. It was mind-blowing. We’d work with gusto for three hours, then cackle like maniacs as we ripped our drawings in two and stuffed them into a garbage can, while Tom Petty sat at the back of the room and chain-smoked. Over beer and pizza after the last class, everyone agreed that this was the best art class they’d ever taken.
A year later I ran into one of the other students in Tom’s class at—yes—the gift shop at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and he said that Tom Petty had died. That he’d been living with terminal lung cancer during our class. I still ponder his lesson plan: Was he trying to teach us that process is all that matters, or that everything turns to shit, so you might as well have a hand in hastening the process, or, some standard-issue carpe diem thing? And, more important, why the chain-smoking?
Georgia, had she been into discussing ideas, would have probably come down on the side of process-is-what-matters. Once she was immersed in a mad art-making phase, she kept at it until she felt as if she’d gone as far with the theme as she possibly could. “I have a single-track mind,” she said, “I work on an idea for a long time. It is like getting acquainted with a person. And I don’t get acquainted easily.” Which explains why there are series of poppies, calla lilies, jimsonweed, iris, New York skyscrapers, cow skulls, black crosses, doors in adobe walls, clouds, and pink-and-blue vulviform abstractions known informally as “what the gynecologist saw.”
Once, during the mad phase at the end of 1915, when she was drawing every night on the floor on her hands and knees, she had a roaring headache. Someone else (me) would use this as an excuse to take three Advil and settle in for a night of What Not to Wear. But Georgia thought, “I feel like my brains are going to explode all over the inside of my cranium, so why not work with it?” And that’s what Drawing No. 9 (1915) looks like. (You could also argue that it looks like what it feels like the moment before the explosion.)
As anyone who has ever had a migraine will tell you, this is realism—not some lady in a big hat sitting in a rowboat. Georgia would express similar views in an interview in the New York Sun after she had become O’Keeffe: Nothing is less real than realism.
The lost art of sublimation.
This will be the most unpopular lesson in the book; no offense taken if you feel the need to skip ahead to the section on How to Be a Man Magnet (hint: It has nothing to do with your shoes) or How to Avoid Looking Like a Starving Artist (hint: It has everything to do with your shoes).
You can’t always get what you want. So said the poet Jagger, at a time in American history when his college-educated, fringe-vest-wearing fan base was getting pretty much everything it wanted, compared to young people in, say, 1914, the year Georgia met and fell in grown-woman love with Arthur Macmahon.
She’d met Macmahon in the summer of 1915, during one of her teaching stints at the University of Virginia. He was a handsome, soft-spoken political science professor from Columbia University, teaching government at UV summer school. He was entranced by Georgia, her love of nature, her sensual interest in leaves and flowers, her mania for tramping through the piney woods, her long, elegant fingers.
Then, like summer romances since the world began, this one ended. He went back to New York. Before he left he made some noise about her joining him in Manhattan, but then he left and she didn’t hear from him. Frustrated by his silence, she wrote to him, admitting that she wasn’t into game-playing like so many women; she wanted to write to him, so she did.
The exchange of smokin’ letters began. But Macmahon was a graduate of the Stop it Some More, Stop it Some More School of Courtship. He ran hot and cold. Georgia would receive a letter that gave her hope for their romance, and she’d zip one back to him. Then, nothing. It was the 1915 equivalent of The Phone Did Not Ring. She would worry that she’d been too forward, that writing that thing about not playing games like other women was a big mistake. Was she an idiot? Why did she say that? Then, she’d receive a letter from him. Hooray! He’d talk about perhaps going away together to a cabin in the woods, then instead of asking her, switch topics and recommend that she read Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labor. She was beside herself.
Then, “like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky,”††† Macmahon wrote and invited himself to visit her in Columbia for Thanksgiving. She was elated. He showed up a day late, but she put that behind her. They talked. They walked in the piney woods. She dared to take her shoes off and dabble her feet in a stream, while still wearing her stockings. Then, probably, they had sex.
I wish it all didn’t come down to nookie. Who Georgia slept with is none of our business. We’re not the village elders in one of those barbaric cultures who insist on waving bloodied sheets out the window the morning after the wedding night. Still, after this weekend, when Macmahon returned to New York and resumed his maddening passive-aggressive Stop It Some More ways, Georgia, delirious with the memory of their presumably hot time together, frustrated by his mixed messages, started in on the group of charcoal drawings that would capture the eye of Stieglitz and change her life.
If Georgia had lived, say, now, she would not have poured her raging heart into her work. She would have rolled up her sleeves, Googled “How to get and keep your man,” sprung for a weekend workshop on applying the principles of The Secret to her situation, moved to New York, waxed the proper body hair, found out which Power Yoga class Arthur frequented, and arranged to accidentally bump into him. In short, she would have found a way to make him hers!
Georgia was not the only one to sublimate her roiling unhappiness and frustration into her work. Sublimation is not just a woman thing. Stieglitz’s entire early career was also one long adventure in sublimation.
Without putting too fine a point on it, Stieglitz had married his wife, Emmeline “Emmy” Obermeyer, for money. She was the heiress to a brewing fortune, and by 1893, the year they were married in a restaurant on Fifth Avenue, it had become clear to Stieglitz’s father, Edward, that his eldest son was going to need a sugar mama if he was to survive. A deal was struck: Her trust fund would pay for their bourgeois upper-middle-class lifestyle, and Edward would settle enough money on him so that he could pursue his photography.
Since Stieglitz was adamant in his refusal to sell his photographs, or work for magazines, or take commissions for fear his art would be compromised by the quest for filthy lucre, and since every enthusiasm that entered his head demanded its own little avant-garde magazine, and since he could barely get out of bed in the morning if he didn’t have a gallery to go to, where he could hector people, Emmy’s money wound up paying for more or less everything.
Moreover, Stieglitz wasn’t really interested in being a husband, in the traditional sense of the word. On their honeymoon, he left his wife in various hotel rooms around Europe to visit galleries or take photographs. Emmy retaliated in the time-honored tradition: She withheld sex. She was really good at it. After a coitus-free year, Stieglitz came down with a bad case of pneumonia, which prompted Emmy to promise that if he recovered, he’d get some.
Alfred and Emmy managed to produce one child, a daughter named Katherine. After her birth they moved to a big apartment on Madison Avenue where Emmy hired a cook, a maid, and a nanny. Meanwhile, Alfred busied himself photographing skyscrapers at all hours of the day and night, in every sort of weather, after which he camped out in his darkroom, producing one turn-of-the-last-century masterpiece after another.
Sublimation is a powerful thing.
Best of all, it’ll never let you down. Are most of us not, at least some of the time, frustrated by our jobs, disappointed by our mates, envious of the slim-ass receptionist at the gym? The good news is, we needn’t fix anything. We need not get another job, a divorce, or strangle the receptionist while she’s restocking the towels. We need only start a blog.
Say yes to no frills.
You d
o not need a new laptop. You do not need to update your software. Whatever app you think you need, you don’t. You don’t need an iPad, or an i-anything, for that matter. You don’t need to clean your study. You don’t even need a study. You don’t need a secluded cabin in the woods. You don’t need a better chair. You don’t need the best hours of the day. You don’t need big ideas, or even any ideas.
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.