By the age of twenty-one, legend-to-be Georgia O’Keeffe was not quite sure where her life was headed. Though she had studied at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute and the New York Art Students League, she had had to find work as a commercial artist due to money troubles. Run down by her job‘s long hours, she soon became seriously ill and was forced to convalesce at her family’s home in Virginia.
Arthur Wesley Dow
Even at that point, O’Keeffe sensed that there were deeper currents to be tapped within her creative soul. She had done well in school and followed the standard academic training of the era, studying with such major artists as William Merritt Chase, but she still felt more like she was being taught to imitate rather than express. A 1912 summer session at the University of Virginia put Georgia back on track, however, in a course taught by Alon Bement, who strongly professed the theories of artist and fellow educator Arthur Wesley Dow.
Through Bement and Dow, O’Keeffe was able to apply new meaning to the technical finesse she had learned in school. Dow’s ideas were influenced by the natural harmony and balance of Asian art and rejected any painting dictum that involved strict imitation of three-dimensional form. Most importantly to O‘Keeffe, “Pa Dow”— as she called him—believed that art and personal experience should flow together organically, and that an artist’s internal rhythms and energies should be valued over realistic representations.
Amarillo and the Plains
With her renewed perspective, O’Keeffe accepted a position in 1916 to be a teacher for the Amarillo Public School District. While she had grown up in Wisconsin and Virginia then studied in two bustling American cities, O’Keeffe found the aridly spacious Texas plains close to thrilling, amazed by the “bigness and the lonelyness and the windyness of it all.” She took long walks amid thick dust clouds and marveled at the endless skies, explosive thunderstorms and intensely colored sunsets.
In this landscape so utterly different from what she had known all her life, O’Keeffe began to paint—just as Dow himself had been inspired earlier to capture his views of the vast expanse of the Grand Canyon. Eventually, though, O’Keeffe’s Texas works would push beyond Dow’s teachings into more abstract expressions. Preceded by her breakthrough “Special” charcoal drawing series, O’Keeffe’s later Texas colors and forms became primarily complex as she continued to unlearn years of carefully composed landscapes and still-life perfection.
Stieglitz and Manhattan
O’Keeffe taught at the Amarillo school system and later at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon. She enjoyed teaching and interacting with students, though at times her independent attitudes and free-spirited actions were a shade too modern for her Texan neighbors. Furthermore, fate and her own emerging talent would lead her back to New York, as O’Keeffe had begun to correspond with photographer and influential Manhattan gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. Upon first seeing O‘Keeffe‘s smoothly abstract style, Stieglitz declared: “Finally a woman on paper.”
Stieglitz was enthralled by O’Keeffe and wanted to be involved in both her career and her life. He showcased her work and garnered her first sale of a drawing titled Train at Night in the Desert for four hundred dollars, a considerable sum for the time. O’Keeffe left Texas with mixed emotions in 1918 and the couple married in 1924. Nonetheless, O’Keeffe’s impressions of the state would remain with her all her life, while the Panhandle’s stark beauty and evening stars brought about a profound change not only in Georgia herself, but also in the perception of the American art landscape.
Sources
- O’Keeffe and Texas — Sharyn R. Udall (The Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, 1998)
- A Woman on Paper: Georgia O’Keeffe — Anita Pollitzer (Touchstone Books, 1988)
