Willa Cather and Georgia O'Keeffe: Modernism and the importance of place in color, light, and imagery

The fiction of Willa Cather and the painting of Georgia O'Keeffe have been linked by biographers and critics alike; this dissertation examines specific connections between color and light conveyed in words and in painted images. Because place is significant to both artists, the paper establishes that the two artists were influenced by early years in the Midwest, where they developed the love of land that permeates their art. In the natural beauty of the places and the humanity of the people, a synergy emerged that created the images for O'Keeffe's paintings and Cather's stories. The places they visited, the spaces where they worked, and the places they called home appear in their art. This dissertation examines picture-telling in Cather's Nebraska tales, My Antonia and O Pioneers!, and selects O'Keeffe's early Texas paintings to show that the artists convey the same feelings about geographic plains and prairie. Recognizing Cather's and O'Keeffe's New York experiences, the dissertation connects Cather's work at McClure's her personal associations, and two New York stories, “Coming, Aphrodite!” and “Behind the Singer Tower,” to O'Keeffe's apprenticeship with teachers, her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, and her paintings of the city. Similar involvement with the land and people of the American Southwest also invites analogies between the artists' paintings and fiction. Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Professor's House, and The Song of the Lark include scenes illustrated by O'Keeffe's paintings of the New Mexico landscape—its strong colors, light, and images of culture.; Both women produced art that was unique. While they studied the master painters and writers, they developed their own literary and painterly techniques. In their desire to simplify, to create through suggestion, and to stand on their own against critics of their times, they were modern. In their choice of unconventional life styles, Cather and O'Keeffe experienced parallel lives. This dissertation argues for their place as modernists.