How Georgia Became O'Keeffe Read online

  The Art Institute wasn’t chosen for its prestige, but rather for its proximity to the apartment of Uncle Charles and Aunt Ollie, two unmarried, eccentric Totto relatives. In pictures they look Seussian, she with her jaunty feathered hat, he with a handlebar mustache that extended inches beyond his cheeks. Aunt Ollie, who lived to be 102, and was known for being opinionated, self-sufficient, and industrious, was famous in the family for having been the only female proofreader at the Milwaukee Sentinel. Whether or not she was a direct influence on the woman who would become O’Keeffe can only be assumed; Ollie didn’t have a maternal bone in her body, and even though she provided her favorite niece with a roof over her head, Georgia was on her own in the big city.

  Every morning Georgia would put on her long black dress, braid her hair, and take a streetcar across town where she would hunker down in the airless basement studios of the Institute and copy plaster casts of body parts, mostly human torsos. More plaster casts. Ugh.

  The Art Institute was old-school. Inside its immense, cool galleries it was 1880, not 1905. Their idea of modern was paintings by mid-nineteenth-century artists of the French Barbizon school.†† Impressionism, which had already been accepted in Europe, was too out there.

  The classes were taught using the punishing French method: In every class students and their work were ranked. Those with the highest ranking got the best easels and the best location in the next class. Even though O’Keeffe was uninspired, she worked her way up to first rank among twenty-nine students by the end of the first year. But her ability to work the system didn’t make her feel any better. She was searching for something, but she didn’t know what. If this was art, she wasn’t sure she wanted any part of it. All she knew was that art was dead here.

  At the end of the term, she returned to Williamsburg, just in time for typhoid season. Frank O’Keeffe had left tuberculosis in Wisconsin (or so he thought) only to rush straight into the arms of a host of other infectious diseases. Hot, swampy Williamsburg in the spring was host to malaria and typhoid. Within weeks of her return, Georgia was stricken by the fever.

  How to Raise an Art Star

  I’m pretty sure that in 1905 no one imagined that one day millions of American children would hope to grow up to be visual artists, or that, weirder still, their parents would harbor the same hopes. Once, a well-off parent dreamt of having a Van Gogh on the wall, but had no interest in raising the next Van Gogh.‡‡ Parents, in their role as nurturers, want their kids to grow up to be responsible and self-sufficient, to be able to buy their own home, comprehensive car insurance, and high-quality leafy greens—things artists can rarely afford. Unless, of course, your child becomes the next Damien Hirst.§§

  Ida O’Keeffe, who would give the current crop of “bad mommies” a run for their money, had no idea she was raising the girl who would become, by the end of her life, one of the most popular and beloved artists in the nation. I wish I could add “critically acclaimed” to that list of adjectives, but Georgia’s gender, combined with her popularity, especially among other people of the same gender, make that an impossibility. There’s no question that Georgia inherited the art gene from both grandmothers, but beyond that, what was Ida’s secret contribution to her daughter’s eventual unparalleled success?

  The power of benign neglect.

  Georgia was the oldest girl and the second-oldest child, a perfect place in the birth order for flying under the radar. Her older brother Francis was Ida’s favorite, the one she fawned over, and the younger children occupied the rest of her waking hours. For years at a stretch there were two kids in diapers at any given time, which was as time-consuming then as it is now. Georgia, who was quiet and an expert at sneaking around, was left to her own devices. One of the many facets of her genius, manifested at a young age, was the ability to obey enough of the rules to give the adults the impression she was obedient, after which she did whatever she damn well pleased, a strategy to which she resorted for most of her life.

  There was another aspect of Georgia’s unsupervised childhood, something that, as the mother of a daughter, I can barely entertain: Ida thought Georgia, who was angular and tomboyish even as a toddler, was homely. One hundred odd years ago parents did not automatically believe their children were the world’s most beautiful humans; Georgia was even deemed too unattractive to have on hand when company came to call. Whenever there was a knock on the door of the big white farmhouse, she was locked in a room (!) or told to go away and stay out of sight.

  Later in life Georgia admitted that being her mother’s least favorite had hurt her feelings, but she got over it when she realized that it allowed her the sort of freedom she would otherwise never have known. Elder daughters of yore were trained from a young age to be junior wives and mothers, but not so with Georgia. She developed a taste and a skill for entertaining herself, and Ida left her alone.

  For those of us raised in the Time Before Car Seats, or by slacker moms who lacked the necessary ambition/energy/discipline to make sure our lives were an endless whirl of activity, this kind of laissez-faire parenting is reassuring.¶¶ It means that we still might amount to something, even though we had mothers who never managed our schedules or chauffeured us to daily theater rehearsals or stayed up until midnight helping us with our science fair projects. If we’re parents, it means our children might amount to something even if we never went to Gymboree or enrolled them in an elite soccer clinic or made a second career out of finding the right SAT-prep tutor.

  If we are where we came from, then the parenting style known as benign neglect needs to be reevaluated. If O’Keeffe’s epic life is any indication, it seems that the less your parents pay attention to you, the better. If you’re a girl, it’s even better if your mother doesn’t invest any stock in your looks, because then there will truly be no expectations placed upon your lovely beribboned head.

  Notice the term is benign neglect.

  Before I further extol the virtues of having been ignored as a kid/ignoring your kids, and before all you exhausted, overcommitted, overinvolved-by-necessity ** moms write me an e-mail thanking me for allowing you to tell your kids to revive that once-popular parental directive, Go play on the freeway, do consider this: Ida O’Keeffe did not completely ignore her future genius. There were the previously-noted drawing, painting, and music lessons; also, Ida neither encouraged nor discouraged her daughters, thereby teaching them that their art was their own, and that they should aim for excellence only because they wanted to.

  Ida may not have pushed Georgia, but she did place her daughter’s early drawings and paintings in ornate gilt frames that signified the importance of her efforts. Later, O’Keeffe the daughter, the modernist and minimalist, would snort with derision at those ridiculous fancy frames, calling them pretentious. They were pretentious. They were Ida pretending her daughter was already an artist who made paintings suitable for framing.

  And what, we may ask, did Georgia do with all this free time on her hands, this time when no one was paying attention to her? Given that at around age twelve she told a girl at school that she was going to become an artist, you might imagine that she spent hours in the shade of a sugar maple, her white-­stockinged legs tucked beneath her, sketching a purple coneflower or wild petunia. But O’Keeffe was no Picasso-style prodigy, who at age nine completed his first full-scale painting. I’m here to report that the nation’s greatest woman artist engaged in the most ordinary activity known to girls: She played with dolls. Yet more evidence that whatever our gifts might be, they need not reveal themselves before our fourteen-year molars.

  Georgia had a wooden dollhouse around which she fashioned a complex empire. A shingle in a dishpan was a boat on a lake. The apron of green lawn that surrounded the farmhouse was an endless pasture for her doll family’s imaginary herd of horses. She sewed tiny, perfect clothes for her genderless china dolls, made them female and male alike. She was di
ssatisfied with the pants for the boy doll. In the same way her mother banished her because of her own unacceptable looks, so too did Georgia pretend the husband doll was never around, so she wouldn’t have to look at his fat legs.

  What this meant for Georgia (and for us) was that she became comfortable living in and ruling over her own world. This, as any enthusiastic New York Times Op-Ed page–­contributing expert on child development and the underestimated value of play, as well as a number of behavioral science people at MIT, will tell you, is the advantage of tossing your kid out the front door and telling her to find something to do. Hour by hour, she becomes the creator of her own vision and—value added!—she becomes confident in her ability to create. There was no one around to either approve or disapprove of Georgia’s dollhouse empire. And so she developed the habit, at a young age, of only pleasing herself. She became comfortable with the idea of herself as an innovator.

  The power of adventure stories.

  Georgia’s mother was the opposite of a hugger. By today’s standards she’d be considered cold and withholding. The fact that Georgia learned how to cuddle at all (not really) was because of Annie, a boisterous German “hired girl” who seemed to prefer the arrow-straight, self-reliant Georgia to the other children, and didn’t hesitate to envelop her in a big embrace whenever Georgia demanded a hug.

  But what Ida lacked in warmth, she made up for in the avid reading of stories. It was acceptable maternal behavior, but with the required cultural/intellectual spin. Because Francis Jr. was the favorite (and also had poor eyesight), Ida picked books that he would find most entertaining, specifically James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, featuring the intrepid Natty Bumppo, a fearless white guy raised by Indians, who was a master of the long rifle, loved and respected the wilderness, and had many exciting adventures in the middle of nowhere. There is no evidence that Francis Jr., who would grow up to become a stuffy New York architect, absorbed the spirit and daring of those stories. Instead, it was Georgia who was smitten. Deep into her old age O’Keeffe traced her devotion to the wildest that nature had to offer to being forced to sit and listen to her mother read. The lesson, I suppose, is to be careful what you read to your kids. You may inspire the least likely to become masters of the long rifle.†††

  The only discipline is self-discipline.

  Aside from her aptitude for winning foot races, Georgia’s grammar school teacher noticed something else: her pupil’s self-discipline. Unlike every other child who, when offered the rare treat of an oatmeal cookie, gobbled it down, Georgia ate around the raisins, saving her favorite part for last. Is it possible to teach a child to save the raisins?‡‡‡

  A literary expert friend once told me that the way to teach your child to love and respect reading is not to read to them, but rather to refuse to allow yourself to be interrupted while you’re reading. Might this be applied to teaching self-­discipline? The next time you eat an oatmeal cookie with your child, save the raisins for last. See what happens. You will probably wind up as a post on your child’s Facebook page, but it’s worth the risk.

  ‡My own mixture: Richard Karbowski and Joan Mary Sharkey.

  §Yes, these women had free time. If there was ever a reason to get rid of cable, this may be it.

  ¶The year 1893 marked the worst depression the nation had ever known. Georgia was six. The banks and the railroad industry collapsed, credit became scarce, unemployment was as high as 19 percent during the worst of it, hardworking middle-class folks were forced to walk away from their mortgages, etc., etc. Sound familiar?

  *By which I mean women who made their living by their art. There were many women, old and young, who loved to paint, and did so to entertain and enrich themselves, without a thought to selling their work. Working in watercolors was so popular among women that when O’Keeffe’s friend and colleague John Marin began using them, his paintings were initially dismissed by critics as being lightweight and inconsequential.

  ††Naturalistic depictions of gentle landscapes and dignified peasants in soothing neutrals.

  ‡‡Too tortured, too crazy, too much lead paint.

  §§As of this writing considered to be the most successful artist in the world; in 2008, his Golden Calf—a real cow tricked out with gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde—sold for about $17 million.

  ¶¶My own mom complained when I was underfoot, and was happiest when I occupied myself by playing in the neighborhood “until the streetlights came on.” That this was almost 10:00 p.m. during the summer made no difference to her. If she occasionally had to rush me to the emergency room (where we were on a first-name basis with the staff) because I’d leapt from a secret tree house and snagged my nostril on a protruding nail on the way down, that was simply the price we had to pay for her special brand of free-range parenting.

  **The pressure to force-feed our children enrichment activities like a French goose on his way to becoming pâté has been well documented. Our fear, as mothers, is that failing to overmanage our children’s time will doom them to a life lived out of a shopping cart beneath a bridge. No one means well more than a modern mother.

  †††When O’Keeffe was living and teaching in Canyon, Texas, her favorite way to relax was shooting tin cans out on the prairie.

  ‡‡‡Or in this day of gummy worms and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, is it possible for a raisin to even qualify as a delicious treat?

  Georgia O’Keeffe

  American (1887–1986)

  Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot), 1908

  Oil on canvas, 19 x 23½ in.

  Permanent collection, The Art Students League of New York

  3

  ADOPT

  The best course is the one that leaves my mind freest.

  It took Georgia a year to recover from typhoid. If the only brush you’ve ever had with this disease was enduring mild flu-like symptoms and a hot, throbbing arm after having received the required vaccine before jetting off to Southeast Asia or some other part of the developing world, where the locals die of it on a regular basis, here is a quick overview.

  The first week you experience a high fever, headache, and cough. The second week features a higher fever, diarrhea, and delirium, and maybe an itchy and unsightly rash. The third week can bring complications in the form of intestinal hemorrhaging and metastatic abscesses. I’m not sure what that last one is, but you know it can’t be fun. All of these symptoms proceed into the fourth week where, if you’ve managed to survive, the fever slowly abates and you’re left, as Georgia was, with no hair.

  During her months of recovery she read Faust in a lace cap that covered her bald head and made desultory sketches of her younger siblings—the older ones having all left home to start their lives. Even if she’d wanted to return to the Art Institute of Chicago, in September when classes began she was still too weak to go back, and the family finances worsened with each successive failed business undertaken by her father. The grocery went belly-up, followed by a creamery. There was a brief foray into real estate. Mostly, he was becoming more despondent and alienating the locals with his inexplicable Yankee ways. Ida, her mother, daughter of the genuine Hungarian count, who believed Williamsburg was going to be a step up from Wisconsin farm life (even though the local ladies suspected Frank’s Yankee ways, they did admire Ida’s emerald earrings), was forced to help make ends meet by feeding local college students. Georgia, in her lace cap, helped.

  Life largely sucked, the way it does when you’re almost twenty and life’s bounty, if it exists, is being harvested by others, elsewhere.

  Becoming Patsy O’Keeffe

  A year passed, and Ida had saved enough to send Georgia to the Art Students League of New York. The Art Students League was established in 1875 as an alternative to the fuddy-duddy “traditi
onal” art schools;§ it had no requirements for admission, major areas of study (aside from art), or required courses. It was a hippie school long before there were hippies, and Georgia loved it.

  When she arrived in New York she was easily the poorest girl at the League, but she didn’t care. She was giddy to have escaped the Dostoevskian drama that was shaping up back in Williamsburg: her depressed, frustrated father; her determined, increasingly bitter mother. Her hair had grown into a chin-length bob, the kind flappers would popularize a decade later. It’s probably safe to say that this was the first and last time in Georgia’s life her hairdo could be considered cutting-edge. For a few dollars a month she shared a room with a fellow student with the sweet, early-twentieth-century name of Florence Cooney. In Virginia Georgia was mocked for her plain way of talking and dressing; in Chicago fellow students and teachers had been indifferent to her familiar, no-­nonsense Midwestern mien; but in New York, she was considered an androgynous beauty with snappy blue eyes, a chic head of curls, a sly and playful wit. People got her. Her fellow students called her Patsy; with her love of dancing, music, and practical jokes, she seemed very Irish. Aside from having to watch every penny, “Patsy” O’Keeffe flourished. She attracted admirers, including a fellow classmate named George Dannenberg, an exotic San Franciscan—she called him the Man from the Far West—who was bewitched by her easy individuality and liked to take her to dances.