Their letters, spanning fifty years, chronicle an extraordinary friendship between two women who both, in different ways, had tremendous impact on 20th-century America

“I just feel like writing to you – and as all the other paper is upstairs I decided that a letter on this [ruled paper from a notebook] would be just as nice. So began Anita Pollitzer’s first letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, written on on June 1, 1915.  It was the start of a correspondence that would last over fifty years and chart O’Keeffe’s emergence as America’s first great woman artist and Pollitzer’s leadership at the frontlines of the fight for women’s rights.

Pollitzer had met the standoffish O’Keeffe the year before at Columbia’s Teachers College and the Art Students League in New York City where they were both enrolled. Older by eight years, desperately poor and with very few prospects, O’Keeffe found herself drawn to Pollitzer’s generous and gregarious nature.  

Dear litttle Pollitzer – O’Keefe wrote back to her diminutive new friend – Don’t you like little spelled with three t’s – but you are little you know and I like you little but I also like you a lot.  The letters flew back and forth all summer and into the fall. They wrote to each other about what they were reading and thinking, but their primary subject was art. Did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side of the wall wouldn’t be big enough to say it on?  O’Keeffe asked Pollitzer in the midst of creating the series of charcoals that would establish her career.

Their correspondence could be light-hearted, too, full of gossip and details of their everyday lives. Pollitzer would often annotate her letters with little pen and ink drawings. O’Keeffe would think nothing of bundling up whatever she had been working on and mailing it off to Pollitzer for her opinion. I’m glad blue is your color, Pollitzer wrote after receiving a roll of O’Keeffe’s latest watercolors, I love them … I wouldn’t like one line different.

It was Pollitzer who introduced O’Keeffe to family friend Alfred Stieglitz, the world-famous photographer whose 291 Gallery in New York City was the epicenter of the modern art world.  Their letters offer a first-hand, intimate look at the romantic and artistic partnership that soon blossomed between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz who became O’Keeffe’s manager, lover, and, eventually, husband.  

Even as their lives diverged — Pollitzer throwing herself into the fight for women’s rights, O’Keeffe finding her footing and then fame as an artist — they stayed in touch.  I cannot tell you how moved I was—excited & glad—to hear from you in such a fashion, Pollitzer wrote to O’Keeffe after receiving the catalog of her first major one-woman exhibit in 1923. Let’s try to take a week off together—it could be done … & lie on our backs—& fill in gaps & talk ourselves out.

In a speech at the National Woman’s Party Convention in 1926, delivered as a favor to Pollitzer, O’Keeffe said: I believe in woman as individual, individual not only with the same rights and privileges as a man, but with the same responsibilities.  But by then, in fact, O’Keeffe’s independence had been curtailed by her role as Stieglitz’s wife, her growing reputation and success as an artist controlled by her husband’s outsized influence and opinions.

It rains and rains, O’Keeffe wrote to Pollitzer when depression was settling in after a breast operation in 1927. There is no news except that I am wondering about you and looking forward to seeing you again. O’Keeffe’s illnesses, both physical and mental and exacerbated by Stieglitz’s affair with a much younger woman, finally forced O’Keeffe to start spending half of each year in New Mexico. There, free to live and paint as she chose, she established a new, solitary, enormously productive life.

The grain is ripe in the little fields along the Rio Grande valley, she wrote to Pollitzer from her home in the Ghost Ranch region. Pollitzer would visit her there, stopping during cross-country tours to drum up votes for the Equal Rights Amendment.  By then, as Chairman of the National Woman’s Party, Pollitzer was a prominent national figure in her own right, a respected lobbyist who was on a first-name basis with Presidents and other national figures.

But her friendship with O’Keeffe was always a source of pride for Pollitzer and, when she retired from the National Woman’s Party in 1950, she was pleased to accept an invitation from the Saturday Review to write an article about O’Keeffe who, after Stieglitz’s death, was closing his Manhattan gallery and moving permanently to New Mexico.

Your neat little package of your article came to me yesterday A.M., O’Keeffe wrote to Pollitzer after receiving her printed copy, as I read it here in the morning sun I had an odd feeling of there being something religious in your way of doing it… It is only thank you that I can say to you.  Soon after this, O’Keeffe asked Pollitzer to expand her article into a biography. You seem to be on the way to becoming an authority on me, O’Keeffe explained.  Pollitzer devoted nearly 20 years to the biography’s research and writing. But despite O’Keeffe’s encouragement over that time, despite her suggestions for people to contact, despite her reading many drafts and making minor corrections, when she was sent the final manuscript in 1967, O’Keeffe rejected it outright. It would mark the end of their correspondence and their friendship.  

You have written your dream picture of me—and that is what it is . . . I really believe that to call this my biography when it has so little to do with me is impossible—and I cannot have my name exploited to further it. . .. I cannot approve it, directly or indirectly, in any way.

Why? The corrections O’Keeffe had asked for were all minor and easily fixed. The final manuscript, one O’Keeffe herself had asked her friend to write, was one that O’Keeffe had seen in one version or another many times. “A key to the refusal,” speculates Benita Eisler, who wrote the introduction to Lovingly, Georgia, a collection of the letters, “may be seen in her threatening to sue Anita, should she proceed with the book and use the letters – letters that demonstrate that Anita was neither inventing a person nor further gilding an icon. It is relevant to note O’Keeffe’s insistence that her most revealing correspondence – that with Stieglitz – remain sealed until twenty-five years after her death.”