How Georgia Became O'Keeffe by Karen Karbo Read Free Book Online Page A

flat.
    Georgia showed up at Bement’s class and Anita was right. He was an effeminate goofball, who called himself Bementie, and pranced around the classroom in a silk tunic. Georgia adored him, and Bement, in turn, taught O’Keeffe a few things about art that finally made sense to her. It’s one of the great contradictions of O’Keeffe’s personality: Her devotion to her own intuition was balanced by her pragmatism; if something didn’t make sense to her, she saw no point in moving forward. Because of this, she’d stopped painting completely.
    Please recall that the thing that turned Georgia off to art in her early twenties was the expectation that the job of a painting was to imitate reality, preferably in the way of the European masters. The subject was the thing, the artist merely a servant of what he saw.
    But Bementie brought news from New York, specifically Arthur Wesley Dow, the dean of Fine Arts at Teachers College, Columbia University: A painting was more than just its subject. What went on inside the frame created by the canvas was just as—if not more—important. The composition, the way the forms related to one another, the positive and negative space, should all be balanced in a visually satisfying fashion. And who decided what was visually satisfying? The artist.
    Enchanted by the simplicity of Japanese art, and the voluptuous lines and shapes of Art Nouveau, Dow had tossed the dusty plaster casts aside and asked his students, on the first day of class, to draw a line on their paper, thus beginning the process of defining the space. This was pure radicalism in 1912. It was the beginning of modernism, a declaration of independence for the artist. “I had stopped arting when I just happened to meet him and get a new idea that interested me enough to start me going again,” said Georgia, in a letter to a friend.
    Bement, for all his vanity and affectation, accurately read O’Keeffe’s enthusiasm. He saw the lightbulb go on over her head. After the term was over he asked her to be his teaching assistant. There was a hitch, however; the position required her to have secondary-school teaching experience. The only high school teacher O’Keeffe knew was Alice Peretta, an old classmate from Chatham, who taught at the public high school in Amarillo, Texas. Peretta pulled some strings, and O’Keeffe was hired. It was the first job she’d had in two years.

    Amarillo was a cattle-shipping station, a flat, dusty place where railroads crossed paths, smack in the middle of the rattlesnake-infested Texas panhandle. I’m using all the literary self-control I can muster not to use the cliché “middle of nowhere.” But clichés don’t spring into the culture fully formed like Athena out of Zeus’s head; Amarillo, founded the same year as Georgia was born, was nothing more than a train depot for cows.
    Georgia arrived in the middle of August and ensconced herself in the Magnolia Hotel. A more apt name would have been the Sunburned Cornea Inn, or Relentless Crazy-Making Howling Wind Lodge. There were no magnolias for hundreds of miles, let alone any other growing thing aside from the wild grass that covered the plains. In Paris and New York, abstract art struggled to be born, but in Amarillo, Georgia already inhabited an abstract painting. In every direction the low horizon was plumb-line straight, nothing but dun-colored prairie and the occasional collection of dark-hued dots, a herd of cattle in the distance. Every day the sky was the same punitive blue, the sun a blazing lip-blistering orb.
    The extreme landscape and weather possessed Georgia, but she also loved teaching. She was still a-swoon with new ideas. She taught her students—the sons and daughters of ranchers and railroad men—the new commandments of art, that it was not just a painting hanging in a fancy big-city museum, but the way you arranged the objects in your life,