Queen of the Owls Page 5

  “And that makes you angry.” The corners of his mouth twitched in amusement.

  “Damn right it does. Those paintings mean something.”

  “And how are you going to figure out what they mean? If they mean anything. After all, they’re only twenty of the two thousand paintings she did in her lifetime.”

  “But they’re such a specific group of paintings! And she did them in such a short period of time, in a place that was the exact opposite of the desert, where she lived before and after.” Elizabeth could see that she had his attention now, so she pressed on. “Stieglitz showed them at his gallery, later that year. Some of the critics were ecstatic, some were disappointed, the way it always is. I found this one review that really struck me. Henry McBride, the New York Sun.” She rummaged through her papers. “Here’s what McBride wrote: ‘She annexes the islands with a glorified fishhook.’” Elizabeth looked up at Harold. “He was referring to her two fishhook paintings, of course.” Then she returned to the clipping. “Anyway, then he said: ‘Only the most intelligent fish would feel equal to such beautiful and reasonable bait.’”

  “Meaning, the ordinary joe wouldn’t understand what O’Keeffe was trying to convey?”

  “It does sound elitist, but maybe that was just McBride. For sure, he thought the paintings demanded something from the viewer, a special kind of effort. And yet they’ve hardly been studied. Not compared to her other work.”

  “And you think you can bring that special perception to your analysis?”

  “I think I can try.”

  “How?”

  She winced, but it was a fair question. “I need to focus on the paintings. Consider them for myself, no matter what other people have written or said. Really look at them.”

  “That sounds a bit subjective.” His skeptical look returned. “Where’s the scholarship in that?”

  “It’ll be there. I promise.” Elizabeth hunted in her bag again. “Here. You told me I could use the White Bird of Paradise, to get started.” She pulled out a sheaf of papers. “It’s a strange plant, not soft and pretty like other flowers. Like Georgia, in a way.” She handed him a photo of the painting. “I keep asking myself why she chose this particular plant. Why not some other flower—Hawaii had plenty of them—or the regular Bird of Paradise, with all those gorgeous colors?”

  Harold looked at the paper, then gave it back to her. “And what did you conclude?”

  Elizabeth pulled in her breath. “I think it was the whiteness. That was Stieglitz’s color for her. He saw her as white, pure, flawless.”

  “He saw her like that in 1939, when she went to Hawaii?”

  “I don’t know. It was mostly in the ’20s, when he was obsessed with taking photos of her.” She searched for the right words. “By 1939 he’d hurt her dreadfully with his infidelity. Maybe Georgia wanted to take something back that she’d given him.”

  “Be careful,” Harold said. “You’re an art historian, not a psychoanalyst.”

  Elizabeth knew she was treading a delicate line. “I understand. But I do think she was trying to accomplish a very specific aim.”

  She looked at the picture again, tracing the outline of the bracts with her fingertip. “Those long white leaves remind me of the antlers she painted later, or the ribs. So yes, the author of that book was right, there’s a cold and angular quality to the painting. Yet there’s more to it. Look, there’s the tiny heart of the flower, right in the center, you see? Only you can’t really get to it, everything around it’s too sharp, like a spiked fence. Her core’s still there, her female essence, but it isn’t accessible, not like it is in the flower paintings she did earlier.”

  Harold pursed his lips. “An interesting approach, Ms. Crawford. As I said, however, your job is to make scholarly use of the evidence, not to fantasize. You’re not O’Keeffe’s therapist.”

  “I’m just explaining why I think there’s something here to study.” She dared to offer a faint smile. “O’Keeffe painted a heliconia again, you know, almost thirty years later. In 1967, when her eyesight was starting to fail. She called the painting Not From My Garden.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “Hardly anyone has. It’s a fragment of the heliconia, not like the one she painted in Hawaii. But it means she hadn’t forgotten.”

  Harold nodded. “Well, give it a try.” Then he placed his palms on the desk, signaling that the conversation was over. “As I said, put everything in context, look at the paintings she did before and after.”

  “Exactly. Widen the lens.”

  “Are you humoring me, Ms. Crawford?”

  “Never, Dr. Lindstrom.” Her smile deepened. “Thank you. Really.”

  Elated, she ran down the two flights of stairs. She could do this.

  This. The word held something enormous. Larger than making her mark on art history.

  This.

  Find her own Hawaii.

  Five

  Elizabeth leaned against the heavy wooden desk that had been placed at the front of the classroom. It was a massive, authoritarian piece of furniture, like a bulkhead or a judge’s bench, symbol of her command. A joke, really. She was a part-time instructor, not an actual professor. Not yet. But with Harold Lindstrom as her patron, she would be.

  Arrayed in front of her were two dozen students in metal chairs with folding armrests. Behind her, a screen had been pulled down to cover the chalkboard. Elizabeth studied the class. “What do you think?” she asked. “Does feminist art depend on the artist’s identity or is it a particular type of product? Can anyone create feminist art, man or woman, if they have the right intention?”

  A young woman in the first row answered at once. “It’s an attitude,” she said. “The motivation behind the art.” There was a tiny jewel above her right nostril, blinking as it caught a glint of sun. Electric blue highlights fanned out in spikes from the part in her hair.

  Elizabeth gave a courteous nod. “Could we say that attitude is an aspect of identity? A set of beliefs that lead one to embrace a specific identity?” She paused. “Ms.—?”

  “Pennington,” the young woman said. “Naomi. And you could say it, if you want, but I didn’t.”

  The class snickered. “A figure of speech,” Elizabeth replied, trying not to react. “If you prefer, I can restate the question. Does feminist art depend on the artist’s purpose or on the type of artwork that’s produced?”

  “It’s both.” The same young woman. Naomi. She thrust out her chin and the jewel flashed, a reddish flare. “You need both, or else you’re saying one thing and doing another. Talking the talk instead of creating art that leads to liberation.”

  Elizabeth had to make an effort not to snicker herself. Art that leads to liberation. It sounded like a slogan on a coffee mug. “It’s an interesting dilemma.” She looked around at the class. “Think of the well-known female artists, prior to what we’d call feminist art. Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt. Brilliant and independent, all of them, daring to work in a milieu controlled by men. Yet none considered herself a feminist painter.”

  There was a note of belligerence in Naomi’s voice. “But they were, whether they thought so or not.”

  “Are you sure?” Elizabeth was starting to dislike the young woman. Don’t, she warned herself. Letting it get personal was the surest way to lose control.

  She slid off the edge of the desk and went to the podium. “Take Cassatt and Morisot. They were hardly rebels, out to challenge the status quo. They painted in the style of their time, confined to subjects they were permitted to paint—mothers, children, nature. Gorgeous paintings, certainly, but conventional. Safe. Not like this.”

  She pressed a button, and an image filled the screen. Some Living Women Artists/Last Supper. Each disciple around the table had the face of a woman artist. Georgia O’Keeffe’s face was superimposed on the visage of Christ, in the center.

  “Mary Beth Edelson painted this in 1972,” Elizabeth said, “as a kind of fe
minist manifesto. At some point—I don’t remember when, or who reported it—the story is that Gloria Steinem went to visit O’Keeffe with a bouquet of roses, but O’Keeffe refused to see her. She wanted nothing to do with the feminists.” Elizabeth gave a wry grimace. “That didn’t stop them from turning her into Jesus, of course.”

  She crossed her arms, regarding the class. “Was O’Keeffe a feminist painter? She didn’t even want to be seen as a female painter. Only as a painter.” The next slide showed one of O’Keeffe’s urban landscapes, geometric and surreal, followed by a painting of a cow’s skull. “Nothing like the sweet domestic scenes of Cassatt and Morisot.”

  “So O’Keeffe painted that stuff on purpose? To break down a sexist barrier?” A different student this time, thank goodness. A tall girl with glasses and a tattoo that crept across her shoulder and neck, a blue-green vine that reminded Elizabeth of a snake.

  Elizabeth studied the slide. “I don’t know. I think she just painted whatever she wanted to paint.”

  “But no people,” the girl said.

  “No. Never.” Only herself, Elizabeth thought. In the rocks and flowers and bones. She waited a moment, then continued. “O’Keeffe was the first woman to have a solo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the first woman to command an enormously high price for one of her paintings. So here’s my question: is it sexist and patronizing to differentiate firsts by gender? Should gender matter, or only the achievement itself?”

  Again, Naomi answered. “It matters because it gave her power. It made people—men—take her seriously.”

  “True,” Elizabeth said. “None of the male artists would grant her that, back when she was starting out. But she kept painting.”

  “They only noticed her when they thought she was painting vaginas,” Naomi said.

  “She insisted that she wasn’t.”

  Naomi wrinkled her face, and the jewel sparkled. “Denying it was part of the thing. It only made the men more into it.” The class laughed.

  Elizabeth clicked the remote again. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. “Other artists, later, were clear that they were celebrating the female anatomy. Louise Bourgeois, with her pregnant nudes. Carolee Schneemann, certainly.” She could feel herself beginning to grow defensive, as if Naomi had insulted Georgia, or her. “O’Keeffe was clear that she wasn’t. She was trying to examine the world around her, show it to us in new ways through color and form. Her paintings weren’t symbols. They were themselves.”

  She knew she was talking about O’Keeffe too much. The students wanted to talk about the outrageous things the feminists had done to make their point, the performance art, the explicit use of their own bodies. It was ironic—terrible, really—that the year Edelson painted Some Living Women Artists, with O’Keeffe as Christ, was the very year O’Keeffe lost her vision to macular degeneration and stopped being able to paint.

  “How do you know?” Naomi said. “Maybe those flowers were paintings about sex, even if she didn’t want to admit it, maybe not even to herself.”

  Elizabeth fought the urge to slap her hand over Naomi’s mouth. She wanted to shield Georgia from this girl with her blue hair who kept talking as if she knew her.

  “Personally,” Naomi went on, “I think using your own body in your art is the highest form of feminist expression. Being part of the artwork, not just a name on a plaque. Otherwise it’s a cop-out, a way to play it safe.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “Are you saying that painters are less authentic than performance artists?”

  The student with the tattoo waved her hand, and several others looked like they wanted to speak. But Naomi had the floor.

  The girl kept her eyes fixed on Elizabeth’s. “I’m asking you, specifically. How far would you go to use your own body to make a statement about what you believe? Not a lot of words on paper, but a real statement that puts you right out there, where it counts. How far, if everyone knew it was your body?”

  Elizabeth could hardly believe what she’d heard. No instructor would be expected to respond to a boundary-defying question like that. She could feel the class watching to see what she would do.

  “An interesting question, Ms. Pennington. I think I’ll appropriate it, credit to you of course, for our next homework assignment. Three pages, with citations. How should an artist locate herself in her work—as creator or part of the creation? The invisible architect, holding the power, or the visible subject?” She looked around, pleased with herself. “Due on Tuesday.”

  She caught Naomi’s eye. The young woman looked annoyed. “You turned it into words after all.”

  “It was a good question,” Elizabeth said. She gathered her papers and aligned them against the desk with a brisk whack. “Too good to limit to a single person’s reply.”

  She knew she’d finessed a moment that had, in fact, upset her. She had no idea how she would have answered Naomi’s question.

  Elizabeth hurried out of the building, headed for the library. Naomi had disturbed her, and now she had to know: was what O’Keeffe had done, in modeling for Stieglitz, different from mere posing? Was she the co-creator of the photographs he had taken of her, in charge of her own exposure, or simply his subject, like a plant or a chair? Was it his art, or theirs?

  The question had nothing to do with her Hawaii thesis but she didn’t care. The urgency to understand made her run down two flights of stairs and halfway across the campus before the ping of her cell phone stopped her in mid-stride.

  It was a text from Lucy, the babysitter. “Can u pls call?” Lucy had written, followed by two sad-faced emojis and the word “Katie.”

  Katie alternated between stubborn independence and hysterical neediness, a classic case of the Terrible Two’s. Elizabeth considered ignoring the text and claiming that she hadn’t seen it until she was on her way home. Lucy had been told not to call unless it was an emergency; a sad face hardly qualified as an emergency, and yet—

  She opened her list of contacts and tapped Lucy. Lucy answered at once. “Oh, thank goodness I reached you. Katie’s beside herself.”

  “What’s the matter?” Elizabeth pictured a cracked skull, blood, doctors wheeling Katie off to surgery. Then: no. Lucy wouldn’t have described a cracked skull as beside herself.

  “Her tummy hurts—way too many raisins, to be honest, plus someone didn’t nap this afternoon—and she’s worked herself into a state about how she needs her mommy to make her feel better. I’ve tried everything. Singing, the stroller, even that DVD she loves, you know the one.”

  Elizabeth closed her eyes. “I’m sure you have.”

  “For real, Mrs. Crawford. I wouldn’t have bothered you otherwise.”

  Was she going to have to make Lucy feel better too? What about her trip to the library, the two hours of quiet work she was expecting, was entitled to? Elizabeth sighed as Georgia’s image receded. “Why don’t you put her on?”

  A pause, and then Katie’s plaintive little voice. “Mama?”

  “It’s me, sweetie.”

  Katie’s whimper rose to a heart-rending sob. “Mama, come. Come now.”

  Elizabeth flipped through her mental catalogue of responses. You know Mama has to work right now, but I will be there very, very soon. And when I get there, we’ll read a special story and make pasta for dinner, the kind shaped like little bows. Actually, we’ll read ten stories and have ice cream for dinner. Whatever you want, as long as you stop crying and let me do what I want right now.

  Yet she understood Katie’s despair. Katie wanted one particular thing, and that wanting was making her desolate. Elizabeth crossed the library off the list of things she might do that day—as if Georgia had given a sigh of resignation, put on her clothes, and walked away.

  “Yes,” she told her. “I’m on my way right this second.” Katie made a little mewling sound. It was almost a moan, but Elizabeth knew it signaled relief. “Give Lucy the phone, pumpkin, so I can let her know.”

  She heard the phone clatter to the floor and then, a min
ute later, Lucy’s surprised voice. “You’re coming? Really? I’m okay till five, like we agreed.”

  “No, it’s all right.”

  “You know she’ll drop off for her nap the second we hang up, right? She just wanted to hear your voice, but she won’t know what time you actually get here. You could come at five and she’d never know the difference.”

  It was probably true, yet Elizabeth had to keep her word. The reason Katie would relax and tumble into sleep was because she trusted her mother. Tricking her would be unforgivable. Besides, Katie was a woman, or would be. Once a woman lost her trust in someone, it was hard to regain.

  Georgia, though childless, would have understood. After Stieglitz hurt her so deeply with his infidelity, she never gave herself to him again the way she had in those early photographs. They stayed married—ardent correspondents, forever connected—but the purity of her trust was gone.

  “I told her I was coming, and I will.”

  “Well, it’s up to you. We’re here, whenever.”

  “Daniel’s okay?”

  “In heaven. The Morgenstern twins are here today.”

  Lucy had several families with rotating schedules. Elizabeth had heard about the Morgenstern twins, a boy and girl Daniel’s age, but had never met them.

  “The three of them have been in the sandbox for hours,” Lucy said. “Apparently they’ve invented a world populated by dinosaurs, Barbie, and Luke Skywalker.”

  Which was probably why Katie refused to nap. She’d fight to be included, no matter how tired she was. “Daniel won’t want to leave, then.”

  “I think Phoebe’s picking them up early, so it works out.”

  Elizabeth had never met Phoebe either, mother of the Morgenstern twins, although she’d been curious about her. Their schedules hadn’t meshed until now. “Perfect. See you soon.”