For O’Keeffe, a Long Way From Santa Fe

Georgia was allowed to wear the plain shifts she preferred instead of the pretty dresses tied at the waist that proper girls had in the early 1900s. But the residents of Williamsburg, Va., had come to expect strange things from the peculiar O’Keeffe family and its outlandish ideas on raising children and so much else.

Biographers rarely mention the artist’s large Irish family and the odd concrete block house her father built on the edge of what is now Colonial Williamsburg. It quickly became known as the ugliest abode in town, but to Georgia O’Keeffe and her six brothers and sisters, it was home.

O’Keeffe’s years in Williamsburg, and a subsequent exhibit of her work there at the College of William and Mary about 25 years later, were largely forgotten until an art historian started researching the school’s acquisition of O’Keeffe’s “White Flower.” Now the show and O’Keeffe’s Williamsburg years will be revived next month when the college re-creates the original exhibit of nine paintings. It will also publish an account of the artist’s life between 1903, when she joined her family in Virginia at age 15, and 1912, when her father sold the house and followed his family to Charlottesville, N.C.

For art historian Ann C. Madonia, curator of collections for the college’s Muscarelle Museum of Art, what started out as a simple assignment turned into a three-year project.

While O’Keeffe’s biographers tend to focus on her time at boarding and art schools in Chatham, Va.; Chicago; and New York during those early years, most of her family life, it turns out, took place in Williamsburg.

“Somewhere in the second day of research, I heard she had lived in Williamsburg,” Madonia said. “But there were all sorts of stories, such as she left here when she was 9 or she was here only a couple of years. None of them turned out to be true.”

What is true was that Francis and Ida O’Keeffe insisted their girls learn to be independent by getting a good education at a time when young women in Williamsburg aspired to early marriage.

Francis, fearful of the era’s tuberculosis epidemics, had sold his prosperous farm in Sun Prairie, Wis., and moved the family south to Williamsburg in 1902 after reading promotional literature claiming the town was free of the disease. It wasn’t. Ida contracted TB there and died in 1916.

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The Williamsburg years were hard for the family in other ways. A dairy business failed in Virginia, as did a grain operation. Francis then turned to housing, promoting the use of concrete block construction. The model house he and his sons built didn’t sell, and the family had to move into it.

Long regarded as an eyesore, it was demolished in 1968. At the time, no one connected it with Georgia O’Keeffe.

Madonia discovered that O’Keeffe returned to Williamsburg in 1938, when she was 51. College President John Stewart Bryan had offered her an honorary fine-arts doctorate. Abby Rockefeller, whose family was restoring Williamsburg at the time, donated “White Flower” to the college when she heard O’Keeffe would be honored.

The Rockefeller donation led the college to offer a show to O’Keeffe. After lengthy negotiations with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe’s husband and manager, a five-day show of nine works, including “White Flower,” was held that May.

In the official program, Bryan wrote, “Williamsburg may find a grateful bond in recalling that in its quiet atmosphere her talents for vision and craftsmanship were first given an opportunity to mature.”

The audience expected O’Keeffe to graciously accept her diploma and say pleasant things about her years in Williamsburg. O’Keeffe said nothing. In an earlier letter to Bryan, she said she hoped her paintings would speak for her.

Art department chairman Leslie Cheek Jr. said later, “She seemed strangely hostile to the honor and was unmoved by it.”

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Madonia said such misunderstandings led to the public’s perception of O’Keeffe as a dour, solitary individual who shunned public attention. But home movies of the ceremony show a fashionably dressed O’Keeffe beaming at the camera, clearly enjoying the event.

“She was positively radiant,” Madonia said.

In letters to Bryan afterward, O’Keeffe says how happy she was to see “that quaint little town” and adds, “The days in Williamsburg seem like a dream to me.”

But they will be revived when the re-created show opens Jan. 27. Madonia will publish a paper, titled “The O’Keeffe Affair.”