Georgia Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Dawn Tripp

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Tripp, Dawn

  Georgia: a novel of Georgia O’Keeffe/Dawn Tripp.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-1-4000-6953-8

  ebook ISBN 978-0-679-60427-3

  I. Title.

  PS3620.R57G46 2015

  813'.6—dc23 2015012643

  eBook ISBN 9780679604273

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adaped for eBook

  Cover design: Tom McKeveny

  Cover illustration: Robert Hunt

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Part I

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Part II

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Part III

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Part IV

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Part V

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  After

  Now

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Dawn Tripp

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Georgia is a novel, a work of fiction inspired by the life of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe and, in particular, her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz.

  I came to O’Keeffe’s story through her art, specifically a show of her abstractions held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2009. That show was a revelation. I have always admired O’Keeffe’s work but, like many, I knew her as a representational artist. I knew her giant flowers, her cow skulls, her Southwest landscapes. That day at the Whitney, as I moved from piece to piece, I began to draw together an entirely new understanding of O’Keeffe and her art. As early as the fall of 1915, at twenty-nine years old, she was creating radical abstract forms when only a handful of artists were bold enough to explore this new language of modern art. Her abstractions of that time—and those she continued to create throughout her life—were ambitious, gorgeous shapes of color and form designed to express and evoke emotion, and they were stunningly original. I was overturned. Who was the woman, the artist, who made these works? And why was she not recognized for the sheer visionary power of these abstractions during her lifetime?

  In the Whitney show, O’Keeffe’s art was shown alongside photographs Alfred Stieglitz had taken of her as part of a portrait that spanned twenty years: images of O’Keeffe’s hands, face, body—some clothed, others nude. There were also excerpts from letters O’Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged over the course of their relationship, from 1916 to 1946. The language of those letters was sharply intimate, vulnerable, complex. O’Keeffe’s letters revealed a woman of exceptional passion, a rigorous intelligence, and a strong creative drive. Her letters had a raw heat that felt deeply aligned with the abstract pictures I was seeing on the walls, but at odds with the image of O’Keeffe I’d grown up with: the aged doyenne of the Southwest, poised and cool, holding the world at arm’s length.

  In the weeks after the show, I read several biographies on O’Keeffe, and what struck me is that while each hewed to the core events of her life, there were curious discrepancies in fact as well as varied interpretations of the woman behind the icon. This fascinated me.

  In my early research, I gleaned that a central struggle in O’Keeffe’s relationship with Stieglitz was the battle over her image as an artist and the “branding” of her work. While O’Keeffe allowed passion—creative and sexual—to be a key inspiration for her art, she would explicitly come to resist and ultimately refuse to allow her art to be cast in gendered terms. In time, she worked to redefine herself as an artist according to her own vision. While O’Keeffe would continue to use abstract forms as a vocabulary in her art throughout her life, the critical reception and initial public reduction of her work into gendered terms had a profound effect on her willingness to show the purely abstract pieces, which are arguably some of the most innovative and original works produced in the twentieth century by any artist—male or female.

  The critical language repeatedly used to describe and define O’Keeffe’s work by (mostly) male art critics during her lifetime was an important inspiration for this novel. This language frames her works in gendered terms—and continues to limit our perception of her art and influence today. For me, the pull to write this novel was not just to explore O’Keeffe’s life and art but also the challenges faced by women at the forefront of any discipline.

  These themes became the bones of my story.

  Along with O’Keeffe’s art and Stieglitz’s photographs, several additional sources were critical to me in the early stages of writing this novel: Roxana Robinson’s biography Georgia O’Keeffe; Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe; and Benita Eisler’s O’Keeffe and Stieglitz.

  Barbara Buhler Lynes, an art historian, professor, and a founding curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in New Mexico, is widely recognized as the preeminent scholar on O’Keeffe’s art and life. Lynes’s work, perspective, and insights have been invaluable. While I recommend all of her writings on O’Keeffe, the three works that were most vital to my process were: Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné; O’Keeffe’s O’Keeffes; and O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, and the Critics, 1916–1929. In this last book, Lynes comprehensively maps how critical reviews of O’Keeffe’s early work influenced the way she would choose to portray herself and her art.

  I was in my third draft of this novel when the correspondence of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz was published, having been sealed for twenty-five years after her death: My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915–1933, edited by Sarah Greenough. These letters were very useful in terms of clarifying the timing of events and revealing certain key dynamics of their artistic and marital partnership: the powerful bond between them, the flow of ideas, as well as the storms, politics, and, at times, untenable emotion that marked their relationship.

  In this novel, I’ve attempted to capture the spirit of two extraordinary
artists by imagining dialogue between the two of them and others in their circle of friends, family, and acquaintances. The letters, dialogue, and scenes in my book are invented. Since this is a work of historical fiction, I took inspiration from actual events and letters that O’Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged, as well as biographies about both artists, published interviews of O’Keeffe, speeches she gave, and catalogs and other writings by both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz. On occasion, some of O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s actual words from these sources are used in dialogue exchanges or in Georgia’s thoughts within this novel. Less frequently, short phrases from other letters and sources are embedded in the dialogue or in other parts of the narrative. Where snippets from reviews of O’Keeffe’s art appear in quotes, the quoted language is the exact language used in the referenced review. My use of statements that the historical record tell me were made and my reference to incidents or events that did happen are not intended to change the entirely fictional nature of this work.

  In addition to the works listed above, I found the following texts useful in my research: Georgia O’Keeffe by Georgia O’Keeffe; Georgia O’Keeffe: Some Memories of Drawings by Georgia O’Keeffe; Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction by Jonathan Stuhlman and Barbara Buhler Lynes; Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters by Jack Cowart, Sarah Greenough, and Juan Hamilton; Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction (Whitney Museum of American Art), edited by Barbara Haskell; Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography by Sue Davidson Lowe; America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait, edited by Waldo Frank et al; Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer, edited by Clive Giboire; How Georgia Became O’Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living by Karen Karbo; Alfred Stieglitz by Richard Whelan; Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe by Laurie Lisle; Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things by Elizabeth Hutton Turner; Georgia O’Keeffe by Lisa Mintz Messinger; Two Lives, Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs by Belinda Rathbone, Roger Shattuck, and Elizabeth Hutton Turner; Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz; Georgia O’Keeffe and the Camera: The Art of Identity by Susan Danly; A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings, edited by Frederick L. Rusch; A Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe by Margaret Wood; The Book Room: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Library in Abiquiu by Ruth E. Fine; O’Keeffe: Days in a Life by C. S. Merrill; “The Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty Fine,” a profile of O’Keeffe by Calvin Tomkins published in The New Yorker in March 1974.

  PART I

  I NO LONGER LOVE YOU as I once did, in the dazzling rush of those early days. Time itself was feverish then, our bodies filled with fire. Your fingers inside me, mouth grazing my throat, breast, thigh—the metallic scent of the darkroom, smells of sweat and linseed oil, a stain of cocoa on the dining table. It was all smashed together back then—art, sex, life—mixed into the perfect color, every shadow had a substance, shape, and tone. Your bowler hat, the lead-rolled gleaming whiteness of an empty canvas, tubes of paint lined up, my dressing gown on the floor, and you above me, light moving on your shoulders. Your eyes did not leave my face. When you touched me then, you moved so close to me—so close and hot and fast and deep.

  I no longer love you that way. My hands are cool now, the past remade and packed away. Sometimes, though, late at night the air lifts and I feel it—the faint burn of your eyes on my closed lids. Still. That sense of you rushing back in.

  I

  1979, Abiquiu, New Mexico

  I BOUGHT THIS house for the door. The house itself was a ruin, but I had to have that door. Over the years, I’ve painted it many times, all different ways: abstract, representational, blue, black, brown. I’ve painted it in the hot green of summer, in the dead of winter, clouds rushing past it, a lone yellow leaf drifting down. I painted the door open only once. Just before he died. In every picture after, it was closed.

  This is not a love story. If it were, we would have the same story. But he has his, and I have mine. He used to say it all began with the charcoal abstractions I made in 1915 before I met him. I was twenty-seven, a schoolteacher, poor, driven only by a singular, relentless passion for my art. One night, I turned my back on everything I’d learned about what art should be, I locked the door of my room and got down on the floor with large sheets of paper and charcoal. I remember the cool hush of the night through the window as shapes poured out of the nub of charcoal in my hand.

  Finished, I rolled up the drawings and sent them to my friend Anita Pollitzer in New York. She brought them to Stieglitz at his gallery. When he saw them, he told her, “These are the purest, fairest, sincerest things that have entered 291 in a long while.”

  I knew who he was—everyone did. I’d met him once before though he would not remember. The father of modern photography. An icon of American art. In groundbreaking shows at 291, Alfred Stieglitz had introduced New York to the work of Picasso and Matisse. A brilliant photographer in his own right, he was known more for the careers of the artists he’d “made.”

  I wrote to him at 291 and asked him to tell me what he saw in my charcoal drawings. He wrote back to say he wanted to show my work, I should send him more. We exchanged letters back and forth across the country. I spent every extra dollar on brushes, paper, paint.

  Over the years, this would be the story he told, again and again, until it became The Story: those charcoals; his discovery of me; our correspondence that began shortly after. He would say I was what he had been waiting for. What he had always known was meant to exist.

  Because Stieglitz used words with a certain unique force, his version of our story prevailed.

  “You will be a legend,” he said to me once.

  I laughed.

  “No,” he said. “I see it. It’s already in you.”

  Legend. A word he would use again and again.

  He had faith in me. He did not give me greatness, but his faith in my early work gave me the space to achieve it. He knew this then, and perhaps on some level he also knew that for me to fully become the legend he saw, I would have to leave him.

  —

  TONIGHT IN NEW Mexico, so many years later, the air is clear. My sight is gone, but I know this view by heart. The ropy silvered turns of the road passing below my window, the shrubby heads of the cottonwoods, the river valley, the distant line of hills. The shapes of the world out there are shadowy. Lean and contoured strokes, they glow. The moon shines and cuts the night open.

  —

  THERE’S A GRAIN of truth to Stieglitz’s version of things: The story of my art in his life did begin the moment he unrolled those charcoals. But to my mind, our story began more than a year later. I was still teaching, at a small college in Texas, sending him my pictures as I made them. A curious intimacy had begun to evolve in our letters.

  It was late May 1917 when Stieglitz wrote to say he had hung a small show of my watercolors and charcoals. My first show. It would be 291’s last. He was closing the gallery. The war. I felt my heart skip as I read those lines. What I’d give to see my things on those walls.

  For three days, I walked around with his letter in my pocket. Then I went to the bank manager’s house on a Sunday and begged him to open, so I could withdraw the last two hundred dollars I had to buy a train ticket from Texas to New York.

  I did not tell Stieglitz I was coming.

  II

  May 1917, New York

  291. THE WALLS are bare, already stripped. He looks up and when he sees me standing in the doorway, his face changes, softens to a simple pleasure, lit. “Georgia.”

  He dismisses the two fellows he was speaking with.

  “You’ve come all this way,” he says. “I had no idea you were coming to New York.”

  “I know, I should have told you.”

  “Your show was taken down two days ago. I’m sorry.”

  His eyes are dark, piercing through his bent spectacles, a kind of deep-set fire in them; his hair thick and wild, turni
ng steel gray. He is in his mid-fifties, nearly twice my age.

  “Where are you staying?” he says.

  “With a friend. Near Teachers College.”

  His eyes have not left my face. “Wait,” he says. He goes into the back room and reappears with two of my pictures.

  “Sit down.” He gestures to a chair.

  I shake my head. “I’d rather stand.”

  He pauses. “You aren’t going to leave?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good.”

  He begins to hang my art, piece after piece. My watercolor skies, my charcoal landscapes of the canyon with the humped shapes of cows, my numbered blues. He hangs them exactly as he’d placed them for the show. A sureness in how he handles them. Prophet. Seer. Giant of the art world. Iconoclast. The small room is hot. I can feel threads of sweat moving down my body, heat in my throat, in my hands.

  He is married, I tell myself. A wife. A daughter. You’re his artist. Nothing more.

  I think back to a day in February, his letters were piling up—sometimes five in a week—I had begun to dread their coming. Began to dread even more the impatient hunger I felt for them to come. And on that day, in the one free hour I had between classes, instead of going to the post office to see what he had sent, I made myself not go. I bought a box of bullets instead, took my gun and some old tin cans, walked out across the plains, threw the cans onto the ground, and shot at them like I could blow that hunger right apart—