How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (5 page)

BOOK: How Georgia Became O'Keeffe
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Recuperating is a lost art. A hundred years ago people like Marcel Proust spent their entire lives recuperating. Now, we have TheraFlu. The next time you're sick, stay in your bathrobe for two days longer than you feel you have any right to. Think of it as recuperation for the mind. Georgia recuperated. Then, a bit of luck: Her old art teacher at Chatham Episcopal, Miss Willis, hankered for a sabbatical and asked Georgia if she'd step in for her. The final piece of the lesson on taking time to recuperate is knowing when it's time to get out of your bathrobe, and on with it.

Drink someone else's lemonade.

Yes, the lemons again; if you were a young woman in the early part of the last century, these metaphorical lemons were part of life. This time they belonged to Georgia's sisters, Ida and Anita.
†

In 1912 the University of Virginia admitted men only, except in the summer. Ida and Anita made the best of not being excluded for those few short months, and both enrolled. Anita signed up for a drawing class taught by a beloved weirdo named Alon Bement. Because Georgia was also a weirdo (see footnote), Anita suggested Georgia take the class, too.

Georgia's line of thinking was: Why the hell not? She had nothing else going on. Her alleged true love, George Dannenberg, the Man from the Far West—who'd written in a letter that he had half a mind to show up on her doorstep and take her away with him to Paris—had listened to the other half of his mind, which told him to leave her behind. He was now ensconced in the Latin Quarter, living
la vie Bohème,
and she was stuck in Charlottesville, back to dusting the living room.

She was almost twenty-five and living at home. File under “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” When she was at the Art Students League, during what seemed like another lifetime, a fellow student named Eugene Edward Speicher, who would grow up to be a moderately celebrated and fogeyish portrait artist known for his perfect draftsmanship and methodical compositions—yawn—begged her to model for him. She had turned him down, saying she was too busy with her own work. He had responded by telling her she might as well pose for him, since one day he would be a celebrated artist and she would be teaching art at some girls' school. But even that didn't look like it was going to happen. After Georgia's gig substituting for Miss Willis at Chatham, she applied to teach in the Williamsburg school system, thinking that teaching would save her from having to return to the hellhole sweatshop nightmare that was Chicago.

Williamsburg turned her application down flat.

Georgia showed up at Bement's class and Anita was right. He was an effeminate goofball, who called himself Bementie, and pranced around the classroom in a silk tunic. Georgia adored him, and Bement, in turn, taught O'Keeffe a few things about art that finally made sense to her. It's one of the great contradictions of O'Keeffe's personality: Her devotion to her own intuition was balanced by her pragmatism; if something didn't make sense to her, she saw no point in moving forward. Because of this, she'd stopped painting completely.

Please recall that the thing that turned Georgia off to art in her early twenties was the expectation that the job of a painting was to imitate reality, preferably in the way of the European masters. The subject was the thing, the artist merely a servant of what he saw.

But Bementie brought news from New York, specifically Arthur Wesley Dow, the dean of Fine Arts at Teachers College, Columbia University: A painting was more than just its subject. What went on inside the frame created by the canvas was just as—if not more—important. The composition, the way the forms related to one another, the positive and negative space, should all be balanced in a visually satisfying fashion. And who decided what was visually satisfying? The artist.

Enchanted by the simplicity of Japanese art, and the voluptuous lines and shapes of Art Nouveau, Dow had tossed the dusty plaster casts aside and asked his students, on the first day of class, to draw a line on their paper, thus beginning the process of defining the space. This was pure radicalism in 1912. It was the beginning of modernism, a declaration of independence for the artist. “I had stopped arting when I just happened to meet him and get a new idea that interested me enough to start me going again,” said Georgia, in a letter to a friend.

Bement, for all his vanity and affectation, accurately read O'Keeffe's enthusiasm. He saw the lightbulb go on over her head. After the term was over he asked her to be his teaching assistant. There was a hitch, however; the position required her to have secondary-school teaching experience. The only high school teacher O'Keeffe knew was Alice Peretta, an old classmate from Chatham, who taught at the public high school in Amarillo, Texas. Peretta pulled some strings, and O'Keeffe was hired. It was the first job she'd had in two years.

Amarillo was a cattle-shipping station, a flat, dusty place where railroads crossed paths, smack in the middle of the rattlesnake-infested Texas panhandle. I'm using all the literary self-control I can muster not to use the cliché “middle of nowhere.” But clichés don't spring into the culture fully formed like Athena out of Zeus's head; Amarillo, founded the same year as Georgia was born, was nothing more than a train depot for cows.

Georgia arrived in the middle of August and ensconced herself in the Magnolia Hotel. A more apt name would have been the Sunburned Cornea Inn, or Relentless Crazy-Making Howling Wind Lodge. There were no magnolias for hundreds of miles, let alone any other growing thing aside from the wild grass that covered the plains. In Paris and New York, abstract art struggled to be born, but in Amarillo, Georgia already inhabited an abstract painting. In every direction the low horizon was plumb-line straight, nothing but dun-colored prairie and the occasional collection of dark-hued dots, a herd of cattle in the distance. Every day the sky was the same punitive blue, the sun a blazing lip-blistering orb.

The extreme landscape and weather possessed Georgia, but she also loved teaching. She was still a-swoon with new ideas. She taught her students—the sons and daughters of ranchers and railroad men—the new commandments of art, that it was not just a painting hanging in a fancy big-city museum, but the way you arranged the objects in your life, where you placed a rocking chair in a room or lined up the toes of your shoes against the baseboard. Feng shui had been kicking around China since antiquity, but you can bet no one in the Texas panhandle had heard of it.

When Georgia arrived the new high school hadn't been finished yet, nor did she have any books or supplies. She didn't mind. In fact, she preferred it. As she would her entire life, she used what was at hand. Once, a boy rode his pony to school and Georgia coaxed the animal inside so he could serve as a model for the day's lesson on line and form. “I enjoyed teaching people who had no particular interest in art,” she said later in life, remembering these unsung years.

I'm not the first person who has written about Georgia to try and square this giving, inventive, popular high school teacher with the solitary, secretive, bleached-cow-bone–­loving misanthrope she became in her dotage, but we can't forget that the other thing she loved about teaching was that people left her alone.

To be a woman in 1912 meant to be a wife or not-a-wife. To be not-a-wife meant being an old maid forced to live with your parents or other relatives. Or, you could be a schoolteacher. Schoolteachers were usually also old maids, but they had their own money, could come and go as they pleased, wear odd shoes, and cultivate strange enthusiasms, and no one paid them any mind. Being a teacher allowed Georgia to hide in plain sight. She could get away with wearing her customary black clothes and flat men's shoes, take daylong walks out on the prairie and then come home to the Magnolia Hotel where she would beat windburned cowboys and gap-toothed prospectors at dominoes, because no one saw her anyway
. To live happy, live hidden
, or so the French proverb goes, and Georgia was living proof.

Living at the Tail End of the World

Would Georgia have become O'Keeffe had she taken the job at the University of Virginia? After a year in Amarillo she returned to Charlottesville to work in the summer program as Alon Bement's teaching assistant. She was offered a full-time position that was more prestigious, paid more, and allowed her to be closer to her family,
‡
but she couldn't quit Texas and those over-the-top sunsets that begged her to stop every day and stare. Whatever it was about that bellowing wind, that scorching sun, she could not give it up. It not only spoke to her, but it also made her feel in tune with her true self. She taught for a second year in Amarillo, but was not asked back. Her eccentricities caught up with her; the school board wanted her to use a stodgy but well-respected textbook and she wasn't having any of it. She preferred to use ponies. Or, she may have made one too many cracks about what she considered to be the cloying, dumbheaded patriotism exhibited by the upstanding residents of Amarillo, as they and the rest of the country faced American involvement in World War I. Or, her complicated nature simply demanded she move on. By 1914 standards (she held the position in Amarillo through spring of that year) this failure to settle down signified a failure to launch. It was one thing to be an old maid schoolteacher, and quite another to—well, no one really knew
what
she was doing, including Georgia herself.

For the next six years a list of her addresses reads like one belonging to a felon trying to get back on her feet. New York. Charlottesville. Columbia, South Carolina.
§§
Back to New York. Back to Charlottesville. On to Canyon, Texas, for more teaching in the middle of nowhere.

Of all the Georgia O'Keeffes—the devoted and uncompromising artist, the mysterious much younger lover of Alfred Stieglitz, the iconoclastic painter of erotic abstractions and monumental big flowers, the middle-aged woman in black who put northern New Mexico on the map, the self-sufficient crone with a weather-beaten face whose work was rediscovered and cherished by feminists in the 1970s—this little-known, in-the-process-of-being-defined twentysomething O'Keeffe is the one I cherish.

She moved around because that was where the work was. She needed to work. She was learning the hard way how life is without money. Usually, decisions to take a job or enroll in a class were made at the last minute. She kept her options open, a polite way of saying she dithered until she could no longer afford to. She kept returning to Teachers College at Columbia University in New York, to take classes toward the teaching degree she was required to have, but didn't really want. She always seemed to be one course short of the prerequisite required by whatever institution wanted to hire her. Aside from the feelings she'd expressed in Amarillo about patriotism, World War I came and went like a mid-grade two a.m. earthquake. She hardly noticed. Years passed. She avoided coming down with any more infectious diseases. She owned almost nothing. An excellent seamstress, she made her own simple clothes, including her underwear. In New York she lived in a small, drab room, bare except for a red potted geranium she kept on the windowsill.

In the fall of 1915, Georgia accepted a teaching position at the tail end of the world: Columbia, South Carolina. Columbia College was an all women's college specializing in the training of music teachers. It was small and insular and had fallen on hard times. Georgia may have been offered the job because they couldn't pay much, and her lack of a teaching degree put her in no position to bargain. It mattered little to O'Keeffe: Her idea was to sequester herself there, teaching only four classes a week, leaving the rest of the time to paint. Whatever charms the school and its environs might have possessed, they were lost on Georgia. In a letter to her friend Anita Pollitzer, she drew a tiny, chaotic-looking picture of a jagged hole surrounded by pieces of broken plaster captioned, “Thats [sic] the hole I kicked in the wall because everyone here is so stupid—I never saw a bunch of nuts—It makes me mad—”

She lived in the dorms. She was miserable, and glad of it. Her letters from Pollitzer, who was still in New York, nourished her. Georgia wrote repeatedly that she felt a tremendous vacancy in her life—that she was lost, floundering, in a muddle, and enjoying it; that she was determined to “wonder and fight and think alone.” What was happening, of course, is that, removed from New York, the stimulation of new art, new friends, new teachers, new ideas, stuck in a place where she knew no one, her influences—more about them in the next chapter—could marinate. I'm not much of a cook, but I can tell you that every hunk of meat tastes better when it's been sitting in the fridge in a nice marinade for a day or two. Likewise, most casseroles—by which I mean my chicken enchiladas—taste better the next day.

She wrote about having nothing to paint, about priming canvas after canvas but having nothing to express. Along the way her old mentor and boss, Alon Bement, had pressed into her hands a copy of Wassily Kandinsky's
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
. Kandinsky gave O'Keeffe the get-out-of-realism-jail card she needed. He said, in effect, that the true subject of any painting was the artist's inner world, and that every line, color, and form she chose should reflect that, rather than the “realistic” apple in the bowl, the woman sitting on the settee. Boy howdy and hallelujah.

BOOK: How Georgia Became O'Keeffe
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