Flannery O’Connor’s Artworks Finally See the Light

“I don’t know how to write,” Mary Flannery O’Connor once said. “But I can draw.”

She had just become a cartoonist for her high school newspaper, at Peabody High School in Milledgeville, Ga. There, and later at Georgia State College for Women, she hoped to place her linoleum-block-print satires of campus life in The New Yorker.

Instead, she left for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Yaddo residency in New York State, shed “Mary” from her name and published two finely tuned novels about religious belief, the perversely funny “Wise Blood” (1952) and her grave “The Violent Bear it Away” (1960), then a collection of short stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955), whose staring contest with belief and tradition in the modernizing South placed her at the front of new regional literature until her death from lupus in 1964, at age 39.

Since the republication of those newspaper cartoons, in 2012 — and a deeply researched biography in 2009 — an academic scavenger hunt for the true Flannery O’Connor has taken off. Her prayer journal and unfinished third novel were recently published, a documentary and biopic released. On March 25, for the centenary of her birth, her alma mater, now the Georgia College & State University, will exhibit 70 newly acquired artworks of a different sort, which some O’Connor scholars have heard about but far fewer have seen. Then on March 27, the exhibition moves to the Andalusia Interpretive Center, an exhibition space nearby run by the college.

Comprising painted woodcut caricatures from her childhood along with regional oil paintings from the peak of her writing career, the artworks might shed new light on a literary vision cut far too short, a Roman Catholic theology that scholars have debated for 70 years and infamously protective gatekeepers — her mother and cousin — who may have resisted access to O’Connor’s artwork.

On a balmy afternoon during Lent, Seth Walker, the college’s vice president of advancement, led me up two flights of stairs of a peeling Federal-style foursquare house in downtown Milledgeville, where O’Connor, age 13 and a self-described “pigeon-toed” only child “with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex,” moved from Savannah with her parents, and where she would reside until age 20.