Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters by Amy Von Lintel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters by Amy Von Lintel Linda M. Grasso Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters. By Amy Von Lintel. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2020. Pp. 248. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) At two different times in the 1910s, when Georgia O'Keeffe was in her twenties, she taught in Amarillo and Canyon, Texas, before becoming a professional artist. The personal and artistic importance of O'Keeffe's time in the Texas Panhandle was first explored by art historian Sharyn R. Udall in a 1988 exhibition and accompanying catalogue, O'Keeffe and Texas (Abrams). In Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters, Amy Von Lintel once again brings attention to O'Keeffe's Texas years by assembling, editing, and contextualizing a well-curated sampling over more than two hundred letters that O'Keeffe wrote during her time there. Von Lintel's focus on the effects of World War I on O'Keeffe's sensibility is the book's most distinctive feature. Von Lintel's book is an intense immersion in a brief yet formative period in O'Keeffe's life and career, and it reveals how O'Keeffe used letters to sustain relationships, rehearse ideas, make meaning of emotions, chronicle experiences, and create shifting identities. As Von Lintel astutely observes, O'Keeffe was a "verbal creator" who painted "with words as well as with brushes" (2). This artistry, accompanied by nineteen beautifully reproduced color illustrations of O'Keeffe's Texas paintings, as well as the relevant work of other artists and artifacts, is on full display in this collection. Unlike Sarah Greenough's massive tome, My Faraway One (Yale University Press, 2011), which contains correspondence between O'Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz spanning three decades, Von Lintel's volume features only the letters O'Keeffe wrote while she was in Texas from August 1916 to June 1918. This editorial decision privileges O'Keeffe's syntax, consciousness, and poetic talent and highlights the significance of the region on O'Keeffe's imagination. Italicizing references to the war, identifying O'Keeffe's neighbors, colleagues, suitors, and friends, and providing international and national context about modernism, war, and local practices, the book transports readers into the era and enables us to hear O'Keeffe's voice, which is at times exuberant, angry, reflective, vulnerable, and sardonic. As interpreter and guide, Von Lintel's framing introductory chapter offers new ways to think about O'Keeffe's Texas paintings, linking them, for example, to European modernism and interpreting their images, color, and content through the lens of wartime referents. She also provides concise, insightful summaries of the letters in the conclusion of each of the book's six chapters. However, while Von Lintel helpfully parses O'Keeffe's ambivalent responses to the Great War, noting how she vacillates among a number of reactions, including skepticism, criticism, and despair, the author [End Page 356] misses opportunities to examine O'Keeffe's racial attitudes with the same depth, especially as they were expressed in the American West. For instance, Von Lintel suggests that O'Keeffe's use of the phrase "war path" is evidence that "the war gave her new metaphors for productivity" (9). But surely this idiom, as well as O'Keeffe's employment of the metaphor of scalping to express impatient anger (57, 126), references not World War I but rather the U.S. conquest of Indigenous peoples, which O'Keeffe knew well from boys' stories about the Wild West that were part of her upbringing. And while including only O'Keeffe's letters enables a narrative charged with adventure, romance, risk, and passion, the one-sided correspondence also, ironically, severs O'Keeffe from context by eliminating consideration of how her responses may have been influenced by the people with whom she was corresponding. Most of the letters Von Lintel includes, for example, are to Stieglitz, who subsequently became O'Keeffe's husband and life-long artistic champion. Nevertheless, Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters is a welcome addition to studies that historicize the artist and make O'Keeffe's letters readily available. Linda M. Grasso City University of New York Copyright © 2021 The Texas...