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

living with terminal lung cancer during our class. I still ponder his lesson plan: Was he trying to teach us that process is all that matters, or that everything turns to shit, so you might as well have a hand in hastening the process, or, some ­standard-issue carpe diem thing? And, more important, why the chain-smoking?
    Georgia, had she been into discussing ideas, would have probably come down on the side of process-is-what-matters. Once she was immersed in a mad art-making phase, she kept at it until she felt as if she’d gone as far with the theme as she possibly could. “I have a single-track mind,” she said, “I work on an idea for a long time. It is like getting acquainted with a person. And I don’t get acquainted easily.” Which explains why there are series of poppies, calla lilies, jimsonweed, iris, New York skyscrapers, cow skulls, black crosses, doors in adobe walls, clouds, and pink-and-blue vulviform abstractions known informally as “what the gynecologist saw.”
    Once, during the mad phase at the end of 1915, when she was drawing every night on the floor on her hands and knees, she had a roaring headache. Someone else (me) would use this as an excuse to take three Advil and settle in for a night of What Not to Wear. But Georgia thought, “I feel like my brains are going to explode all over the inside of my cranium, so why not work with it?” And that’s what Drawing No. 9 (1915) looks like. (You could also argue that it looks like what it feels like the moment before the explosion.)
    As anyone who has ever had a migraine will tell you, this is realism—not some lady in a big hat sitting in a rowboat. Georgia would express similar views in an interview in the New York Sun after she had become O’Keeffe: Nothing is less real than realism.
    The lost art of sublimation.
    This will be the most unpopular lesson in the book; no offense taken if you feel the need to skip ahead to the section on How to Be a Man Magnet (hint: It has nothing to do with your shoes) or How to Avoid Looking Like a Starving Artist (hint: It has everything to do with your shoes).
    You can’t always get what you want. So said the poet Jagger, at a time in American history when his college-educated, fringe-vest-wearing fan base was getting pretty much everything it wanted, compared to young people in, say, 1914, the year Georgia met and fell in grown-woman love with Arthur Macmahon.
    She’d met Macmahon in the summer of 1915, during one of her teaching stints at the University of Virginia. He was a handsome, soft-spoken political science professor from Columbia University, teaching government at UV summer school. He was entranced by Georgia, her love of nature, her sensual interest in leaves and flowers, her mania for tramping through the piney woods, her long, elegant fingers.
    Then, like summer romances since the world began, this one ended. He went back to New York. Before he left he made some noise about her joining him in Manhattan, but then he left and she didn’t hear from him. Frustrated by his silence, she wrote to him, admitting that she wasn’t into game-playing like so many women; she wanted to write to him, so she did.
    The exchange of smokin’ letters began. But Macmahon was a graduate of the Stop it Some More, Stop it Some More School of Courtship. He ran hot and cold. Georgia would receive a letter that gave her hope for their romance, and she’d zip one back to him. Then, nothing. It was the 1915 equivalent of The Phone Did Not Ring. She would worry that she’d been too forward, that writing that thing about not playing games like other women was a big mistake. Was she an idiot? Why did she say that? Then, she’d receive a letter from him. Hooray! He’d talk about perhaps going away together to a cabin in the woods, then instead of asking her, switch topics and recommend that she read Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labor. She was beside