How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (11 page)

GOK despised the heavy Victorian furnishings of Oaklawn, particularly a hideous plaster bust of a woman that served no purpose other than taking up space. Judith, as she'd named the bust, stood for everything she hated in the art she'd refused to respect when she was at the Art Institute of Chicago: It was phony, fussy, meaningless, dead. A lot of the furniture was sold with Oaklawn, but Judith managed to make her way to The Hill. One night Georgia Minor and GOK stole the bust and buried it. They did such a good job, Judith was never found.
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7

REBEL

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant . . . making your unknown known is the important thing.

O'Keeffe and Stieglitz, Stieglitz and O'Keeffe. By the mid-'20s they had become a Famous Art Couple. There was no one like them. People began to recognize them on the streets of Manhattan, walking arm in arm in their twin loden capes, or sitting across from one another in a modest restaurant, eating soup. Georgia's black dresses had become uniforms. Sometimes, she donned a black turban.

Greenwich Village was the center of bohemian life, but O'Keeffe and Stieglitz lived in Midtown, and Lenox Hill. When O'Keeffe was first dazzled by Stieglitz, as an art student visiting 291, she had imagined he had money—or at least a lot more than she did. She was a poor student in a rented room, a potted red geranium her only decor. Stieglitz ran his own gallery, published his own magazine, and in hard times was so generous to his artists he practically supported them, buying their paintings when no one else did, and accepting artwork in lieu of commission when they did make a sale.
†

How dazzled Georgia must have been, how relieved. After years of scraping by on a teacher's salary, here was an older man who was obviously successful and apparently settled. Not long after she moved to New York, however, it became apparent that Stieglitz had no real income of his own. During his marriage to Emmy, it was her family money that kept them afloat, which allowed him to invest every penny of his small monthly trust settled on him by his father in his photography. Now, his trust had to support him, and Georgia. This didn't seem to bother Georgia much;
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she was with the man she loved, and was free to paint. She was used to scrimping, and she didn't need much to get by. Also, Stieglitz was a high priest of modern art, and like high priests everywhere it was to be expected that he find money beneath his concern (an attitude made easier to hold since he also enjoyed the support and affection of a large, well-off family with apartments in upscale Manhattan neighborhoods).

Alfred and Georgia lived in his niece Elizabeth's studio for several years, until they were given notice it was to be gutted and remodeled, after which they moved in with Alfred's brother, Lee, and his family, at 60 East 65th Street. Lee's mother-in-law also lived there, so Georgia and Alfred, not yet married, had separate rooms.

When Lee sold the brownstone, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz were forced to move yet again, and took up residence on the twenty-eighth floor of the Shelton Hotel,
§
at 525 Lexington Avenue. It was then the world's tallest residential hotel, thirty-four stories, with 1,200 rooms. It had a solarium, a roof garden, a swimming pool, and three squash courts. Their apartment had pale gray walls and no kitchen, for which O'Keeffe was grateful. In New Mexico, in her dotage, she would take up cooking and publish a book called
A Painter's Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O'Keeffe.
¶
During her heyday, however, she saw it for the distracting time-suck it is, Master Chefs and all the other reality-cooking-show stars notwithstanding.

The woman who'd reveled in the vast skies of the Texas Panhandle loved living in the clouds above New York. She refused to put curtains on the windows. She sat at her easel in her black dress and painted while the sun moved from one side of the apartment to the other. The city roared far below. In that she could be happy at all in New York, she was happy at the Shelton.

O'Keeffe had developed the habit of painting quick sketches of every new place in which she found herself. To Stieglitz's displeasure, she went through a skyscraper phase. It's no surprise, really. When the culturati weren't talking about Freud, they were talking about skyscrapers.
*
From the rooftop terrace of the Shelton Hotel, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz watched both the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building go up. Every photographer and painter in New York was having a go at rendering the amazing structures, including Stieglitz, who felt he hadn't had much luck in capturing their alarming grandeur.

When it came to her work, O'Keeffe was completely deaf to the advice of others. Her first skyscraper picture was called
New York with Moon.
A brown skyscraper arches up from a corner of the frame into a blue sky bisected with rippling clouds. A nubbin of moon peeks out, dwarfed by the big streetlight in the middle of the picture. Like the best O'Keeffes, it appears both representational and abstract at the same time.

In 1925 O'Keeffe's work was represented in a group show:
Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans:
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159 Paintings, Photographs & Things, Recent and Never Before Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz.

O'Keeffe always hung Stieglitz's shows. Her flawless eye guaranteed every picture was displayed in the best light, in the best location, in the best proximity to the other works. She found a perfect place in the gallery for
New York with Moon,
but when the show opened, it wasn't there. Stieglitz had removed it. He explained that after consulting with the Men they felt it was inappropriate. She was furious, but said nothing. The next year, in 1926, she had a one-woman show and rehung the picture.
New York with Moon
was the first painting to sell, for $1,200.
‡‡

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.