Most people tend to remember Georgia O’Keeffe as a sharp-witted, sharp-featured painter of sparely beautiful landscapes or floral portraits. While this is true of the legend that O’Keeffe came to be, the younger Georgia was also quite intriguing.
Born in 1887, O’Keeffe was raised on a Wisconsin farm. Her parents were hard-working and self-reliant, yet they appreciated books, music and art. These traits – diligence, independence, and curiosity about the creative world beyond – were integral to the formation of O'Keeffe's character.
Chicago and New York
In 1905, O'Keeffe enrolled at The School of the Art Institute. Chicago seemed bleak and gray, however, and she was unnerved at one of her first assignments – having to draw a nearly naked male model. Still, she realized that anatomical knowledge was crucial to being an artist, so she pushed through and completed the necessary lessons.
Following a bout with typhoid, O'Keeffe continued her education at New York’s Art Students League and was happier in the new environment. One of her teachers was William Merritt Chase, who passed on his love of color to her. “Chase was always stressing the use of pigment and the beauty of oil paint,” she later noted. “To interest him, our canvases had to be alive with paint.” Apparently interested, Chase would award O'Keeffe the League’s top prize for her still life work.
O'Keefe was popular at the League. Nicknamed "Patsy", she was regarded as pretty and charming. Many other students wanted to paint her portrait, although some of her male admirers like artist Eugene Speicher were a bit pompous about how they would surely become famous while she would just end up teaching “in some girls’ school” for the rest of her life.
Teaching and Learning
The years following graduation were financially troubled for O’Keeffe. She was forced to work as an illustrator and was about to abandon painting altogether when she took a class based on the methods of Arthur Wesley Dow.
Dow stressed pattern and balance in art education, as opposed to strict realism. This approach gave O'Keeffe a second wind, and shortly after she accepted a position with the Amarillo school system. O'Keeffe had been fascinated by the Western adventure stories that her mother had read to her as a child, and in 1912 she headed with enthusiasm for the Texas Panhandle.
Though most of her students were dirt poor and Amarillo so rain-parched that it was hard to find wildflowers for the children to draw, Texas proved liberating for O’Keeffe. The skies and stars were breathtaking, and the local people and history different than what she had ever known.
O’Keeffe’s next teaching job was in South Carolina. While she didn’t find the environment as inspiring, academic life allowed her time to develop her skills. She produced a significant series of drawings, exhibited in 1916 by photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. O’Keeffe would of course return to her beloved Southwest in years to come, and she would eventually marry Stieglitz.
A Woman on Paper
A chronicle of O’Keeffe’s early years can be found in her fellow art student Anita Pollitzer’s A Woman on Paper. The book contains excerpts from letters between O’Keeffe and Pollitzer, providing a fresh glimpse into the spirit of a woman who would become one of the world’s best-known artists:
“It always seems to me that so few people live – they just seem to exist…I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t live always…why do we do it all in our teens and twenties….” – Georgia O'Keeffe to Anita Pollitzer, 1915
Sources
- A Woman on Paper: Georgia O’Keeffe– Anita Pollitzer (Touchstone Books, 1988)
- A School’s Colorful Patina by Holland Cotter, The New York Times, September 9, 2005
