by Karen Karbo
Life wasn’t notably bad for Stieglitz and O’Keeffe that particular year, but the picture seemed to be an expression of all the difficult years that had come before; they simply looked wrung-out. Indeed, by the time this picture was taken she had mostly recovered, in no small part because she now had a new love: Ghost Ranch.
I have the same misgivings about introducing Ghost Ranch as I had about introducing Stieglitz in an earlier chapter: Once you start talking about O’Keeffe’s mad love for this part of New Mexico,¶¶¶ those hundreds of paintings of red and yellow sandstone cliffs, the flat-topped Pedernal Mountain, the purple hills, the blue hills, the gray hills, and the rest of the breathtaking stuff out there*** take over the narrative. The semi-mystical terminology starts creeping in: the White Place, the Black Place, the Faraway Nearby.
The semi-crackpot anecdotes assert themselves. “What are those people doing in my house?” O’Keeffe demanded of the ranch’s owner, Arthur Pack, in 1936, when she arrived unannounced and a family was renting the cottage she’d rented the year before. “It’s my private mountain,” she said of the Pedernal, which she could see from the windows of the house she eventually purchased from Pack in 1940. “God told me if I painted it often enough I could have it.” In marched the esteemed photographers—Cecil Beaton, Philippe Halsman, Todd Webb, Horst—to codify her solitude, her regal, aging face. The black dress. The black hat. The cow skull hung on the wall. In rushed the gaggle of lifestyle magazines to rave about the chicness of O’Keeffe’s houses and decor. Once you start talking about Ghost Ranch, it’s hard to see the woman inside O’Keeffe the Icon.
After she found and fell in love with Ghost Ranch, poor old Stieglitz—and by now, he was old—and creepy Dorothy Norman,††† and everything else that went on in New York no longer concerned O’Keeffe. She spent the winters in New York with Alfred out of a sense of duty, or because she felt obligated since he had done so much to launch her career, or because of a shared history. She fussed over his clothes, sewing buttons on old shirts and seeing that his suits were faithfully copied, as they always had been. Now that she’d made a life all her own, a strange thing happened: She enjoyed his company once more.
In 1936, the Elizabeth Arden Beauty Salon commissioned O’Keeffe to do a painting for the exercise room. Although this was no more elevated than the ladies’ lounge at Radio City Music Hall, O’Keeffe asked Stieglitz to take care of the business end. He negotiated a staggering $10,000 for her fee, about twice what her paintings were going for at the time.‡‡‡‡ She painted a big, sexy, spirited jimsonweed and everyone was happy.§§§§
Despite all their insane letter-writing, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were visual artists; she was his artist, he her manager and promoter, and it was in this realm that they made their apologies. They moved from the Shelton Hotel that year as well, to a penthouse on East 54th Street. Georgia had tired of living in a hotel, and also felt she needed more space to work. The lease was in her name. Stieglitz grumbled: He felt it was too fancy. It had a terrace and a view of the East River. Georgia was unmoved by his protestations. She was going, and he was welcome to come along.
The same year, Henry R. Luce founded a new kind of magazine, focused not on words but on pictures. The arrival of a lightweight, compact 35mm camera had led to the advent of something called photojournalism, and Life magazine was created to celebrate photojournalists and their images. Did Stieglitz ever imagine photography, which had at one time been written off as a passing fad, would catch on this way? Was he gratified, appalled, or jealous because the art he had legitimized had, like his wife, ultimately escaped his control?
In 1938, Life did a four-page spread on O’Keeffe, with pictures by her friend Ansel Adams, declaring her “the most original painter working in America today,” and borne out by a large, alarming picture of O’Keeffe wearing jeans and a cardigan,¶¶¶¶ holding a full cow’s vertebrae with ribs attached (I counted nine) in one hand, and a cow’s head in the other. This is not a clean, sun-bleached skull, but the head of a cow dead no more than two weeks.**** Even in the grainy black-and-white photo you can see the matted curls on its cheeks, the eyes staring vacantly. The caption reads in new mexico o’keeffe gets material for a still life by lugging home a cow’s skeleton.
Perhaps this is an appropriate, if grisly, metaphor for what can happen in a marriage when there’s no premium placed on communication or honesty. At first, it’s a sweet, big-eyed calf swishing its tail, so cute, then it ages and gets less cute, and eventually it dies and the buzzards swoop down and feast on the rotting corpse. Time passes, the bones are picked clean, and it becomes once again a thing of beauty, albeit seriously pared down. If you can stand the buzzards, you might wind up with the sort of fond friendship O’Keeffe and Stieglitz shared in his later years. On the other hand, maybe she’s holding his dead and rotting metaphorical head.
In 1938, at the age of seventy-four, Alfred suffered a heart attack, followed by a case of double pneumonia. O’Keeffe nursed him most of the summer, until he was well enough to be looked after by Margaret Prosser, who had worked for the Stieglitz family at Oaklawn, when she was still in her teens. Stieglitz begged O’Keeffe not to go, but it was too late for that. New Mexico had claimed her heart, and even though she said she felt like a heartless wretch for doing so, she left.
During the last years of Stieglitz’s life, their letters to one another were especially affectionate. They’d developed the habit of writing many letters in advance of her yearly departure for Ghost Ranch. She would hide hers around the apartment for him to stumble upon, and he would mail his in advance, so they would be there when she arrived. “I greet you on your coming once more to your own country,” he wrote, “I hope it will be very good to you . . . I’m with you wherever you are. And you ever with me.” During Georgia’s long absences Stieglitz kept regular hours at An American Place, even though the gallery had few visitors. Stieglitz had become a relic. He often napped on a cot in the back office, and on his desk he kept a single red flower stuck in a water glass, to remind him of Georgia.
“. . . I will be thinking of you all through the night and all through the days,” she wrote to him.
“You will be with me in my country
I will be with you here
Be good to your self for me—
It means so much for me—
But I need not say—
You know without my saying—”
Shortly before Stieglitz’s death, the Museum of Modern Art, his old nemesis, opened a show of Georgia’s work, the first retrospective of a woman artist in its history. Alfred wrote: “Incredible Georgia—and how beautiful your pictures are at the Modern . . . Oh Georgia—we are a team.”
The summer of 1946, while O’Keeffe was in New Mexico, Stieglitz suffered a stroke while sitting at her desk reading one of the letters she had left for him. O’Keeffe received the telegram while she was grocery shopping in Espanola, a small town about forty-five miles south of Ghost Ranch, and drove straight to the airport. She arrived at Doctors Hospital to find Dorothy Norman at his bedside. The two women took turns sitting vigil, but O’Keeffe was there when he died, the morning of July 13.
I wish I could report that O’Keeffe, in her role as legal wife and Most Famous Woman Artist in America, took the high road and simply snubbed Norman, or looked right through her using the Native American blank-gaze-of-belittlement she’d picked up from Tony Luhan. Instead, she behaved badly. She was silent until the day after the funeral, then she called Norman and told her that by the fall, she needed to get her shit out of An American Place, and she didn’t care about the lease being in Norman’s name, or about the stupid rent fund Norman had been maintaining all these years, or about anything Norman had invested in the gallery or Stieglitz.
Norman tried to explain that she was also grief-stricken and heartbroken; O’Keeffe’s response was to tell Norman she thought the affair s
he’d had with her husband was absolutely disgusting. She wanted Norman out. People who had been friends to both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were stunned at her behavior, at her lack of grace and generosity in the face of death, but she didn’t care. She was, after all, a heartless wretch.
O’Keeffe traveled alone to Lake George, to scatter Stieglitz’s ashes. With cupped hands she carefully scattered them among the roots of an old tree, but never revealed the exact location to anyone. Sixty years later, in 2006, a 1919 palladium print of those same hands, which Stieglitz had found to be so ethereal and hypnotic, sold at auction for $1.47 million.
‡Pre-Viagra!
§The art of the Depression was rife with images of those stricken jobless, breadlines, and misery. O’Keeffe’s always-personal subject matter seemed distinctly out of step with the times.
¶So named because the spadix is overhung with a striped, lifelike structure that makes the flower resemble a minister (named Jack?) preaching from a pulpit.
*Instead of stored in the basement behind the Christmas decorations and camping gear.
†I’m told this paper will not dissolve if you vomit on it.
‡‡Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose (1931), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
§§Summer Days (1936), Whitney Museum of American Art, gift of Calvin Klein.
¶¶Historian and critic Lewis Mumford did allow that “O’Keeffe uses themes and juxtapositions no less unexpected than those of the Surréalistes, but she uses them in a fashion that makes them seem inevitable and natural, grave and beautiful.”
**!!!
††Alfred had written to a number of them on her behalf, trying to persuade them that Norman was a poet on par with O’Keeffe the painter.
‡‡‡Well, for her; she was five-foot-five, and at her heaviest weighed 142 pounds.
§§§I realize I’ve violated the rule of outlines by having a “1” without a “2,” but alas, there is nothing else to say here.
¶¶¶Ghost Ranch is located in the northeastern corner of the Piedra Lumbre, a high desert valley about seventy miles north of Santa Fe.
***I’m more of an ocean person.
†††For her side of the story, read Encounters: A Memoir.
‡‡‡‡Inflation reality check: A good upper-middle-class salary at that time was about $4,000 a year.
§§§§Town and Country ran a piece on it called “Beauty Is Fun!”
¶¶¶¶Interesting to see her in a pair of pants, but that’s not the alarming part.
****According to Jerrod, who once worked as a mobile slaughter guy in the Ojai Valley for about a year, the head could actually be mummified, but as it still has its lips, this is unlikely. Furthermore, he feels the vertebrae and the head probably belong to two different animals.
Georgia O’Keeffe
American (1887–1986)
Above the Clouds I, 1962/1963
Oil on canvas, 361⁄8 x 481⁄4 in.
Gift of the Burnett Foundation and the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation
Photograph by Malcolm Varon, 2001
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe/Art Resource, NY
10
PRIZE
There is a bit of a bitch in every good cook.†
In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atom bomb, and the People’s Republic of China was officially proclaimed by Mao Tse-tung. In Paris, Samuel Beckett was putting the finishing touches on Waiting for Godot. South Pacific opened on Broadway, and All the King’s Men was in movie theaters. Americans were buying one hundred thousand television sets a week, and the first Polaroid camera went on the market in New York, and sold for $89.85. Gene Simmons, lead singer of the rock band Kiss, was born. Georgia O’Keeffe, aged sixty-two, moved to New Mexico for good. That August, she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, over the protestations of “the men.”‡
It had taken O’Keeffe three years to settle her husband’s estate. There was the predictable tussling over the will with Dorothy Norman, but in the end Georgia won out, and with ferocious care saw to it that each one of Stieglitz’s 850 pieces of art, thousands of photographs, and tens of thousands of letters, found the perfect home. We forget, or at least I do, that in addition to his seminal roles in photography and the modern art movement, he was also a prodigious collector. He owned Picassos, Matisses, and Rodins. He owned hundreds of Marins, Doves, and Hartleys, as well as some good pieces of African sculpture. Long before there was a voluntary simplicity movement, O’Keeffe was an adherent. She didn’t believe in owning a lot of stuff. She gave away everything, keeping only a few paintings from her old cronies—Hartley, Dove, and Marin—for her collection. Stieglitz’s letters, totaling 50,000 pages, all went to the Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale.
The majority of the art collection went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to which O’Keeffe also wanted to donate Stieglitz’s “key set.”§ The curator had an issue with the irregular shapes and sizes of the mats, which Stieglitz had cut in relation to the individual size of the print. To accept the gift, the mats all needed to be the same size for ease of storage. When O’Keeffe objected, the curator said that this was standard, and that even their Rembrandts had been altered this way. O’Keeffe said, “Well, Mrs. Rembrandt isn’t around, is she?” Neither side would give in, and in the end O’Keeffe gave the key set to the National Gallery of Art.
Eventually, everything had been sorted and cataloged and photographed and placed, and O’Keeffe, as her parting farewell to the city she’d tolerated but never loved, did a painting of the Brooklyn Bridge. The focus of the painting is the bridge’s Gothic arches, placed side by side on the canvas. They look like a pair of tall, vacant eyes.
O’Keeffe Goes Domestic
One of the reasons O’Keeffe was so remarkable during the last four decades of her life is that her life stages had been reshuffled. Her twenties were spent in the same way many young adults today spend these early years of adulthood: taking random jobs, moving hither and yon, believing fervently that this guy’s The One—no, this one . . . no, this one. When she moved to New York on impulse to be with Stieglitz (another classic young-adult maneuver), she skipped the young-married business that consumes most of us in our thirties and early forties—buying a house, making a home, getting a kitten or a puppy, having babies who grow into children who need school supplies, after-school snacks, bedtime rituals, cooking endless meals for a growing passel of ingrates, remodeling, redecorating, and eventually, caring for your elderly parents (husband)—and skipped straight to being an Empty Nester Treating Herself to an Intensive Art Retreat, living in other people’s flats, Elizabeth’s tiny studio, Lee’s brownstone, and then a hotel,¶ eating meals out, arranging her living space according to her creative requirements, taking off on a whim to Maine, Bermuda, New Mexico, wherever.
After the death of Stieglitz, when O’Keeffe moved to Ghost Ranch, the demands of living in what was essentially the wilderness, forty-five miles on a dirt road from the nearest town (Espanola), and sixteen miles from the nearest telephone and general store (Abiquiu), pressed her into joyous domesticity.* O’Keeffe was sixty-two, and because she hadn’t already logged thirty years of wondering what smells at the back of the refrigerator, and how can the roof be leaking when the guy was just out to repair it, and how on earth can it be time to make dinner when we just ate lunch, and so on and so forth, she was delighted by homemaking. She was not only fresh for the task, but was also now a rich widow, and had the deep pockets required for living a life of elegant, rustic simplicity that people, then as now, covet.
Food became important to her as never before. She was friends with health food “nut cake”†† Adelle Davis. In 1947 Davis published Let’s Cook It Right. Before Michael Pollan had his omnivore’s dilemma, Davis was a proponent of eating organic fruits and vegetables and avoiding processed food. O’Keeffe was on board. She was a confirmed locovore, before anyone knew what that was. She‡‡ grew two acres of organic fruits and vegetables. When an infestation of grasshoppers threatened to ruin her crop, she bought a gang of turkeys to solve the problem. She thought sugar could kill you. She believed in whole grains. She ground her own flour, purchased eggs from the neighbors. The most exotic item in her pantry was brought by her sister, Claudia, when she came to visit in the summer: alligator pears (avocados) that grew on a tree in her yard in Beverly Hills, California.
Her average day in meals looked like this:
Breakfast: Whole-grain bread, fruit, some kind of meat, teas
Midmorning snack: Homemade yogurt or protein drink
Lunch: Salad, made from whatever was ready to harvest in the garden
Dinner: Fruit and cheese
In addition to the Ghost Ranch home, O’Keeffe also owned a place twelve miles down the road in Abiquiu. When she had first glimpsed the Spanish-style house during one of her summer visits in the mid-1940s, it was being used as a pigsty by the local Catholic parish. The house was in such disrepair that the traditional adobe was crumbling back into the earth from which it was made. O’Keeffe purchased the building for a dollar, and spent four years overseeing its heroic restoration.
