How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (4 page)

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The best course is the one that leaves my mind freest.

It took Georgia a year to recover from typhoid. If the only brush you've ever had with this disease was enduring mild flu-like symptoms and a hot, throbbing arm after having received the required vaccine before jetting off to Southeast Asia or some other part of the developing world, where the locals die of it on a regular basis, here is a quick overview.

The first week you experience a high fever, headache, and cough. The second week features a higher fever, diarrhea, and delirium, and maybe an itchy and unsightly rash. The third week can bring complications in the form of intestinal hemorrhaging and metastatic abscesses. I'm not sure what that last one is, but you know it can't be fun. All of these symptoms proceed into the fourth week where, if you've managed to survive, the fever slowly abates and you're left, as Georgia was, with no hair.

During her months of recovery she read Faust in a lace cap that covered her bald head and made desultory sketches of her younger siblings—the older ones having all left home to start their lives. Even if she'd wanted to return to the Art Institute of Chicago, in September when classes began she was still too weak to go back, and the family finances worsened with each successive failed business undertaken by her father. The grocery went belly-up, followed by a creamery. There was a brief foray into real estate. Mostly, he was becoming more despondent and alienating the locals with his inexplicable Yankee ways. Ida, her mother, daughter of the genuine Hungarian count, who believed Williamsburg was going to be a step up from Wisconsin farm life (even though the local ladies suspected Frank's Yankee ways, they did admire Ida's emerald earrings), was forced to help make ends meet by feeding local college students. Georgia, in her lace cap, helped.

Life largely sucked, the way it does when you're almost twenty and life's bounty, if it exists, is being harvested by others, elsewhere.

Becoming Patsy O'Keeffe

A year passed, and Ida had saved enough to send Georgia to the Art Students League of New York. The Art Students League was established in 1875 as an alternative to the fuddy-duddy “traditional” art schools;
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it had no requirements for admission, major areas of study (aside from art), or required courses. It was a hippie school long before there were hippies, and Georgia loved it.

When she arrived in New York she was easily the poorest girl at the League, but she didn't care. She was giddy to have escaped the Dostoevskian drama that was shaping up back in Williamsburg: her depressed, frustrated father; her determined, increasingly bitter mother. Her hair had grown into a chin-length bob, the kind flappers would popularize a decade later. It's probably safe to say that this was the first and last time in Georgia's life her hairdo could be considered cutting-edge. For a few dollars a month she shared a room with a fellow student with the sweet, early-twentieth-century name of Florence Cooney. In Virginia Georgia was mocked for her plain way of talking and dressing; in Chicago fellow students and teachers had been indifferent to her familiar, no-­nonsense Midwestern mien; but in New York, she was considered an androgynous beauty with snappy blue eyes, a chic head of curls, a sly and playful wit. People got her. Her fellow students called her Patsy; with her love of dancing, music, and practical jokes, she seemed very Irish. Aside from having to watch every penny, “Patsy” O'Keeffe flourished. She attracted admirers, including a fellow classmate named George Dannenberg, an exotic San Franciscan—she called him the Man from the Far West—who was bewitched by her easy individuality and liked to take her to dances.

Patsy also began acquiring artistic influences, a taste for what to embrace and what to ignore. She despised her life drawing class, but loved her still life class with William Merritt Chase, a famous American Impressionist of the time who later founded what would become Parsons The New School for Design. The eccentric Chase—he wore a black top hat to class—had become famous and rich primarily as a society portrait painter. He believed in O'Keeffe's talent, even though she was at a disadvantage for genius because of her sex.

According to the great scientific thinkers of the time, women could never be artists because an artist needed to devote himself to his art wholeheartedly, which meant days, not to say years, of undivided time and attention. A woman could conceivably arrange such a thing, except that an artist also needed to work from his true nature, and a woman could only access her true nature by having children, and to have children meant a woman would never have the undivided time and attention to devote to her art. Chase didn't care about all that, and proved it by supporting Georgia as a candidate for the League's Still Life Scholarship, which she managed to win, despite her gender. The prize was an all-expenses paid summer of painting at the Outdoor School in Lake George, New York.

In someone else's life story, this would be the beginning of everything coming together. After surviving a life-threatening illness, Patsy had freed herself from her soul-crushing home situation. She'd found her tribe. She'd found a respected mentor. She had a hot boyfriend who adored her. All she needed was a pair of signature boots and a rock anthem and she'd be set. And it was about time. She was twenty, and in 1907, when the average woman married for the first time at twenty-one and died, on average, at fifty-two, this was exactly the right age for a young woman to get her act together.

Fortunately for me, and my search for O'Keeffian life lessons, it was not the beginning of everything coming together. My mother used to say that no one ever learns anything when things are going well, and however well Patsy's life may have looked from the outside, inside she was in turmoil.

Like so many people leaving childhood and taking those first tentative steps into adulthood, Georgia suffered deeply from she knew not what. Because she was a Midwestern farm girl she didn't grumble, but she was unhappy. Her scholarship had been awarded based on a painting of a dead rabbit slung beside a copper pot that looked as if it hadn't seen a good polishing since the first Thanksgiving, done in the smeary style of her mentor, Merritt Chase. In her heart, she knew that if this was what painting was all about—duplicating objective reality—she didn't want anything to do with it. And anyway, there were people who were much better at doing that than she was, despite Chase's encouragement. Even the Impressionists, so up-to-the-minute, so cutting-edge, were still giving their
impressions
of what they saw. The eyes still ruled the day. What about the heart? Was there no room for feelings in painting?

The Lake George countryside was a lush blanket of blooming flowers, the lake itself a sun-kissed sapphire, yet she felt no urge to paint. Instead, she rowed desultorily around the lake with the sensitive, smitten Dannenberg, until one day the rowboat was stolen, and with it, her interest in pursuing a career as an artist.

After her stint at Lake George ended, Patsy went home to dispiriting Williamsburg, with its decaying mansions and cold neighbors. Georgia—no one called her Patsy at home—dusted the living room in the morning and read in the long, lazy afternoons. Because it was another time, and people didn't air their money troubles, Georgia's only clue that family finances were on their way from bad to worse was that when September came, only her brother Alexius was sent to school. Education for girls a hundred years ago was a luxury on par with having a personal trainer or a twice-weekly housecleaner; when money got tight, it was the first thing to go.

Some Lessons for Getting through Challenging Times

Screw the lemonade—seriously.

Sometimes when life gives you lemons, you stick them in the fridge and forget about them, until one day months later you're cleaning out the vegetable drawer (because every time you open the door something smells), and lo and behold, you discover an old bag of radishes with liquefied greens, and while times may be challenging, they're not
impossible.
You're not a complete wreck; you just aren't sure what you're supposed to be doing next. You manage to get it together enough to sling those nasty radishes into the garbage. Meanwhile, at the back of the drawer you come across these shriveled yellow artifacts, perhaps spotted with white mold. Yes, those annoying lemons. The ones that you were supposed to use for the lemonade you didn't want. My point is, sometimes there's no making the best of things. Georgia may have been half Irish, but she was half Hungarian too (i.e., capable of being dour and petulant).

For all the ways in which Georgia was not like us, in some ways she was. She was given lemons and she did not make lemonade. She did not rise above her circumstances and do something inspiring and amazing. Instead, she dragged herself back to Chicago (gray, uninspiring), moved back in with her uncle Charles and aunt Ollie (nice of them to have her back; still), and proceeded to “pursue” a “career” in commercial art. Basically, she was hired to work in a sweatshop that made drawings for dress catalogs. Georgia's subspecialty was lace collars and cuffs. She loathed it. She wrote in a letter to her sister Catherine that she was making a living, but it wasn't worth the price. Somewhere along the line the legend sprang up that during this time Georgia designed the iconic little Dutch girl
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who famously occupied the bottom half of the Old Dutch Cleanser can, which more than anything reflects our need to rehabilitate this dull and nonproductive time in the life of the great O'Keeffe, to show that the long hours spent bent over that Chicago drawing table weren't a complete waste of her life and talent, that it wasn't a dead end, that something “good”—okay, it was just a cleanser label, but as far as product logos go, it's a beloved classic—came out of these miserable years.

Maybe there was nothing redemptive about this time in Chicago; maybe this was just an awful time to be gotten through. Maybe, to use an analogy from the long-lost Sun Prairie farm, the ground of O'Keeffe's life needed to lie fallow. Maybe, this deadly year of cuff and collar drawing was just what she needed to realize what she
didn't
want. It's all well and good to know what we want to do; sometimes it's just as handy to know what we don't want to do.

Thank your lucky infectious disease.

For someone who lived to be almost one hundred, Georgia survived a number of serious ailments. She was saved from the slow-mo calamity of a career in commercial art by a case of the measles. After two years of grinding away in Chicago, one day she awoke and felt feverish and itchy. It will come as no surprise to you that the first measles vaccine came along around the same time as the Beatles. In Georgia's case, not only did she suffer from a high fever, cough, and bright red rash, but her suffering was further complicated by corneal ulceration (inflammation of the cornea), which made it impossible to render tiny buttons and lacy textures. Once again, she went home.

When she arrived in Williamsburg she discovered that only her father was there, unemployed and living alone. While Georgia had been away, her mother had been diagnosed with early-stage tuberculosis and had moved with her other daughters to Charlottesville, in the dry, cool, and presumably restorative foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Georgia was, among other things, private. She endured a lot of misfortune, and didn't have much to say about having done so. The degree to which she was devastated by the news of her mother's diagnosis is unknown. Frank, her once happy-go-lucky dad, he who loved to dance after having logged in a good twelve hours on the farm in Sun Prairie, was depressed. His life had turned into a walking O. Henry
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story: He'd given up the land and life he'd loved to flee tuberculosis, only to meet it head on in a place he couldn't abide, and that couldn't abide him.

In Williamsburg, Georgia spent several months recuperating. The great thing about recuperating is that no one expects you to do anything. You have nothing but time to sit and ponder. This is the case, then as now, although it's infinitely more difficult to be granted the time to get back on your feet these days. People who beg to be allowed to get over a cold are viewed as slackers, and the sorts of diseases that allowed Georgia's generation the luxury of lolling around on the divan for months on end have been wiped out or prevented by vaccines. Now, we need extreme measures to be allowed a little time to convalesce.

Several years ago I needed surgery to remove a benign nodule on my thyroid. It was an easy day surgery, in at seven a.m., home on the couch recuperating by three. I'm a fairly irrational patient. The week before my yearly checkup—it doesn't matter which one—I'm already practicing living under a death sentence. Even though it ignites an instant feeling of gratitude for my morning cup of coffee and the pink roses that struggle to bloom in the front yard, it's stressful having only six weeks left to live. For this reason I'd booked the operation for the day before Thanksgiving, imagining the place would be empty, and thus less anxiety-producing, the nurses sitting around yawning and playing solitaire on their desktop computers, the doctors placing bets on the next day's football games.

Instead, the OR was so packed there was no room for me in recovery when I was out of surgery. They had to park me in the hallway near the pre-op staging area, which was also full. In the narrow slot between each set of illusion-of-­privacy-providing curtains there lay a woman, hooked up to an IV, entertaining friends and family members there to offer support. It was downright festive, all these women—yes, all women—who were preparing to go under the knife. Why, you may ask, were they all so giddy, aside from the Valium in their IV drips? Because their surgeries were giving them a free pass from mounting the annual eat-a-thon that is Thanksgiving. There was a woman two slots over who said, “Thank God I don't have to make any gravy this year!” She was delirious with joy; she couldn't be expected to be useful the next day, because she was going to be recuperating.