Letters Like the Day

On Reading Georgia O'Keeffe

Jennifer Sinor

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780826357830
• eBook ISBN: 9780826357847
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Georgia O’Keeffe mistrusted words. She claimed color as her language. Nevertheless, in the course of her long life, the great American painter wrote thousands of letters—more than two thousand survive between her and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, alone. Jennifer Sinor’s Letters Like the Day honors O’Keeffe, her modernist landscapes, and, crucially, the value of letter writing. In the painter’s correspondence, we find an intimacy with words that is all her own. Taking her letters as a touchstone, Sinor experiments with the limits of language using the same aesthetic that drove O’Keeffe’s art. Through magnification, cropping, and juxtaposition—hallmarks of modernism—Sinor explores the larger truths at the center of O’Keeffe’s work: how we see, capture, and create. Letters Like the Day pursues the highest function of art—to take one’s medium to the edge and then push beyond.

Notes

The majority of Georgia O’Keeffe’s letters are held at the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Unless otherwise noted, letters that I quote can be found there. Around two hundred letters from O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz are housed at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the collection “Letters to Alfred Stieglitz, 1933–1944, undated.” When appropriate, I indicate letters coming from that archive.

In 2011 Yale University released the first of a two-volume set that will eventually contain the majority of the correspondence between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz. My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz (volume 1, 1915–1933) is edited by Sarah Greenough and beautifully done. The volume has been very helpful to me, especially in reproducing the back-and-forth conversation between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz. I am grateful for Greenough’s gift.

Abbreviations

GOK	Georgia O’Keeffe
AS	Alfred Stieglitz
MC	Maria Chabot
AP	Anita Pollitzer
AY	Anita Young
JT	Jean Toomer

Epigraph

PAGE VII

“At the mailbox”: GOK to AS, June 22, 1946. “Letters to Alfred Stieglitz, 1933–1944, undated.” Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center Archives.

I find this line such a fitting way to open Letters Like the Day because of the two images presented. The first: a picture of O’Keeffe at the mailbox in Abiquiú, waiting to post a letter to her husband. The second: the image she creates of her world, unfurling with possibility before her. I am also drawn to this particular line because O’Keeffe pencils it in while waiting for the mail. The rest of the letter is in ink, but this line is inserted at the very top corner, scrunched and almost illegible. An apparent afterthought, it lets us know that O’Keeffe valued her letters enough, cared about them enough, that she reread them and even sometimes revised.

Letters Like the Day

PAGE 1	“found unopened—came too late”: GOK to AS, July 12, 1946.
PAGE 2	“A kiss to you”: GOK to AS, July 6, 1946.
PAGE 5	“We are tempted”: Several writers warn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Dear Reader
• Letters Like the Day
• Holes in the Sky
• A Walk into the Night
• More Feeling Than Brain
• Cleaving, 1929
• Taking Myself to the Sun
• Perfectly Fantastic
• Spiral
• I Must Speak to You
• Acknowledgments
• Notes