Georgia

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 timeâand those she continued to create throughout her lifeâwere 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, bodyâsome 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 passionâcreative and sexualâto 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 artistâmale 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 termsâand 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 RaisonnÃ©;
O'Keeffe's O'Keeffes;
and
O'Keeffe, Stieglitz, and the Critics, 1916â1929.
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, 1915â1933,
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 FrederickÂ 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.

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