How Georgia Became O'Keeffe

by Karen Karbo

  The rigors and expense of this cannot be overstated. For the job, O’Keeffe hired a young woman named Maria Chabot, a free-spirited jill-of-all-trades who wanted to be a writer, but wound up doing just about everything else, as often happens, including acting as O’Keeffe’s general contractor. Open their massive (542 pages) collected letters§§ at random and you will come across phrases like, “I had eight men lined up for wall building today. . .” and “I will plant the apples, the plums, the apricot and the weeping willow—and we will see if they will grow” and “There is a large crack in the studio west wall.” You get a sense of the magnitude of the undertaking. Before O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico, Chabot stayed on, investigating, for example, how they might drill for water at the Ghost Ranch house, or how to install a butane gas system. Chabot, who was in love with O’Keeffe, would have worked for free, but O’Keeffe insisted she accept a stipend, advising her that for artists, it never mattered where the money came from, as long as it gave you time to work.

  O’Keeffe Style

  Once the houses were made livable, she decorated them with impeccable, mid-century style that looks as chic right this minute as it did back then. Also, in a move that belies the image that her husband had so carefully tended—that of a naive Woman-Child from the heartland who lived according to her feelings and intuition—O’Keeffe set aside an entire room in Abiquiu for her book collection, three thousand volumes, everything from a large assortment of cookbooks to first editions of French modernists.

  Sometime during the fifties writer Christopher Isherwood visited her and marveled at the “Zen simplicity” of her environment. As we now know, any decor worthy of the adjective Zen is aesthetically, morally, and spiritually superior to whatever hodgepodge of Pottery Barn, IKEA, neighbor’s-garage-sale thing you may currently have going on. Fortunately, emulating O’Keeffe style is not outside our reach.

  The less furniture the better.

  Time to get rid of that love seat you rescued from the neighbor’s garbage in 1997. If you have not sat on a chair, or put a glass down on a table for a week, get rid of it. Empty space always trumps something stuck there just because you can’t think of anything else to do with it. Once you’ve gotten rid of the dust bunnies, and your rooms are beautifully empty, purchase an Eames chair, or a Le Corbusier–style lounge chair.¶¶

  Paint the walls white.

  If it’s in your budget, hire a team of Hopi women to come in and apply mud plaster to the interior walls. They can pat your walls into a homely, earthy sheen like nobody’s business.

  Have as many fireplaces as possible.

  O’Keeffe had seventeen, combined.

  Bring the outside in.

  Collect some beautiful stones and stick them on window ledges. Wash them often: Nothing makes a rock look less like an objet d’art than three weeks’ worth of dust. Go wild and hang a cow skull on the wall, but only if you can bear being completely unoriginal. No one in her right mind, aside from O’Keeffe, can live with one of those things staring at her day in, day out. Splurge on one great piece of art.

  Get a Calder mobile and hang it in your bedroom, where only you and a select few can enjoy it. This is key: The point is not to display art, but to live with it. Your bedroom should be the most austere room in the house, your own private art museum. Use only white linen. Cover one wall with one of your own masterpieces, if possible.**

  Georgia O’Keeffe, American, Sees the World

  In the fifties, travel replaced painting as O’Keeffe’s primary occupation. Her final show at An American Place, which she’d kept open after Stieglitz’s death against the advice of people with a more finely honed business sense, Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings 1946–1950, opened in October 1950 to the unthinkable: No one paid attention. There were a few small notices, but nothing like the old days, when the Men would go on and on for many column inches.

  Many of the paintings, particularly those of the square patio door in her house in Abiquiu, were in keeping with Abstract Art, which was enjoying its heyday in New York; still, critics didn’t make the connection between her work and that of, say, Clyfford Still or Mark Rothko. O’Keeffe was just O’Keeffe, doing her weird O’Keeffe thing. It mattered not that she had been painting abstractions since the early teens. She knew the show was good, but few people came; her star had dimmed, it seemed.

  O’Keeffe’s reaction was unexpected: She got the travel bug and embarked on the kind of trips we all say we’re going to take, then never do. She drove through Mexico with Eliot and Aline Porter: Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Oaxaca. They met Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. With Rose Covarrubias, wife of illustrator Miguel Covarrubias, who years earlier had done a caricature of O’Keeffe for Vanity Fair, she hopped on a plane and flew to the Yucatan. They watched the sun rise at Chichén Itza.

  In 1953, when O’Keeffe was sixty-five, she finally got to Europe. One of the most famous painters in America could no longer say she’d never been to Paris. Like everyone the world over, she made her obligatory pilgrimage to the Louvre, only to leave with the same tired feet and slight headache. She liked the Fra Angelicos. She was happy to meet Alice B. Toklas, the longtime companion of the late Gertrude Stein, but she didn’t think it necessary to make the acquaintance of Picasso, claiming they didn’t speak the same language.††† In Spain she went to the Prado and to the bullfights. She loved the country; their brand of morbid Catholicism appealed to her. As did the bad vibes of Peru. She was there for two months in 1956. She was stunned by the grim, malevolent-seeming Indians, the jungle-choked mountains shrouded in dark mist.

  When she was seventy-one she flew around the world with a small tour group. I see that I’ve made it sound as if she set out on her own. As intrepid as she was, she always had a companion. One of her favorite traveling buddies was Betty Pilkington, the daughter of the man who owned the gas station in Abiquiu.

  Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Saigon, Bangkok, Phnom Penh. She spent seven weeks in India. For some reason this gives me pause: Fastidious O’Keeffe, who only liked salads made from the red-leaf lettuce and watercress grown in her own garden, who cultivated clean, bright empty spaces, who was also seventy-­one years old, and probably couldn’t just sleep on any old bed, or satisfactorily use any old toilet, loved India. “I like the dirty places of the world,” she once quipped.

  Everyone who knew O’Keeffe as she aged said she was abrupt to the point of rudeness and increasingly obstinate and impatient with anything that was not to her exact specifications. Then I think of her negotiating the chaos of India for days on end, traveling in her flat shoes and black suit from Bombay to Kashmir to the foothills of the Himalayas, and I think she was simply a genuine introvert. She was direct and had no time for nonsense, both traits that are respected in men, but in women, not so much.

  When she was seventy-four she took an eleven-day trip down the Colorado River with a gang of old friends and their children and children’s spouses, including Tish Frank, the granddaughter of Mabel Dodge Luhan. By day they floated downstream in a raft, stopping in the afternoon so that O’Keeffe could hike along the ribbon of sandy shore in her red sundress and PF Flyers. During the 185-mile float, she occasionally manned the oars, saying that if she couldn’t row, she shouldn’t be there. It was sweltering. The sun felt hot enough to melt their scalps. Thunderstorms flooded their raft, the drops falling hard enough to hurt. O’Keeffe was in heaven.

  O’Keeffe’s Secrets to Aging Well

  Even people who don’t like O’Keeffe’s work, or who only like some of O’Keeffe’s work,‡‡‡ can’t help but be amazed by the way O’Keeffe marched through her life with complete disregard for prevailing fashions. She was a beautiful woman who had no real interest in enhancing her beauty. She never wore makeup or dyed her hair. In 1936, when she painted Jimson Weed for the exercise room at Elizabeth Arden, Elizabeth insisted O’Keeffe submit to a makeover. She did, then pro
mptly scrubbed all the makeup off. Which isn’t to say she didn’t take care of herself. Her lack of lipstick did not signal a lack of self-regard, which those of us who grew up with Glamour magazine find hard to accept.

  It all comes down to the skin.

  Like all of us, O’Keeffe was more insouciant about her skin care when she was younger. But, in 1929, at the age of forty-two, she was still baking herself for hours at a time under the New Mexican summer sun without a care. She was so ahead of the times when it came to food and exercise, you would think she would have figured out that daily, year-round sun exposure was turning her slowly into a piece of living, human jerky. In her fifties she got a hat, but by then the damage had been done. This did not, however, prevent her from taking care of her skin. She put cream on her exquisite hands, morning and night, and also used a special moisturizer on her face. She continued to do this long after she could no longer really see her face. We, of course, live in the age of SPF 9000. My larger point is that regardless how freckled we may become, how lined and spotted, it’s good to take care of what we have.

  Motion is the lotion.

  O’Keeffe never abandoned her body, simply because it was growing older. She believed in the power of movement, whether through exercise or massage. She walked, hiked, gardened, rode horseback until she was in her seventies and after that, she was still of the opinion that you could add years to your life by walking a mile a day. When she was very old she measured the distance around her Abiquiu property with small stones; with every lap she moved a stone from one pile to another. Georgia was also an early devotee of Rolfing, a system of (excruciating) soft tissue manipulation§§§ founded by Dr. Ida Rolf, meant to improve your posture and the way your body moves through space. Rolfing was big in the 1970s, and as I write this, is enjoying a resurgence in the form of a recent article in the New York Times Style Section. O’Keeffe would drive to Santa Fe for her monthly sessions.

  Experience your experiences.

  Perhaps O’Keeffe was just a woman of her time—by which I mean a time when it wasn’t a character flaw to look your age; when women didn’t swear off any activity that might cause a wrinkle; when we didn’t spend all our free time and discretionary income doing whatever it takes to look no older than thirty-eight. An argument can be made—and I’ve made it—that looking young isn’t just a matter of vanity: For women, still, youth and beauty are our top currency. To be effective in our jobs, it’s better to look young and beautiful; ditto to having the self-confidence to venture out and try new things, expand our horizons—all the things women’s magazines advise women in midlife to do, failing to mention that unless you do look thirty-eight, you’ll be attempting to strike out into a world in which you’re viewed with near contempt for having the lack of self-discipline and bad manners to look middle-aged.

  O’Keeffe, who looked fifty when she was forty, and continued to look fifty for the next twenty years, never would have deprived herself of experience for the sake of looking younger. To the end, she preferred to focus on how she felt over how she looked, while at the same time having enough self-respect to take care of herself.

  During her final years she had a lovely companion, a young artist named Christine Taylor Patten. Once Patten heard O’Keeffe on the phone with a friend, saying, “They tell me I look good, like I have no right to look good. Everyone’s mad at me . . . I have three more years until I’m a hundred.”

  O’Keeffe never lost her spunk, or her conviction that what she was up to at any given moment was somehow less important because she was older. This was also true of her fellow extreme seniors Katharine Hepburn and Coco Chanel. Hepburn lived to be ninety-six; Chanel, who smoked, died young at eighty-eight. Like O’Keeffe, they were skinny, busy, and irritated until they declined a bit, then died. They were active, didn’t eat a lot, and followed their interests. They never let anyone tell them what to do. They were always a bit pissed-off. I can only assume that this is the real recipe for longevity.

  Georgia O’Keeffe is Alive and Groovy

  The brief eclipse of O’Keeffe’s career in the fifties ended in 1962, when O’Keeffe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. One of only five women, she was the lone painter. Four years later, in 1966, she became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Vogue ran a feature story on her in 1967. In an interview in the Chicago Daily News she said, “You turned page after page of beautiful young things leaping through the hay before coming to eight pages—eight pages!—of this old face. I thought it was rather grand.”

  Meanwhile, back at the only place that really mattered to her, her studio at Ghost Ranch, she was painting what would be the last great series of her career, Sky Above Clouds, seven paintings of clouds as seen from a jetliner at cruising altitude. The last painting in the series was the largest of her entire career. The canvas was twenty-four feet long and took four days, and a few assistants, to help stretch. When the painting itself began, O’Keeffe worked twelve hours a day, from dawn until dusk, working from top to bottom. She stood on a ladder, then a table, then a box, then a low chair, then lay on the ground. She was seventy-eight. Despite the fancy awards and the occasional magazine story, people wondered whether she had died. She would live another twenty years.

  In 1970, the Beatles broke up. Earth Day was established. Four unarmed college students were killed by the Ohio National Guard during antiwar protests at Kent State. The Chicago Seven were convicted of having crossed state lines in order to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention, two years earlier. Patton won the Oscar for Best Picture, and the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a career retrospective of the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. The show was arranged thematically rather than chronologically. There were her early abstractions in watercolor, charcoal, and oil; her landscapes of Lake George, Maine, and New Mexico; her flowers, cornstalks, clamshells, and skyscrapers; her floating skulls; her puffy clouds. O’Keeffe was eighty-three. To the opening she wore a gray silk suit and a pair of purple velvet slippers.

  The second wave of feminism was on the rise. Is it any wonder that the same year Our Bodies, Ourselves was published, when women all over the country were gathering for consciousness raising parties, where not infrequently one of the activities included peering at their own cervixes with the aid of a make-up mirror clamped between their thighs, that the woman who painted all those abstractions about “what every woman knows,” all those irises and pansies that reminded people of genitalia, who had chosen to live freely with a married man back when it was a serious scandal, and who also made her own money, became instantly and once again famous?

  After the show at the Whitney, O’Keeffe gained sudden and powerful cred with the counterculture—both with feminists who worshipped (there is no other word) her as a strong, independent role model, and with the back-to-the-land crowd who found the life O’Keeffe had made for herself to be properly cosmic and groovy. Letters arrived by the bagful, written by earnest young people who wanted advice on becoming an artist. She always said the same thing: Go work. When the feminists came calling, even though she was behind their cause long before they were born, she told them a version of the same thing: “Too much complaining and too little work.” These women further annoyed her by wanting to celebrate her as a woman artist without realizing that she’d been spending her whole life fleeing from that limiting label.

  She was unmoved by her inclusion in Judy Chicago’s epic and still-impressive mixed-media installation, The Dinner Party,¶¶¶ an imaginary banquet table set for thirty-nine of history’s most creative and innovative women. Each leg of the triangle is forty-eight feet long, and each place setting is set with a chalice and china-porcelain plate fabricated in a manner representative of the woman’s life. O’Keeffe’s setting is a three-dimensional rendering of a vagina, with a nod to its flower-like qualities. As the most-contemporary guest at the party, her setting was also supposed to represent the
distance women have come*** since the first place setting, Primordial Goddess.

  That sound you hear is O’Keeffe snorting with derision from her perch in Heaven. When art historian John Richardson asked O’Keeffe in an interview how it felt to be the only living guest at the imaginary party she drolled, “You mean Chicago’s still alive?”

  The Last Lesson

  One day in 1971, O’Keeffe walked out of a shop in Abiquiu and was surprised to see that the sky was dark and overcast. When she’d entered the shop, the sun had been blazing. Then she realized the sky was not dark with clouds; it was her eyesight. The doctor diagnosed macular degeneration. At eighty-four, O’Keeffe was going blind.

  Since Maria Chabot had helped her make a life in this unforgivable part of the world, O’Keeffe had always had, in her employ, handymen, housekeepers, cooks, secretaries, and various assistants for special projects around her houses. Doris Bry, who’d worked for Dorothy Norman at the time of Stieglitz’s death, had been hired away by O’Keeffe†††† to serve as her manager, and came to visit every year to attend to business. Her old friends, or the ones who were still alive (and to whom she was still speaking),‡‡‡‡ came to visit, as did her surviving sisters,§§§§ Anita, Catherine, and Claudia. Also, the longer she lived in Abiquiu, the more involved she became in the community. She employed as many local people as possible, and when the local basketball team needed to travel for an away game, she lent them her car.¶¶¶¶ They called her the Empress of Abiquiu.

  Despite her well-burnished reputation as a lone woman living her life of Zen simplicity in the mystical high desert, there were always people around, and the guest rooms were usually full. She was never an easy employer. She was exacting, with an unforgiving sense of fairness, but she also had a tendency to want to draw people close, to become friends with her staff, to expect them to want to stay with her long after they were off the clock, to devote themselves to her. And they would do it, her housekeepers and cooks. They would be drawn in by the O’Keeffe mystique, would sit and sip orange pekoe tea out of china cups, and listen to music with her into the night, and sometimes she would talk about Stieglitz or share a memory of a time, now long ago, when she made a painting that now hung in a museum in New York, and they would be bewitched, as she had intended them to be. Then, the next day or week or month, when they’d failed to properly dress the salad, or inadvertently forgot to mail a letter, or had to get home to their child who had a worrisome virus, she would get angry, and that would be the end of them.