How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (6 page)

I haven't lost track of the lesson: Live at the tail end of the world. I wish I was the kind of person who could recommend, in good conscience, and with absolute authority, that you should sell your house in Atlanta or Petaluma or Cherry Hill and move to the modern-day equivalent of Columbia, South Carolina, where people are existing rather than living, and there's no one worth knowing and nothing going on, the better to write, paint, sculpt, compose a song, storyboard a movie, create the new social networking paradigm, or devote yourself to something else that has currency in your inner world, but I am not that person. For one thing, I know how much it costs to hire movers, not to mention the giant garbage bags in which you jam all the stuff going to Goodwill. I know that you might have a partner or spouse with a good job (with benefits!) and kids that are clam-happy in school. In other words, it's a lesson with a big price tag, and those are a lot harder to implement than, say,
Think happy thoughts.

But it hardly matters if you pull up stakes in Beaverton or Provo or Silver Springs; there is no tail end of the world left anyway. In the Maldives, the most enchanting tail-end-of-the-world island nation on earth, the tallest thing in the country is a palm tree, and the most common cause of death is getting beaned by a falling coconut. The nearest college is five hundred miles away and across the Laccadive Sea in Sri Lanka. In 2005 I stayed at a resort with over-water bungalows, where you could stand on your deck and glimpse baby blacktip reef sharks and silky stingrays gliding over the pale sand beneath your feet. You
could
do this: Most of the guests preferred to wait in line at the computer in the “business center,” where they could check their e-mail, look up the lyrics to “The Pina Colada Song,” and comparison-shop for Frye boots. I know this because I was one of them.

These days, if you want to live at the tail end of the world, you must get off the Internet. You must disable your connection, put down your smartphone, stop checking whatever it is you're checking. Like O'Keeffe, however, I'm pragmatic. I realize that the longest you can be expected to live at the web-less tail end of the world is about ten hours at the outside, and that's only if you're having open-heart surgery. I know it's difficult. During the writing of this paragraph, I checked my Facebook newsfeed using the android phone app several times. It's pure habit, like fingernail biting. I have no idea why I do this, other than to escape the anguish of following a thought to its conclusion (I'm lost, I'm floundering, I'm in a muddle . . .).

In case you suppose that I'm keeping up with the interesting doings of close friends, or my daughter who's away at college,
¶¶
this is not the case. For some reason the Facebook phone app does not display the same newsfeed I see on my laptop; rather, this newsfeed contains only the most banal updates from the most boring friends on my list. You know: those compulsive updaters who post pictures of their pesto, divulge their favorite wart-removal remedy, how far they ran today, what the doctor said, how much they loved the love theme from
Titanic,
or that Jenn is going to be meeting Zack at Applebee's. It's as if I'm part of some secret digital experiment to see how often people log in to check up on people they hardly know and couldn't care less about—indeed, people they find irritating and would avoid in real life.

I suspect it may be more difficult for women to disconnect than men. We are, after all, the gender that is hardwired to forge connections. Ping! An e-mail drops in our box and our double XXs go all shivery, anxious to respond. Over the last several years, we've come to expect shorter and shorter response times. E-mail has become harder to ignore. Now, if you don't e-mail someone back that day, they'll assume you died in a fiery crash. Facebook messages and notifications fall under this heading, and don't get me started on Twitter. If being unable to disconnect has derailed our collective trains of thought, Twitter—which by its very nature demands a continuous state of receptivity to every random idiot thought of a stream of utter strangers—has destroyed the train completely, leaving us with single freight cars with nothing in them but an old hobo of a germ of a notion dozing in the corner.

Even if you don't want to become a painter whose work winds up in every major museum in America and revolutionizes modern art, but only want to write a poem or two, or figure out how best to plant your garden, or figure out how to throw an original birthday party for your beloved—turn off the computer, and leave your phone at home.

If there's any doubt about this, look at the online lives of the most creative, innovative, groundbreaking creators and thinkers out there. Does David Sedaris even have a website?

It would be unfair to press this lesson on you without offering a few tips on how to accomplish this.

1. Forget the apps (especially Jewels, which has reduced my own IQ by at least 20 points).
   
2. Get the dumbest phone available.
   
3. See how long you can ignore your e-mail before someone calls on your landline to see if you've died in a fiery crash. If you feel anxious with all that e-mail piling up, just delete it at the end of the day. A side benefit is that you'll see how few people really care when you don't answer.
   
4. Pretend you actually
   are
   living at the tail end of the world, and can only get on the computer for half an hour a day.
   
5. Read a book. (After this one.)
   

4

MUDDLE

Imagination certainly is an entertaining thing
to have—and it is great to be a fool.

I must stop for a brief art history interlude. There's no need to worry. I dropped my lone art history class in college. I thought I was signing up for the section where you study nothing older than Toulouse-Lautrec's comely whores in their sassy thigh-highs, but wound up in the Venus of Willendorf
*
section by mistake. Beyond that, my art education, aside from my autodidactic love of O'Keeffe, stimulated by the
Poppy
Poster of My Youth, consists of slogging through one of those mammoth biographies of Picasso,
†
buying the DVD of
Pollock,
‡
and power-walking through the great museums of the world.

While we're on the subject of museums, I should also admit that sometimes I'm really more of a gift-shop person. For me, the gift shop is often the reward for having endured the exhibits. My spin through the museum is the five miles I run in order to savor the apple fritter that is the gift shop. I realize I could go straight to the gift shop, but I'm not that much of a Philistine. (Do they even have Philistines anymore, or is that a term straight out of Patsy O'Keeffe's time at the Art Students League?)

So, modern art. It began with the French Impressionists in 1860 or thereabouts, but then there's
really
modern art. The critics of Impressionism thought the work was sketchy, sloppy, and undisciplined, but at least they understood they were looking at a lady with a platter hat and creamy bosoms boating on a pond;
really
modern art, the kind that well-upholstered matrons and stuffy city fathers believed was a scourge on par with Internet porn, can be dated to the time when Georgia was in her twenties, taking a long time to figure out her life.

While she was busy teaching the children of cattlemen in Amarillo how to draw a pony, going about her internal business at the tail end of the world, modern art was elbowing its way into the consciousness of the American culturati. It was slow going. The center of the art universe was Paris, not New York, specifically the salon of Gertrude and Leo Stein. In 1904 the brother-sister art-collecting duo sprung for Gauguin's
Three Tahitians
and Cézanne's
Bathers
. A year later they picked up Matisse's
Woman with a Hat.
§
They'd discovered the manic cubist Picasso, in a modern art league all his own, but meanwhile, here in the States, we considered thirty-year-old French Impressionism, those gauzy landscapes and soft-edged ballet dancers, those picnicking pink-skinned Parisians boating on lakes of aquamarine and cerulean blue, to be all the rage. On this side of the pond we were an art revolution or two behind the times.

By
we,
I mean everyone but Alfred Stieglitz.

I've held off introducing Stieglitz into the story of O'Keeffe because I fear that here, as in life, he'll dominate the “conversation.” The quotes are mine, because it's doubtful the man ever had a genuine conversation; Stieglitz was a relentless, spittle-lipped monologist, commanding every room he entered. Force of nature doesn't begin to describe his personality. Even a hurricane ends, a tsunami recedes. Stieglitz was indefatigable. Every thought that entered his head needed to be verbalized. Here was a man who wrote at least fifty thousand letters, and
hand-copied each one
before mailing it, for his records. Just the thought of him makes me want to take a nap. In pictures, his big, dark eyes hold the penetrating gaze of a serial killer with a credo.

Monographs and biographies as hefty as those dedicated to O'Keeffe have been produced about Stieglitz and his staggering contributions to photography—it was Stieglitz who insisted a photograph should be called a picture, and so it has come to pass—and everything we think of when we think of contemporary art and the way it's exhibited, discussed, promoted, and appreciated. He single-handedly elevated photography from something akin to surveying a residential street for a new sewage pipe to a respected fine-art form; inaugurated the concept of the one-man (or one-woman) show; understood the importance of regulating the market for an artist's work by pricing the work high and limiting inventory; and reconfirmed the suspicion the human race has harbored since Eve held the apple out to Adam: Sex sells. Stieglitz was to modern art in America what Bill Gates is to personal computing: It wouldn't exist, in the way it exists, without him.

Stieglitz: An Enthusiast Like No Other

At this very moment, on the floor of the room in which I'm writing,
Camera Work: The Complete Photographs 1903–1917
(Taschen), at 552 pages an exquisite brick of a book, is flattening one side of a poster.
¶
Camera Work
was one of Stieglitz's passions, an avant-garde magazine devoted to publishing fine-art photography (
fine art
and
photography
being two mutually exclusive terms in 1903), in which he spared no expense and let no one else have a say. It was a typical Stieglitzian enterprise, a forum for new ideas in which no one else was allowed to get a word in edgewise.

Stieglitz was intoxicated not so much by his Picassos, Matisses, and Braques, but by his role as explainer of them. He was there, explaining, years before the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, aka The Armory Show, which introduced thunderstruck New Yorkers to a bunch of new –isms (among them fauve-, cube-, and future-), and was so shocking that City Hall wanted the exhibit closed immediately for promoting anarchy and immorality. The normally sober
New York Times
called it “pathological.” Even President Theodore Roosevelt weighed in: “That's not art!” Most famous among the Not-Art was Marcel Duchamp's
Nude Descending a Staircase
, which one wag described as “an explosion in a shingle factory.”

Georgia knew Stieglitz the way every art student in New York knew him: from his gallery, 291—a small room with gray walls, heavy brown woodwork, and a skylight. In 1908, when Georgia was Patsy, the fun-loving girl at the Art Students League, she trekked over to 291 with a gaggle of other students to see Stieglitz's exhibit of racy Rodin sketches.
**
In 1914, during her stint at Columbia University's Teachers College, she visited 291 to see Stieglitz's exhibitions of works by Braque, Picasso, and the out-there American abstract watercolorist, John Marin.

Visiting 291 was not like visiting an ordinary gallery, where the gallerist sits at a desk in the back in his Italian loafers, glancing up only long enough to see if you look as if you have the money to buy anything. Stieglitz was more of a lying-in-wait kind of guy. He'd position himself in the middle of the small, square room and pounce on his visitors, goading them into saying something ignorant about the art so he could educate them. It was not unusual for his impromptu lectures to last an entire afternoon.

No one who visited 291 escaped Stieglitz's notice. He was extremely interested in young women, except for Patsy O'Keeffe, who was lanky, reserved, standoffish, and nobody's fool. She was a laconic daughter of the Midwest. She believed in doing, not saying; she believed in making art, not blathering about it. Stieglitz, in her opinion, was a blatherer. Plus, if his behavior toward her friend Anita Pollitzer
††
was any indication, he also stood too close and asked too many personal questions, somewhat creepy for a guy who was twenty-four years older than O'Keeffe, thirty-one years older than Pollitzer. Yes, yesterday's lecher is today's sex addict.

I realize I haven't portrayed the father of modern photography (also the father of a daughter, Kitty, with whom he had a troubled, distant, and tragic relationship) in a favorable light. I'm leaving that to whoever writes
How Alfred Became Stieglitz
. We are on Team O'Keeffe. He can find his own apologist.

Still, O'Keeffe knew that when it came to art, Stieglitz's opinion was the one that mattered. There's a mini lesson in here: Always aim high. In October 1915, while Georgia wondered, fought, and thought alone in South Carolina, she wrote in a letter to Anita, “I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like some thing—anything I had done—than anyone else I know of.” It's astonishing how one poorly punctuated sentence can change a person's life.

During this time Georgia had a habit of sending drawings to her friends. She was working in charcoal at the time. Every biography of O'Keeffe mentions this, the sending of the pictures, but there are no details about how this was accomplished. Charcoal is sidewalk chalk for the arty, the smearyest art material there is. Did she send them in a flat envelope between two pieces of cardboard, protected by a sheet of nice vellum? Anita spoke of receiving the “batch”
‡‡
and swooning with joy at Georgia's breakthrough—tucking them under her arm (!) and hurrying out to a performance of
Peter Pan
at the Empire Theater,
§§
after which she re-tucked them under her arm and raced over to 291, where she found Stieglitz. It was New Year's Day and his birthday, so naturally he was working.

What happened next is the stuff of modern art lore: Anita, whom Stieglitz once called
my dear little friend
in a letter he wrote in response to her letter to him (asking whether he might send some issue of
Camera Work
to her friend, Miss O'Keeffe), gazed at Georgia's voluptuous and otherworldly swirls and pronounced, “Finally, a woman on paper.” What he meant was, there was no doubt that Georgia was expressing something essentially feminine. People have argued whether he did or didn't actually say that. Clearly, based on everything that happened afterwards, he said something along those lines. My question is whether his enthusiasm was calculated to mirror Anita's, and thus was a hookup ploy, or whether what he was really saying was, “You can tell a woman sent this because it was stuffed in an envelope without any cardboard or nice protective vellum.”

No matter. It changed everything. In that batch of charcoal drawings, which Georgia called, simply,
Specials
, Stieglitz saw the future of American art. Georgia was twenty-eight, nearly penniless. Stieglitz was fifty-four, restless in his marriage—and frankly, a little tired of promoting avant-garde European art. Since The Armory Show had been such a cause célèbre, modern art had gained a few more defenders, which, for Stieglitz, was a few too many. He was arguably the oldest and first sufferer of what we now call Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which for most people resolves itself before high school graduation night. But by the time Stieglitz saw Georgia's charcoal drawings, photography had become respectable, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Stieglitz loathed museums) had purchased its first piece of post-Impressionism, Cézanne's
Hill of the Poor (View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph)
; clearly, it was time to forge ahead into another realm. Like maybe a woman-on-paper realm; an American woman on paper; an old maid schoolteacher from the tail end of the world on paper. Who among Americans had ever seen art that expressed what went on inside a woman's heart?

How Georgia Found Her Voice and Changed the History of Art, Not to Mention Wall Calendars: Some Lessons on Creativity

Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

I wish I'd said this,
¶¶
but in the spirit of this lesson, I'm stealing it. The best art comes from knowing the best stuff to steal from other people. This is known as having influences, and Georgia had a ton, even though later in life she would deny she'd had any. She was a magpie. She had a natural habit of absorbing anything and everything that would prove useful to her in her quest to express that for which she had no words, for making her “unknown known.” Her influences were far-reaching and random:

Alon Bement (a teacher who was a disciple of someone else)

Wassily Kandinsky's
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
(a book)

Art Nouveau (a craft movement)

Music (another art form, which she felt was superior to painting)

The neck of her violin (a common shape)

The bright white primer the neighbor in the apartment across the way used to prime his own canvases (the fruit of voyeurism)

Whatever nature thing was currently floating her boat (trees, stones, mountains, sunsets, etc.)

The thing is not to try to do something brand-new, which is impossible, but to steal the best stuff—defined as that which really speaks to you—then toss it into the VitaMix blender of your consciousness, take a walk (O'Keeffe was a big fan of what she called
tramping
), and then come back and have at it.

And while I'm on the subject of having at it:

Paint the headache.

I'm relieved to report that Georgia did not work every blessed day of the Lord. Sometimes you read about these people. They do their thing seven days a week for forty-seven years. They show up in their studio at seven a.m. and don't leave until midnight, even on Christmas. I'm convinced that the only reason people no longer read Trollope
***
is because they hear about how he wrote every morning before he went to work at the post office, and how, if he finished one epic novel during his writing hours, he simply grabbed a new piece of paper and started a new one. His productivity is so off-­putting that we'd rather see what's going on over at ­gofugyourself.com.

But Georgia was a proto slacker. She would go through phases when she would work every day, but there were days and weeks when she would read, spend hours tramping around outside, write letters, sew, and play dominoes with the cowboys. When she was at the height of her fame, she spent an inordinate amount of time doing housework, as Stieglitz's domestic skills were diametrically opposed to his genius for discovering great artists.