“You are no stranger to me” Georgia O’Keeffe’s Fan Mail

Dear Miss O’Keefe [sic]—

I have wanted to tell you how much enjoyment I have gotten from a magazine reproduction of your painting “Bindweed” which appeared in a womans [sic] publication some time in the 1930’s. I framed it and hung it at the foot of my bed, so that it is the first thing I see when I open my eyes every morning. . . . I have been half-blind since the age of 10, and can’t even find my glasses without my glasses, but your lovely flower, so full of faith and tenacity and hope and courage—this I can see.

(July 1968)¹

In the introduction to a 1992 collection of essays about Georgia O’Keeffe as an icon, Christopher Merrill claims that as “one of the most photographed figures of our time,” O’Keeffe is “an intellectual pinup girl of sorts.”² By modifying pinup with the adjective intellectual, Merrill makes O’Keeffe exceptional: she is an enigmatic figure whom many long to know and understand, and her pinup keeps her hidden and elusive. For her female fans, such as the one I quote above, O’Keeffe’s pinup is her art, not her body, and she is knowable because she and her work are familiar and full of hope. Although O’Keeffe was a painter, not a movie star, she was a celebrity to the fans who wrote to her.

Fig 1.

This 1968 fan letter to Georgia O’Keeffe illustrates how O’Keeffe and her paintings circulated within white female culture throughout the twentieth century. The writer’s signature has been removed to protect her privacy. Fan Mail, Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

This study focuses on fan mail sent to O’Keeffe between the 1950s and 1980s, a span of years in which women grappled with social conditions that led to the reemergence of feminism as a public discourse and political movement. During these decades, female fans saw in O’Keeffe and her paintings life-guiding values and inspiration. “I never write to strangers,” one admirer tells O’Keeffe in a birthday greeting, “but you are no stranger to me. From the time I was a little girl going to the New York Galleries with my mother I have been friends with your work. . . . You showed me that a woman could do this work, and, do it so well!” (November 5, 1968).

O’Keeffe was indeed “no stranger” to fans who revered her as a phenomenal example of female achievement in a competitive, male-dominated professional world.³ Many of the women who flocked to O’Keeffe wanted to be like her, even as some beckoned her to become like them and affirm their female condition. Members of women’s clubs, students, and housewives invited O’Keeffe into their communities and lives. Women of all ages wrote to O’Keeffe, perceiving her variously as female, feminine, or feminist, sometimes blending all three in a contradictory combination that reflected conflicting conceptions of womanhood in the larger culture. During this period, challenges to gender discrimination, including the detailing of gender inequity in the 1963 report by the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, coalesced into the second iteration of a feminist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s.⁴ In a number of ways, women who wrote fan letters to O’Keeffe made meaning of conditions and experiences that impelled, and shaped, feminism in these decades.⁵ How the writers imagine O’Keeffe, respond to her paintings, and create an epistolary relationship reveals a great deal about how they negotiate being female. Although men also wrote fan letters to O’Keeffe, I study women’s letters to show how O’Keeffe appeals especially to white women as model, validation, and imaginative possibility.⁶ “Are there any biographies of your life? Have you written your own story?” one woman asks. “[W]omen today need to know the kind of woman who has been able to break through the barriers to realize herself” (February 29, 1969).

In photographs and popular culture lore, O’Keeffe is presented apart from women. Typically imaged alone with her paintings or in nature, she is almost never seen in the company of other women. Newspaper and magazine stories emphasize her exceptionalism, sometimes showcasing her as one “woman” artist among others, but never putting her and the other artists in dialogue.⁷ The trove of fan writing offers a different story. Women and O’Keeffe are joined together in an epistolary archive that chronicles white female consciousness, experience, and culture. In their letters to O’Keeffe, female fans communicate feelings they experience when they look at her paintings and think about her, express anxiety about their gendered situations and status, convey their longing for female companionship in a creative life, and imagine new ways of being female in youth and in middle and old age. Making pinups of O’Keeffe’s paintings, these women redefine female value from physical beauty to artistic accomplishment. Hanging the pinups in bedrooms and kitchens, they integrate aesthetic appreciation into their domestic identities and derive pleasure from making choices as curators of their own galleries. O’Keeffe in turn responded to many of their letters, sometimes sending autographed reproductions of her paintings on postcards and posters which underscored that her art, not her body, was the star.⁸ She kept and preserved the fan letters, making it possible for scholars to reconstruct this and other histories.⁹

The gargantuan size of the fan mail collection eloquently attests that O’Keeffe was a magnet of attention, the object of desire, the spur of fantasy. “So many letters,” O’Keeffe is quoted as saying in a Washington Post article, “Why do all these people care about me?” People cared about O’Keeffe chiefly because she was a celebrity. The number of fans who wrote to her after reading articles in newspapers and magazines or seeing her on television makes clear that O’Keeffe’s enormous national fan base was created by a star-making industry that utilized modern media. Her celebrity produced celebrity fan behavior. Fans wrote to O’Keeffe the way they wrote to movie stars, having learned to do so by what Marsha Orgeron calls a “culture of participation and interaction” promoted by fan magazines. Devising contests and promoting correspondence and advice seeking, these magazines engaged in an “intimacy-building project” that “encouraged epistolary responses from their readers and often rewarded them as well.”¹⁰ There is no better example of the “interactivity” these practices encouraged than when an O’Keeffe fan reads the previously mentioned Washington Post article and then answers O’Keeffe’s question about receiving so many fan letters by writing a fan letter herself. Echoing O’Keeffe’s words, she begins with the phrase “‘So many letters’” and then adds, “Aspiring, young artists want to absorb something from Georgia O’Keeffe” (November 25, 1977). It is as if the writer is telephoning O’Keeffe to answer her question. This fan imagines access to the star with no intermediary to screen, block, edit, or censor.

The illusion of access was reinforced by articles with striking photographs in magazines such as Time, Life, Look, and Vogue. “We shall probably never see one of your paintings face to face,” one fan writes, “but we certainly thank a magazine for having so faithfully reproduced your work and you” (September 25, 1960). Because this fan and others believe the reproductions are so “faithfully” rendered, they perceive little distinction between the original and the copy, and by implication, the photographs, art, and artist. The artist and her paintings are seemingly very close, within arm’s length. Some fans thus interpret the articles as an invitation to make contact. “We are not acquainted,” one fan writes, “and I hope you’ll forgive my imposing on your privacy. While at the hairdressers I read of you and your career” (1967). Reproductions of O’Keeffe’s paintings in public spaces also fostered the illusion that the viewer, paintings, and artist shared a relationship. “The first painting I ever saw of yours was in my doctor’s office,” the actress Mildred Dunnock remarks in a tribute to O’Keeffe. “[I]t’s there now, on the waiting room wall, a great blue flower, open, limitless, perfect. It is now part of me.”¹¹

Fig 2.

Fans encountered O’Keeffe and her art in popular magazines that fostered an illusion of intimacy. Fan Mail, Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

O’Keeffe’s celebrity affected how female fans related to her. Tom Mole’s “hermeneutic of intimacy” paradigm helps us to understand why. Critics often read O’Keeffe’s paintings as revelations of her innermost female feelings, fomenting the idea that she and her paintings were inseparable. “Knowing” the paintings means also “knowing” the artist who created them. This fantasy produced the illusion that viewers were intimately connected to the artist and her work. O’Keeffe’s ubiquitous presence in magazines that women read in hairdressers and doctors’ offices may have increased the illusion of intimacy. The two women I quote above mention seeing reproductions of O’Keeffe’s paintings in public spaces where the body is tended, where literal touching occurs. The merging and absorption metaphors they use to convey a relationship with O’Keeffe and her paintings evoke an intense, intimate connection in which distinction between subjectivities is eradicated, an eroticized relation. Absorption connotes receptivity; merging is the transformative result. In both cases, the fans suggest that the intimate connection is beneficial, enriching—in Dunnock’s imagining “open, limitless, perfect.”¹²

Fig 3.

Joined together in a fan-celebrity relationship, O’Keeffe and her fans shared a female culture. Like her fans, O’Keeffe read popular magazines at the hairdressers. Photograph Used with Permission From the Estate of Edith Evans Asbury. Georgia O’Keeffe Letters to Edith Evans Asbury, 1967–1986, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Underlying the fantasy of intimacy is a sense of shared gender identity, what Christine Stansell terms “extravagant universalizing.” The fans identify themselves as female and O’Keeffe as female. Because of this shared identification, they relate to O’Keeffe not only as a celebrity but also as a woman just like them. One letter offers a telling example of what Jackie Stacey terms a dual “identificatory practice.” The writer begins by reporting that she “so enjoyed the article in Look Magazine . . . also the photographs.” She follows with a question: “New Mexico holds a wealth of material for an artist, doesn’t it?” She then mentions a “movie actress” with whom she has also corresponded, suggesting that though a resident in “a sleepy town of about 1900,” who paints “as a hobby” and is a “Grandmother (aged 48)” of “two lovely Grandchildren” whom she likes to “baby sit for most every day,” she is important enough to have relationships with stars. “The lovely Miss Greer Garson (movie actress) . . . graciously sent me a giant post card” of a painting of her “adobe summer home near Pecos” “done by NAUMER.” Emphasizing how much she values art, this fan adds, “I have it framed, and treasure it beyond words.” She concludes by establishing an intimate female connection through the fantasy of shared appearance. “Incidentally, you have a hair-do exactly like mine! I find it so comfortable both in winter and summer, don’t you?” (January 8, 1961). Using a homey conversational tone, she imagines contact, communication, and reciprocity.¹³

This fan and others see in pictures of O’Keeffe a woman more like themselves than like a movie star. “You and I have the same taste in walking shoes,” one woman writes on Fairfield County Library Commission stationery. “It would please me very much if you would send me your size and I would be delighted to send you several pairs. They are easily obtainable in my home town” (March 2, 1968). Wearing “walking shoes” that aid mobility, O’Keeffe represents and enacts a different kind of feminine glamour that this fan and others find appealing. O’Keeffe’s self-fashioning is practical, like their own; she uses her body to walk and make art, not to entice men. The offer to buy O’Keeffe shoes unites through shopping the fan and the celebrity she professes to love and suggests that she imagines her idol shares her values and experiences because they walk in the same shoes.¹⁴

While evincing how certain fans both imagine O’Keeffe’s dual subjectivity and relate to her accordingly, these letters also illustrate how the writers negotiate their own female subjectivities in relation to how they imagine O’Keeffe’s. Epistolary customs disallowed women independent identities, reinforcing societal expectations. The fans’ confusion about how to address O’Keeffe makes visible their confusion about whether it is possible to be an individual and a wife simultaneously. One woman articulates the dilemma explicitly. “Dear Mrs. Stieglitz, I hardly know how to address you,” she admits. “You do not seem like a ‘Mrs.’ anyone” (October 22, 1960). “Dear Mrs. Stieglitz,” another woman explains, “I use your married name and not the famous name that everyone knows you by as I thought perhaps your mail came under Mrs. Stieglitz” (September 25, 1960). Yet another fan addresses O’Keeffe as “Dear Miss O’Keefe (or Mrs. Stieglitz)” (October 24, 1960). Several years later, another fan worries, in a postscript: “Hope I did not err in addressing you as Miss O’Keeffe instead of Mrs. Alfred Stieglitz” (January 28, 1967). Frequently, others simply refer to O’Keeffe as “Mrs. O’Keeffe.” In one instance, a writer creatively fuses O’Keeffe’s individual and married identities, refusing to privilege one over another, calling her “Mrs. Georgia O’Keeffe Stieglitz” (October 26, 1970). Beginning in the late 1970s and increasingly in the 1980s, letter writers use Ms. O’Keeffe, an indication of the feminist movement’s impact on social customs.

Fig 4.

The various ways in which fans address O’Keeffe make visible their confusion about whether it is possible to be an individual and wife simultaneously. “Black Bird,” penned by O’Keeffe, is an example of how she sometimes made notations on envelopes. Fan Mail, Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Gender anxiety is also visible in certain women’s signatures. Some women sign their names with their first and last names, using no title, but add parenthetically Mrs., or Mrs. and the husband’s first name, or Mrs. and the husband’s full name. The parentheses visualize a cordoning off, the women’s attempt to separate their marital status from the independent self who is writing to O’Keeffe, a woman they see as attaining the pinnacle of autonomy while remaining connected to loved ones. “Two years ago I began to ‘grow up’ emotionally and began to feel the real me,” reports a thirty-nine-year-old mother of “2 daughters, 11 and 13,” who describes herself as living “a comfortable, middle-class life.” She then relates an epiphany that has drawn her to O’Keeffe. “I realized I had lived my whole life according to what I thought I should do, influenced by what I thought others might think, etc. . . . Now I hope for the day when I can just be myself. You seem to have attained that state. From your photograph I would assume that you are not a recluse. You have not withdrawn from people, but have learned to be yourself among people” (October 24, 1960). By signing their names and putting Mrs. in parentheses, it is as if these women cannot bear to relinquish their marital identities even as they yearn to be a “me.”

To her fans, O’Keeffe is a married “me.” They know from magazine articles that she had been married until her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, died in 1946. Thus many fans perceive her as sharing with them the experience of being a wife, and for some, of being a widow. At the same time, they see in her a woman who is strong and successful, a wife whose marital status did not impede her independence. “How pleased I was to find in the June issue of Popular Photography a section lauding your Life cover story! . . . [T]he story gives me a good feeling each time I read it, a feeling of great admiration for the strength of womanhood,” one woman enthuses (May 5, 1969). To this fan and many others, O’Keeffe is a thrilling example of a woman who offers possibilities for reimaging conventional female roles. “Why do I turn to you?” another asks rhetorically. “First, from your paintings I am positive you are a woman in every sense of the word. Secondly, you are an artist” (March 25, 1969).

Conflating the artist with her art, fans write to O’Keeffe based on an illusion of knowingness rooted in gendered affinity, while also revering her as a great artist who transcends gender. Perceiving O’Keeffe as a “woman” artist who surpasses gender enables these fans to imagine her as both a gendered and genderless achiever. On one hand, they are proud their idol is female like themselves. On the other hand, they are proud she proves gender is surmountable. “Let me say that from a life-time of interest in art, that you are not only the greatest Woman painter of America, but one of the greatest, regardless of sex, this country has given to the world,” one admirer declares (January 14, 1959). Another tells “Dear Miss O’Keeffe” that, as a fan who also paints, she does so “because I must and NOT as a hobby.” “It is too often supposed,” she continues, “to be a nice relaxing hobby for a woman to have—in fact because one is a woman that is how one is expected to paint. I think you will know what I mean” (June 30, 1961). A graduate student in painting asks for an interview, which O’Keeffe granted, and adds, “I chose your work for my reports not so much for your being a rather powerful woman painter, as I hope myself to be some day, but because of my admiration for your paintings that I have seen” (September 26, 1967). These fans’ paradoxical view of O’Keeffe as a woman painter who demonstrates that genius has no gender encapsulates a feminist paradox. Feminism necessitates that women identify as a group who collectively experience gender bias and discrimination in order to advocate eliminating gender distinction. Without gender distinction, however, there is no recognition of the obstacles women encounter in their daily lives and ambitions.

The sense of what one writer calls “a kind of kinship with you—not in painting, but in ‘being’” moves many women to share responses, ideas, and deep feelings (October 24, 1960). How these women describe their reactions to O’Keeffe’s paintings suggests that writing the fan letter is a testing ground for an independent, reflective self. “I am just a housewife and I know nothing of art,” one woman admits, “but I had to write to tell you how impressive and even fascinating I found the photos of your paintings which were shown in Time magazine. I cut them out and have them hanging in my kitchen where I spend most of my time” (November 1, 1960). Another woman, writing several years later but also responding to the Time article, writes, “Dear Mrs. Stieglitz: I guess this might come under the heading of a fan letter. In October 1960, I saw your paintings reproduced in Time magazine. I’ve been meaning to write to you ever since because I’ve enjoyed them so much. They still are up on my bulletin board in the kitchen, along with notices from the dentist and the PTA” (February 5, 1963). Later still, a self-described fifty-year-old woman with married children tells O’Keeffe, “‘Light Coming on the Plains No. 2’ has been on the bulletin board above my kitchen stove for the past month (clipped from Vogue magazine). . . . For many years I have had this bulletin board, on which I keep pictures of paintings and other interesting clippings (also some pictures of my grand children)” (June 26, 1969).

For these writers, O’Keeffe’s art becomes part of their domestic scene, collapsing boundaries between high and low, public and private. Women who identify themselves as “just a housewife” or “a housewife and mother” are able to partake in a museum experience while remaining in their kitchens. The pinup enables the creator of the “impressive” and “fascinating” paintings to be in the kitchen with them, and her art coexists with the visual tokens of everyday domesticity: family photographs and PTA notices. The pinup also enables these women to experience serenity and otherworldliness without having to go out to museums or movies. “[The pictures] give me such a feeling of calmness and serenity when everything seems to be closing in on me and the fussing and fretting of my children begins to get on my nerves,” one woman writes (November 1, 1960). Another relates a similar experience: “My life seems to be so hectic no matter how hard I try to be efficient, that a minute gazing at your paintings seems to help my perspective. My youngest boy will be four tomorrow and I’m writing this as I wait for his cake to come out of the oven” (February 5, 1963). Yet another fan says, “the pictures shown in a recent issue of Time give me the most wonderful feeling of peace. When the 4 children—one a college freshman and one of 6 yrs. get noisy or on my nerves I take a quick glimpse of your graceful calming paintings and all is well again” (December 16, 1960). These women experience O’Keeffe’s paintings, in the words of one of the writers, as “effective tranquilizers” (November 1, 1960).

The content and layout of the Time magazine article helped shape these fans’ responses. In the last section, called “An Unforgettable Loneliness,” the author makes this observation: “She has never been known to paint a human being, and her severe and silent canvases—whether bold close-ups or vast landscapes—all have an unforgettable feeling of loneliness.” O’Keeffe is quoted, however, saying of “a place she loved”: “There was a quiet and an untouched feel to the country. . . . And I could work as I pleased!” Although the journalist and the picture captions associate O’Keeffe and her paintings with loneliness and austerity, the fans quoted above read O’Keeffe’s concluding remarks positively, seeing serenity, independence, freedom, and productivity in O’Keeffe’s life and paintings.¹⁵ One wonders if the idea that loneliness could produce great art appealed particularly to those women who often experienced loneliness in their kitchens and stifled ambitions.

O’Keeffe’s painting “pinups” also provide fans an opportunity for contemplation and transcendence. For some fans, O’Keeffe’s art transports them from familiarity and predictability, characterized by one woman as a life in which she is “pretty busy raiseing [sic] 3 children and a husband who expect the usual mother and wife things of me” (November 19, 1977). In their letters, these women talk about looking at pictures of O’Keeffe’s paintings, which then inspires them to look at themselves. “I am happy in an enduring relationship of marriage to one man for twenty years—perhaps that shall have to be my ‘painting’ or my literature, I don’t know yet,” one woman writes poignantly, her sense of yearning palpable (February 28, 1968). This fan and others convey the difficulties of concentrating on their own nurture when their social roles demand that they invest all their energy into caring for their families. Attending to the self, to the inner life, to one’s thoughts and feelings—all are antithetical to being a “housewife.” The children, the husband, and the house consumed women’s internal lives. “Some women marry houses,” Anne Sexton wrote in the same era, “It’s another kind of skin; it has a heart, / a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.”¹⁶

For some fans, the sense of “kinship” with O’Keeffe and her art moved them to transform her into a mentor, parent, psychologist, and advice columnist. Several haltingly express their yearning to make art, taking pains to explain that this does not mean they love their husbands and children any less. “I have everything in a way—I love my husband and children and have no desire to escape my responsibilities where they are concerned.” “Yet”, this writer confides, “underneath I yearn for solitude and simplicity” and “began painting a year ago” (October 24, 1960). Others want advice about how to live an independently creative life and still have a family. “How do you feel about not entering motherhood?” one woman asks. “I need advice. Some days all that exists is the act of painting—other days I long for a family” (August 14, 1983). “I have many confusions about what it is to be a woman painter,” another writes. “There should be a strength and power, a way of seeing, different from the masculine, different from the pseudo-masculine women’s liberation toughness” (1969?).

For women unsettled by such questions and desires, O’Keeffe signifies hope, the potential for change, and art’s emotive power. “You have been a sustaining example and source of hope for a long, long time,” one woman writes in gratitude as she begins fulfilling her “[dream] of studying art,” now that she is “near forty, alone, [and her] maternal duties fulfilled” (July 27, 1965). “I want to tell you,” another declares, “that you mean a great deal to me. . . . You stand for freedom. A chance for women to try, and, at last, be accepted in the creative world” (November 10, 1968). In some instances, the writers express longing for O’Keeffe’s love, which can be interpreted as longing for affirmation of a self that values warmth, relationships, and an intensely feeling inner life. “I love art,” one fan proclaims. “All kinds. Not so much of the cold ‘Modern Art,’ as the warm and friendly art one creates from strong feelings inside. I mean, like your paintings of hill and sky and your flowers. They’re beautiful. I feel them. . . . I’m trying to say I love your art work, and that some of [the] things that you love so deeply I also love and feel the same way about. . . . I guess I want you to feel about me like I feel about you” (ca. April 22, 1968).

These women fantasize kinship with O’Keeffe because that relation promises to resolve the pervasive gendered conflicts that their letters so eloquently reveal. O’Keeffe’s art-making and decisions authorize the contemplation of similar choice-making. Although many fans report living in radically different circumstances, some imagine inhabiting O’Keeffe’s world along with her and envision her as their means of transport. “This is a fan letter—from a 40 yr. old N.Y. housewife who has just come from the Whitney, from you,” one woman writes. “I have seen a world I know exists but have never found, a world which is strong, and hard and loving and beautiful, and I thank you—for painting it, for showing it to me, for pulling me back” (November 2, 1970).

“Pulling me back”—this phrase is so evocative, forceful, and nostalgic. Does this fan imagine O’Keeffe and her paintings “pulling her back” to a self and time before marriage and motherhood, when there was still the possibility to act on her creative desire? O’Keeffe was imaged in the media as independent and content—untethered by family and deriving great pleasure from her singularly focused artistic life. She commanded attention and adoration from fans because of her power, sometimes envisioned as mythic and maternal. “I cannot tell you,” one fan gushed, “the feelings I have about your work. Now when I see even a small picture of one of your paintings that I particularly like, I get a dull ache, almost a nausea—because they are so powerful. . . . I paint some myself, but I would probably have quit many times in disgust, had it not been for you—you, a true earthmother” (May 5, 1968).

Women fans thrilled to O’Keeffe because she was a star who performed a kind of equal-rights feminism that melded with cherished U.S. beliefs in individualism and equality. That gender should not determine women’s rights and opportunities is a key component of feminist philosophy. O’Keeffe had been in the spotlight since the 1920s, always the “woman artist” trailblazer. Epitomizing uniqueness and success, she signifies both genders and transcends gender limitations. As the embodiment of white female liberation, she enacts America’s most cherished myths about itself: O’Keeffe’s resourcefulness, independence, and tenacity are quintessentially American qualities.

Living into advanced age adds another nuance to O’Keeffe’s significance. In the 1970s, young women saw the aging O’Keeffe, who was then in her eighties, as an “artist idol,” in the words of one fan, because O’Keeffe had succeeded as “a woman artist in a male artist world” (November 8, 1977). They also discovered in her a model of womanhood in which old age is valued, respected, and inspirational as a source of creativity. “I love and am in awe of the vitality you continue to show with age. . . . If I get the nerve, I’ll change my home/gallery to become very sparse (like yours),” one admirer tells O’Keeffe (November 23, 1984). Elderly women were equally awestruck. One woman, self-described as in her “80s,” writes after seeing a 1977 documentary about O’Keeffe, “Seeing and hearing you on Television last night has done something for me that I think you will like to know,” she begins. Then she describes how she had “lost [her] dear husband” a year before, and that after a protracted period of grieving, she realized she had “become old” and felt a loss of physical power and the will to live. Seeing O’Keeffe, however, transforms her. “Watching your active participation in living, transmitted itself to me” and now, she triumphantly reports, she is committed to “start again” (November 16, 1977).

This fan’s affecting remarks offer a clue to O’Keeffe’s captivating appeal to so many women of all ages, professions, life choices, and political persuasions: they revere O’Keeffe because she signifies power over loss resulting from aging or from gender expectations and barriers. In O’Keeffe, they see a woman who sustains a lifelong, passionate pursuit, an artist who creates female beauty in her paintings rather than being an object of female beauty, which is transitory. O’Keeffe’s “active participation in living,” grounded in the act of painting, was an activity all women could engage in, respond to, and appreciate. Many fans who wrote to O’Keeffe refute Betty Friedan’s assertion in The Feminine Mystique that when women “dabble at art,” they are “evading growth.”¹⁷Painting as a hobby or in a classroom is gratifying, several fans report, and it connects them to beauty and to O’Keeffe. “Tell me Georgia,” asks a teenager who wrote eighteen letters to O’Keeffe between 1983 and 1985, “what art objects are you working on now? Are you experimenting with media you’ve never used before or working on some beautiful painting, drawing, sculpture, or pottery? I’ve been doing a lot of watercolor painting lately. I love watercolor painting” (July 28, 1983). The powerful artist O’Keeffe also wears sensible shoes, gardens, and loves artful domestic interiors as much as the vastness of open outdoor spaces. In photographs, she is depicted as young and old, woman and man, artist and laborer, mythical and ordinary. She is gender transcendent at the same time that she is gendered female. “It’s so comforting to know that a great artist can also be a great person,” a fan tells O’Keeffe after seeing the documentary about her on television, “so well balanced, so calm, whose inner strength serves to fortify instead of nullify her femininity and sense of humor. On the screen, you were like a gentle neighbor, dropping in” (November 20, 1977).

O’Keeffe achieves for her fans what so many experienced as impossible. She is artist and female. To understand the magnitude of this accomplishment, O’Keeffe’s fan letters should be read alongside historical studies that delineate the formidable barriers twentieth-century U.S. women encountered if they desired to be “painting professionals”: genius and masculinity were inextricably linked; women were considered amateurs and their work was judged inferior and inadequate by male critics; women were excluded from classes, schools, galleries, and professional male networks; women were barred from painting subjects and employing styles that were deemed “male”; women were expected to relinquish their desires so they could support men’s ambitions and lead domestic lives. For women of color, racial discrimination added to gender barriers.¹⁸

Conceiving of O’Keeffe as a “great artist” who is also “a gentle neighbor,” fans perceive her identity capaciously: they see in her both male and female characteristics, as well as a femaleness that could include daring, strength, playfulness, and femininity. This capaciousness was inspirational for many women who lived at a time when it was difficult to imagine an artist without the unstated, ever-present “man” as a modifier. “Why are there so few great women painters in all the long history of art? What ever happens to all those thousands of girls who major in art in college?” asked a reporter in an article in a 1957 North Carolina newspaper. Curator John I. Bauer hazards an answer: “Maybe it’s because [women] are always too busy doing the necessary things such as cooking and taking care of the children. Most great artists put their work ahead of everything else, and this would be hard for a woman to do. If the baby cried, she would drop her brushes and take care of the baby. A man probably wouldn’t even hear the baby, if he were completely absorbed in his work.” O’Keeffe is one of three women included in a book featuring “the 50 leading painters of the 20th century” that occasioned this newspaper article.¹⁹ In this instance as in so many others, O’Keeffe is construed as a “great artist” who is also an exceptional woman. Because “great artist” is so stubbornly equated with men’s power, ambition, and achievement, so is O’Keeffe. Thus O’Keeffe is a woman who shares affinities with men at the same time that she is different from men because she shares affinities with women.

O’Keeffe’s sameness-difference paradox replicates the sameness-difference paradox at the heart of feminist philosophy. When women identify as women who are united by their shared gendered condition, they define themselves as different from men. How, then, can women argue they are the same as men and demand equality with men, when they understand themselves to be different from men? The fan letters suggest that O’Keeffe fascinates because women saw in her performances and paintings the drama and resolution of this paradox.