Georgia O'Keeffe: Artist (Women of Achievement)

134 Pages·2009·4.06 MB·English

by  Dennis Abrams

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
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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
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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.