Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe

by Laurie Lisle Narrated by Grace Conlin

Overview

Georgia O'Keeffe was one of the most original painters America has ever produced. Her vivid visual vocabulary-sensuous flowers, bleached bones against red sky and earth-has had a profound and lasting influence on American art in this century.

Renowned for her fierce independence, iron determination, and unique artistic vision, O'Keeffe had a personal mystique as intriguing and enduring as her bold, brilliant canvasses. Here is a full account of her exceptional life-from her girlhood and early days as a controversial art teacher, to her discovery by the pioneering photographer of the New York avant-garde Alfred Stieglitz, to her seclusion in the New Mexico desert, where she lived until her death. Here also is the story of a great romance-between the extraordinary painter and her much older mentor, lover, and husband, Stieglitz.

Editorial Reviews

bn.com

Portrait of an Artist is the most comprehensive biography of Georgia O'Keeffe to date. Her life story, that of a pioneer in the modernist movement, an independent woman in a prefeminist age, and the true peer of her life partner, is remarkable. And art critic Laurie Lisle tells it ably. This edition is revised with a significant amount of new material. Includes 16 pages of photographs.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169517125
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/2007
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,102,005

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One: Sun Prairie

Late in the autumn of 1887, the Sun Prairie Countryman, a rural Wisconsin newspaper, briefly noted that a baby girl had arrived two days before on Tuesday, November 15, in the farmhouse of Ida and Francis O'Keeffe. The birth, assisted by a country doctor in the O'Keeffe home, was the second for the young couple. The twenty-three-year-old Ida named her infant Georgia Totto for her patrician Hungarian grandfather, George Totto. Georgia, it appeared, would have Ida's dark hair, and her round face was pure Irish, like her father's. The variegated pigment of her eyes suggested the mingled bloodlines of brown-eyed maternal forebears and blue-eyed paternal ones.

Georgia was born into a rapidly industrializing world. The country's longest suspension bridge, linking Brooklyn to Manhattan, had recently opened, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris was still under construction, due to be completed in two years. The American government in Washington, under the reformist leadership of President Grover Cleveland, was attempting to exert some control over capitalist monopolies and to bring order to the grim, oppressive factories where immigrant laborers often erupted into violence and strikes. But in the western part of the country, the last great Indian war was still to be fought against federal troops.

Little of this turmoil affected the pastoral life on the Sun Prairie farm, however. It remained like farm life everywhere, suspended in a timeless ritual governed by the rhythms of nature. The newborn baby was kept indoors during the long, dark, icy northern winter. When the snow finally melted, the sunlight became warm, and the prairie was touched by the brightgreen of spring, Georgia was carried outside for the first time. She was placed on a handmade patchwork quilt spread on the new grass and propped up by pillows. Those very first moments of seeing in the brilliant sunlight became indelibly etched in her memory: She precisely remembered the quilt's patterns of flowers on black and tiny red stars as well as the startling blond looks of her mother's friend.

Yet another perception during those minutes in the pool of yellow sunshine was not so pleasant. Georgia, less than a year old, was acutely aware that two other children playing on the patterned quilt were getting all the admiration. One of them was her older brother, Francis Jr., two years old, the firstborn child with dark Totto eyes, who was adorable in his mama's eyes. When he was born, weighing a plump ten and a half pounds, it had been heralded as a grand event by the Countryman. As Georgia crawled around the cotton quilt, she felt a sharp sting of neglect. "Why doesn't anyone think I'm beautiful?" she recalled wondering many years later. She squirmed off the quilt, she remembered, and was impatiently thrust back onto it.

Georgia's was a uniquely American heritage -- three of her grandparents were immigrants, and the fourth was descended from one of the earliest colonists in the New World. Her O'Keeffe grandparents had settled in Sun Prairie first during the initial large wave of immigration to America. Pierce O'Keeffe and his wife, Catherine Mary, and other family members left for the American frontier when their family wool business in Ireland faltered. They arrived in Milwaukee through the chain of Great Lakes, then traveled directly west by oxcart for about eighty miles inland to the young settlement of Sun Prairie in the southern part of the state. In July 1848 Pierce O'Keeffe bought his first acres along the Koshkonong Creek from the federal government for less than a dollar an acre. As he turned Virgin forest into rolling farmland, his wife, Kate, gave birth to four sons: Boniface, Peter, Francis, and Bernard.

The O'Keeffes began to homestead just two months after Wisconsin ceased being a territory and entered the union as a state. Meanwhile, the last of the Winnebago Indians were being driven westward as the arriving farmers cut down the thick forests, plowed the hunting trails under, and decimated the deer. More and more land was being laid out in neatly numbered lots, and roads increasingly followed the straight lines of the surveyor's measure. At the same time, railroads were inching into the newly settled regions to transport the wheat harvests and the iron ore to other parts of the country.

About ten years after the O'Keeffes had settled in Sun Prairie in 1848, George Victor Totto and his wife bought land next to the O'Keeffe farm. Whereas the Irish family had emigrated to Wisconsin because of a business failure in the old country, George Totto had fled to America because of his belief in liberty. A count from Budapest, he had fought in a doomed Hungarian uprising against Austrian rule as an aide-de-camp to the revolutionary hero Lajos Kossuth. Family legend has it that Totto was ransomed from jail with the family jewels. In any case, he escaped to America and wound up in Sauk City, Wisconsin, later known as Prairie de Sac, where another Hungarian political refugee of a flamboyant stripe had bought land.

Totto's wife, Isabel, prided herself on her heritage as well. One of her granddaughters later uncovered many European coats of arms designed for both grandparents' families. Her roots, as deep as any in America, could be traced to a Dutchman who arrived in New York in 1637. Two hundred years later, one of his descendants, Charles Wyckoff , fathered Isabel and her younger sister Jane. Wyckoff, a hotelkeeper in the East, apparently had business troubles, and, after his wife died, he moved with his teen-age daughters and a new wife to Sauk City to try his luck at running a hotel on the frontier. Wyckoff hadn't been in Wisconsin long when a cholera epidemic broke out. Although he made plans to move his family out, a day before their departure he came down with the disease and died shortly afterwards.

It was in Sauk City that the exiled George Totto and the orphaned Isabel Wyckoff met and fell in love. In the twenty-five-year-old Isabel's eyes, the pedigreed Hungarian patriot ten years her senior was a cut above the other marriage prospects on the frontier. Formal photographs show that Totto was a thin-lipped, rather homely man with a light brown beard and that Isabel with her long, raw-boned face, could never have been called pretty. The poise and good breeding of the tall, dark-haired girl with the eastern education appealed to the European, and in May 1855 the two were married.

A year after the wedding their first child, Alletta, was born. Her birth was followed in rapid succession by those of Josephine, Charles, Ida, Leonore, and George. Meanwhile, the Tottos had moved to Sun Prairie, where the 1870 census revealed that their farm was larger and more abundant than the neighboring O'Keeffe property. But farming in the harsh midwestern climate proved too difficult for George and Isabel. In the 1870s Totto gave up and returned to Hungary, supposedly to claim his share of the family fortune. Totto may have visited his family in Wisconsin again, but he eventually died in his homeland, still worshiped, in absentia, by his daughters. Left to fend for themselves, Isabel and her six sons and daughters moved to nearby Madison in the early 1880s. The town had been a high-brow university town for more than forty years, and she must have imagined that it held better prospects for her children.

Georgia's father, Francis Calixtus O'Keeffe, was around thirty when he began to drive his mother's buggy the twelve miles to Madison to court the fourth Totto child, Ida Ten Eyck, a poised, brown-eyed teenager. Frank had known Ida all his life as the little girl on the neighboring farm. Now Ida had grown tall like her mother and developed a more handsome version of her mother's dark looks. Frank was a wiry, good-natured farmer with fair Irish skin and curly hair. His schooling had stopped in adolescence when his father died and he had to help his mother and brothers run the farm. Then in October 1883, the brother closest in age, Peter, died of tuberculosis. It is likely that his brothers death startled Frank into the realization that his life was rapidly passing, because about this time he proposed to Ida.

Ida's family favored the match, partly because Frank wanted to buy the Totto pastures in Sun Prairie. But Ida's two older sisters weren't married, and she had little inclination to wed and return to her childhood home of Sun Prairie, a simple farm community of a few hundred people without even a library. Ida was a serious girl who kept a diary, loved books, and dreamed of becoming a doctor. It was also commonplace at the time to avoid marriage to someone with tuberculosis in the family in the mistaken belief that the highly infectious disease was hereditary. Ida, however, was young, obedient, and fond of Frank, so she reluctantly accepted his proposal. A few weeks after she turned twenty, they were married. The Sun Prairie newspaper carried the announcement:

Wedded -- At the residence of the bride's mother, in the city of Madison, on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 1884, by the Rev. J. B. Pratt, Mr. Francis O'Keeffe of Sun Prairie to Miss Ida Totto, of Madison. The contracting parties in the nuptial affair above chronicled are well and favorably known hereabouts, and the best wishes of the community are extended to Frank and his charming bride.

The Tottos considered themselves to be a notch above the O'Keeffes because of their lineage and cultivation, and the wedding was entirely a Totto affair. Although Frank was a Roman Catholic, the Tottos' Episcopal clergyman officiated. And even though either of Frank's two brothers could have signed the marriage certificate, an older brother and sister of Ida's were the witnesses. Throughout their marriage Frank would appear to be in Ida's shadow, even though he was eleven years older than she. People often echoed Ida's early doubts and wondered why a woman who carried herself like an aristocrat had married a humble Irishman.

After the wedding, Ida had no more time to pen her thoughts in her diary. Within six months she was pregnant, and for the next eight years she was either pregnant or nursing an infant. Interestingly, only the births of the first two, Francis and Georgia, were entered into the public record. A few weeks before Georgia's second birthday a sister was born, named Ida Ten Eyck for their mother. Sixteen months later another sister arrived: Anita Natalie, with a tiny round face and large dark eyes. And when Anita was only sixteen months old a brother, Alexius Wyckoff, was born.

Ida, as a mother, above all enjoyed spending evenings and Sunday afternoons reading to her little children. In her enthusiasm for books, Mama seemed to make them come alive, Georgia recalled many afterwards, and she adored listening to the warm, glowing tones of her mothers beautiful, well-bred voice. Since the stories were picked for the benefit of her eldest, Francis, the first ones that Georgia heard were boys' books such as James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales about pioneer days and cowboy-and-Indian adventures in the state of Texas and the New Mexico territory.

Reading aloud was one of the ways that Ida showed her interest in the mental development of her offspring -- the daughters as well as the sons. Education for women was a family tradition: Her own mother had been educated in the East, her sisters had become schoolteachers, and she had joined a group of Sun Prairie women with intellectual and charitable interests who gave themselves the lofty name of The King's Daughters. Furthermore, Ida took great interest in the curriculum of the nearby schoolhouse, and the schoolteacher usually boarded with the O'Keeffes. Ida quietly had high expectations for her daughters. "Our mother had a very good opinion of herself, and she wanted all of us to be the same way," Georgia told a younger sister later. When in time mama tried to provide the girls with private schools and special lessons, she was motivated, in part, by her own disappointment at having ended her schooling too soon as well as by her desire that her daughters be able to care for themselves. Since all of Ida's daughters but one became professional women, her influence on them is evident. What's more, since they also had an extremely low birthrate -- only producing two children among the five of them -- it's likely that they also sensed her dissatisfaction with domesticity.

In fact, Ida seemed to spend more time cultivating her children's minds than cuddling them in an affectionate, maternal way. That kind of mothering apparently was taken over by others in the large household, particularly by Ida's aunt, Jane Varney. Aunt Jenny, as she was known, had been a teen-aged bride when she went to California during the Gold Rush in a covered wagon. But she soon was widowed and returned to Wisconsin on a sailing ship via Cape Horn to help care for the children of her sister Isabel. When her niece, Ida, gave birth to her first child, Aunt Jenny moved to the O'Keeffe household and oversaw it with a stern eye for the rest of her life. The presence of the small, alert woman (some said a busybody) in the family freed Ida to continue to pursue her quest for self-education, and gave her the chance to visit her mother and friends in Madison frequently and even to go to the opera in Milwaukee on occasion.

By the time Georgia was a four-and-a-half-year-old solemn brown-haired girl -- remembered by one of her teachers as a "little, dark-skinned, wide-eyed, spritelike child" -- she had four brothers and sisters to compete with in the struggle for the grown-ups' attention. She believed that her goodlooking older brother was her mother's favorite, and that her affectionate little sister, Ida, was the other family pet. Whether or not those perceptions were true, Georgia adapted her early behavior to them and remained convinced of them all her life. But because of the numbers of grandmothers, aunts, and uncles in the extended family, Georgia apparently got all the attention she needed, which was probably less than that required by the ordinary child in any case. "I was not a favorite child, but I didn't mind at all," she insisted many years later.

Until the death of Grandmother Totto -- when Georgia, her eldest granddaughter, was six -- the girl used to visit the Totto household on the edge of Madison's Lake Monona, where her maiden aunts and bachelor uncles lived. Georgia probably knew best her Grandmother O'Keeffe, who lived on the adjoining farm until the age of eighty-five, when Georgia was almost ten. Both her grandmothers -- the deserted Grandmother Totto and the widowed Grandmother O'Keeffe -- were strong matriarchs who had kept their large families together after the loss of their men. In Sun Prairie Kate O'Keeffe was highly respected for her sharp intelligence and deeply loved for her sweet nature, according to her lengthy obituaries. The two women, along with Georgia's mother, were part of that tradition of capable frontier women: They sewed the family clothes, preserved the food, decorated the home, nursed the sick, taught the young, and, in general, nourished life in all its forms. In time, Georgia herself would be called the expression of these women's creative spirit.

Born agile and alert with pretty hands, Georgia was a quiet child, who, one imagines, walked long before she talked while always intently observing everything around her. Her earliest years were spent stoically tagging along behind her brother, who was a year and a half older. Soon it was evident that she had advantages in her rivalry with him. He had weak eyes and her keen sight didn't miss a thing. She was also naturally athletic and before long she was outrunning and outclimbing him. Georgia thought about it carefully and came to the conclusion that she was better than her brother -- even if their mother preferred him.

Not close to her brother and believing herself to too grown-up to play with her baby sisters, Georgia began to play apart from the other children at a very young age. A teacher who boarded with the O'Keeffes on school days and sometimes stayed over on weekends to help Aunt Jenny with the children when their mother visited Madison recalled that self-reliant Georgia required little care. "I had more to do with the younger children -- Ida, my favorite, and Anita, sweet and cute, and Alexius, never in sight." In time Georgia discovered that not being the focus of the adults' attention had its advantages. She learned that she could easily elude her great-aunt's discipline and stealthily do the forbidden things that interested her while, at the same, time, appearing obedient.

Later Georgia remembered being happy keeping to herself. Under the apple trees she invented an imaginary household with a park of clipped grass, trees of tall weeds, a shingle boat in a dishpan lake, and doll people for whom she stitched little clothes, as she vividly recalled in her book, Georgia O'Keeffe. The little girl directed her miniature-doll family to behave according to her childish rules and whims, creating a make-believe world within the confines of her actual one. It provided her with hours of fantasy as well as with the growth of a comfortable, centered place that would always be within her. This early behavior also set the pattern for relationships throughout her life. She often seemed to recoil instinctively from others and never needed anyone to entertain her. "I've never been bored," she once stated flatly when she was elderly.

As the solitary hours nurtured her imagination, they also strengthened her natural inclination to have things her own way. She wanted to be distinct, only wearing white stockings, for instance, when her little sisters were not wearing theirs. "From the time I was a little girl, if my sisters wore their hair braided, I wouldn't wear mine braided," Georgia recalled. "If they wore ribbons, I wouldn't. I'd think they'd look better without it too."

Although unadorned clothes or atypical friends embarrassed Georgia's sisters and brothers, she was merely kidded and her ways were tolerated. Mama and Papa pursued their separate interests and seemed to be unusually permissive about their children's behavior, as if they had no doubt about their underlying talent and motivation. For example, after Georgia's younger sister, Ida, ran away from school because she disliked the teacher, she was tutored at home. Although perhaps Georgia carried the family tendency to individuality the furthest, her brothers and sisters all became irrepressible individualists as well.

It was a family in which the prevailing emotional climate appeared to be that of kindness and mildness. By virtue of being the oldest daughter, Georgia had a room of her own in the farmhouse's Victorian tower (built by her father) with large windows facing north and west. Jessie Flint, one of Georgia's playmates who spent many nights with her in the tower room, remembered that her friend was so content with her family life that she had no desire at all to visit Jessie in the village.

When Georgia was grown, she recalled with pride that her father's land stretched over a great distance in the best farm country in Wisconsin. It was three and a half miles southeast of the village of Sun Prairie, so the mailman delivered the mail on horseback to the outlying farms. By the time Georgia was a toddler, her father owned four hundred and forty acres, according to an 1890 plat map, and, by the time she was teen-ager, he owned a great deal more. In order to provide for his rapidly growing household, he planted wide variety of crops, ran a dairy, and traded livestock. In fact, he traveled to the Dakotas to trade a herd horses for some "fat cattle" a few months after his first child was born, according to the Countryman. His neighbors had known him all his life and respected him as a fine farmer and dairyman as well as an affectionate family man who kept any wanderlust well in check.

As Georgia became old enough to wander beyond the wide lawn around the white colonial-style O'Keeffe farmhouse, she began to discover the wonders of her father's farm. Georgia and the other children liked to play Handy Andy Over and other children's games among the milk cans and cream separators of the creamery. Its dank air, cooled by huge chunks of ice cut by creamery patrons from a nearby lake in winter, was a refuge from the midsummer heat. Georgia's father was also intrigued by the latest inventions, and he hired a man to mow his corn-fields with one of the newly invented harvesters the September that Georgia was eight.

The rotation of the seasons, each with its dramatic changes, forced open all of the perceptive child's senses, and they absorbed the marvel of it all. She learned that metal stuck to her fingers in the bitter cold and that flower petals felt velvety soft. She tested the sweet spring grasses, listened to the high notes of the songbirds, and carefully observed the profusion of brilliantly colored wildflowers that appeared when the meadows thawed each year. She remembered the squares of dark, rich, moist earth where a plow had turned the soil, the patterns that were created when neat rows of green seedlings began to sprout, and the wide wheat fields that gilded the land in midsummer, the fall, the maples and oaks around the farmhouse flared red and orange, then the harvested fields darkened to autumn browns and the heavy horsedrawn hay wagons ambled toward the barn before the snow silently shrouded everything once again.

The country days of her childhood, beginning with daybreak and ending when darkness fell, left Georgia with a profound feeling for the companionship of nature and an acute sensitivity to its moods. At mealtimes she used to hear serious talk by her father and his farmhands about the life-or-death power of the weather. She learned to accept even the brutality of the melodrama around her, which she came to understand as the underside of life force. Like other farm children, she found out about conception and birth at a young age, particularly since her mother went through childbirth at home five more times after Georgia was born. As a result, she grew up unashamed of her sensuality, even though she came of age in the Victorian era.

Georgia gravitated to her laughing Papa, who kept his pockets full of sweets and played Irish melodies on his fiddle. As a child, she thought him handsome, and she appropriated many of his tastes and habits, always saying that she liked him more than her aloof mother. She preferred his love of the land, for instance, to her mother's world of learning. Even after she had achieved great success among New York sophisticates, she continued to fancy that she was more like her farmer father than her cultured mother. When Georgia returned to Wisconsin in her fifties to receive an honorary degree, during the ceremony one of her old Sun Prairie schoolteachers fell into the academic procession beside her and remarked that she strongly resembled her father. "She seemed very pleased and smiled with both eyes and mouth," recalled the teacher, "and then she did look like him."

Papa was a lapsed Catholic, but his bachelor brother, Uncle Bernard, used to pick up Georgia in his horse and buggy and take her to Mass at the stone sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Church in the village. She developed a childhood crush on the Catholic church, warming to parishioners -- many of them immigrants who continued to arrive in large numbers -- who crowded into the pews and spoke with the same soft brogue as her Grandmother O'Keeffe. She also liked the pools of colored light created by the high, narrow, arched stained-glass windows, the pictures of saints, pungent puffs of incense, the somber music, and the priests' colorful robes. Years later Georgia speculated that she might have overcome her intellectual reservations and converted to catholicism if the church had gotten a firmer grip on her in childhood. However, all but the youngest O'Keeffe children were baptized in their mother's Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, and most Sundays the children were taken to the simple Congregational services at the church nearest the farm.

Two months before her fifth birthday, Georgia started school in the little one-room Town Hall school house, where her parents had gone, with two dozen so other children from the neighboring farms. Though she was a year younger than the other first graders, she was bright, curious, and clever -- and her education had already begun. Her imagination had been limbered by the children's classics her mother read aloud. Also, it is possible that one of Georgia's schoolteacher aunts or a schoolmistress who boarded with the O'Keeffes had already started her reading or writing. At any rate, her first day of school was undoubtedly not a fearful prospect. Only a quarter mile down her long driveway, past the high hedge across the dirt road, and surrounded by her father's land, the white clapboard schoolhouse was a familiar place. She would attend it for nine years, until she was thirteen.

Her second-grade teacher recalled that Georgia excelled in the school yard, beating most of the boys in the running and jumping games. In the classroom, she was remembered as a well-behaved schoolgirl who dutifully did her lessons with ordinary ability. Since she later insisted that she had always hated school, preferring to run wild on the farm to sitting in a schoolroom, she must have been trying hard to please her mother through her obedience. Georgia later said that she was the type of self-disciplined child who liked to save the raisin in the cookie for the last because it was the best.

When she was in the second grade, she was extremely inquisitive, and her incessant questions sometimes perplexed her young teacher. "When two big clouds bump together, is that thunder?" she once inquired. "If Lake Monona rose up, way up, and spilled all over, how many people would be drowned?" she asked another time. She was often dissatisfied by the inexperienced teacher's replies and indicated that she thought her teacher was a bit dumb. When an answer was particularly unsatisfactory, she used to reply evenly, "Well, I'll just ask Aunt Lola -- she knows everything."

Her mother's younger sister, Leonore, a soft-spoken schoolteacher nicknamed Lola, used to spend holidays on the Sun Prairie farm. Georgia enjoyed Aunt Lola's attention, particularly at the age of seven, when her mother's attention was, once again, absorbed by the birth of a new baby, Catherine Blanche. At the end of August, in 1897, when Aunt Lola returned by train to her teaching job in Milwaukee, she took Georgia, who was nine and a half then, along for a visit. Perhaps the trip was an attempt to compensate for the fact that Papa was planning to take her older brother to Chicago in September. In any case, it was most likely Georgia's first journey outside of Madison. A few months later, when her beloved Grandmother O'Keeffe died of cancer, the loss was probably eased by the increasing closeness to youthful Aunt Lola. For Georgia it was a time of passage from her pretend dollhouse world to the actual world beyond the farm.

As long as Georgia was preoccupied with her dollhouse, she did not give the grown-ups any evidence of an artistic gift. They doted on what they considered to be the real talent for drawing demonstrated by the more forthcoming little Ida. Without the adults' knowledge, however, Georgia had closely observed the illustrations in her cloth Mother Goose, in her mother's books, and in her schoolbooks. She had also struggled to draw a man with a black lead pencil on a brown paper bag and to copy pictures of exotic places out of her geography book.

Both of her grandmothers dabbled in art and painted pictures of flowers and fruit in flat, naive folk styles. Two of Grandmother O'Keeffe's precisely done paintings hung in the farmhouse -- one was of two plums and the other of a moss rose. It was assumed that Georgia and her younger sisters would also learn the ladylike art of painting. Since the country schoolteacher had little time to teach more than the three R's, the girls' mother arranged for private art lessons when Georgia was close to twelve. That winter the three oldest O'Keeffe girls spent evenings copying cubes, squares, and spheres from a standard drawing book.

The next year Ida decided that her daughters were ready for painting lessons from an amateur painter, Sarah Mann, who lived in Sun Prairie. The elm-shaded village -- a cluster of tobacco warehouses, blacksmith shops, brick stores, and a high school -- was home to about nine hundred people. Georgia must have realized that art was something very special, for her and her sisters to be driven the seven miles round-trip in the buggy every Saturday afternoon. Mrs. Mann allowed them to choose illustrations to copy in watercolor, and Georgia picked subjects typical for a young girl, such as an Arabian horse and a red rose. She was being given training in realism at an age when a child quite naturally obeys rules. Shortly, however, she began to wrestle on her own with such puzzling problems as how to depict the brightness of sunshine and moonlight on the snow. Those initial experiences with colored pigment, in a medium with which she would eventually amaze the New York avant-garde, were exceedingly pleasant for her.

At this time, Georgia's right-handed facility with a paintbrush and a pencil became immediately apparent, the family remembers. She progressed rapidly, executing at around the age of twelve a startlingly accurate sketch of Aunt Jenny. She cared strongly about how her pictures looked, disliking the interference when her teacher touched them up or when her mother elaborately framed them. Her mother was trying to be encouraging, perhaps imagining that her oldest daughter would, at the least, become an accomplished young lady or even an art teacher. It was unheard of for a young girl to take her training one step further and become an artist.

Her mother did not know, however, that the desire to be an artist was exactly what Georgia was experiencing. One day when she was twelve, Georgia asked her friend Lena, the daughter of the O'Keeffes' washerwoman, what she wanted to be when she grew up. Lena replied that she didn't know. "Well, I'm going to be an artist," Georgia blurted out. She was surprised at the sureness of her own words, and she stood silently for a few moments, contemplating their barely perceived meaning.

In retrospect, Georgia never precisely put her finger on what prompted her at such an untried age to declare her intent to be an artist. No great women artists were mentioned in her school books, she didn't know any professional artists, and she cared little for the few paintings she had seen. But, as she observed in her book, a small illustration of a comely Grecian maiden in one of her mother's books had inspired her to create something as lovely herself. "I think my feeling wasn't as articulate as that, but I believe that picture started something moving in me that kept on going and has had to do with the everlasting urge that makes me keep on painting." she wrote.

What's more, she had lived with the annoying, but not painful, label of being the black sheep in the family, always being teased about her "crazy notions." As she matured, she discovered that no one minded at all when she gave her imagination free rein in colors and shapes. "I decided that the only thing I could do that was nobody else's business was to paint," she liked to say in adulthood. "I could do as I ch

Videos