Georgia O’Keeffe had two main connections with the Carolinas. The first is the story of what happened during her brief but life-changing tenure as a teacher of design and drawing at Columbia College, a two-year Methodist women’s school in Columbia, South Carolina. The second was her lifelong friendship with Anita Pollitzer, a native of Charleston and tireless advocate for women’s rights. The two stories are woven together by the fact that O’Keefe’s artistic breakthrough in Columbia is most fully documented in the letters she was writing at the time to Anita (collected and published in 1990 as Lovingly, Georgia, edited by Clive Gibori) and in the biography of her friend which Pollitzer wrote entitled A Woman on Paper (1988).

Goergia O’Keeffe of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin and Charlottsville, Virginia met Anita Pollitzer of Charleston, South Carolina in the fall of 1914 in Charles J. Martin’s oil painting class at the Art Student's League on West 57^th Street in New York City. Both women were also enrolled at the School of Practical Arts at the Teachers College of Columbia University. Founded in 1887, Columbia Teachers College had become a Mecca for educated women, particularly from the South. Its teacher training was the best in the country, especially in Art, where Arthur Wesley Dow was launching a revolution in the teaching of design which would transform art classrooms from places where students drew detailed realistic renderings of plaster casts of classical Greek and Roman sculpture to places where they practiced exercises with abstract blocks of color based on Japanese principles of design, modeled on the patterns found in arts and crafts from Peruvian tapestries to Greek vase paintings to Moorish tiles.

Two more opposite creatures could hardly be imagined. At twenty-seven, O’Keeffe was seven years older than Pollitizer. Austere in appearance, focused, self-possessed and self-supporting, she had already begun to establish herself professionally, having distinguished herself in classes on figure drawing under John Vanderpoel at the Art Institute in Chicago, still life with William Merritt Chase at the Art Student’s League in New York City, and drawing and design with Alon Bement at the University of Virginia. (In 1912, the University of Virginia allowed women into its classes for the first time, for summer session only, and Georgia and her sisters eagerly took advantage of the opportunity to study with a nationally known drawing instructor. After two weeks in his course, Bement asked Georgia to come back and teach the following year.) She had worked for two years as a commercial artist in Chicago – she is credited with the logo for Little Dutch Girl Cleanser and a rumor persists that she also created the Morton Salt girl. And she had put in two successful years teaching art in Amarillo Texas and two summers teaching with Bement at Virginia.

Anita records that she and the other undergraduates looked up to O’Keeffe who already exhibited the simplicity of style that would always mark her public appearance. She remembers that O’Keeffe spoke "with an air of authority and no words wasted." In her crisply tailored suits and starched white blouses, she appeared "dignified, haughty without meaning to be."

Anita Pollitzer, on the other hand, was petite, lively, interested in everything and everyone. The youngest daughter in a prominent and wealthy family of Jewish cotton traders, she met the world, as the editor of her letters says, "with the prodigality of the well-loved child." Her dark hair flying, festooned with flakes of paint, she threw herself into the cultural and political life of New York City. She didn’t just visit 291, the gallery on Fifth Avenue where Alfred Steiglitz was introducing Euorpean Modernism to America with shows by Rodin, Braque, and Picasso, she became fast friends with fifty-year old impresario. She didn’t just work for suffrage; she went to the offices of the National Women’s Party and became an assistant to Alice Paul, its leader.

In going to New York City for a college education, Anita was following a family tradition. Pollitzer’s Charleston family was not only socially prominent; it was also unusually socially progressive and activist. A recent article in The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association by Amy Thompson McCandless traces the family’s involvement in women’s rights. Anita’s older sister Carrie was the first to get a degree from Columbia’s Teacher’s College in New York. Thirteen years older than Anita, she and Mable, who was nine years older, were quite radical in that they supported the National Women’s Party under Alice Paul, the most extreme of the national feminist organizations because it called not only for federal ratification of the Suffrage Amendment but also for federal ratification of an Equal Rights Amendment and sought to achieve those ends through civil disobedience such as holding hunger strikes and picketing Woodrow Wilson’s White House. (This was usually progressive for South Carolina, a state McCandless reminds us, where women were not allowed to serve on juries until 1967, and where the 19^th Amendment – providing women suffrage – was not ratified by the state legislature until 1969. No wonder the Pollitzer sisters supported federal action!)

The sisters belonged to the Charleston Equal Suffrage League and often staffed booths in downtown Charleston answering questions and refuting the attacks of the "antis." Anita seems to have participated in these activities from an early age. In September of 1915 Anita wrote O’Keeffe that she had been working for suffrage in Charleston: "was one of a deputation to visit our congressman—gave out Suffrage literature and Lemonade at a booth & such things." Besides their work for suffrage, her older sisters were local leaders in women’s education, teaching at Memminger High School for (white) women in Charleston and starting a petition drive which eventually led to the admission of women to the College of Charleston.

What, then, attracted two such opposites? Temperamentally, Anita’s optimism, sociability, and generosity of spirit were a good match for Georgia’s taciturnity and tendency to live like a hermit. But the two also shared many interests. Both were fascinated with the new developments in modern art and passionate about being part of the new artistic revolution. And both were very aware of the current of social change surrounding them and committed to exploring and helping to foster the grand changes in moral values which they were sure would come about with women’s increasing equality. For them the changes in art and the changes in life were closely entwined – both promised a new freedom, honesty, and depth of self-expression.

Throughout the autumn of 1914 and the spring of 1915, Georgia and Anita built their friendship in New York, attending classes, going to galleries and concerts. Anita immediately talked Georgia into joining the National Women’s Party. (O’Keeffe maintained her membership for many decades, eventually serving on the board when Anita took over as head of the organization.) When summer came, the two went their separate ways: Georgia to Charlottsville to stay with her increasingly ill mother, visit with her sisters, and teach summer school again, and Anita starting out at the family home, 5Pitt St. in Charleston, but moving with her family on the usual summer route to Hendersonville and Skyland in the mountains of North Carolina.

Anita and Georgia’s correspondence began on June 10, 1915 with Anita in Charleston writing to Georgia in Charlottsville and continued throughout 1915 and the early part of 1916 while Georgia was rusticating in Columbia, South Carolina. It picked up again sporadically in the summer of 1916 while O’Keeffe was in Virginia teaching summer school and coping with the death of her mother, and continued throughout 1916 and 1917 while O’Keeffe was teaching in Canyon, Texas, eventually trickling off as Stieglitz became more central to O’Keeffe’s life and correspondence. In May of 1918, Stieglitz invited O’Keeffe to come to New York City, and from that point on letters between Georgia and Anita are only occasional since for many years they lived in close proximity.

The letters exchanged between 1915 and 1917 introduce us to two young women busy absorbing as much of contemporary art and thought as they can get their hands on. There is, of course, a good deal of discussion of art. Anita sends Georgia regular reports of all the shows she is going to -- Man Ray, Picasso, Nadelman, Max Weber -- as well as having Stieglitz send Georgia issues of Camera Work with their illustrations by Picasso and Marin and their modernist literary experiments by Gertrude Stein. The two trade lists of books to read: Kandinsky’s treatise on the spiritual dimension of art had just been published; both women are reading Jerome Eddy’s new book on Cubism and Post-Impressionism and Clive Bell’s explanation of "significant form" in Art. Having absorbed the lessons of Van Gogh, Gaugain, Matisse, Cezanne, Rodin, Picasso, they discuss the expressive purpose of art with the fervor of converts. As Anita declares, "We’re trying to live (& perhaps help other people to live) by saying or feeling—things or people—on canvas or paper—in lines, spaces &color."

But the letters are not just about the art world. Both women are reading widely, particularly social theory and modern literary works that challenge accepted values. O’Keeffe had been introduced to the work of Randolphe Bourne, a progressive pacifist, by Arthur Macmahon, his college roommate. She also subscribed to the The Masses, a left-wing monthly published in Greenwich Village devoted to social protest in the interests of working people, which was particularly known for its brilliant political cartoons, and she read H.G. Wells and other anti-war writers, while Anita was recommending "The Soul Under Socialism" by Oscar Wilde. There is also much reading on women’s issues. Georgia was absorbing Floyd Dell’s Women as World Builders, and recommended the issue of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Forerunner on dress reform. Anita was reading Fidelity, a novel about adultery by Susan Glaspell, one of the founders of the Provincetown Players. And all of these just in the summer and autumn of 1915.

When O’Keeffe left Charlottsville in September of 1915 for her new job in South Carolina and Anita went back to New York City to continue her art classes, the letters become even more of a cultural lifeline for O’Keeffe. The two women miss each other’s company greatly. Anita says, "I really feel there’s a hole in the floor where you used to sit in Mr. Martin’s back room." Appointing herself O’Keeffe’s cultural caretaker, she does all that she can to keep her friend in touch with the New York scene, not only by writing her about galleries visited and concerts attended, but also by becoming a kind of informal agent for O’Keeffe’s artwork. She demands that O’Keeffe send her new drawings, watercolors, and pastels, fills her letters with reactions to their color and design, takes them to various teachers for critique, and even goes so far as to pick out what she considers the best, and have them framed. Then she peppers O’Keeffe with entry forms to fill out so she can submit them to student exhibitions.

Initially, O’Keefe was not happy about her new job at Columbia College in Columbia South Carolina, and the thirty-six letters she sent Anita during the less than five months she resided there are laced with complaints from the acid to the good humored about the dullness of the cultural backwater to which she felt she had exiled herself. Throughout the summer, she had vacillated about whether she was going to take the job or not. She dreaded the isolation from New York City, particularly the lack of intellectual companionship, but knew that financially she had to do it. In addition, she had some new ideas kindling and she wanted a time of peace and quiet to work them out. Characteristically, she made the impending trial into a personal challenge and test of her artistic vocation. In early September, while O’Keeffe was still in Virginia, Anita wrote her about the possibility of getting a teaching job in somewhere in New York City. But O’Keeffe explained that South Carolina would be "nearer freedom to me than New York—You see—I have to make a living." She went on to declare "If I can’t work by myself for a year—with no stimulus other than what I can get from books—distant friends and from my own fun in living—Im not worth much."

When O’Keeffe arrived in South Carolina on September 22, 1915, her chief hope for her new job was that it would give her enough time to think and develop her own work. The teaching load was not heavy, four lectures on design per week and the rest studio time when she had only to supervise students. Little did she know that, in fact, this small, sleepy, college suburb would be the scene of the crucial imaginative breakthrough that would set her on the road to becoming the country’s most important woman artist.

O’Keeffe’s initial impressions of Columbia College were pretty grim. Founded in 1856 by Methodists as a two-year school for music teachers, the campus had repeatedly been devasted by fire, most recently in 1909. (Benita Eisler tells a story about how in 1914, the year before O’Keeffe arrived, students who had cut classes to attend a suffrage rally in town were punished by being made to clear away rubble still strewn around campus.) Located in College Place, then at the end of a two-mile trolley line from Columbia, the college’s financial situation was as desperate as its physical condition. Because of the falling price of cotton, enrollments had plummeted; in 1915 there were 150 students and only ten faculty to teach them.

As O’Keeffe had dreaded, there was little intellectual companionship. Jerold Savoy’s research O’Keeffe’s time at Columbia College published in the Women’s Artists News Book Review does record that she enjoyed the company of Music Professor J. H. Earnshaw and English Professor James Milton Ariail and their families; however, when she tried to explain modern art to her colleagues they laughed at her, and when she showed them her work they found it "crazy." Throughout September and early October, her letters to Anita reveal how isolated and depressed she is feeling:

For the next two months O’Keeffe’s moods oscillated wildly; the combination of gorgeous autumn weather and letters from Arthur filling her with so much energy that she felt "like turning the world over" or kicking a hole in it. One of her notes to Anita actually contains a drawing of a hole she says she kicked in the wall "because everyone here is so stupid." She played wild tunes on her violin until her fingers were sore and walked in the woods for several hours a day. Everything finally came to a head in late November when Arthur surprised her by coming for a four-day visit over Thanksgiving, a repeat of the four days they had spent together in Virginia when summer school was over that August. She told Anita that she was so glad about his visit "Im almost afraid Im going to die." They spent the four days mostly hiking in the countryside, taking pictures of each other, talking heatedly, and making wild plans for renting a cottage together in the spring. While no one knows for sure if they became lovers, they had a wonderful time, so wonderful that Georgia felt "stunned" when he left. Unable to collect her wits, she told Anita "the world looks all new to me." Although she tried to tell Anita how she felt about Arthur, in letter after letter she is unable to articulate her feelings, perhaps because, as she confesses in one letter, "I hard such a hard time making myself think right about it."

Although tempted to take all her savings and spend them on an impetuous trip to New York to visit Arthur for Christmas, O’Keeffe decided to stay at Columbia College and take advantage of the holidays to get some work done. Buoyed by the energy of her feelings for Arthur and buzzing with new ideas generated by their conversations, she had begun earlier in the autumn to reassess the work she was doing. Sometime during the middle of October, in a gesture that many critics see as an effort to free herself from emotional excess, she had made the decision to stop using color at all, to pare her art down to absolute essentials. As she later explained,

While we do not know the exact order in which these early drawings were created, they all share certain similarities. (Some of these drawings were made available in 1974 in Some Memories of Drawings. More were included in her 1987 Retrospective and published in Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters. Sarah Peters provides the definitive list of which O’Keeffe drawings were done in South Carolina in her detailed and scrupulous account of O’Keeffe’s early years, Becoming O’Keeffe. Barbara Buhler Lynes’ recently completed cataglogue raisonne reproduces all of them.) All the new charcoals were large, nearly 19 inches by 25, a good deal larger than most of her previous work. All incorporated organic, biomorphic, often curvilinear forms, many of them stretching in seeming aspiration towards the sky; others reaching, then drooping or curling in on themselves like the petioles of young ferns or shepherd’s crooks melting in spring rain. Played off against the spiral trajectories of buds opening are ripples of water flowing in parallel lines across the page. Besides their natural associations, many of these works also seem to evoke musical rhythms of climax and recession, theme and variation. As Savoy points out, several, including Early Number 2 and Early Abstraction, seem to picture the spiral scrolls of a violin, an instrument which O’Keeffe had been playing regularly. She may also have been remembering Picasso’s drawing of a violin which she and Anita saw at 291 and discussed repeatedly in their letters.

It is tempting to hypothesize that the first of these drawing are the more realistic ones such as No. 2 – Special which seems to be a somewhat recognizable fountain (Savory hypothesizes it might be a drawing of the fountain outside "Old Main," the building at Columbia College where O’Keeffe lived) and Second, Out of My Head, whose trees rising out of waves backed by mountains surely represent the charcoal landscapes O’Keeffe was making in October. It would make sense to assume that the more simplified and abstract works, such as Early No. 2 then developed as logical refinements or concentrations of essential motifs such as the arch, the heavy drop or droop, the spiral, and parallel grooves of waves. But O’Keefe’s intentions for these drawings remain mysterious. She herself suggests they may have something to do with sexuality; for example in Some Memories of Drawings she labeled a later version of Early No. 2 as "maybe a kiss… ." But they seem to have come from a variety of different stimuli; she also described Special No. 9 as picturing " a very bad headache" which she had gotten from sitting on the floor every night drawing.

Reguardless of the source or meaning of these new drawings, their effect is a matter of history. Some time right after Christmas, Georgia bundled them up and sent them off (rather like Arthur Macmahon’s letters) to Anita in New York City. Anita received them on New Year’s Day 1916, and immediately upon opening them was so struck by their power and originality that she took them (and several other of O’Keeffe’s recent drawings she happened to have on hand) straight to Steiglitz at 291 (stopping only to attend a matinee of Peter Pan). Steiglitz meditated over them and pronounced the words that Pollitzer later used to title her biography of O’Keeffe, "Finally a woman on paper."

This moment, canonized by Pollitzer in her 1950 memoir of O’Keeffe in the Saturday Review and repeated by countless critics and biographers, was not quite the spontaneous act of pure enthusiasm described in her immediate letter to Georgia and in her later re-dramatizations. Anita had been cultivating Stieglitz for months. Throughout 1915 her letters to Georgia reveal subtle efforts to connect the fifty-two-year old gallery owner and the twenty-eight year old aspiring artist. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz had already met each other several times. In 1908 O’Keeffe visited 291 with a group of fellow students to see a show of Rodin drawings. She went back that year to see the Matisse show, and when she was resident in New York City in 1914 she made several more visits to the Picasso/Braque and John Marin shows. But she and Stieglitz had not been drawn to each other. Later, O’Keeffe revealed she had been put off by the "fantastic violence" of his arguments with skeptical art students, and in her fine biography of O’Keeffe Roxanna Robinson suggests he was much more immediately attracted to the vivacious, gregarious Anita. But Anita, as always, was more than willing to share.

In Anita’s very first letter to O’Keeffe, she mentions going to Steiglitz’s gallery and asking him to sell her an issue of his magazine, Camera Work. Three weeks later she wrote him asking that he send a duplicate issue to O’Keeffe. By September Anita was back in New York and her letters to Georgia repeatedly evoke Steiglitz as an arbiter of modernist taste, describing many meetings with him at his gallery and at art shows and even enclosing clippings of articles by and about the "great man." Somewhat starstruck by their access to the person who was single-handedly introducing European modernist art to the U.S., the two began a game of "what would Stieglitz think?’ In October, Georgia confessed to Anita that she "would rather have Stieglitz like some thing – anything I had done – than anyone else I know of." Planting the seed of Anita’s later action, she declares that if she ever made "anything that satisfies me even ever so little" she would like to show it to Stieglitz "to find out if it’s any good." A few weeks later in November after receiving two new experimental works from O’Keeffe, Anita tentatively suggests that if Georgia would give her permission she’d take her drawings to Steiglitz for a critique. Meanwhile, she had been keeping O’Keeffe in the forefront of Stieglitz’s mind by repeatedly asking him to make sure O’Keeffe was getting her issues of Camera Work.

Whether Anita was consciously match-making or only trying to get a friend’s work recognized by a noted authority, Steiglitz evidently did respond strongly to O’Keeffe’s charcoal abstractions. He told Anita to write O’Keeffe and tell her the drawings were "the purest, finest, sincerest things that have entered 291 in a long time." Asking Anita if he could keep the drawings, he said he would like to look at them again and even mentioned that he might like to exhibit them in his gallery. In April he was still thinking about them; he wrote a friend about "the really personal abstractions" he had seen done by "a young girl of unusual sensibility." And in May he hung ten of them in his gallery—on the same walls where he had displayed the drawings of Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque.

O’Keeffe’s reaction to Anita’s long, exultant account of Steiglitz’s praise was, on the surface at least, calm gratitude. The approbation of such a noted authority gave her the confidence to continue her experiments with abstractions based on her own feelings. She immediately accepted Steiglitz’s interpretation of her work as the unique expression of feminine feelings and was intensely curious as to how he interpreted them. A week after hearing from Anita, she wrote Stieglitz directly, asking him why he liked her drawings. He wrote her back, inviting her to come talk to him in person since that was the only way he felt he could express the depth of his response.

It only took O’Keeffe a little more than a month to accept Stieglitz’s invitation and leave South Carolina for New York City. Although many critics, and in later life O’Keeffe herself, saw the time in Columbia as an essential retreat, an isolation which allowed her to meditate and confront her own emotions, at the time, both Anita and O’Keeffe saw her life in South Carolina as diametrically opposed to the larger possibilities in the art world of New York. Anita ended her announcement of Stiegltiz’s interest with the triumphant assertation "You’re living Pat [a pet name for Georgia] in spite of work at Columbia! South Carolina!" And Georgia responded by declaring that "Columbia is a nightmare to me—everything out here is deliciously stupid." By mid-January, O’Keeffe was aggressively pursuing the possibility of a new teaching position for the fall, as head of the art department in a West Texas teacher’s college in Canyon, a job that conveniently would require her to resign her position in South Carolina and return immediately to New York in time to take an additional semester of methods courses at Columbia Teacher’s College. She left South Carolina at the end of February. Robinson speculates there may have been some trouble between O’Keeffe and Columbia College because O’Keeffe’s "abrupt" departure left the small art department "in the lurch" with no replacement teacher.

When O’Keeffe returned to New York, it was more to fulfill the ambitions that Stieglitz’s approval had confirmed as legitimate than to establish any kind of relationship with a man who was, after all, married and twenty-four years her senior. Over the next two years, however, her relationship with Anita and Arthur Macmahon gradually began to take a back seat to a growing sense of connection to Stieglitz, who wrote her in Texas at the rate of four or five letters a week. The once-or-twice weekly letters to Anita dwindled down to once-a-month missives. In 1917 Stieglitz gave O’Keeffe a solo exhibition at 291, and when she came East to see the show he began photographing her. (A marked of the increasing distance between Georgia and Anita, Pollitzer did not know anything about the show until she saw it announced in the newspaper.) A year later, when O’Keeffe fell ill with a bout of influenza, Stieglitz sent a friend to bring her back to New York. Within a month, he had left his wife and moved in with O’Keeffe. Although it would take another six years for Stieglitz to get a divorce and marry O’Keeffe, they lived together as artistic partners for nearly thirty years, Stieglitz acting as O’Keeffe’s agent, O’Keeffe becoming his most favored photographic subject, both feeding off each other’s creativity, conducting a long reciprocal conversation in paintings and photographs which answer and trump one another. The intensity of their artistic collaboration was demonstrated in a 1992 exhibition at the Phillips Collection, Two Lives.

Anita’s life was changing too. In 1916 Anita finished her BA degree at the School of Practical Arts at Columbia University. While Georgia went West to teach art, Anita became increasingly involved in the women’s movement. Her letters to Georgia during the sumear and fall of 1916 show a gradual discouragement with her art classes. Although she completed her art degree and would continue her schooling to get an MS in International Law, by 1918, she had moved to Washington D.C. to work full time for suffrage.

The history of Anita Pollitzer’s contribution to women’s rights in the United States has yet to be written. But it was considerable. Anita worked for six years as Alice Paul’s right hand aide in the National Women’s Party. Paul had spent time in England and seen the pressure exerted by more militant British feminists whose civil disobedience extended to from digging up golf greens and leaving signs saying "No vote, no golf" to hunger strikes. On her return to America, Paul began to organize effective but radical protests to encourage the U.S. Senate to take up the Suffrage Ammendement – which had first been introduced in 1878 but had been languishing in committees for more than thirty years. In 1917, the National Women’s party began 24-hour picketing of Woodrow Wilson’s White House. Photographs from this period show many of the clearly lettered signs accusing Wilson of being a hypocrite for saying he supported democracy around the world when he did not support it at home. Anita was one of those arrested and jailed when Wilson finally lost patience with the personal attacks and the constant turmoil of women chaining themselves to the White Houses fences and gates. The subsequent treatment of these women, the hunger strikes, followed by forced feeding, accompanied by man-handling and restraint in straight jackets was widely publicized and so embarrassed the Wilson administration that it was instrumental in getting the President to urge Congress to pass the Nineteenth Amendment. According to family legend, Anita played a crucial role in its final adoption. We know for sure that Anita obtained at least one interview with Wilson, and her nephew William Pollitzer claims, "Anita’s persuasive talk with legislator Harry Burns of Tennessee caused him to cast the deciding vote for suffrage that made that state the thirty-sixth one to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment." Usually it is a persuasive letter from his mother that is cited as the deciding factor in the one vote that gave women the franchise.

In 1921 Anita was elected the first national secretary of the National Women’s Party, reorganized after the passage of the 19^th Amendment to campaign for national passage of the Susan B. Anthony Equal Rights Amendment. For thirty years she continued to campaign for the ERA around the country, accepting no pay, only travel expenses. She is generally credited with getting the ERA on the Senate calendar for the first time in 1938. Eventually she succeeded Alice Paul as Director of the National Women’s Party. Retired in 1949, she continued to serve the NWP until her death in 1975, writing letters and giving speeches in support of the ERA.

From the 1920’s through the rest of their lives, Pollitzer and O’Keeffe remained friends. In 1928, Anita married Elie Charlier Edson, of French heritage on his mother’s side, a publicity agent for French celebrities, including Sarah Bernhart. They moved to New York City, which meant she and Georgia could and did meet frequently. Anita and Elie had a small apartment on West 115^th St. around the corner from Columbia University which became a meeting place for artists and writers and even musicians like Elie’s nephew Pete Seeger, particularly during the McCarthy era when times were hard for progressives.

As O’Keeffe became more and more famous, Anita continued to encourage her friend to support women’s rights. O’Keeffe evidently shared Anita’s conviction that the ERA was the best way to ensure women’s full equal participation in society since she remained a dues-paying member of the NWP until she left the east coast in the early fifties. She also showed her support in public forums from time to time, one suspects at Anita’s urging. In 1926, for example, she spoke at a funding-raising dinner Anita had organized to encourage women to run for office. And in 1944 she wrote Eleanor Roosevelt quite a stern letter chiding her for not supporting the ERA, in which she told the First Lady that it was the women who had worked for Equal Rights who had made it possible for Mrs. Roosevelt to be "the power that you are in our country, to work as you work and to have the kind of public life that you have." O’Keeffe also argued that the ERA "would have very important psychological effects on women and men from the time they are born. It could very much change the girl child’s idea of her place in the world." (This letter can be found in Georgina O’Keeffe: Art and Letters, edited by Jack Cowart and Juan Hamilton).

Georgia and Anita’s continued friendship is also shown by the many visits made when O’Keeffee and Stieglitz left the city, first to Stieglitz’s family home on Lake George in upstate New York, and later to O’Keeffe’s homes in New Mexico. Anita visited O’Keeffe out West first in 1936, then went back for two weeks in 1945; in 1951 she and her husband stayed with Georgia for five weeks.

O’Keeffe and Pollitzer’s long friendship was marred by only one episode – unfortunately it was near the end of Anita’s life and reflected rather badly on O’Keeffe. In 1950, Anita wrote a short memoir of O’Keeffe for The Saturday Review (it is reprinted at the end of Lovingly , Georgia, the collection of Pollitzer and O’Keeffe’s letters). The piece is poetic and reverential and furthers the mythification of O’Keeffe as a solitary desert sage, whose simple life is deliberately lived for the pure sake of her art. O’Keeffe’s initial reaction to it seems to have been positive. It was published on November 4^th, and on December 12^th she wrote to short note to Anita mentioning "You seem to be on the way to becoming an authority on me." Some time after, it was decided that Pollitzer would expand her sketch into a full biography, and she began assiduously to collect materials. O’Keeffe gave her permission to reprint passages from her letters, to read and excerpt passages from letters between Georgia and Stieglitz, and even to reproduce paintings, and encouraged her to interview a growing list of friends and associates. For eighteen years Anita worked on the project, writing all sorts of people and working visits to important O’Keeffe sites into her travels. For example, in 1955, she wrote Georgia about her long conversation with Dr. F.S.C. Northrop of Yale, whose book The Meeting of East and West had discussed O’Keeffe’s work in some detail. And once the manuscript began to take shape in the mid-fifties, O’Keeffe suggested various art critics such as Daniel Rich to whom Anita could send the work for advice. However, when Pollitzer sent the completed project to O’Keeffe in 1968, to her surprise and dismay, O’Keeffe refused to sanction its publication. In her initial letter to Anita, she claimed that the biography was too sentimental and too mythic – a "dream picture of me" -- that she felt was "as much a myth as all the others" that strangers had invented about her. Thirty pages of notes pointing out various inaccuracies followed as support for her rejection. But as numerous biographers, editors, and critics have pointed out, most of O’Keeffe’s objections were fairly trivial and could have been fixed rather easily. Speculation is rife over why she treated her old friend this way. Theories range from rather benign explanations that Pollitzer’s optimism and deference embarrassed O’Keeffe or that the manuscript’s personal and conversational tone was not professional enough to suit O’Keeffe’s growing national reputation, to the to the more Machiavellian suspicion that O’Keeffe wanted to have complete control of all aspects of her presentation to the public and that Pollitzer’s book revealed aspects of O’Keeffe’s past that she did not want made public, such as the fact that she was highly educated and had studied with all the best teachers of her day.

Unfortunately, subsequent events tend to support the idea that it was not the content or even style of Anita’s writing that bothered O’Keeffe. Shortly after her manuscript’s rejection, Pollitzer began a decline into the early senility that eventually resulted in her death in 1975. It does not seem like a coincidence that the year after Pollitzer’s death, in 1976, O’Keeffe produced a definitive retrospective of her work in a book prefaced by a short, elegantly spare autobiography, an autobiography which incorporates many stories, images, and even some exact words from Pollitzer’s manuscript. When Pollitzer’s book was finally published, in 1988, two years after O’Keeffe’s death and twenty years after it was completed, O’Keeffe’s debt to Pollitzer became publicly apparent.

The sketch of O’Keeffe’s life in Georgia O’Keeffe became the blueprint for the very controlled myth of herself that she held to with rigid discipline for the remaining ten years of her life – ironic considering that she had faulted Pollitzer for the same myth-making. No matter how spontaneous they appear, all her subsequent interviews were based upon this script; her seemingly off-hand comments in the film Perry Miller Adato made about her for PBS in 1977 are word-for-word quotations from this text, as carefully rehearsed as the now-almost-blind O’Keeffe’s climb up the ladder to her roof to "see" the mountains.

In Anita’s Pollitzer’s first version of the O’Keeffe myth, her 1950 Saturday Review article, there was no mention of O’Keeffe’s stay in South Carolina. Instead, the emphasis was on her stints at Amarillo and Canyon Texas, as befitted her growing reputation as a Western artist whose inspirational roots were in the landscape of New Mexico. But when it came time to write down her own version of the history of her artistic life, reminded perhaps by Anita’s treatment in her longer manuscript, O’Keeffe also presented the time at Columbia College as the germinal moment of her breakthrough into Modernist abstraction, the time when she first began "thinking things out for myself." As she wrote Jerold Savoy in 1979:

• Arrow… Two Lives
• Buhler Lyons,’
• Cowart, Hamilton
• Eisler, book
• Gibore
• McCandless
• Peters
• Pollitzer\
• Robinson
• Savoy