by Karen Karbo
Even today’s young women, who believe feminism is a euphemism for Lonely, Disfigured Troll Beneath a Bridge, would have to allow that this was unfair, ridiculous, and sexist. But we’re all victims of the times in which we live, and the Men were no different. They’d let O’Keeffe into their club on the condition that she stick to avocados, petunias, and abstractions that resembled lady parts. Rendering skyscrapers was man’s work.
Sexism aside, something about this thinking is so familiar, so right this minute. O’Keeffe had, by the mid-1920s, what every working artist/writer/musician covets in our modern times: a Platform, a thing you are known for, which you can exploit until every last person with eyes to see and ears to hear knows that you are the expert on holistic closet-organization techniques, or the inner workings of Hezbollah, quirky sociological trends of your own invention, or pugs. It’s made a certain amount of sense. We live in difficult economic times. If you’ve made a name and a fragrance line for yourself painting like a four-year-old coming off a sugar rush, you’d be mad to start drawing like the grown-up you are. If you’ve had success writing murder mysteries set in the Florida Everglades featuring kitchen utensils as murder weapons and a cross-eyed detective, it would be career suicide to refuse to write twenty-five more. French women have a built-in Platform; they can write about being French women until they sexily inhale their last Gauloise, but see how far the author of How to Breathe In and Out Like a French Woman gets when she tries to sell her treatise on the history of comic books.
These days, we don’t need the Men to tell us what we can’t do. We don’t need them to sneakily remove our skyscraper picture from the exhibit. We’ve allowed the Market to dictate what we can and cannot do; if we’re beneath the Market’s notice, we imagine what the Market would dictate. Unlike O’Keeffe, we don’t have much faith in our own creative instincts. We yearn to find a niche to which the Market responds, and set up camp there for the rest of our lives.
It’s possible I’m simply envious because my Platform is that I have no Platform. Yes, I’ve written two previous books about other female icons of the last century, but before that—well, here’s the footnote.§§
Maybe I’m not being completely honest with myself. Maybe I would love a Platform, but I’m incapable of adopting one, for the simple fact that, for me, familiarity really does breed contempt. Once I’ve written a book about something or someone, I can no longer stand to think about it. The entire subject is like someone I’ve been forced to share a studio apartment with for six months longer than expected, or like the default marital spat, the one you resort to when you feel like having an argument. When I began my book about Coco Chanel, I could think of no one and nothing else. I loved her clothes, her life, her love life, her little hats. I admired her nastiness, I forgave her her Nazi lover, her cruelty to her workers. I wore Chanel 19.¶¶ Now, someone mentions her name and I sigh and think, Oh, her. I’m sure the same will happen with O’Keeffe.
But I do share one thing in common with her: Unlike my savvier and more-successful peers, I’m doomed to follow my interests. It cannot be helped. If someone told me I could not continue to do so, or, if someone said, “Here’s $100,000 a year for the rest of your life to write an annual quirky love story set in the world of NASCAR,” I couldn’t do it. I would have to become a dental hygienist.
Like O’Keeffe, we must say “Screw the Men” and “Screw the Market.” We must follow our instincts. We’ll paint skyscrapers if we feel like it. And when we feel like stopping—she only painted about twenty of them, between 1925 and 1929—we’ll do that, too. And if worse comes to worst—and here she was head and shoulders above Stieglitz, who always had a relative to bail him out—we can always go west and teach school in the Texas Panhandle. We can always make do.
Baby Wars in the Land of Modern Art
Georgia longed to be a mother. She’d adored the public school children she’d taught in Amarillo, and had always felt maternal toward her little sister, Claudia, who, at seventeen, had come to live with her in Canyon, after their mother died. In 1923 she turned thirty-six. If she wasn’t that young, Alfred was almost old. If they were going to do it, they needed to get cracking.
Her desire to have a baby was understandable. Stieglitz’s desire not to have a baby was equally understandable. They’d been at odds over this since the day they’d moved in together, before Stieglitz was divorced from Emmy. On January 1, 1924, Stieglitz turned sixty. He already had one daughter, Kitty, who as a girl had refused to pose for him, who wouldn’t participate in his dream project of documenting her life in photographs, and so they had nothing to say to each other. Once he’d left her mother for Georgia, Kitty refused to have anything to do with him. Stieglitz was scalded by her rejection, especially since he was, as always, innocent of any wrongdoing. Kitty had not invited him to her wedding, in 1922, and in 1923, after she gave birth to a son, she was institutionalized with severe postpartum depression. She didn’t want to see him, and his own brother, Lee, her doctor, advised that Stieglitz respect her wishes and stay away.
Did he need more children to make him feel sad and guilty? No, he did not. Did he need a screaming plum in diapers distracting Georgia from her work? No sirree. O’Keeffe may have been Woman, but she was only one on paper.
To be fair: From the beginning of his relationship with O’Keeffe, Alfred had told anyone who would listen** that he didn’t want any more children, and he didn’t think Georgia should have any either, because it would wreck her career. There’s a god-awful poem he composed in 1923, that includes the lines she carries dawn/ in her womb, which one might interpret as—well, I’m not quite sure what to make of it. Faulkner famously said, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.”††† Stieglitz’s theory was similar: Blue Line (1919) was worth any number of infants. By the mid-’20s, it was apparent that Georgia had accepted her fate: She would be Georgia O’Keeffe, American, with a world class painting career and dawn in her womb.
I suspect that like many women, some of whom do go on to become mothers, only one part of Georgia wanted a baby. The other part thought Stieglitz had a point. She wanted a baby, but she did not want a baby enough. Few women in American history (I have no evidence to support this—you’ll just have to bear with me) have lived a more self-determined life than O’Keeffe. Indeed, most people who admit to admiring her, admire her for this very fact. In the mid-1920s her career was firmly established, and from then until the end of her life, she did pretty much exactly as she pleased.
So why, if Georgia wanted a baby so badly, did she not have an Oops? She and Stieglitz had lots of sex and lousy 1920s-era birth control.‡‡‡ Then, as now, an Oops is a completely acceptable way of starting a family.
Even in the twenty-first century, when condoms are available 24/7 at convenience stores throughout the land, women still get pregnant accidentally-on-purpose. It’s a time-honored tradition, like pretending to love horrific Christmas presents. Girls have also long known something that the social scientists who conducted a study for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy were recently surprised to learn: Most guys are secretly pleased by an Oops. The Oops proves they have strong swimmers. For already-married men, the Oops spares them from many interminable conversations with their women about Should we have a baby? And, if so, When should we have a baby? and Should we wait to start trying until after the pay raise/kitchen remodel? For the unmarried, the Oops forces them into adulthood without losing face among their bros. Sorry, dude, no [fill in raunchy activity from Hangover here] for me tonight! Gotta babysit.§§§
I’m not advocating for the Oops. It displays a lack of character to bring another human being into the world without giving a thought to whether you’re going to be able to provide him with soccer camp, iPods, and SAT prep courses.¶¶¶ Still, I would have forgiven Georgia O’Keeffe for getting pregnant accidentally-on-purpose. There’s no guarantee that the child of O’
Keeffe and Stieglitz would not have inherited her way with the camera and his way with the paintbrush, his nose and her weakness for coming down with gnarly infectious diseases, and the lunatic aspects of both of them (the offspring of many a homely rock star and supermodel have inherited his looks and her brains), but the world could certainly use their genius genes paddling around in the pool.
Had Georgia become pregnant, everything in her life would have been different, but not in the way she imagined. Nature abhors a vacuum, or so we are told. One could make an argument that the moment O’Keeffe fully accepted the fact that she would never be a mother, the war of their marriage began, which made for brief spells of happiness amid a lot of misery, and which wound up propelling her art to even greater heights.
In fifth grade I wrote a paper on World War I in which, overwhelmed by the length of the World Book Encyclopedia entry, I said that the causes of the war were “too numerous to mention.” Here, now, I’m resorting to the same tactic. The fallout of Stieglitz putting the kibosh on a baby are too numerous to include here. Their relationship suffered a serious setback, in terms of grown-up behavior. If there is a lesson here, it’s this: You might as well go ahead and have the damn baby. One way or another, you’ll be dealing with the urge; if a baby isn’t around to have temper tantrums and throw things, the adults will fill in the gap.*** There will be babies in the house, one way or another.
1. Stieglitz made a fool of himself doting over someone else’s two-year-old.
In the summer of 1923, Stieglitz invited his young secretary Marie Rapp Boursault and her two-year-old daughter, Yvonne, to Lake George for ten weeks. Boursault was also pregnant with her second child.†††† Stieglitz doted on Yvonne, taking over fifty pictures of her. In addition, he fussed suspiciously over Marie. Georgia seethed, and referred to the child as a brat. If Stieglitz was so anti-child, why was she forced to mop up the strained peaches and projectile vomit of another woman’s baby?
2. O’Keeffe developed a fierce and irrational hatred for a dumb lapdog.
O’Keeffe’s least favorite Stieglitz sibling was Selma Schubart, Alfred’s younger sister. She was the anti-O’Keeffe, a pretty dilettante who swanned around The Hill in chiffon gowns laden with big jewelry given her by male admirers,‡‡‡‡ batting her eyelashes with coy helplessness. She owned a Boston terrier named Prince Rico Rippe§§§§ that tore around the dining room during meals, yapping and nipping at people’s heels. Georgia was appalled, then enraged, eventually refusing to stay in the house when Prince Rico was there.
3. O’Keeffe did something that was seriously uncalled-for.
More cyclical than the economy is the degree to which kids are welcome in the lives of adults-not-their-parents. When I was growing up in the ’70s, no one wanted their kids hanging around; nothing ruined a party faster than having a kid in footie pajamas come downstairs and ask for a glass of milk. Now, however, to be an adult and not want children around is to advertise yourself as a hater of all living things. So it was in the Stieglitz summer home at Lake George during Georgia’s time. The many children of Alfred’s siblings showed up with their parents unannounced, to run wild and break things for weeks at a time. Once, when there were a half-dozen kids terrorizing the household and Georgia was at her wits’ end, one of the three-year-olds who’d just arrived introduced herself and said, “How do you do, Aunt Georgia?” O’Keeffe slapped her across the face and said, “Don’t ever call me Aunt.”
The Good Wife, O’Keeffe Style
December 11, 1924, was a bleak Tuesday, and also the day of the most cheerless celebrity wedding in modern history. In the office of a random justice of the peace in Cliffside, New Jersey,¶¶¶¶ Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz were married. John Marin was their only witness. Several days earlier, driving to get their marriage license, they had crashed into a tree and had to walk the rest of the way in a downpour. At the ceremony, no rings were exchanged. She refused to say the words honor and obey. There was no reception. O’Keeffe had not wanted to get married. They had weathered the public disgrace of living together and were now accepted as a legitimate couple. What was the point? Especially since now there would be no children.
The point was the mental health of Kitty Stieglitz, who had not yet recovered after the birth of her baby. Her doctors thought that perhaps if Stieglitz and O’Keeffe got married, it would ease some of her anxiety. Her father would be safely married, even if it wasn’t to her mother. Kitty was not Georgia’s daughter, but she was Alfred’s, and so she went along with it.
Georgia’s own father, Francis, from whom she’d inherited her black hair, white skin, and droll sense of humor, had died in a fall from a roof he’d been repairing not long after Georgia had moved in with Stieglitz in 1918. As distraught as Georgia had been over her mother’s death, the death of her father was the death of the heart of the family. Georgia was stricken. She had her siblings, but her sense of being an orphan was absolute. Not surprisingly Stieglitz had been there to fill in every possible gap. She said yes to marriage, even though she confessed decades later that she’d wanted to say no. In any case, their marriage had no effect on Kitty, and Stieglitz never saw her again.
This is so depressing, I’m tempted to forget about offering lessons from O’Keeffe’s marriage and cut straight to home decorating. At least we can all agree that the interiors of her New Mexican houses were chic examples of mid-century design. I feel equally compelled to make an argument for the atypicality of their union, but every marriage is atypical, each one its own nation, with a population of two.
A few things O’Keeffe did that helped hers last:
By the end of the 1920s Georgia was able to support herself and Stieglitz with her art. She did not remind Stieglitz every chance she got that she was the breadwinner, like some people I know.
Once it was done, she never made herself crazy wondering how her life would have turned out if, say, she’d married Paul Strand, or stayed in Canyon to become the Official Eccentric Schoolmarm, or done anything else other than cast her lot in with Stieglitz. Despite his difficult personality, his possibly pathological gregariousness, his perfectionism, his need for control, his compulsion to make love with his camera to every female in their circle who would remove her blouse, there is no record that she ever met a girlfriend for an overpriced Cosmopolitan at an upper East Side watering hole and complained about having made the wrong choice. I suspect that Stieglitz was simply the man version of the hostile landscape and terrible weather that spoke to her soul.
She also found his foibles amusing. The Lake George farmhouse was usually packed with family, friends, friends of friends, and family of friends, plus the random colleague or ten from the art world. On the rare occasions when it was just the two of them, they sometimes found themselves together in the kitchen, doing the dishes. Stieglitz, who had no real life skills, could not manage this. He either dried the dishes and put them back in the dish strainer, or put them into the cupboard while still wet. Georgia found this to be hilarious, instead of a metaphor for their relationship.
She nurtured all that they had in common. It perhaps comes as no surprise that what bound them together was their love of art, their respect for each other’s work, and at the beginning, the receptivity they had toward each other as influences, and their us-against-the-world pleasure. Headboard-banging sex at the beginning of a relationship is never enough, if the only other thing you share as a couple is paying the bills.
She didn’t cook.
It’s a Flower. Really.
Did O’Keeffe have any inkling when she laid her brush upon the canvas in 1922, aiming to paint a big orange-red flower, that she was creating the breakout image of her career? Her first flowers were also orange, immersed in a glass of water. She painted them in high school. O’Keeffe’s love of flowers was complicated. “I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move,” she once said.
There are several stories about how the big flower canvases came to be. In o
ne, she is influenced by the jazzy technological advances of the Roaring ’20s. Radio was becoming popular. Middle-class families were purchasing Model T automobiles. Billboards were springing up along well-traveled highways. O’Keeffe, intrigued by the enormous size of the billboards, believed that in these modern times you needed to shout to be heard, and this meant visually as well. Flowers were so elegant and complex, so lovely. But they were also small—too small for those modern times. Her idea was simple: Make it big, and people will have to look.
Others believe that she was still smarting and furious over the critics’ response to her earlier abstractions, in which she sang her one-note, one-line song: What every woman knows! What every woman knows! What every woman knows! Flowers were such a classic, representational still-life choice that they verged on cliché. The critics didn’t know what to make of her previous abstract charcoals and watercolors? Fine. This is a petunia (Petunia, No. 2). This is a calla lily (Calla Lily Turned Away).
In her flowers you can see the influence of Paul Strand’s mysterious close-cropped pictures of bowls, fence pickets, and typewriter keys, and Arthur Wesley Dow’s belief in the power of pleasing composition and design. The flowers were luscious, feminine, and authoritative, rendered in outrageous hues: lavender, pink, and teal. O’Keeffe yearned to be taken seriously, and yet she refused to make her paintings somber and ugly. She still believed in the aesthetic she taught her students in Texas: that every aspect of our lives should be visually pleasing, even fine art. She stood behind pretty. She was proud, and unrepentant.