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

by Karen Karbo

  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.

  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.

  Forget the apps (especially Jewels, which has reduced my own IQ by at least 20 points).

  Get the dumbest phone available.

  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.

  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.

  Read a book. (After this one.)

  § Like the Art Institute of Chicago.

  ¶ Some others who might have been the brain trust behind the little Dutch girl, listed in no particular order: Maude E. Sutherland of Westville, Nova Scotia; Chester Marhoff, employee of the Cudahy Packing Co. in Chicago; Horst Schreck, who was awarded $2.00 in a national brand logo contest when his little blue and white girl in the wooden shoes was chosen the winner. Mr. Schreck’s family also claims that he designed the logo for Arm & Hammer, clearly unaware that now they were going too far.

  * Do they still assign O. Henry stories in school? “The Gift of the Magi,” about the impoverished husband and wife, is still the best, neatest lesson on life’s injustice. In an effort to buy one another the best Christmas present they can find, they each sell their finest possession. He sells his gold watch to purchase a beautiful comb for her hair, and she cuts off and sells her beautiful hair to buy him a new strap for his watch. The moral of the story is, skip Christmas altogether and splurge on a trip to Cabo.

  † If there’s any doubt about the role personality plays in what we think of as “genius,” Ida mère believed that Ida fille was the most artistically gifted O’Keeffe, and Georgia believed that Anita was the most talented. All of them thought Georgia was weird. Then and now, it takes nerve to be weird—and I mean genuinely out of step with everyone else, not hipster-weird, where you affect the weirdness embraced by everyone else at the coffee shop.

  ‡ This sounds good, but then as now, in the same way that good fences make good neighbors, many miles make happy families.

  §§ During her late twenties, every time O’Keeffe turned around she was in one Columbia or another: She attended the Teachers College at Columbia University in New York and later taught at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina.

  ¶¶ Mark Zuckerberg did a profound public service to the parents of older teenagers the world over: Instead of obsessively calling or texting them to make sure they’re not dead in a ditch somewhere, we can Facebook-stalk them. If they’re posting, they’re still breathing. Thank you, Mark.

  Georgia O’Keeffe

  American (1887–1986)

  No. 12 Special, 1916

  Charcoal on paper, 24 x 19 in.

  Gift of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation.

  © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation

  The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

  Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

  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.