How Georgia Became O'Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living

by Karen Karbo

  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¶ 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* 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.

  Instea
d, 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.

  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. Schooltea
chers 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.