Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  When she got the nerve to return to her pictures of skulls and bones, she painted a still life of a bleached jawbone nestled in the curve of a rib, but her key picture of the year was Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock—Hills. In a sky roiling with gray clouds, above the bumpy red hills dotted with green scrub, a ram’s skull with unusually extended horns floats mysteriously next to a single white hollyhock blossom. “I had looked out on the hills for weeks and painted them again and again,” she recalled. “I don’t remember where I picked up the head—or the hollyhock. Flowers were planted among the vegetables in the garden between the house and the hills and I probably picked the hollyhock one day as I walked past. My paintings sometimes grow by pieces from what is around.”35 More than any other picture that year, it signaled her return to power, her willingness to take her art in an unprecedented direction.

  With Ghost Ranch only forty miles southwest of Taos, she reconnected with a clutch of friends: Charles Collier, Miriam Hapgood—the daughter of Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce—Spud Johnson, the Luhans, and Beck Strand, who, in 1937, married Bill James, a fourth-generation westerner. As befitting the daughter of the man who created Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, she habitually wore a black Stetson cowboy hat, jeans, and boots, as well as bright red lipstick. She continued her reverse paintings on glass and made pictures with a nineteenth-century method of embroidery called colcha.

  O’Keeffe kept her distance from Dodge Luhan but enjoyed a friendship with the ever more eccentric Brett, who explained that she stayed in New Mexico because of “The powerful spirit of the Indians; that unaccountable mystery that holds so many of us here.”

  Frieda Lawrence had returned to Taos with her Italian husband, Angelo Ravagli. O’Keeffe admired the feisty Frieda, who “was not thin and not young, but there was something wonderful about her. . . . She stayed at the top of the heap. I really liked her.”36 Plus, there were always interesting writers and artists making the pilgrimage to meet Brett and Frieda.

  Taos had been an arts colony since the late nineteenth century, and Ernest Blumenschein, Bert G. Phillips, and Victor Higgins, who had formed the Taos Society of Artists, were still painting pictures of the pueblo and of Indians in costume for tourists. Considering herself a modernist, and having little in common with what she saw as provincial figure painters, O’Keeffe shunned association with most of them, with the exception of the artist Cady Wells, a wealthy transplant from Boston, who had studied with Andrew Dasburg and pursued the philosophies of the Far East. Wells’s exceedingly strange watercolors of landscape and plant forms appear to be scratched from somber surfaces or mounded in layers. He once described his paintings as looking like “dachshunds under a blanket.”

  Russell Vernon Hunter, a Surrealist painter who ran the local Federal Arts Project for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, also befriended O’Keeffe and became a regular correspondent.

  In November, O’Keeffe drove back to New York. Along the way, she stopped in Canyon, Texas. Unannounced, she arrived at the classroom where she had taught art to Ted Reid and other college students nearly twenty years earlier. Isabel Robinson, head of the art program, looked up and saw O’Keeffe standing in the doorway to the classroom. Without a word, O’Keeffe went to the files, picked out every drawing she had ever done there, and walked out with them.

  XIII

  Throughout O’Keeffe’s career, when she felt tentative about her work, she returned to the traditional rendering of still lifes, much as a novelist may write letters as a way of exercising the craft without pressure. In 1934 and 1935, she had retreated to modest still lifes, flowers and landscapes, which she showed at The Place in January. Neither Stieglitz nor Norman bothered to photograph the installation.

  In such subdued company, O’Keeffe’s dramatic painting of the ram’s head and white hollyhock suspended against storm clouds attracted plenty of attention. It led Mumford to observe in The New Yorker, “O’Keeffe uses themes and juxtapositions more unexpected than those of the Surrealistes, but she uses them in a fashion that makes them seem inevitable and natural, grave and beautiful. . . .”1

  Stieglitz asked Hartley to contribute the brief brochure essay, “A Second Outline in Portraiture.” Hartley pointed out that O’Keeffe’s recent “illness” had brought her so close to death that the ram’s head picture represented a resurrection of sorts. “She remains the same as always—she is never struggling for man-power or man equality—she has no need of such irrelevant ambitions,” he wrote. “O’Keeffe has never questioned the condition of delight—it is for her like her daily meal. . . . There is seldom a time when she is not aware of her privilege—and the relation to the beauty of appearances is as natural to her as the training of an athlete is to his final demonstrations.”2

  Desperate to return to the Stieglitz circle after leaving the Downtown Gallery, Hartley was attempting to redeem himself in this characterization of O’Keeffe as independent of ambition or power. Stieglitz agreed to show Hartley’s new paintings that March.

  In April 1936, O’Keeffe moved with Stieglitz from the Shelton to the Arno penthouse, at 405 East Fifty-fourth Street, named after its previous tenant, cartoonist Peter Arno. O’Keeffe had yearned for ample studio space to embark upon larger paintings. The previous year, Stieglitz had written to the Shelton management insisting that the great “woman painter” should be given a studio free of charge. Their response was a polite but firm no.

  It is likely that spring weather inspired her two small watercolors and two oils of pink spotted lilies, focusing on the freckled petals and extended stamens. She did three preparatory drawings before painting four canvases of yellow jonquils. The golden trumpets take up more of the nacreous background as the pictures increase in scale. The final picture, Jonquils No. IV, measures 40 × 36 inches and is entirely gilded in petals.

  O’Keeffe returned to the black iris, but her two detailed drawings and two paintings in mauve and pewter are somewhat restrained in execution compared to her earlier versions of the subject.

  In May, she went to Lake George, and, after a month there, she drove to New Mexico. She arrived at Ghost Ranch without a reservation, so Arthur Pack rented her his own house, Rancho de Los Burros. She would rent the same house every summer until 1940, when she convinced Pack to sell it to her.

  The adobe was set apart from the rest of the houses, with three walls wrapped around a courtyard patio with a clear view of Cerro Pedernal, the mountain that she would depict frequently between 1936 and 1958. The cliffs, hills, and trees surrounding the house would provide subject matter for the next thirty-five years.

  That summer, she painted three oils of the Pedernal rising in the distance behind magenta hills. Red Hills with Pedernal, White Clouds contrasts the undulating mounds striated with celadon and the sharp angles of the blue mesa. She also did a small oil study of the top of the Pedernal and a view of the yellow expanse of desert and mesquite leading out to the mesa on the horizon. After her nervous breakdown, she had taken up drawing seriously for the first time in almost twenty years. The delicately realized drawings of banyan trees had awakened some lost urge that resurfaced that summer. In addition to preparatory drawings of flowers and skulls, she executed three finished drawings of the rolling plains and the distant Pedernal as well as two detailed watercolors. After years of churning out masterpieces for Stieglitz, she felt rewarded by the intimacy of working outdoors on an undemanding scale.

  On the other hand, that summer also brought about one of her most ambitious and unconventional series of paintings. The ram’s head with hollyhock painting had signaled the beginning of her first fully resolved work since her nervous breakdown, and she wanted to capitalize on the breakthrough. At first, she attempted simple still lifes with a drawing and then two paintings of the wild turkey feather placed next to a mule skull, to be hung vertically, and a horse’s skull, hung horizontally. A steer’s skull with down-turned horns and a patch of fur clinging to its scalp like a toupee was named Bob’s Steer Head after her friend Robert
Johnson.

  Summer’s Day is O’Keeffe’s cheeky title for a deer’s skull, its nose dipped into a bouquet of wild flowers, floating in a clouded sky above pink mountains. This fusion of death into life imagery was so inspiring that she used it as the cover of her autobiography and kept it in her own collection until the early 1980s. Metaphorically, O’Keeffe was breathing life into bleached skulls that had been left behind as dead. Painting them, she must have felt as though she was bringing herself back to life.

  In Deer’s Skull with Pedernal, O’Keeffe mounted the animal’s cranium onto a twisted tree trunk against the blue sky and mountains. She played with scale by placing an enlarged mule’s skull on the desert floor with the small red mountains in the distance and pink poinsettias floating amid ghostly apparitions of cloud in Mule’s Skull with Pink Poinsettias. In a painting of a skull on a white background flanked by enormous tan avocado leaves, Ram’s Skull with Brown Leaves, she again reversed the scale.

  Each of these paintings seems to summarize her signature motifs onto a single canvas. In reviewing her artistic achievements, it seems that O’Keeffe wanted to emphasize her triumph over adversity.

  In July, she took a break from painting to visit Navajo country, Monument Valley, and Rainbow Bridge.

  In August, she combined travel with painting and drove about one hundred and fifty miles to the area of northwest New Mexico that she called “the Black Place.” “As you come to it over a hill, it looks like a mile of elephants,” she said, “grey hills all about the same size with almost white sand at their feet.”3 Her painting Grey Hill Forms fills the canvas with gray, tan, and mauve rock formations. Grey Wash Forms is nearly abstract—a soft sheet of variegated charcoal and a thin slice of livid sky.

  In September, O’Keeffe drove back to New York with Mosley and received welcome news. She was commissioned to complete a 6 ×7-foot painting Jimson Weed (also called The Miracle Flower) for the Elizabeth Arden Gymnasium Moderne on Fifth Avenue. Arden, who already owned one of O’Keeffe’s petunias, was one of America’s richest self-made women. Armed with this knowledge, Stieglitz negotiated a miraculous fee, ten thousand dollars, the equivalent of a year’s wages for the average working man.

  O’Keeffe was finally able to paint the mural that had been denied her at Radio City Music Hall. Without jimson weeds at hand, she worked from her imagination and earlier paintings to concoct a picture of four stylized white datura blossoms against lushly curling leaves and a powder-blue sky. The resulting mural was redolent of the symbolic miracle of O’Keeffe’s recovery.

  Arden began inviting O’Keeffe to soirees at her lavish apartment, where she introduced her to the arbiter of personal panache, interior designer Elsie de Wolfe. O’Keeffe drafted art critic Ralph Flint as her escort to one such event. “I’m only staying five minutes, and I need support,” she begged him. They stayed for an hour and a half. Flint observed, “Her shyness . . . quite evaporated under the soothing barrage of ‘Are you the Georgia O’Keeffe?’” When the acerbic Flint later attended an Arden dinner party with Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, he couldn’t help noticing that the artist looked “aboriginal” compared to the famous cosmetician. Then he recalled O’Keeffe once saying that there was only one individual whose looks she envied—Albedia, the leather-skinned Native American woman from the Taos pueblo who served meals at the Luhans’ ranch. 4

  O’Keeffe’s brother-in-law Robert Young invested most of her Arden commission. That year, with millions of people still reeling from the impact of their economic losses, her profits meant a payment of two thousand dollars in income tax. (Stieglitz complained that his personal income that year was only eight hundred dollars.)

  She could afford her new penthouse, and when Stieglitz had resisted the move, she responded coolly that she was going anyway. According to Claude Bragdon, their former neighbor at the Shelton, Stieglitz had become “too soft” and O’Keeffe “too hard.”

  In addition to a grand living room, the light-filled apartment featured three bedrooms. Sharing a bedroom as they had at the Shelton had come to seem an artificial intimacy. As at the Shelton, the windows looking over the East River were free of curtains. There was a boxwood hedge around the terrace. Electric bulbs were hung without shades. The wood floors were stained dark brown, and the walls were hung with O’Keeffe’s art. Striped black-and-white Navajo rugs were laid on the floor. The lease and telephone were in O’Keeffe’s name, and she paid all the bills.

  Stieglitz complained that the penthouse was “so grandly spacious and light that I feel queer.”5 Months after their move, he still refused to unpack his steamer trunk. When he invited cronies for dinner on Saturday nights, a cook-housekeeper—”the sour Swede,” according to O’Keeffe—prepared the entire affair. O’Keeffe no longer bothered with the role of hostess and, if she was at home, sat in the corner, sewing.

  On January 10, ten days after Stieglitz’s seventy-third birthday, his younger brother Julius passed away. It was traumatic for Stieglitz, whose own complaints of physical malaise were no longer traits of hypochondria. He felt the palatial apartment to be cold and wore his woolen long johns even in the warm months. He disliked taking a taxi to An American Place or his preferred restaurants, and it was too far to walk. Furthermore, O’Keeffe had instructed the housekeeper not to let Norman cross the threshold.

  Stieglitz spent as much time as possible at An American Place, where O’Keeffe’s paintings were shown in February, but there were noticeably fewer visitors than in the past; In March, O’Keeffe went to see her sister Anita in Palm Beach. Even Norman was busy with other interests. For the most part, Stieglitz rested on a folding cot in the corner. “He wanted so to die,” said Claude Bragdon.6

  Much of his time was consumed with looking back into his own past. The previous fall, the Museum of Modern Art had opened a Marin retrospective that traveled to the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C. It was a validation of the faith that Stieglitz had unwaveringly demonstrated toward the reclusive watercolorist.

  Hartley, however, was a different story. Broke, as usual, Hartley expected Stieglitz to bail him out with a show in the spring of 1937. By the summer, he was off again, this time for a life-changing stay in Nova Scotia. Living on an island with a family of fishermen, he fell in love with one of the sons, Alty. In September, Alty and his brother drowned in a storm at sea. Affected as he had been by the death of Karl von Freyburg in 1914, Hartley painted several brilliant canvases to exorcise the pain of this loss. But his health deteriorated, and he seemed to be on the brink of a mental breakdown. Stieglitz felt he could no longer handle him. Shortly thereafter, he convinced a young dealer named Hudson Walker to represent his old friend. Nonetheless, Hartley never failed to dine with Stieglitz on his visits to the city.

  In June, a retrospective of Stieglitz’s photographs was held at the Cleveland Museum of Art, but he was too frail to travel to the exhibition.

  O’Keeffe, after readying the farmhouse that June, decided to spend a few weeks with Stieglitz there and was surprised to find it “really quite pleasant.” Old cronies from the Group Theatre such as Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan, Frances Farmer, and Leif Erickson arrived. The Davidsons, having converted to Hinduism, invited their guru, Swami Nikhilananda, for the summer.

  “Alfred . . . gets on a prickly edge ready to meet them. He seems to become all different at the thought of having someone to talk to. . . . I immediately lose all the quiet I’ve been feeling . . . maybe it is just an unending fatigue I’ve taken on,” O’Keeffe sighed. “I had hoped to have another week quiet here—and Now there will be talk . . . and it all bores me so—No one will say anything except how awful the world is. . . . I would rather walk through the woods and the grass and ferns and wild strawberries—or just look at the sky.”7

  When she arrived at Ghost Ranch in the middle of July, she learned that Arthur Pack had married Phoebe Finley, the daughter of a former business partner. Anxious to maintain her independence, O’Keeffe rented Rancho de los Burros again. A hou
sekeeper brought breakfast and lunch, so O’Keeffe didn’t join guests at the main dining room until the evening meal.

  She was enchanted by the house itself, a traditional cabin, built of adobe, with low ceilings and oak plank floors. The living room and dining room windows looked out onto the buttery cliffs and towering Chimney Rock. Fireplaces in each room were built into the walls and bookshelves were made of stone slabs set into adobe niches. O’Keeffe painted a long, horizontal study of the adobe called The House I Live In.

  O’Keeffe wrote to friends that they should see her backyard, a yawning expanse of sage-covered gravel terminating in an apron of tawny cliffs called the Kitchen Mesa. Titled My Backyard, her painting of the view draws a comic comparison to the tidy lawns behind most people’s houses. After a loose sketch, she painted another version of the scene, Part of the Cliffs.

  In Hollyhock White with Pedernal, a single huge blossom was added to the sky above the mesa in an entirely pearl-colored composition; next came a canvas of brilliant colors, Hollyhock Pink with Pedernal, New Mexico.

  The Navajo believe that the Pedernal is the birthplace of their “Changing Woman,” who represents earth and time. In a way, the Pedernal gave birth to a changed O’Keeffe, a woman of true, tough independence, the woman the public has come to know and respect not only for her paintings but for her choice to live according to her own rules.

  The breakdown, the recovery, and the acceptance of her husband’s love for another woman forced O’Keeffe to reinvent herself. The Ghost Ranch adobe and the surrounding landscape would become an integral part of that identity. When people imagine O’Keeffe today, hardly anyone visualizes the sensual, languid nude from Stieglitz’s 1919 portraits. Instead, one visualizes a suntanned O’Keeffe sporting her black cowboy hat and silver Alexander Calder pin, posed by an adobe wall or, as Life magazine published her in 1938, outfitted in jeans and dragging the bleached skeleton of a cow across the desert. This is the Georgia O’Keeffe photographed by Cecil Beaton, Horst, Philippe Halsman, Ansel Adams, Todd Webb, Laura Gilpin, Arnold Newman, Dan Budnick, and dozens of others over the next five decades, ensuring that history would preserve her hard-won authenticity. Facing a solitary future, she became her own publicist and consciously controlled her image, not as Stieglitz had seen her but as she saw herself.