Georgia O’Keeffe Abigail Adams Susan B. Anthony Tyra Banks Clara Barton Hillary Rodham Clinton Marie Curie Ellen DeGeneres Diana, Princess of Wales Helen Keller Sandra Day O’Connor Georgia O’Keeffe Nancy Pelosi Rachael Ray Eleanor Roosevelt Martha Stewart Venus and Serena Williams Georgia O’Keeffe ARTIST Dennis Abrams GEORGIA O’KEEFFE Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York, NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abrams, Dennis, 1960– Georgia O’Keeffe: artist / by Dennis Abrams. p. cm. — (Women of achievement) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-336-3 (hardcover) 1. O’Keeffe, Georgia, 1887–1986—Juvenile literature. 2. Painters—United States— Biography—Juvenile literature. I. O’Keeffe, Georgia, 1887–1986. II. Title. III. Series. ND237.O5A86 2009 759.13—dc22 [B] 2008055366 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Series design by Erik Lindstrom Cover design by Ben Peterson and Alicia Post Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. CONTENTS 1 Frustration 7 2 The Early Years 15 3 Student and Teacher 30 4 Finding a Mentor, Lover, and Fame 47 5 Discovering a New Way of Seeing 65 6 Finding Her True Home 83 7 Ghost Ranch 92 8 A Woman on Her Own 102 Chronology 115 Notes 119 Bibliography 125 FurtherResources 126 PictureCredits 127 Index 128 AbouttheAuthor 133 1 Frustration The year was 1908. Theodore Roosevelt was the twenty- sixth president of the United States. New York City’s Board of Aldermen had just passed the Sullivan Ordinance, which made it illegal for women to smoke in public. (Katie Mulcahey was the first to be arrested under the ordinance before the law was vetoed by the city’s mayor.) In Detroit, Michigan, Henry Ford produced his first Model T auto- mobile. Although women did not yet have the right to vote, Mother’s Day was observed for the first time, at St. Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia. And, in Williamsburg, Virginia, a young student named Georgia O’Keeffe decided to give up on art school and her dreams of becoming an artist. 7 (cid:2) 8 GEORGIA O’KEEFFE The decision was a heartbreaking one for her. For nearly as long as she could remember, all she had wanted to be was an artist. But now it was not to be. A number of issues forced O’Keeffe to make that decision. One was monetary. Her parents, who had been well-to-do farmers in Wisconsin, had suffered a series of financial losses since moving the family to Williamsburg. Tuition for the Art Students League in New York City, where she had been studying, was now out of the question. Instead, she would have to begin to earn her own living and help her family out as best she could. There were other factors as well. For anyone to attempt to make a living as an artist, it was (and is) a risky undertak- ing at best. The world, as they say, is filled with starving artists. For a woman living in the early twentieth century, however, the odds were even more daunting. In 1908, women artists were considered somewhat unusual—art was still something that men made. Women, it was thought, were supposed to fulfill themselves through marriage and family, not through their careers or their art. And in the unlikely chance a woman did become an art- ist, there was the question of what kind of artist she could become. While women had been artists throughout history, they were generally relegated to the sidelines of art—and by virtue of traditional notions of the proper role of women, relegated to painting tidy, ladylike portraits or painting inanimate objects, such as flowers and fruit, known as a still life. In such paintings, realism was thought to be the pri- mary goal. The artist strove to paint as realistic a picture of the person or object as possible. In the days before photog- raphy, painting was the only way a realistic representation of a person, an object, or a landscape could be made. O’Keeffe, while uncertain of her own path as an artist, rejected realism for realism’s sake. “If one could only repro- duce nature, why paint at all?” she asked years later. “Rather (cid:2) Frustration 9 than spend my life on imitations, I would not paint at all.”1 Of course, this statement was said in hindsight, as O’Keeffe in her later years set about creating her own public image, that of a woman who had been determined to become an artist on her own terms or not be an artist at all. Most likely of course, it was largely financial consider- ations that kept her out of art school and diverted her away from a career in art. But there was something more. If she had to work to earn money, if she couldn’t devote herself wholeheartedly to her art, she decided that she just wouldn’t be an artist at all. A fellow student at the Art Students League said years later: O’Keeffe will not admit to personal tragedies, although her face tells a story . . . She only tells you that she had to give up the thing she loved best, painting, in order to fit into the narrow hemmed-in existence which circumstances made for her. Painting remained her passion, but it was all or nothing. Since she could not devote herself to it, she never touched a brush [and] could not bear the smell of turpentine because of the emotions they aroused.2 IN HER OWN WORDS Georgia O’Keeffe did not necessarily get the same pleasure from looking at art as she did by creating it. As she said in a 1971 interview: I don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.