Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  After Stieglitz’s rejection of Wells, O’Keeffe was forced to accept that her role at the gallery had eroded completely. Norman was in charge. Under the auspices of An American Place, Norman began that month editing and publishing a hardcover magazine, Twice-a-Year: A Semi-Annual Journal of Literature, the Arts and Civil Liberties. The first was dedicated to Stieglitz, and the title was composed in his distinctive handwriting. It contained the notes that Norman had taken during her talks with him as well as four of his photographs.

  Although Norman and Stieglitz had slowed their amorous activities due to his weak heart, he still felt proprietary and was noticeably jealous of the attention she paid to other writers and intellectuals. Her home was used as a salon frequented by the likes of the novelist Theodore Dreiser, who had written one of the first articles about Stieglitz almost half a century earlier, not to mention the salacious Henry Miller. Norman admitted to Steichen that Stieglitz’s “possessive instinct and his ego often got the better of him.” While Stieglitz praised the new publication, O’Keeffe found the whole enterprise to be one more irritation courtesy of Norman. She painted two small oils of the bleeding heart flowers, her nonverbal protest over Norman’s continuing presence in Stieglitz’s life. And, dreading the winter in New York, she decided to make other plans.

  XIV

  O’Keeffe’s American Place show, which ran from January 22 to March 17, 1939, included the ram’s head floating next to a blue morning glory and the painting of deer horns. Annoyed by the previous year’s critical response to her work, O’Keeffe attempted an exegesis in her brochure. She explained that she was tired of all the associations generated by her flower paintings and so had turned to the red hills around Ghost Ranch. “A flower touches everyone’s heart,” she wrote. “A red hill doesn’t touch everyone’s heart as it touches mine and I suppose there is no reason why it should.”

  She asserted that not only the badlands but the bleached skeletons were beautiful. She wrote, “The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho’ it is vast and empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all its beauty.”1 She never tired of the sere plains littered with the desiccated carcasses of cows and horses or the illusion of sensuality in the red hills and strange rock formations.

  William Einstein also contributed to the exhibition brochure with his opinion that, simply by being herself, O’Keeffe communicated to an unusually diverse audience of “the people.”

  Despite these essays, critics were growing bored by O’Keeffe’s recurring southwestern motifs. The year before, even her friend Flint chided O’Keeffe in Art News for “a degree of uniformity that has passed beyond being a personal expression, which is the artist’s signature, into a kind of mass production.”2

  “There is nothing in sight but the vibrating thing I am on,” O’Keeffe wrote Carl Van Vechten from the deck of the SS Lurline, a Matson oceanliner bound for Hawaii.3 This expense-paid vacation was the gift of the N. W. Ayer advertising agency, which represented the Dole Company’s pineapple account.

  Ayer executive Earl Thomas, who had engineered O’Keeffe’s honorary doctorate at William and Mary, organized this promise of fresh scenery and warm weather in exchange for two paintings to be used in advertisements. With Stieglitz throwing his support behind Norman’s new publication, O’Keeffe felt little compunction in defying his reservations about artists who did commercial work. Plus, there was a respectable precedent. Ayer had commissioned Charles Sheeler to photograph a Ford plant two years previous and hired Steichen to photograph the Matson ocean liners at the same time that O’Keeffe would be in Hawaii.

  Due to Ayer’s enthusiastic publicists, the arrival of the “famous painter of flowers” in Oahu in late January was noted with much excitement by the local newspapers. Within two days, she was attending afternoon tea at the home of the Honolulu art supporters the Atherton Richardses. With various social obligations, she didn’t visit the pineapple fields until she’d been in Oahu for two weeks, but her affection for them was immediate. She described them as being “all sharp and silvery stretching for miles off to the beautiful irregular mountains. . . . I was astonished—it was so beautiful.”4

  O’Keeffe wanted to stay in the simple thatched lodgings where the workers were housed near the pineapple fields. Representatives of both Dole and Ayer felt that the humble dwellings were unsuitable for the celebrity artist and, after installing her in grander accommodations, tried to mollify her by sending her a pineapple to paint. She thought it looked “manhandled” and opted to fly to Maui on March 9, where there was another house party in her honor.

  The painter Robert Lee Eskridge, whom she had met in Honolulu, arranged for O’Keeffe to stay on the east side of the island in the sugar plantation town of Hana with Willis Jennings, manager of the enormous Hana Plantation. Jennings’s wife was on the mainland, and O’Keeffe developed a crush on Jennings, who flirted with her and evaded anything more serious. After a trip to the beach, O’Keeffe finished a drawing and painted two canvases of the tumultuous sea, including Black Lava Bridge, Hana Coast, No. 1.

  While Jennings was at work, O’Keeffe and Jennings’s daughter Patricia borrowed the station wagon and drove around the tropical forests, past sheer cliffs and waterfalls. O’Keeffe and Patricia visited the Seven Pools of Oheo Gulch, now Haleakala National Park, and hiked to ancient temple sites. O’Keeffe ate raw fish and wore the natives’ grass and wood thong sandals.

  After a week, she drove the winding coastal road to the center of Maui and visited the Iao valley with a guide. “I . . . drove up the valley with a feeling of real fear and uncertainty. I enjoy this drifting off into space on an island.”5

  Five Hawaiian landscapes were composed in the Iao Valley (also known as Hana). In addition to a papaya tree, O’Keeffe painted four pictures of mist-capped emerald mountains embracing a narrow stream of plummeting water. The last of the series, Waterfall, No. III, Iao Valley has a composition similar to that of many of her abstractions of the twenties, with wavy wedges of color buttressing a thin center line.

  O’Keeffe always found value in certain conjunctions of shape and hue. In Hawaii, she discovered waxy, poisonous white flowers to equal the jimson weed. Bella Donna, on a 36 × 30-inch canvas, crowds together three tunnel-shaped blooms. The only clue that the view is not New Mexico is the thin band of ocean and sky at the top of the picture. (O’Keeffe herself misidentified the painting as a jimson weed when it was reproduced in her autobiography.) Her sister Anita Young purchased the picture.

  O’Keeffe painted a frontal version of the flower posed before the ocean with a little spire of pink petals, Bella Donna with Pink Torch Ginger Bud. An oil sketch of a pair of hibiscus and a painting of five gold and magenta flowers combined in the 40 × 30-inch Hibiscus with Plumeria, in which the white and pink petals of the flowers are set against a background of brassy petals and blue sky. Her smaller canvas of a white and green flower, Cup of Silver Ginger, was purchased by Cary Ross. O’Keeffe’s paintings of the spikey white bird of paradise on a mauve ground and the white lotus, its petals folded over its yellow center, demonstrate a certain difficulty executing these foreign shapes.

  On March 24, the interisland steamer Waialeale took O’Keeffe to the town of Hilo, where she was met by Jennings’s friend Leicester W. Bryan, a territorial forrester. His wife, Irma, took her to the black sand beach at Kalapana, but she spent the rest of her stay at the Kona Inn in Kailua on the opposite side of the island.

  At Kailua, O’Keeffe was introduced to Richard Pritzlaff, the rogue member of a prominent Arizona family who was coincidentally her distant neighbor, living in Rancho San Ignacio, about fifty miles east of Santa Fe. Pritzlaff, a rancher, took her to the spreads of a few cattle barons on Hawaii and to remote areas of unspoiled natural beauty. She excitedly described “fourteen or fifteen thousand foot mountains—(and) bare lava land more wicked than the desert.”6 After nearly three months, on April 14, she took the SS Matsonia back to Sa
n Francisco. Before leaving, she gave her brushes and paints to Eskridge.

  Thirty years earlier, O’Keeffe had not enjoyed work as a commercial illustrator. Despite the luxurious nature of the Ayer commission, she struggled with the assignment. Upon her return to New York, the artist sent the painting of a papaya tree to the advertising executives, but papaya was the fruit sold by Dole’s competitors. So she sent them paintings of a pink and green heliconia plant and a pink ornamental banana. After many requests for a pineapple painting, exasperated executives air-freighted a pineapple plant from Hawaii to her penthouse, hoping that she would get the hint. Two months later, after much procrastination and complaint, O’Keeffe produced a likeness of a pineapple bud nestled amidst long green leaves, and a painting of a red crab’s claw ginger plant. The Ayer executives heaved a collective sigh of relief, and both pictures were featured in advertising campaigns extolling the health benefits to be derived from pineapple juice.7

  Shortly thereafter, despite months of rest on a tropical island, O’Keeffe took to her bed. While rusty freighters crowded the East River, far below her penthouse windows, O’Keeffe quietly reviewed letters that she had written in her twenties when she was “just beginning to see and work in my own way.” As an artist enjoying honors and sales, she found it poignant to read her “excitement over the out doors and just being alive—My working and working and always seeming to think that maybe it was foolish.” She confided, “But I kept at it a bit madly because it was the only thing I wanted to do—it was like an urge to speak—and the drawing and painting made me feel much more truly articulate than the word.”8

  Her illness, which appears to have been psychological, meant spending the summer in confinement at Lake George. At four-thirty in the morning, she watched the sun rise over the glacial lake. She wrote to Einstein that she had a headache and stomach trouble and had lost twelve pounds. “It’s my handsome set of nerves,” she said. After she had spent eight weeks in bed, her doctor, Edward B. Janks, prescribed another two weeks at his private rest home in the country. By the end of July, fed up with her program of recovery, O’Keeffe complained to McBride, “We might as well die when it is such a dull life trying to get healthy.”9

  Dryly, she observed, “Of course, it makes a wonderful story for Alfred.”10

  Released from the care of Dr. Janks, O’Keeffe returned to The Hill in the middle of August. Two weeks later, after hearing of Germany’s invasion of Poland, Stieglitz suffered another angina attack. Still weakened from her nervous collapse, O’Keeffe canceled her trip to New Mexico though she managed a trip to York Beach in the fall.

  Over the summer, even in his weakened condition, Stieglitz had been trying to accommodate a request from the art historian Beaumont Newhall to prepare his work for the debut of the Museum of Modern Art’s new photography department. Funded largely by a substantial donation from McAlpin, it was to be the first independent photography department in a major art museum.

  An amateur photographer, Newhall had been named head of the department and wanted the first show to be a Stieglitz retrospective. But after museum director Alfred Barr—in a catalogue for a Picasso retrospective—wrote that the artist’s show at 291 was “probably” his first in America, Stieglitz indignantly canceled his own exhibition, having taken offense at the word “probably.” Still, Stieglitz remained friends with Beaumont and his young wife, Nancy, with whom he interviewed in 1941 and 1942 for a biography that never materialized. Throughout the process, Stieglitz flirted with Nancy Newhall and even proposed moving in, but his seductions had become empty gestures.11

  O’Keeffe remained in the New York penthouse with Stieglitz through the winter of 1940. When her exhibition opened in February, all of the pictures shown were devoted to her Hawaiian idyll, and two of them were strangely surreal renderings of a horizon dividing sky from sea as seen through a loop of fishing line, Fishhook from Hawaii, No. 1. This was O’Keeffe’s initial use of a circular device to frame the distant dimension of clear sky.

  Surrealism manipulates context through placement and enlargement, with diminution or framing as favorite devices. Doorways, windows, and other enclosures were used to evoke a world beyond this world, perhaps another dimension. From 1940 onward, O’Keeffe incorporated such unconventional framing within her compositions, notably in the paintings of bleached pelvic bones held against the sky, to evoke her particular mode of surrealism.

  Of her waterfalls and pictures of plumaria, hibiscus, and belladonna, she expressed the hope that they would give back what Hawaii had given her. “What I have been able to put into form seems infinitesimal compared with the variety of experience,” she explained in her American Place brochure.12

  Although O’Keeffe felt that she had struggled with much of the Hawaiian flora, the critics were happy to write about something new. McBride quipped, “The landscapes, flower pieces and marines in this collection all testify to Miss O’Keeffe’s ability to make herself at home anywhere.”13

  The only piece in the show not specifically Hawaiian was Sunset—Long Island, a painting that had been chosen to represent New York State at the 1939 World’s Fair, where O’Keeffe was honored as one of the twelve most accomplished American women of the past fifty years. In February, she traveled to San Francisco to see her work included in the Golden Gate international exhibition. At the invitation of the Johnson brothers and their wives, she went on to Nassau where she stayed until late March. The trip inspired her to paint the triangular sails of a ship heading out to sea in Brown Sail-Wing and Wing, Nassau.

  Upon her return to New York, O’Keeffe made the unusual decision to try her hand at portraiture, completing two highly finished drawings of Dorothy Schubart, the wife of Selma’s son William Howard Schubart. They are highly accomplished, compared to O’Keeffe’s earlier efforts at drawing likenesses, with Schubart looking as elegant and imperious as an opera diva.

  O’Keeffe then went to Lake George, where, after one of her hikes up Prospect Mountain, she was inspired to paint the chaotic abundance of wild flora in Mountain Flowers No. I, a canvas filled with dozens of purple, red, and yellow blooms. Mountain Flowers II is focused on the magenta mariposa lily. She also did a small study of two sunflowers.

  In June, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe came as a couple to the opening of The Museum of Modern Art Presents Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art and were featured prominently among the crowd of celebrities in Miguel Covarrubias’s illustration of the event for Vogue magazine. Frida Kahlo, who had met O’Keeffe during the 1930 MOMA retrospective for her husband Diego Rivera, noted that she was impressed by the presence of the older artist.

  As they had at the MOMA reception, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe continued to maintain a semblance of their marriage in public. But soon after, O’Keeffe drove to New Mexico with her friend Narcissa Swift, heiress to the meat-packing fortune, stopping in Chicago as well as Madison and Portage, Wisconsin, to visit family.

  When she reached Ghost Ranch, Pack had rented Rancho de Los Burros, where she had stayed two years earlier. She stayed at other quarters at Ghost Ranch, where she was introduced to the sculptor Mary Callery, who became a close friend. She also met Mary Wheelwright’s friend and assistant, Maria Chabot.

  By October, O’Keeffe had convinced Pack to sell her Rancho de Los Burros and eight acres of land for some six thousand dollars. It was the first house that she had ever owned. (She later purchased an additional five acres.) Now that she was a homeowner, there was more reason than ever to render the architecture of the low-slung adobe, and she quickly finished two drawings and two paintings from the courtyard of the house looking toward the window and roofline. From the Patio I documents the shadows of afternoon light and From the Patio II chronicles the misty shades of early morning.

  Once in residence, O’Keeffe pursued painting her surroundings: four sketches and three paintings of the sulfur-capped and flame-hued towers of rock behind her house. Red and Yellow Cliffs Ghost Ranch fills the 24 × 36-inch canvas without reference to horizon or
sky. Ghost Ranch Cliffs portrays the stacks of stone with the purple hills in the foreground. Red Hills with Flowers shows the rolling hillocks dotted with budding scrub.

  She also painted two small pictures of yellow cactus flowers and resurrected the jimson weed floating against the sienna hills and blue mesa in Datura and Pedernal. She painted a dead tree writhing as though in agony in the fiery desert, Stump in Red Hills.

  At Rancho de Los Burros, O’Keeffe would habitually rise at dawn, have a cup of coffee, and go out walking in search of her next painting. Chabot wrote her initial impressions of O’Keeffe that fall. “She never misses the first rays of light on the cliffs behind her house,” and when she wanted to capture a special color or effect, she was “known to run out into the prairie in her nightgown.”14

  O’Keeffe’s genius lay in knowing how to frame and edit, skills she had adapted from studying photographs. The technique gave her a sort of detachment: She could translate the feeling of place without being overwhelmed by its immensity.

  D. H. Lawrence had written, “All creative art must rise out of a specific soil and flicker with a spirit of place.” O’Keeffe had spent much of the last decade in northern New Mexico and found there the spirit of place that inspired Marin in Maine and Stieglitz in Lake George. The identity of O’Keeffe’s art would not be shared with their terrain. She had found a place of her own.

  After settling herself in her new home, she went back to Plaza Blanca and painted the chalky cliffs shooting upward at a precipitous angle, as though the viewer were standing at the very base, From the White Place.