How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (2 page)

There's always e-mail, except that e-mail, too, is about to join letter-writing as a lost art. A newsy, content-rich e-mail has too many sentences, and, God forbid, paragraphs. Social networking in all its manifestations may try to pass itself off as the modern iteration of letter-writing, but posting, tweeting, and so on is all about soliciting a response. It's about audience, not expression.

O'Keeffe claimed to have never trusted words. She said that she and words were not friends. To prove her point, she refused to learn how to punctuate. Still, every day for most of her life she was writing her struggles, trying to figure out what she was doing, what was important, and how she felt. O'Keeffe and her correspondents were one another's therapists in the time before therapists, serving as witnesses to each other's struggles to locate themselves in their own lives.

In an oft-quoted letter to Anita Pollitzer, the college friend who hooked Stieglitz up with O'Keeffe's early, transcendent charcoal drawings, O'Keeffe attempts to both explain and sort out her mixed feelings about showing her work: “I always have a curious sort of feeling about some of my things. I hate to show them—I am perfectly inconsistent about it—I am afraid people won't understand them and—I hope they won't—and am afraid they will.”

We could write such a thing in a journal, but no one would reply, reassuring us not to worry or telling us she understands. We could write such a thing in a blog, but it's a tender statement, one that requires a loving, supportive response and not an anonymous comment that may very well say
You suck
. Perhaps an ad on craigslist might work. Knitting has enjoyed a comeback; why not letter-writing?

She found a devotee.

One of the reasons O'Keeffe was able to flout the conventions of Canyon with such confidence and ease is because she had Stieglitz rooting her on from New York. Fat envelopes arrived from him daily. He sent her books to read, conversed with her about the work he'd included in a group show at 291,
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closely monitored her current work, and cheered her on every baby step of the way.

On January 1, 1916, while O'Keeffe was still living and teaching in Columbia, South Carolina, before she had moved to Canyon, Anita Pollitzer marched over to 291
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on a whim and showed Stieglitz some of O'Keeffe's charcoal drawings. Legend has it that Stieglitz fell into a memorable quote–producing swoon and gasped, “At last! A woman on paper.” It's doubtful he said this, then or ever, but he behaved as if he did. When Pollitzer reported back to O'Keeffe, it was Georgia who sought out Stieglitz and wooed him with her letters about her work. People who knew her well said that she possessed the nose of a bloodhound when it came to finding people who would champion her art.

The best devotees are people whose interest in you is mixed up with their own self-interest. It's not only what they can do for you, but what you can do for them. Stieglitz was a compulsive educator. Art students used to bait him for fun. They would go to 291 and venture an unlearned opinion about the Picasso or Matisse currently on exhibit, just to see how many hours (five) Stieglitz could lecture them on their poor judgment.

Thus, he required an audience and a pupil, and she was there; she required someone who supported not only her radical approach to painting (how something made her feel was more important than how it looked), but also encouraged her rejection of middle-class expectations. That one day they would fall in love, marry, and wind up driving each other crazy was only to be expected.

She defied all accepted conventions of feminine beauty.

I'm willing to accept that you're reading this book because someone gave it to you for your birthday, or because you like to take a stroll around an art museum on occasion. But even if you don't seek to defy every social norm so that you may pioneer a new school of art and become a personal icon to millions of women and aspiring painters everywhere—not to mention a one-woman tourist magnet for a previously overlooked yet majestic corner of our fine and enormous nation—please nonetheless consider abandoning the pursuit of robo-beauty in favor of accepting—and even celebrating—a few flaws.

With her fabulous rawboned frame, straggly brows, and schoolmarm's bun, her black vestments, man's shoes, and odd assortment of hats and turbans, O'Keeffe was out there. There was no one like her, then or ever.
††
A few months before she left her teaching post in Canyon, when someone mustered up the nerve to timidly ask her why she wore her hair that way, O'Keeffe said, “Because I like it.” Freeing herself from the endless demands of looking like other women released her into a parallel, and freer, universe. After people adjusted to her curious look, they accepted it and expected nothing else.

Let your freak flag fly. Or at least retire your flat iron. You just may gain a sense of yourself as a unique human being, rather than as a mere consumer of lip plumpers and designer handbags. Do this in the interest of your own self-worth.

2

GROW

Where I come from, the earth means everything.

In my previous books I wrote about Katharine Hepburn and Coco Chanel—like O'Keeffe, among the most dazzling, if not
the
most dazzling, female icons of the twentieth century. I deconstructed their lives with my special, somewhat eccentric, fine-toothed comb. I examined the choices they made in their lives, the opportunities they seized, the people they enraged, their stamina, opinions, and work ethic, their panache and style. I imagined that by running their lives through my own consciousness, by figuring out what they did right, and what they did wrong (no one's perfect), I would not only figure out how I should then live, but also, that some of their luster might rub off on me, and by extension, you.

It's a good theory, but the one thing I could never get past was the childhoods of Hepburn and Chanel, which differed so radically from my own (and perhaps yours). Sure, I could rouse myself every morning at the crack of dawn for a brisk swim, as Hepburn did, or eat standing up like a thoroughbred, as Chanel did, but in the end I secretly despaired of ever possessing even a smidge of their force of personality, because our formative years had been so different. Whoever I was, whatever I would be able to achieve, was rooted in the fact that I hailed from the loins of a sensible, hardworking, middle-class couple who lived in the suburbs.

I could never ignore the truth of that old Jesuit maxim,
Give me the boy (girl) until he is seven and I will give you the (wo)man.
Hepburn came from a cultured life of WASPy privilege. Her father was a well-respected doctor; her mother belonged to the Corning family (of cookware fame) and was instrumental in helping women gain the vote. George Bernard Shaw, whom Kate referred to simply as “Shaw,” was a family friend.

On the other end of the spectrum was Chanel, who was born in a literal poorhouse—her name was misspelled
Chasnel
on her birth certificate—to a tragic, eternally pregnant young woman who died when Chanel was a wee thing. Her father, a classic good-looking roué, had split years before, and Coco and her sister were shuttled off to the nearest orphanage. The orphanage was run by nuns, and when Chanel turned eighteen, since she had no interest in pursuing a religious vocation, she was turned out onto the street, without a sou to her name, to live by her wits. We all know how that turned out.

My relationship to their upbringings resembled that of Goldilocks to the Three Bears: Hepburn's was too high and Chanel's was too low. Hepburn's family imbued her with a sense of security and entitlement, providing her with a lot of opportunities and a safe and cushy haven to return to when life sucked. Chanel's “family” taught her to be crafty, industrious, and dead-serious about her own survival.

The childhood of Georgia Totto O'Keeffe, on the other hand, was, if not relatable, at least recognizable. She, too, was from a sensible, hardworking, middle-class family. It was neither too high, nor too low, but just right. Or right enough.

O'Keeffe: The Early Years

O'Keeffe was born in 1887, just outside the beautiful and bucolic-sounding Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, to Frank and Ida Totto O'Keeffe. Frank was Irish and Ida was Hungarian. This Irish-and-Something-Else is a common mixed breed in America; indeed, for many generations (except perhaps the current one), it is
the
mixed breed. Irish seems to have mixed with everything.
‡

Ida and Frank's relationship was typical of its time. It wasn't a marriage so much as a merger, a union rigged to help the Totto and O'Keeffe families, who lived on neighboring farms. The O'Keeffes had leased the Tottos' land ever since George Totto had abandoned his wife and daughters and returned to Hungary, where there was allegedly an inheritance awaiting him. More likely, farm living was not all it was cracked up to be. Isabella, his wife, had moved to Madison with her daughters, where she saw that they were educated and exposed to culture. She wanted them to marry into the professional classes, but when Frank O'Keeffe began courting Ida, she saw immediately that Ida's marriage to him would be a way to hang on to the Totto farm.

The tiny detail that everyone overlooked in the land grab was the one that would eventually derail the marriage: Ida was the daughter of a genuine Hungarian count, George Victor Totto. Royalty! This made her not only erudite, snooty, and uptight, but also determined to make sure that no one ever forgot she had married down when she agreed to hook up with the Irish Catholic farm boy next door. Every marriage has, at its core, an unspoken agreement, and this was Frank's and Ida's. Unspoken but not unnoticed, Georgia would grow up to make a marriage that also had, at its core, several substantial unspoken agreements.

Frank and Ida were different in the way of so many husbands and wives—of so many of our parents, I'd wager. Frank was a softie who played the fiddle, carried candy in his pocket to dole out to passing children, and, while hardworking, nevertheless amassed enough debt to eventually sink the farm. Ida was a prisoner of pregnancy, eventually giving birth to seven children, from whom she always remained a little removed. She was cool; he was warm. She was Episcopalian; he was Catholic. She believed in the value of education, culture, and discipline; he believed in the value of having a really good time.

Does this not strike a familiar chord? One parent is strict, the other happy-go-lucky? One warm and engaging, the other exacting and aloof? One parent says potato, the other says private art lessons in the home of a watercolorist who lives three-and-a-half miles away in the town of Sun Prairie? Ida was determined that no matter the state of the O'Keeffes' precarious finances (farming being the ultimate high-stakes game), her daughters were going to be trained in the demure and culturally approved activity of drawing and painting. Like playing the violin (O'Keeffe sawed away with great enjoyment, even though she wasn't very good), being able to draw was an appropriate skill for a young lady, and increased her appeal as the future mate of someone who, like O'Keeffe's father, couldn't care less about that stuff but was proud of having a wife who did.

Ida and Frank O'Keeffe didn't have much in common aside from their acreage, but during the all-important wonder years of their eldest daughter, Georgia (the only one we care about), that was enough. The household was busy, and with each year became more so. After Francis Jr. (1885) came Georgia (1887), named for her grandfather the Count, then Ida Jr. (1889), Anita (1891), Alexius (1892), Catherine (1895), and Claudia (1899). Whew!

Georgia, as the oldest girl, had her own room in the big white Victorian farmhouse. Her room had a view of Wisconsin's gently rolling plains and apricot-hued sunsets. For a time, during the height of the O'Keeffes' prosperity, her father owned the land as far as her eye could see. This would help explain how, as a famous painter in midlife, she assumed that the mountains and mesas that rose outside her homes in northern New Mexico belonged to her. Georgia started school a year early, and her best subject was recess, where she could (and did) outrun the other farm children.

In later years O'Keeffe would always remember her childhood as being a time of intoxicating freedom, where her love of flowers, landscape, and extreme weather was imprinted upon her. Her family was well-off. As an old woman O'Keeffe still boasted that they had the first telephone in Sun Prairie—but then, O'Keeffe had a tendency to put a good spin on things. Was this denial or determined optimism? Life, then and now, is complicated; it was probably both.

When Georgia turned ten, the idyll ended for good. Her O'Keeffe and Totto grandmothers were farm matrons of the first order. Unlike Ida, they didn't seem to have any conflicted feelings about their roles. With a song in their hearts and a bounce in their fierce frontierswoman steps, they put up the tomatoes and churned the butter, planted and tended the kitchen garden, fed, slaughtered, plucked, dressed, and roasted the chickens, managed the house budget, nursed the sick, cuddled the children, and threw their backs into other turn-of-the-last-century rural chores that I can't begin to name. In their free time
§
they both also painted. Then they died. First Grandma Totto, then Grandma O'Keeffe. The lights in the farmhouse shone dimmer, extended family scattered.

Then, more bad news: Uncle Bernard started to lose weight, began to cough up blood. Two of Frank O'Keeffe's other brothers had died of tuberculosis, and when Bernard finally succumbed, Georgia's cheerful, hardworking dad silently freaked out. He was the only O'Keeffe brother left. He believed he was marked for death. Matters were not helped by the economy (are they ever?). For several years the country had been staggering through the worst depression in history,
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which made everything that was already difficult even more so.

O'Keeffe's Impressively Spotty Education

Her first year of high school Georgia attended the swanky Sacred Heart Academy in Madison. Located in an old mansion on the shores of picturesque Lake Wingra, the school had much to offer Miss O'Keeffe who, at fourteen, had grown into an exotic is-she-homely-or-is-she-beautiful? young woman. The exclusive boarding school provided O'Keeffe with strict convent-style rules (which she loved, the controlled bedlam of her own family, with all those little kids underfoot, being too loosey-goosey for her disciplined ways) and nuns who taught art. After getting off on the wrong foot with Sister Angelique, who criticized her small, dark, and fussy rendering of a baby's hand from a plaster cast, Georgia learned to make her sketches larger, lighter, more expansive. I love this glimpse into O'Keeffe's younger, eager-to-please self. It's one of the lesser-noted aspects of her fearsome personality: She was not completely unyielding. Throughout her life, the pragmatic Midwestern farm girl side of her would rear up and instruct the otherworldly visionary to make the most of the current situation. At the end of the term, Georgia was awarded a prize for Most Improvement in Illustration and Drawing.

Sophomore year money was tight, and Georgia was sent to public school in Madison, where, like fifteen-year-olds the world over, she skated through her classes earning mostly Bs, but was otherwise half-asleep.

Meanwhile, her father thought he'd found a solution to both his growing financial difficulties and fear of disease: sell the dairy farm, and with the capital move his family far away from the place where tuberculosis stalked and killed his brothers—Williamsburg, Virginia. For once, Ida was in full agreement. She was never really cut out for farm living; Williamsburg, one-time capital of the great colony of Virginia, was the home of the second-oldest university in the nation, the prestigious College of William & Mary, alma mater of Thomas Jefferson; and there were bound to be more cultural options than Saturday-night talent shows at the Grange.

Today's Williamsburg, with its meticulously restored Colonial District, cutting-edge Asian/Southern fusion restaurants, elegant wineries, and world-class Spa of Colonial Williamsburg, is nothing like the sad backwater the O'Keeffes discovered when they rolled into town in 1902. The famous college was on the verge of bankruptcy; the rutted, potholed main street was unpaved and smothered in dust; the grand eighteenth-century houses were collapsing in on themselves, like Halloween pumpkins past their prime. With the proceeds from the farm, Frank O'Keeffe purchased a white homestead on nine acres called Wheatland, and a small grocery. The eighteen-room house had pillars, but almost no furniture, because now Frank O'Keeffe was more strapped for cash than ever before.

After spending a sultry summer in Williamsburg, giving the neighbors plenty to talk about—even at sixteen Georgia was a straight-talking Midwesterner who preferred neutral, tailored clothes and flat shoes, her long dark hair pulled off her face; in demeanor, outlook, and style she was the opposite of a Southern belle—Georgia was shipped off to Chatham, an Episcopal, all-girls boarding school.

Chatham was not as fancy as Sacred Heart. It catered to the daughters of the gentry who had fallen on hard times. For some reason, the urge to excel academically had abandoned Georgia completely. She was a gregarious, spirited troublemaker, and had learned that by breaking rules she could draw attention to herself. She was skinny and handsome with her hooded blue eyes, her strong jaw. She eschewed corsets. The only ribbon she wore was at the end of her braid, to keep it from coming undone. She kept a running game of poker going in her room. She stole fresh onions from the school garden, which she would then eat raw. Despite her high jinks, her art teacher, and even the headmistress, recognized her talent. During her two years at Chatham she developed a lifelong habit of working intensely, then slacking off. After serving as the art editor of the high school yearbook, she graduated with the other five girls of her class. The year after she graduated, the school burned down, taking two of her watercolors (one of lilacs, the other of red corn) with it.

June 1905. Revolution broke out in Russia; the first theater dedicated solely to motion pictures opened; Freud published his theory of sexuality. Georgia O'Keeffe was seventeen. Upon graduation, most of her classmates already had at least one marriage proposal in hand, but Georgia's future was unknown. She'd claimed at age twelve that she was going to be an artist, but that was unlikely, the equivalent of a modern preteen girl aspiring to be an army five-star general or an NFL quarterback.

Aside from the highborn Mary Cassatt, daughter of a Philadelphia stockbroker, who had studied and lived in Europe and was a member in good standing of the school of French Impressionism, there were few, if any, American women artists.
*
What there was, however, was an amazing number of lady art teachers. Ida O'Keeffe believed that given the artistic leanings of her eldest daughter, this would be just the career for her, and so in the fall of 1905 Georgia took the train from Williamsburg to Chicago, where she enrolled in the distinguished Art Institute of Chicago.