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

by Karen Karbo

  Stieglitz was not for it. Even though the flowers were part of nature, and thus approved for feminine rendering, he despised them every bit as much as the skyscrapers. With every year he grew more resistant to change of any kind. For most of his adulthood he frequented the same tailor, who always remade the same suit; he wore the same shirt, the same tie, the same socks, the same underwear. Every time Georgia ventured out in a new artistic direction, he sniffed with disapproval. He felt she should stick to small, deeply expressive charcoal abstractions like the Specials he had fallen in love with in 1917. He was like the husband of a woman I know who insists she wear her hair dyed and permed in the same tousled, crunchy mess that she sported on the day they met in 1987, and so she does.

  Until the end of the decade O’Keeffe’s shows were populated with big creamy calla lilies viewed from various angles, pink petunias whose stems were submerged in a white glass, orange and yellow cannas, black-bearded irises, white sweet peas, red poppies that fill the entire frame.

  O’Keeffe was never not a minx. She loved playing pranks, even visual ones. While proclaiming that these were flowers, for God’s sake, the most obvious of subjects, she painted their reproductive parts with her usual sensuality. But it wasn’t just lady parts on not-so-secret display; the spadix at the center of her creamy calla lilies was never anything but a jaunty phallus.

  By the mid-1920s her shows were attracting a lot of attention. It was hard for the critics to leave off talking about how everything she painted was, as Stieglitz had suggested years earlier, an expression of some secret feminine voodoo. Someone called her “the Priestess of the Eternal Feminine,” and reference was made in a New York Times review to her ability to channel the superheroish-sounding Mighty Mother. Lewis Mumford, writing in the New Republic, elevates her in a sentence that reads:

  Miss O’Keeffe has not discovered a new truth of optics, like Monet, nor invented a new method of aesthetic organization, like the Cubists; and while she paints with a formal skill which combines both objective representation and abstraction, it is not by this nor by her brilliant variations in color that her work is original. What distinguishes Miss O’Keeffe is the fact that she has discovered a beautiful language . . .

  And so on.

  It seems that for about ten minutes after Mumford’s review was published, O’Keeffe had achieved the kind of serious critical reception she desired.**** But then something happened that would drum her out of the highbrow art corps forever: Women discovered her. And I don’t mean just the occasional heiress who would spring for a picture of a petunia, but women on the street, flappers, who smoked in public and wore short skirts and rouged their knees, the better to leave people with the impression that they’d just risen from the floor after having given someone a blow job. And not only modern working girls, but housewives. O’Keeffe had gone from being the shy schoolteacher girlfriend of the studly (by art world standards) Stieglitz, who made esoteric abstract paintings that communicated to men, on behalf of Woman-Children everywhere, how moving and erotic it was to have sex with them, to a popular painter embraced by their wives and girlfriends. She painted chick art.

  Cheeky New York Sun critic Henry McBride reported, “I do not feel the occult element in them [the paintings] that all the ladies insist is there . . . there were more feminine shrieks and screams in the vicinity of O’Keefe’s [sic] work this year than ever before.”

  Occult. Ladies. Feminine shrieks and screams.

  There goes the neighborhood.†††††

  I wasn’t surprised to learn this. The higher O’Keeffe’s stock rose with women, the lower it dropped with men, i.e., the educated purveyors of high culture. Fortunately, modern day O’Keeffe scholars have worked, and continue to work, tirelessly to redeem her reputation, to make sure she is revered and appreciated by the right sort of people,‡‡‡‡‡ to make sure the people who tack O’Keeffe posters on their walls and buy pretty O’Keeffe calendars for their kitchens, and love the same paintings that the flappers and housewives loved, feel like the cultural riffraff they are.

  I was fortunate to meet with one such Noted O’Keeffe Expert. I wrote a formal request for an interview and submitted it to her assistant, who said she would see if she could arrange an interview for me. The NOKE lives several time zones away from my home in Portland, but when I heard she would see me, I was overjoyed and immediately arranged a trip. I had so much to ask her. As I’m sure you’ve gathered, there are several different schools of thought on the nodal events of O’Keeffe’s life. Take, for example, the Stieglitz photographic portrait. To what degree was Georgia a willing participant? Was she simply a woman in love, and therefore not in charge of all her faculties, or did she know exactly where the pictures would end up, and how they would propel her into the public eye?

  The NOKE ushered me into her office and then sat crisply down at her desk and folded her hands. “What can I do for you?” Everything about her mien made me feel like the doomed movie heroine who is about to be turned down for the loan that would save the family farm.

  “I’m writing a book called How Georgia Became O’Keeffe,” I said, sitting down in the chair in front of her desk. I opened my file folder and removed several pages of questions I’d wanted to ask.

  She actually snorted. “Isn’t everyone?”

  “They are?” This was news to me. I felt myself blush. “A lot of people have books coming out on O’Keeffe?”

  “Well, have you read my book?”

  “Yes.” No. Published last century, her book was out of print. I’d purchased one of two used copies on offer at Amazon.com. It was $40.99, cost of shipping not included, and had shown up on my front porch the day before I’d left Portland. I’d just started reading it that morning, but I’m a slow reader and hadn’t gotten very far.

  “My thoughts are in there,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  We sat there.

  “Um, I also wanted to hear your feelings on the real O’Keeffe. All the biographies have such different takes on her, and since you’re an expert . . .” With each word that left my mouth I devolved: from the college student who studied the wrong chapter for the biology exam, back to the high school student who couldn’t conjugate mettre, to the seventh grader who, pressed into reading a passage aloud in Social Studies, pronounced peninsula penna-zula, to the fifth grader who was, well, a fifth grader.

  “Who do you think she was?” asked the NOKE.

  “Well, a kind of a Midwestern person, a nice person from the Midwest,” I said. “Practical and direct and . . . Midwestern. In that way Midwesterners are.”

  “If you read my book you’d know how I feel.”

  I busied myself making a note to read her book, even though I was already reading her book.

  “All of those biographers are friends of mine, and in one way or another, all of their books are flawed,” she said.

  “I have a question about the sale of the Calla Lily pictures, people seem to be divided on—”

  “My opinion is in . . .” She named the catalog of an exhibit.

  “Okay,” I said. I was davening to such a degree that I was on the verge of banging my chin on her desk.

  “Um, do you feel her most revolutionary work was also her best work, or—”

  “I wrote about that in my essay in the catalog right behind you,” she said.

  “Do you think she painted the flowers—”

  “What bibliography are you using, anyway?” Her voice got higher and louder.

  What bibliography was I using? Shit. All of them. None of them.

  “I’m . . .” I started to say I was currently working from the bibliography at the back of Hunter Unpronounceable-Polish-Last-Name-Philp’s book. I was in a full flop sweat. I was half-Polish—the pre–Ellis Island last name is Karbowski—and I couldn’t even pronounce Hunter’s last name.§§§§§ “Full Bloom,” I said, remembering the title.

  “Are you reading the letters? You have to read the letters. Sarah’
s book is coming out in June.”

  “I have an advance reading copy,” I said.

  “You must read all of the letters. There are 25,000, and you must go to the Beinecke and read them all. How did you get an advance copy?”

  “My agent.”

  “Who’s your agent?”

  “Inkwell Management.”

  “What did you say the title of your book was?”

  I told her.

  The NOKE leaned back in her chair and looked at me, as if recalculating my worth.

  “You must remember to say O’Keeffe was a staunch feminist. People never get that right about her.”

  Georgia O’Keeffe was a staunch feminist.

  † As a result, he amassed one of the largest and most varied collections of modern art in the world. O’Keeffe gifted a large portion of it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it remains the foundation of their American modern art holdings.

  ‡ I would feel slightly duped, wouldn’t you?

  § Now the New York Marriott East Side.

  ¶ As of this writing, only one reader has reviewed the book on Amazon.com. “Rikki” says, “As far as the recipes go, most are either pretty standard or weirdly gross. However, the book seems spiritual somehow and very connected to O’Keeffe. I loved it.”

  * America’s imaginative, optimistic, and grandiose contribution to world architecture—also one of the first symbols of crass materialism and dehumanizing technology.

  †† O’Keeffe noted that of all the “Americans,” she was the only one who had been west of Chicago.

  ‡‡ Roughly $15,000 in today’s dollars. In 1924 you could buy a Chevrolet Superior Roadster for $490.

  §§ Before this trilogy there was a trilogy of YA mystery novels about a seventh-grade girl detective; a memoir about my father; three adult novels, sort of in the comedic literary vein, one about Russian émigrés in Los Angeles, one about a documentary filmmaker in Hollywood, one about motherhood. Also, a collaboration with beach volleyball player/model Gabrielle Reece.

  ¶¶ Actually, I still wear it, but one’s fragrance choice is another topic for another time.

  ** Anyone who engaged in conversation with him for more than three minutes.

  ††† I’ve always been alarmed by this: Does the mother actually die during the robbery? And is the writer robbing her in order to lay in enough Red Bull and Hot Pockets so that he might write his ode? What if his poem is only just okay—is the robbery/homicide still justified?

  ‡‡‡ A rudimentary diaphragm was on the market in the early ’20s; later in the decade, magazines advertised a Lysol douche (ouch), which was supposed to have both cleansing and contraceptive properties.

  §§§ Why even the best of fathers still refer to taking care of their own children as “babysitting” remains an irritating mystery.

  ¶¶¶ It takes the mother of a teenager to say, without a doubt, that your child will want these things, and they will cost more money than you will ever want to spend.

  *** In the form of acting out, yet another Freudian defense mechanism.

  †††† Lest this didn’t sink in: that’s 2½ months of a pregnant woman and a toddler underfoot.

  ‡‡‡‡ One was famed Italian tenor Enrico Caruso.

  §§§§ Also a gift from Caruso.

  ¶¶¶¶ As a divorced man, Stieglitz could not be married in New York State.

  **** O’Keeffe was one of those artists who claimed never to have read her reviews, yet her biographies are littered with quotes from thank-you notes she sent to critics who she felt especially understood her work.

  ††††† The derision continues to this day. Writing in the New York Times on May 31, 2011, columnist David Brooks felt the need to report on an obscure, and frankly dubious, study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior on how hormones effect perception. Women in the first half of their monthly cycle were shown O’Keeffe paintings; one-third of them saw sexual themes. Only 6 percent of women viewing the same paintings in the second half of their cycle saw sexual themes. “The most amazing thing about the study,” opines Brooks, “is that there are apparently people capable of looking at Georgia O’Keeffe paintings and not seeing sexual themes. These are the people who need to be studied.” Har!

  ‡‡‡‡‡ Not people who dropped their lone art history classes in college and secretly prefer the gift shop.

  §§§§§ Drohojowska-Philp.

  Georgia O’Keeffe

  American (1887–1986)

  D. H. Lawrence Pine Tree, 1929

  Oil on canvas, 31 x 40 in.

  The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund. 1981.23

  Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT

  Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY

  8

  DRIVE

  Flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free

  For those of us with parents who were children during the Great Depression, or those of us who paid attention during Modern U.S. History class, the year 1929 looms. In October, the world would go to hell in a handbasket. By 1928, O’Keeffe was one of the most well-known artists in the country. Her yearly shows were well attended, her paintings purchased by dizzy heiresses and a growing number of serious collectors, including Duncan Phillips, one of the next generation of collectors of modern art, who founded The Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C., the nation’s first museum of modern art.

  In Exhibition of Paintings by Eleven Americans, O’Keeffe’s works¶ hung beside those of Eugene Speicher. Yes, that Eugene Speicher—the same boy who was at the Art Students League with Georgia, and who had begged her to pose for him, telling her that she could easily afford the time since she was only going to become an art teacher anyway. When she found this out, did she do the 1920s version of the fist pump? Or maybe one of those dances football players do behind the goalposts after a touchdown?

  It’s possible she was consumed with her career, her painting, her suddenly bumpier-than-usual marriage. She’d had some health issues. She had other bigger and better fish to fry. Isn’t that the way of it? Someone makes us feel like crap when we’re already vulnerable and not making much progress in life. We vow that one day we’ll make them pay! CALL ME NERD TODAY, BOSS TOMORROW goes the popular T-shirt saying. The irony is that once you get there, once you’re the boss, or shown in the same gallery as the self-important twit who’d written you off because you were a girl, you’ve moved on.

  If you haven’t moved on, you should have. Yes, I know. Revenge is a dish best served cold, but that only really holds true for people in countries where much of the day is spent dozing in the heat, brooding. Anyone with a to-do list simply can’t be bothered . . . or she shouldn’t be.

  I went to a big Southern Californian suburban high school where I was the friend of the homecoming queen. I was the perennial sidekick, and friend to all the cute boys who had crushes on my friends. Even my mother wondered why, since I wasn’t bad-looking, I never had any dates. Off I went to college, where I also had no dates. I vowed that one day I would come back and show them! Those girls would have boring husbands, colicky babies, and the ten pounds of post-pregnancy belly fat that went with them, and I would have—well, not that. Since I never had any dates, I would be unlikely to have a husband, even a boring one, and the resultant babies.

  By the time my twenty-year high school reunion rolled around, I’d published two novels. I’d moved away from the Southern California suburb to Portland, Oregon, where I lived with (surprise!) my husband and little baby. Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” was playing, and I strode into that reunion in my purchased-just-for-the-occasion strappy bronze sandals, and I got myself a cocktail and lay in wait for the first person to ask me what I’d been up to. I’d left the husband and baby at home, even though some girls (losers!) brought theirs.

  It happened in the ladies’ room, which was packed with girls-now-women, peeing and primping. Someone asked what I was up to. This was it
. Here was my moment to shine. I would make her feel the way Speicher must have felt upon learning that Georgia O’Keeffe had twice the career he could ever hope to have. But the moment the word writer left my lips, the girl who asked looked away and said, “Yeah, well I mean to read more, I really do. But I just don’t. I have a library card, though.” This happened over and over again. No one wanted to hear about my books, except Mr. Pendell, the art teacher. Everyone else avoided the subject. I had gone from being the friend of the homecoming queen (who looked as beautiful and queenly as ever), to the person on the corner in front of your favorite Starbucks who works for a well-meaning underfunded grassroots organization that saves puppies from global warming, whose eyes you can’t meet and who nevertheless makes you feel guilty as hell. You’re probably ahead of me on this one, but the girls with the chubby husbands and boring babies loved them. They loved their lives.* They didn’t envy my being a writer. Why would they?

  It is unknown whether O’Keeffe ever attended a class reunion at the Art Students League, but if she did, I feel confident in saying that she never cornered Speicher and informed him that she was an artist, and not an art teacher, ha ha ha.

  In any case, 1928 was a banner year for O’Keeffe, despite the fact that the art market wasn’t as frisky as it had been several years earlier, perhaps a portent of the belt-tightening that was to come.†

  On April 16, 1928, a slightly disingenuous New York Times headline read ARTIST WHO PAINTS FOR LOVE GETS $25,000 FOR 6 PANELS.‡

  Maybe one of the reasons “everyone” is writing a book about O’Keeffe, and people remain as interested in her life as they are in her work, is because certain key experiences remain tantalizingly open to interpretation. This is one of them. The sale was headline-worthy because it was the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist. Stieglitz had a dramatic story to go along with the high purchase price: The six panels had hung in a row at her 1928 show. A dashing, well-dressed stranger pulled Stieglitz aside and told him he wanted to buy the lot of them. Stieglitz was flabbergasted. His heart beat dangerously fast. He was extraordinarily picky about who could own an O’Keeffe, and he wasn’t sure this flashy gent met his standards. He threw out a number: $25,000.§ Without a moment’s hesitation, the man agreed. Stieglitz made him promise to display them together, and never to sell them. The man agreed to this as well. The panels were whisked off to Paris, never to be seen again.