“For the writer of fiction,” Flannery O’Connor once reflected, “everything has its testing point in the eye.” Writing, to her, didn’t just call on emotion and thought; it required “sense-impression” on the part of the author—on what and how she sees. It begins with the eye, “an organ,” she said, “that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.”
From O’Connor’s own eye would issue her deeply observed fiction, written from the late 1940s through early ’60s, now a fixture in the Southern Gothic canon. Underpinning it, though, was the writer’s little-known visual art practice—the cartoons, drawings, and paintings that summoned her perceptive powers. For years, scholars only had inklings of these artworks; a rediscovery, however, is changing that.
Flannery O’Connor’s painting of the family home at Andalusia Farm with her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, in the foreground. Photo: Anna Gay Leavitt, courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
For the first time, dozens of artworks by the Southern writer are seeing the light of day at “Hidden Treasures” at Andalusia Farm, O’Connor’s former homestead in Milledgeville, Georgia. Marking the centennial of her birth, the exhibition brings together her childhood drawings, cartoons, paintings on wood, and even a stuffed red-faced doll she had created, complete with plaid shirt and a large cape. At its heart is a 1952 self-portrait, in which O’Connor painted herself gazing out from under a wide sun hat, while flanked by a pheasant.
“The self-portrait was the first painting that arrived in our custody,” Andalusia curator Cassie Munnell told me over a phone call. “I knew that there was one out there, but I’d only ever seen black-and-white photos of it. To see it in person, to see it in color and the vibrancy of it, was just so exciting.”
Flannery O’Connor standing next to her 1952 self portrait. Photo: Alpha Historica / Alamy Stock Photo.
The entire collection had been stowed away for decades until it was recently unearthed—some works came from a storage unit behind a fast-food restaurant, others from the attic of the Milledgeville townhouse of Louise Florencourt, O’Connor’s cousin and co-executor of her estate. It was in the latter 19th-century building where O’Connor spent her teenage years, squirreling herself away in the top story to create art.
(Before she died in 2023, Florencourt bequeathed the property to the Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities at Georgia College and State University, the writer’s alma mater, which also preserves her library and the Andalusia compound, now a National Historic Landmark. Some of the artworks have also been gifted to the school by the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust.)
Installation view of “Hidden Treasures” at the Andalusia Interpretive Center. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
Few eyes had seen the extent of the archive, which was fiercely guarded by Florencourt (one rare visitor to the storage unit, author Damian Ference, recalled it packed “wall-to-wall” with O’Connor artifacts). A worry of the early trustees, explained Farrell O’Gorman, who recently joined the trust, was that “the paintings might somehow distract from her achievements as a writer.”
Not so, said Munnell. The artworks “complement and expand” what we know about O’Connor, she noted. “You can see the ways that her ideas and the way she described people carried over. Her fiction is often quite dramatic and her characters are often described in these big, bold ways. This carries over in how she painted.”
Flannery O’Connor, c. 1950s. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, O’Connor came to visual art before fiction writing. At five, she was creating caricatures and sketches, which blossomed into her joyous, witty linoleum prints (compiled in 2012’s Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons). She submitted her illustrations to her high school and college publications; others, she compiled into small books. She paused her visual art when she entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1945.
It was in Iowa that O’Connor began her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), and a run of beguiling short stories shot through with pathos, dark humor, and keen perception. In them are characters wrangling with faith and self in the heart of the American South (which O’Connor, a devout Catholic, deemed “Christ-haunted”), threaded throughout with potent descriptions of desolate farms, of eyes “the color of pecan shells,” of a peacock with a “tail full of suns,” and of forest-lined roads, some leading straight to the sky. One senses the cartoonist in these deft strokes.
Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
In 1952, following a diagnosis of lupus, O’Connor returned to Andalusia Farm to live under her mother’s care. The homestead, purchased by O’Connor’s uncle in 1931, was where she would spend the last years of her life before her death at age 39. Despite her prognosis, she maintained a disciplined writing schedule—completing the now-classic The Violent Bear It Away (1960), for one—when not attending church, giving lectures, and painting her surrounds.
These rural scenes are dotted throughout “Hidden Treasures.” There are images of the farm’s horse barn, pictured amid stark tree branches; of a lake, surrounded by a verdant hill and captured with an Impressionistic hand; and of O’Connor’s beloved peafowl, which she avidly raised in Andalusia. “It’s all very grounded in the Southern farm experience, in this area, and our natural landscapes,” said Munnell.
Flannery O’Connor’s painting of fowl. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
But O’Connor also turned her hand to portraits: the show includes depictions of a green-clad female, believed to be her mother, and an African American woman in mid-crochet, likely a farm worker. There’s, of course, her self-portrait as well.
These later works follow her earlier caricatures—colorful portrayals of a wrinkled woman with a pointed nose and a cross-eyed man in a bowler hat, among others—that offer a highly comic counterpoint to her dramatic fiction. They might be juvenilia, but to Munnell, they hold stylistic hallmarks that carried over into O’Connor’s mature paintings such as “the ways that motion is displayed and details like facial features.”
Installation view of “Hidden Treasures” at the Andalusia Interpretive Center. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
And even in these simple drawings one can read O’Connor’s eye for mining meaning out of gesture and expression, and her knack for drawing from life, if not imagination. Drawing, in fact, might be the best medium to accompany fiction writing, she once stressed. “Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look” is essential, she said. “The writer should never be ashamed of staring.”
“Hidden Treasures” is on view at the Andalusia Interpretive Center, 2628 N. Columbia Street, Milledgeville, Georgia, throughout the summer.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
