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\n\t\t\tGeorgia O\u2019Keeffe (November 15, 1887\u2013March 6, 1986), celebrated as America\u2019s first great female artist, was a woman of strong opinions on art, life, and setting priorities and an uncommon gift for committing to words what she committed to canvas. But some of her most revelatory insights on art and the creative experience were shared in a series of letters to writer Sherwood Anderson, who had befriended legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz \u2014 O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s husband and her correspondent in volumes of passionate love letters. Encountering O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s art in the early 1920s had inspired Anderson to pick up the paintbrush for the first time and begin painting himself. Meanwhile, the two developed an epistolary fellowship around their shared ideas about art and their amicable intellectual disagreements. (Only three years later, Anderson would come to articulate his own unforgettable wisdom on art in a letter to his son, very likely influenced by O\u2019Keeffe and their creative rapport.)
\nFound in Georgia O\u2019Keeffe: Art and Letters (public library) \u2014 an altogether unputdownable out-of-print volume released in 1987, a year after O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s death, to mark her centennial \u2014 the letters stand as a sublime paean to the kind of creative integrity that rises above public opinion and blazes with crystalline clarity of conviction. At the same time, one can\u2019t help but wonder how O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s art \u2014 how her sanity \u2014 might have suffered had she lived in our present era of perpetual sprinting on the social-media hamster wheel of public opinion.
\nGeorgia O\u2019Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, 1918
\nOn August 1, 1923, she writes to Anderson:
\nThis morning I saw an envelope on the table Stieglitz addressed to you \u2014 I\u2019ve wanted so often to write you \u2014 two things in particular to tell you \u2014 but I do not write \u2014 I do not write to anyone \u2014 maybe I do not like telling myself to people \u2014 and writing means that.
\nFirst I wanted to tell you \u2014 way back in the winter that I liked your \u201cMany Marriages\u201d \u2014 and that what others have said about it amused me much \u2014 I realize when I hear others speak of it that I do not seem to read the way they do \u2014 I seem to \u2014 like \u2014 or discard \u2014 for no particular reason excepting that it is inevitable at the moment. \u2014 At the time I read it I saw no particular reason why I should write you that I liked it \u2014 because I do not consider my liking \u2014 or disliking of any particular consequence to anyone but myself \u2014 And knowing you were trying to work I felt that opinions on what was past for you would probably be like just so much rubbish \u2014 in your way for the clear thing ahead \u2014 And when I think of you \u2014 I think of you rather often \u2014 it is always with the wish \u2014 a real wish \u2014 that the work is going well \u2014 that nothing interferes \u2014
\nI think of you often because the few times you came to us were fine \u2014 like fine days in the mountains \u2014 fine to remember \u2014 clear sparkling and lots of air \u2014 fine air.
\nAfter a characteristically evocative note about Stieglitz\u2019s health that spring had rendered him \u201cjust a little heap of misery \u2014 sleepless \u2014 with eyes \u2014 ears \u2014 nose \u2014 arm \u2014 feet \u2014 ankles \u2014 intestines \u2014 all taking their turn at deviling him,\u201d O\u2019Keeffe expresses deep gratitude for the very thing that led Virginia Woolf to term letter writing \u201cthe humane art\u201d \u2014 the soul-salving power of a letter sent by one human being to another:
\nYou can see why I appreciated your letters \u2014 maybe more than he did \u2014 because of what they gave him \u2014 I don\u2019t remember now what you wrote \u2014 I only remember that they made me feel that you feel something of what I know he is \u2014 that it means much to you in your life \u2014 adds much to your life \u2014 and a real love for him seemed to have grown from it
\nAnd in his misery he was very sad \u2014 and I guess I had grown pretty sad and forlorn feeling too \u2014 so your voice was kind to hear out of faraway and I want to tell you that it meant much \u2014 Thanks
\nAware of misfortune\u2019s one-way mirror of hindsight, she adds, \u201cI can only write you this now because things are better.\u201d
\nGeorgia O\u2019Keeffe, Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, 1923 (Georgia O\u2019Keeffe Museum)
\nO\u2019Keeffe and Anderson continue their correspondence and in another letter sent a month later, she defies her self-professed distaste for \u201ctelling [herself] to people\u201d and instead divulging \u2014 with the exhilarating intensity of expression that both her art and her letters to loved ones emanate \u2014 a magnificent glimpse of her inner life and creative spirit. She considers the role of form in art and the experience from which art stems:
\nI feel that a real living form is the result of the individual\u2019s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown \u2014 where it has experienced something \u2014 felt something \u2014 it has not understood \u2014 and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown \u2014 known. By unknown \u2014 I mean the thing that means so much to the person that wants to put it down \u2014 clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand \u2014 sometimes he partially knows why \u2014 sometimes he doesn\u2019t \u2014 sometimes it is all working in the dark \u2014 but a working that must be done \u2014 Making the unknown \u2014 known \u2014 in terms of one\u2019s medium is all-absorbing \u2014 if you stop to think of the form \u2014 as form you are lost \u2014 The artist\u2019s form must be inevitable \u2014 You mustn\u2019t even think you won\u2019t succeed \u2014 Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant \u2014 there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing \u2014 and keeping the unknown always beyond you \u2014 catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life \u2014 only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead \u2014 that you must always keep working to grasp \u2014 the form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear.
\nIn a remark of extraordinary humility and wisdom, especially in the hindsight of both O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s present status in the canon of art and Anderson\u2019s in that of literature, she considers the feebleness of any present metric of success against a creator\u2019s ultimate significance for posterity:
\nYou and I don\u2019t know whether our vision is clear in relation to our time or not \u2014 No matter what failure or success we may have \u2014 we will not know \u2014 But we can keep our integrity \u2014 according to our own sense of balance with the world and that creates our form \u2014
\nIn a sentiment that calls to mind Maurice Sendak\u2019s famous dissent with a common classification of his work \u2014 \u201cI don\u2019t write for children. I write \u2014 and somebody says, \u2018That\u2019s for children!\u2019\u201d \u2014 O\u2019Keeffe adds:
\nWhat others have called form has nothing to do with our form \u2014 I want to create my own and I can\u2019t do anything else \u2014 if I stop to think of what others \u2014 authorities or the public \u2014 or anyone \u2014 would say of my form I\u2019d not be able to do anything.
\nI can never show what I am working on without being stopped \u2014 whether it is liked or disliked I am affected in the same way \u2014 sort of paralyzed \u2014 .
\nAll of Georgia O\u2019Keeffe: Art and Letters is a treat for eye and spirit alike. Complement this particular bit with Anna Deavere Smith on how to stop letting others define us and Rilke on why external interference in the artist\u2019s private experience poisons the art.<\/p>\n