27 FEBRUARY, 2015

26-Year-Old Frida Kahlo’s Compassionate Letter to 46-Year-Old Georgia O’Keeffe

By: Maria Popova

“I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn’t know sad things now.”

There is something uncommonly heartening about bearing witness to the virtuous cycle of support and mutual appreciation between two creative luminaries — elevating epistolary exchanges like those between Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, Mark Twain and Helen Keller, Ursula Nordstrom and Maurice Sendak, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. They seem to remind us that, contrary to the toxic myth of the solitary genius, creative culture is propelled by the power of scenius, by the goodwill and generosity of kindred spirits, by tangible reminders that we belong to a human enterprise larger than we are.

One of the most touching such exchanges was between two of the greatest artists and most remarkable women the world has ever known — Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe. Both were prolific letter writers — Kahlo in her passionate illustrated love letters to Diego Rivera, and O’Keeffe in her equally passionate love letters to Alfred Stieglitz, her lifelong correspondence with her best friend, and her emboldening missives to Sherwood Anderson. But what Kahlo wrote to O’Keeffe in 1933 was a wholly different kind of epistolary and human magic.

Even though the Mexican painter had herself been dealt an unfair hand — including a miscarriage just a few months earlier, her mother’s recent death, and more than thirty operations over the course of her life after a serious traffic accident during adolescence sent an iron rod through her stomach and uterus — Kahlo didn’t hesitate to reach out with a beam of compassion during O’Keeffe’s moment of crisis. Shortly after the American painter was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown and instructed by doctors not to paint for a year, Kahlo sent her an epitome of what Virginia Woolf so aptly called “the humane art.”

In a letter from March 1, 1933, preserved by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, Kahlo writes:

Georgia,

Was wonderful to hear your voice again. Every day since I called you and many times before months ago I wanted to write you a letter. I wrote you many, but every one seemed more stupid and empty and I torn them up. I can’t write in English all that I would like to tell, especially to you. I am sending this one because I promised it to you. I felt terrible when Sybil Brown told me that you were sick but I still don’t know what is the matter with you. Please Georgia dear if you can’t write, ask Stieglitz to do it for you and let me know how are you feeling will you? I’ll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn’t know sad things now. After all I shouldn’t complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can’t imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers, but it is so difficult to find the ones I would like for you. I would be so happy if you could write me even two words. I like you very much Georgia.

Frieda

What’s especially interesting is the simultaneous mirroring and reversing of circumstances pertaining to the relationship between art and mental health. Kahlo had actually first begun painting while recovering, immobile in bed, from the brutal accident that nearly killed her. At the time of their 1933 correspondence, O’Keeffe was doing the opposite — recovering in bed from brutally overextending herself in art. But this wasn’t the only reversal between the two. Citing the letter in her book Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own (public library), Sharyn Rohlfsen Udal — who suggests that Kahlo, with her long history of affairs with both men and women, may have been interested in something more than friendship with O’Keeffe — writes:

The next confirmed record of the O’Keeffe–Kahlo contact was through their mutual friend Rose Covarrubias, who took O’Keeffe to visit Kahlo (confined to her bed in Coyoacan after a year-long hospitalization) twice during O’Keeffe’s 1951 visit to Mexico. It is an interesting reversal of roles from the 1933 contact, when it was O’Keeffe who was ill, Kahlo the solicitous visitor.

And that, perhaps, is the point — a palpable reminder that the history of arts and letters is strewn with these barely visible threads of mutuality, generosity, and goodwill, which stand as the most steadfast support structure for the creative spirit.

HT Open Culture

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08 DECEMBER, 2014

Georgia O’Keeffe on Public Opinion and What It Means to Be an Artist, in a Letter to Sherwood Anderson

By: Maria Popova

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you…”

Georgia O’Keeffe, celebrated as America’s 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 — O’Keeffe’s husband and her correspondent in volumes of passionate love letters. Encountering O’Keeffe’s 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’Keeffe and their creative rapport.)

Found in Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters (public library) — an altogether unputdownable out-of-print volume released in 1987, a year after O’Keeffe’s death, to mark her centennial — 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’t help but wonder how O’Keeffe’s art — how her sanity — might have suffered had she lived in our present era of perpetual sprinting on the social-media hamster wheel of public opinion.

On August 1, 1923, she writes to Anderson:

This morning I saw an envelope on the table Stieglitz addressed to you—I’ve wanted so often to write you—two things in particular to tell you—but I do not write—I do not write to anyone—maybe I do not like telling myself to people—and writing means that.

First I wanted to tell you—way back in the winter that I liked your “Many Marriages”—and that what others have said about it amused me much—I realize when I hear others speak of it that I do not seem to read the way they do—I seem to—like—or discard—for no particular reason excepting that it is inevitable at the moment.—At the time I read it I saw no particular reason why I should write you that I liked it—because I do not consider my liking—or disliking of any particular consequence to anyone but myself—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—in your way for the clear thing ahead—And when I think of you—I think of you rather often—it is always with the wish—a real wish—that the work is going well—that nothing interferes —

I think of you often because the few times you came to us were fine—like fine days in the mountains—fine to remember—clear sparkling and lots of air—fine air.

After a characteristically evocative note about Stieglitz’s health that spring had rendered him “just a little heap of misery—sleepless—with eyes—ears—nose—arm—feet—ankles—intestines—all taking their turn at deviling him,” O’Keeffe expresses deep gratitude for the very thing that led Virginia Woolf to term letter writing “the humane art”—the soul-salving power of a letter sent by one human being to another:

You can see why I appreciated your letters—maybe more than he did—because of what they gave him—I don’t remember now what you wrote—I only remember that they made me feel that you feel something of what I know he is—that it means much to you in your life—adds much to your life—and a real love for him seemed to have grown from it

And in his misery he was very sad—and I guess I had grown pretty sad and forlorn feeling too—so your voice was kind to hear out of faraway and I want to tell you that it meant much—Thanks

Aware of misfortune’s one-way mirror of hindsight, she adds, “I can only write you this now because things are better.”

O’Keeffe and Anderson continue their correspondence and in another letter sent a month later, she defies her self-professed distaste for “telling [herself] to people” and instead divulging — with the exhilarating intensity of expression that both her art and her letters to loved ones emanate — 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:

I feel that a real living form is the result of the individual’s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown—where it has experienced something—felt something—it has not understood—and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown—known. By unknown—I mean the thing that means so much to the person that wants to put it down—clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand—sometimes he partially knows why—sometimes he doesn’t—sometimes it is all working in the dark—but a working that must be done—Making the unknown—known—in terms of one’s medium is all-absorbing—if you stop to think of the form—as form you are lost—The artist’s form must be inevitable—You mustn’t even think you won’t succeed—Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you—catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life—only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead—that you must always keep working to grasp—the form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear.

In a remark of extraordinary humility and wisdom, especially in the hindsight of both O’Keeffe’s present status in the canon of art and Anderson’s in that of literature, she considers the feebleness of any present metric of success against a creator’s ultimate significance for posterity:

You and I don’t know whether our vision is clear in relation to our time or not—No matter what failure or success we may have—we will not know—But we can keep our integrity—according to our own sense of balance with the world and that creates our form—

In a sentiment that calls to mind Maurice Sendak’s famous dissent with a common classification of his work — “I don’t write for children. I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” — O’Keeffe adds:

What others have called form has nothing to do with our form—I want to create my own and I can’t do anything else—if I stop to think of what others—authorities or the public—or anyone—would say of my form I’d not be able to do anything.

I can never show what I am working on without being stopped—whether it is liked or disliked I am affected in the same way—sort of paralyzed—.

All of Georgia O’Keeffe: 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’s private experience poisons the art.

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22 OCTOBER, 2014

You Have Never Seen the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe on the Shimmering Beauty of the Southwest

By: Maria Popova

“There is something wonderful about the bigness and the lonelyness and the windyness of it all.”

When Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887–March 6, 1986) was a little girl, decades before she came to be regarded as America’s first great female artist and became the first woman honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, her mother used to read history and travel stories to her every night before bed. The mesmerism of place never lost its grip on her. At the peak of her career, O’Keeffe left New York and moved to the exotic expanse of the Southwest to live a solitary life. She once wrote in a letter to her best friend, Anita Pollitzer, the woman who had selflessly taken it upon herself to make the New York art elite pay attention to O’Keeffe’s work: “I believe one can have as many rare experiences at the tail end of the earth as in civilization if one grabs at them — no — it isn’t a case of grabbing — it is — just that they are here — you can’t help getting them.” Pollitzer would later come to write in a major profile of O’Keeffe: “Fame still does not seem to be as meaningful or real to her as the mesas of New Mexico or the petals of a white rose.”

Indeed, O’Keeffe’s love for the landscape and energy of the Southwest shimmers with growing vibrancy across the lifetime of letters the two women exchanged collected in Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer (public library) — the same wonderful volume that gave us O’Keeffe on art, life, and setting priorities. It was there, under the endless skies and fiery sunsets of the Southwest, that O’Keeffe developed not only the remarkable mastery of color and sensuality for which she is known but also the most essential tool of all art — the ability to pay attention, to look and actually see.

In mid-January of 1916, returning to New York from Texas after a visit as she considered a new teaching job there, O’Keeffe writes to Pollitzer:

There is something wonderful about the bigness and the lonelyness and the windyness of it all — mirages people it with all sorts of things at times — sometimes Ive seen the most wonderful sunsets over what seemed to be the ocean — It is great — I would like to go today — Next to New York it is the finest thing I know — here I feel like Im in a shoe that doesn’t fit.

O’Keeffe would eventually trade the ill-fitting shoe for the bigness that would be her home for the last seven decades of her life — but not before her heart fully surrendered to the sunsets of the Southwest. In one particularly evocative letter from September of 1916, O’Keeffe channels the expansive awe of the Southwest sky:

Tonight I walked into the sunset — to mail some letters — the whole sky — and there is so much of it out here — was just blazing — and grey blue clouds were riding all through the holiness of it — and the ugly little buildings and windmills looked great against it…

The Eastern sky was all grey blue — bunches of clouds — different kinds of clouds — sticking around everywhere and the whole thing — lit up — first in one place — then in another with flashes of lightning — sometimes just sheet lightning — and some times sheet lightning with a sharp bright zigzag flashing across it –. I walked out past the last house — past the last locust tree — and sat on the fence for a long time — looking — just looking at — the lightning — you see there was nothing but sky and flat prairie land — land that seems more like the ocean than anything else I know — There was a wonderful moon.

Well I just sat there and had a great time all by myself — Not even many night noises — just the wind —

[…]

It is absurd the way I love this country… I am loving the plains more than ever it seems — and the SKY — Anita you have never seen SKY — it is wonderful —

Despite declaring to Pollitzer that she always has “a hard time finding words for anything,” O’Keeffe blossoms as a spectacular writer in relaying the sensory awe of the landscape to her friend — a testament to Susan Sontag’s assertion that “a writer is a professional observer.” In another gorgeous letter a few days later, O’Keeffe writes:

Last night couldnt sleep till after four in the morning — I had been out to the canyon all afternoon — till late at night — wonderful color — I wish I could tell you how big — and with the night the colors deeper and darker — cattle on the pastures in the bottom looked like little pinheads — I can understand Pa Dow painting his pretty colored canyons — it must have been a great temptation — no wonder he fell

Then the moon rose right up out of the ground after we got out on the plains again — battered a little where he bumped his head but enormous — There was no wind — it was just big and still — so very big and still — long legged jack rabbits hopping across in front of the light as we passed — A great place to see the night time because there is nothing else.

[…]

Im so glad Im out here — I can’t tell you how much I like it. I like the plains — and I like the work — everything is so ridiculously new — and there is something about it that just makes you glad your living here — You understand — there is nothing here — so maybe there is something wrong with me that I am liking it so much.

There was, of course, nothing “wrong” with O’Keeffe — she was learning a whole new way of looking at the world, directing toward it what Oscar Wilde memorably called “temperament of receptivity,” inhabiting it with the very presence and aliveness from which great art springs. A few more days later, she captures this aliveness beautifully in another letter to Pollitzer:

Really — living is too fine — Last night we had a tremendous thunderstorm — and I’ve never seen such lightning in my life — it was wonderful… Stood out on the porch for a long time watching the whole sky alive.

All of Lovingly, Georgia is a gorgeous read and a rare glimpse into the inner world of one of the most extraordinary artists who ever lived. Complement this particular slice of it with young Sylvia Plath on the transcendence and reverie of nature and Rebecca Solnit on why the sky is blue.

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17 SEPTEMBER, 2014

Georgia O’Keeffe on Art, Life, and Setting Priorities

By: Maria Popova

“Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.”

In her heyday, Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887–March 6, 1986) was written about as America’s first great female artist. The great social critic Lewis Mumford once remarked of a painting of hers: “Not only is it a piece of consummate craftsmanship, but it likewise possesses that mysterious force, that hold upon the hidden soul which distinguishes important communications from the casual reports of the eye.” In 1946, O’Keeffe became the first woman honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Exactly thirty years earlier, her career had been catapulted by the lovingly surreptitious support of her best friend, Anita Pollitzer, who had assumed the role of agent-manager and secretly sent some of O’Keeffe’s charcoal drawings to the famous 291 gallery owned by the influential photographer and art-world tastemaker Alfred Stieglitz — the man with whom O’Keeffe would later fall in love. Upon first seeing her work, Stieglitz exclaimed that it was “the purest, finest, sincerest things that have entered 291 in a long time.”

The lifetime of letters between the two women, full of O’Keeffe’s spirited expressiveness and peppered with her delightfully defiant disregard for punctuation, is collected in Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer (public library) — a revealing look at the inner life of one of the past century’s greatest artists, brimming with her unfiltered views on art, work ethic, love, and life. It is also the record of a remarkable and somewhat tragic friendship, which suffered a profound rift when Pollitzer’s warmhearted and generous biography of O’Keeffe was met with indignant disapproval by the artist. (“You have written your dream picture of me — and that is what it is,” she wrote to her friend in rejecting the biography. “It is a very sentimental way you like to imagine me — and I am not that way at all.”) Even so, for more than thirty years the two women held up mirrors for one another in a most Aristotelian way, using the reflective veneer of their surface differences — Anita with her wholehearted emotionality and faith in the bountifulness of the universe, Georgia with her fierce self-protection and fear of emotional vulnerability, regulated by a formidable work ethic — so that each could reveal her true nature and, in the process, shed light on the other.

Pollitzer’s most vitalizing effect on O’Keeffe was the ability, through the sheer force of her own vibrant aliveness, to pull out of her friend a rejoicing in the full act of living, the kind of “spiritual electricity” essential to great art. O’Keeffe knew and valued this — early on in the friendship, she wrote to Pollitzer: “You are certainly a great little girl — I love the way you just bubble with life — and the enthusiasm of living,” and later, “I haven’t found anyone yet who likes to live like we do.” But she expresses this most exquisitely in a letter from August of 1915. At 27, Georgia — already a formidable presence at that age, typically dressed in tailored suits and immaculate white shirtwaists, with hair pulled back in a disciplined bun — writes to Anita:

Your letters are certainly like drinks of fine cold spring water on a hot day — They have a spark of the kind of fire in them that makes life worthwhile. — That nervous energy that makes people like you and I want to go after everything in the world — bump our heads on all the hard walls and scratch our hands on all the briars — but it makes living great — doesn’t it — I’m glad I want everything in the world — good and bad — bitter and sweet — I want it all and a lot of it too —

Such realness of living was essential for O’Keeffe’s values not only as a person, but also as an artist. Later in the same letter, condemning another artist’s affectation, she writes:

I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected.

Embedded in young O’Keeffe’s worldview was a certain quality of grit, the character trait we now know is the greatest predictor of success. In a letter from September of that year, she makes her determination unequivocal:

I believe in having everything and doing everything you want — if you really want to — and if you can in any possible way… We just want to live dont we.

But O’Keeffe balanced this voracious appetite for freedom and unburdened living with a keen awareness of the practicalities of life and the quintessential tussle of the creative life — the struggle to integrate making art with making a living. She writes to Pollitzer:

You see — I have to make a living

I don’t know that I will ever be able to do it just expressing myself as I want to — so it seems to me that the best course is the one that leaves my mind freest … to work as I please and at the same time makes me some money.

If I went to New York I would be lucky if I could make a living — and doing it would take all my time and energy — there would be nothing left that would be just myself for fun — it would be all myself for money — and I loath — If I can’t work by myself for a year — with no stimulus other than what I can get from books — distant friends and from my own fun in living — I’m not worth much…

But a few days later, O’Keeffe reaches a depth of despondency that testifies to Anaïs Nin’s memorable point about great art being the product of emotional excess. Writing to Anita, she despairs over the psychic drain of apathy:

One can’t work with nothing to express. I never felt such a vacancy in my life — Everything is so mediocre — I don’t dislike it — I don’t like it — It is existing — not living — and absolutely — I just wish some one would take hold of me and shake me out of my wits — I feel that insanity might be a luxury. All the people I’ve meet are all right to exist with — and it is awful when you are in the habit of living.

And yet O’Keeffe’s ambivalence about emotional intensity is clear — without it, she feels vacant; with it, she feels out of control. In a letter from October of 1915, she lovingly but sternly scolds Pollitzer for what she sees as emotional excess:

You mustn’t get so excited… You wear out the most precious things you have by letting your emotions and feelings run riot at such a rate… Dont you think we need to conserve our energies — emotions and feelings for what we are going to make the big things in our lives instead of letting so much run away on the little things everyday

Self-control is a wonderful thing — I think we must even keep ourselves from feeling to much — often — if we are going to keep sane and see with a clear unprejudiced vision —

I do not want to preach to you — I like you like you are — but I would like to think you had a string on yourself and that you were not wearing yourself all out feeling and living now — save a little so you can live always —

Echoing Sherwood Anderson’s spectacular letter of advice on art and life to his teenage son — “The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor. The point of being an artist is that you may live.” — O’Keeffe adds:

It always seems to me that so few people live — they just seem to exist and I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t live always — til we die physically — why do it in our teens and twenties…

For her part, Pollitzer echoes Seneca’s memorable wisdom on living wide vs. living long and responds: “I’d lots rather live hard than long.” But for O’Keeffe, the task of living hard is to be attained no matter the circumstances — in a prescient letter from the same month, fourteen years before O’Keeffe would move to the remote Southwest to live a solitary life, she writes:

I believe one can have as many rare experiences at the tail end of the earth as in civilization if one grabs at them — no — it isn’t a case of grabbing — it is — just that they are here — you can’t help getting them.

In many ways, O’Keeffe implicitly offers the art of living as the answer she poses to Pollitzer about the nature of art itself:

What is Art any way?

When I think of how hopelessly unable I am to answer that question I can not help feeling like a farce… Ill lose what little self respect I have — unless I can in some way solve the problem a little — give myself some little answer to it.

A year later, O’Keeffe would revisit the question with a remark that falls between the sincere and the sardonic:

I don’t know what Art is but I know some things it isn’t when I see them.

And yet O’Keeffe learns the invaluable art of embracing the unknown and writes to Pollitzer a few days later:

This feeling of not knowing anything and being pretty sure that you never will is — well — I might say awful — if it wasn’t for a part of my make up that is always very much amused at what out to be my greatest calamities — that part of me sits in the grand stand and laughs and claps and screams — in derision and amusement and drives the rest of me on in my blundering floundering game — Oh — it’s a great sport

A month later, O’Keeffe revisits the notion of wholehearted living and touches on the presently trendy concept of “work-life balance” — a rather toxic divide, I believe — writing to Pollitzer:

Haven’t worked either since Monday and here it is Saturday afternoon — Ive just been living. It seems rediculous that any one should get as much fun out of just living — as I — poor fool — do — … Next week Im going to work like a tiger.

[…]

I wonder if I am a lunatic… Imagination certainly is an entertaining thing to have — and it is great to be a fool.

Though O’Keeffe was known for her unflinching work ethic — an artist who, dissatisfied with the quality of commercially available canvases, began stretching her own — she never abandoned this exuberant joy in the art of living. A few days later, in November of 1915, she writes:

I just cant imagine anyone being any more pleased and still being able to live.

But O’Keeffe’s greatest feat was in bridging her discipline with her dedication to wholehearted living. In December of 1915, a period when she was particularly short on money, she writes to Pollitzer:

Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.

Still … I sometimes think its almost a sin to refuse to satisfy yourself.

Even so, O’Keeffe isn’t free from the self-conscious guilt we tend to experience when we feel unproductive. A few weeks later, still unhappily stationed at her teaching position in South Carolina, she captures this moral struggle in rather strong language:

Its disgusting to be feeling so fine — so much like reaching to all creation — and to be sitting around spending so much time on nothing —

I am disgusted with myself —

I was made to work hard — and Im not working half hard enough — Nobody else here has energy like I have — no one else can keep up

I hate it

When able to bridge her love of life and her love of work, however, O’Keeffe captures the exultant joy of creative flow and self-expression beautifully:

Ive been working like mad all day … it seems I never had such a good time — I was just trying to say what I wanted to say — and it is so much fun to say what you want to — I worked till my head all felt light in the top — then stopped and looked… — I really doubt the soundness of the mentality of a person who can work so hard.

O’Keeffe would go on to create for herself the kind of life and environment best suited for such delirious and dogged application of her talent and work ethic. Like another great artist, Agnes Martin, who memorably asserted that “the best things in life happen to you when you’re alone,” O’Keeffe mastered the art of solitude by deliberately avoiding social distractions to make art always her priority. In a Saturday Review profile piece Pollitzer wrote of her friend in 1950, she quoted O’Keeffe as saying:

I know I am unreasonable about people but there are so many wonderful people whom I can’t take the time to know.

In a 1958 letter to Pollitzer, O’Keeffe, by that point in her early seventies, speaks to her priorities directly:

Most of the time I am alone with my dog and think it is fine to be alone — I have been working and rather like my doings — I really work like a day laborer — have been preparing canvas and it is really hard work but Im determined to prepare enough to last four or five years so there will always be lots of empty ones around. Im even going to frame them and back them so there will be nothing left to do but the paintings… My life is good — and I like it. The dog and I have a walk almost every early morning and again at sunset — He just now banged on the door to tell me he was ready to come in and go to bed.

But perhaps the single most piercing sentiment, the one most vividly expressive of O’Keeffe’s lifelong priorities, comes from her notes on the very artifact that caused the demise of her friendship with Pollitzer — the biography O’Keeffe deemed wholly unrepresentative of her spirit. One of her many corrections on the manuscript reads:

I do not like the idea of happyness — it is too momentary — I would say that I was always busy and interested in something — interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happyness.

What an exquisite way to capture the idea that happiness is found in being intensely present with one’s experience.

Complement Lovingly, Georgia with O’Keeffe’s passionate love letters to Alfred Stieglitz.

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