Jon Mark Beilue: O’Keeffe’s Wartime Texas Letters

Von Lintel’s book shows voice of celebrated American artist

Photo: Dr. Amy Von Lintel, Doris Alexander Endowed Professor of Fine Arts, tries to capture the voice of American artist and occasional motorcyclist Georgia O'Keeffe in her book, "Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters" that cover the four years she taught at Amarillo High School and the new West Texas State Normal College.

“The country is almost all sky—and such wonderful sky—and the wind blows--blows hard—and the sun is hot—the glare almost blinding—but I don’t care—I like it—The work? I like that too----because—well—You know I get such a ridiculous lot out of living myself—and these boys and girls from the plains---get a lot out of it too—in a way---but I believe I can help them to get more…”

For Georgia O’Keeffe, what initially seemed like an odd trip alone from the East Coast to the young wide-open Texas Panhandle more than 100 years ago spoke to her independence, fearlessness and sense of adventure.

Before she was one of the most significant artists of the American 20^th century, a woman recognized as the “Mother of American modernism,” she was Georgia O’Keeffe, teacher at Amarillo High School and at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon.

“More than anything, she was looking for a job,” said Dr. Amy Von Lintel, the Doris Alexander Endowed Professor of Fine Arts at West Texas A&M University. “But she had also read a book when she was little about the Old West, and so it was something of a goal for her to check it out.”

Von Lintel has previously published a book on O’Keeffe’s more renowned work, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Watercolors.” A second one is a more personal and focused look at her life not through her paintings, but through her words and correspondence.

“Georgia O’Keeffe’s Wartime Texas Letters” (Texas A&M University Press, www.tamupress.com, 248 pages) explores her years in the growing shadow of World War I, when she was first in Amarillo from 1912 to 1914 and then her tenure at the young college in Canyon from 1916 to 1918. It’s a look at her life through her own words, her letters back East, most of it to her friend and future husband Alfred Steiglitz, but also to other friends, other men she had a romantic interest in, and a future sister-in-law.

Von Lintel culled through several hundred letters written during that time, letters that were not released until 2006, 20 years after O’Keeffe’s death. About 30 percent of her letters have been published since 2006. Von Lintel wanted to expand on that, while eliminating any return correspondence.

She looked for O’Keeffe’s independence, her personality, her interests, her concerns as a single woman on the Texas prairie a long way from what had been home.

“I wanted her voice and description and vision of the west,” Von Lintel said. “She can be grippingly funny and poetic, and that’s why this period of her time is so important. It’s about war, the west and gender. The public that knows Georgia O’Keeffe know her as the artist, but there’s so much more she shares.”

“Wish you see the long stretches of white and sandcolored and greenish-gray cliffs out there that mark the beginnings of the Canyon—they are a long way off—and I seem to feel lost out there—even though I’m here—in spite of the cliffs—the skyline is perfectly straight.

“Yesterday I rode out into that—then off to the right—where there is nothing—clouds making big dark shadows on the flatness—I almost went to sleep—dreaming over nothing.”

O’Keeffe was not yet an active studio artist when she boarded a train from Charlottesville, Va., to Amarillo in 1912. She had been an illustrator and done some commercial art work by age 24 when a professor at the University of Virginia encouraged her to become a teacher, but she needed some hours.

A woman at a boarding school told O’Keeffe she taught in the school district in Amarillo, Texas, and it paid well. There was a connection in Amarillo to help her. By the time she stepped off the train in Amarillo, the connection had died of the flu. She didn’t know a soul.

O’Keeffe taught drawing and penmanship at Amarillo High School for two years. She lived at the Magnolia Hotel, not a boarding house. She described watching streets turn from dirt to brick, and seeing some of the first sidewalks being laid in a town just 25 years old. O’Keeffe may have even witnessed a shootout.

“She bonded with her students,” Von Lintel said. “She inspired them.”

She was denied a raise after the 1913-14 school year and returned to the East. She taught at Columbia College in South Carolina and the University of Virginia. O’Keeffe also refined her charcoal abstractions, which made their way to Stieglitz’s studio in New York. That would begin a relationship that carried until his death in 1946.

Yet, O’Keeffe returned to the Texas Panhandle in 1916 after her mother died that year. The college in Canyon was but six years old, and Old Main had burned two years previously when O’Keeffe was given an offer by University President Robert Cousins to head the art department and teach drawing and fashion design to students.

“The soldier mind is a revelation to me. It seems as thought I never felt a real honest need of Art before—it never seemed necessary before—It seems as though I feel more on my own two good feet than I ever have in my life before—I hope they don’t dampen me completely the minute I get off the train in Canyon—I don’t want to come home—but I feel as though I have lots to do—lots—and one thing to paint—it’s the flag as I see it floating.”

Claudia, a sister, joined her in West Texas, getting a teaching job in Spur, near Lubbock. O’Keeffe embraced an outdoor lifestyle – shooting shotguns and hiking. She began a series of watercolor paintings while in Canyon, including several of Palo Duro Canyon

“In her letters, she has a good sense of humor, a good sense of self. She was not shy, but very open, made friends and was opinionated,” Von Lintel said. “She could be a grump, but smart as a whip and not afraid of authority figures.

“She was still a little apprehensive and not confident about her art. She’s not sure at the time she’s a good artist, but is confident that she’s a good teacher.  She lived life to the fullest.”

The winds of war were blowing strongly when O’Keeffe came to Canyon. The U.S. entry into World War I was in April 1917. Her brother Alexis was stationed in at a military camp in Waco and O’Keeffe saw him before he transferred out.

“The buildup of the war showed in her letters, young men going to war and women taking classes to help with the war effort,” Von Lintel said. “It was what was happening to people on the home front that came through.”

O’Keeffe left Canyon in February 1918, nine months before the end of World War I. She left because of a serious illness. Speculation was that it could have been the Spanish Flu as part of the global pandemic that also hit the Panhandle, but that could not be proven. She went to San Antonio to recuperate.

Her four years on two separate stints in the Panhandle did later pave her way back west, this time to Santa Fe, N.M., where she lived from the late 1940s until her death at age 98 in 1986.

“She was a private person, but she talks about dating men and what happened on the dates,” Von Lintel said. “It was a little bit of, ‘Should I be reading these?’ A lot of times she quotes herself as not being good with words, but she’s very good with words. She’s full of it to say she’s not. These letters are about her and her worth.”

Do you know of a student, faculty member, project, an alumnus or any other story idea for “WT: The Heart and Soul of the Texas Panhandle?” If so, email Jon Mark Beilue at jbeilue@wtamu.edu.