Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Hardly any attention was paid to O’Keeffe’s exhibition of timeless red hills and soaring white cliffs at An American Place in February 1942. To most people, landscape painting seemed irrelevant in the worldwide struggle for democracy.

  Peggy Guggenheim returned from Europe that year with her lover, the artist Max Ernst, and opened the Art of This Century Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. Designed by the architect Willam Kiesler, the gallery was outfitted with curved wooden walls and prongs for hanging paintings. Art of This Century soon became a sanctuary for the many Surrealist and abstract artists who fled to New York from Europe: André Breton, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Fernand Léger, Roberto Matta, Piet Mondrian, and Yves Tanguy. Their influence on the development of American art, specifically the Abstract Expressionist movement, would be profoundly felt for the next twenty years.

  In May, O’Keeffe traveled to Madison to collect an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin. As poignant as her triumphant return to Madison was her visit to her octogenarian aunt Ollie Totto (who had funded her degree from Teachers College) and the neighborhood where she had attended high school. During this visit, O’Keeffe also took up Frank Lloyd Wright’s longstanding invitation to visit his architectural studio, Taliesin.

  Although Wright was twenty years her senior, O’Keeffe sensed a kindred spirit: both artists came from the same district of Wisconsin, both were inspired by the Symbolists, William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, and Japanese prints, and both held consistently similar views about art and design. When Wright said that he had “a vision of nature more natural than nature itself,” he seemed to describe O’Keeffe’s paintings.

  O’Keeffe spent a productive afternoon at Wright’s home in Madison, and within an hour of leaving, she considered turning around to visit Wright again. Instead, a driver took O’Keeffe to Chicago, where she continued by train to New Mexico.

  In June, Chabot returned to Rancho de los Burros from her parents’ home in San Antonio. Before opening the house for O’Keeffe, she reiterated that she could not accept any payment from her. “I want nothing from you . . . let me be just as independent and keep me around you as long as you will and as long as I am useful to you.” She added, “I might be less odd if I didn’t take all my meals with you—If you kept me more in the hired man’s place.” Chabot’s mother had looked at her calloused hands and asked, “Does this woman look upon you as a servant or a friend?” Chabot replied, “Neither.”2

  O’Keeffe, however, seems to have had difficulty in keeping the boundaries straight. As she told Chabot, she didn’t think of people as “servants.” “I think of them as people who do things for me.”3

  As democratic as this spirit might have been, it was confusing. Later, as though confiding to a girlfriend, she effused to Chabot over a new blouse that she had made, “a town blouse—so plain it is wonderful.”4 Chabot could not contain her admiration for O’Keeffe when she responded, “I should like to see you in your fine town clothes—if but to confirm my preference for you in blue jeans.”5

  Chabot cleaned and serviced the roadster and picked up O’Keeffe from the Lamy, New Mexico, train station. Flying was no longer an option with the escalation of war, and O’Keeffe complained about the inconvenience.

  As she had the previous summer, Chabot took care of the house and chores, even learning to bake bread and muffins, while O’Keeffe painted. During Chabot’s free time, she pursued work on her novel. In August, they went together to the Santo Domingo Corn Dance. In September and again in November, they went on painting excursions to the White Place.

  Around this time, Richard Pritzlaff hosted a party for some fifty soldiers at his ranch in Sapello. O’Keeffe and Chabot were among the few women invited. During the revelry, a very drunk Chabot picked up a butcher’s knife and stabbed one of the guests. Soldiers began brawling throughout the house and onto the front lawn. Chabot, with a flashlight, was egging them on, and Pritzlaff had to break up the fray. The drunken soldiers were loaded onto a truck and taken back to camp. O’Keeffe enjoyed recounting this story to friends and even painted her symbolic interpretation of the evening on a canvas of two pink flowers called Maria at the Party.6

  One day, O’Keeffe was painting in the studio when an Albuquerque cowboy rode up and asked for a glass of water. As O’Keeffe provided old west hospitality, John Candelario, twenty-six, told her that his family owned the Old Curio Store in Santa Fe. In fact, he was a seventh-generation New Mexican. She asked if he could sharpen her knives. In return, she cooked him dinner. Candelario was a chatty and charming character. He soon confessed that he wanted to be a photographer and hoped that she would look at his prints. She was sufficiently impressed to take them back to New York to show Stieglitz.

  After purchasing Candelario’s photograph of a penitente cross tilted in front of a white church, O’Keeffe brought his prints of New Mexican scenes to curators at the Museum of Modern Art. They immediately wanted to include a couple of the prints in an exhibition about the penitentes, but she refused them on Candelario’s behalf. She told him to hold out for a show of his own. It must have been unnerving to have her stage-managing his career, but she proved to be right: the following year, Candelario was included in a prestigious exhibition, New Workers I, where seventeen of his platinum and bromide prints were hung alongside work by Lisette Model, Morris Engel, and Dorothy Norman. Candelario went on to do commercial photography for magazines such as Life and Look as well as working in television and film.

  Candelario joined the ranks of photographers who made portraits of O’Keeffe. He felt sufficiently grateful to give her many of his photographs of New Mexican landscapes and portraits of American Indians. In 1954, she donated them to the Museum of Modern Art.

  Knowing of her interest in bones and skulls, Candelario brought O’Keeffe a human skull. She portrayed it from the rear, detailing the seams that knit the bone plates together. Facing a broken pot and resting on a map of the world, the skull is featured in It Was a Man and a Pot, one of O’Keeffe’s few works that overtly addressed the themes of destruction and chaos. She returned to the skull the following year, painting it from the front with the broken pot and a red hill.

  O’Keeffe also painted three oils of the concentric rings of age on a knot of wood. A small red circle in the center of A Piece of Wood transforms it into a target. The two sets of pictures seem to address the transience of life, an issue dominating most people’s thoughts during the war years.

  When O’Keeffe returned to New York in December, she used a canvas sent to her by Chabot to paint Black Hills with Cedar, the pink and charcoal mounds capped by a blue and white sky, with a bunch of cedar berries in the crotch. “It is one of the best—a little bunch of the green and blue cedar you sent me down in front of it—the Black Place back of it,” she wrote Chabot. Another version of the scene shows the Black Place dotted with yellow scrub. She also painted two oils of the mischievous kachina kokopelli and a red and green bromeliad, Leaves of a Plant.

  O’Keeffe had been gone but a few weeks when Chabot wrote to say, “I don’t like the idea of your money world. I’d like to feel that I was working at something more secure—for both of us—the land.”7 For the next year, she would be consumed with finding property around Abiquiu where she hoped to farm peaches and create an idyllic existence with O’Keeffe.

  Stieglitz’s work was highlighted that December in New Acquisitions: Photographs by Alfred Stieglitz at the Museum of Modern Art, a gift of photographs from David McAlpin. Henwar Rodaikiewicz came for lunch and took a long walk in Central Park with O’Keeffe, culminating in a trip to the museum for Stieglitz’s opening reception.

  O’Keeffe had given up on her penthouse. It was proving too expensive for the amount of time that she was spending in New York. She found a smaller apartment that was closer to An American Place in a brownstone at 59 East Fifty-fourth Street, her last New York address. Though darker and smaller than their penthouse, Stieglitz’s room had its own heater and he could walk o
ne block to the gallery. Apart from a Dove collage on the mantel, the Steuben bowl, and a few plants, decoration was scant. O’Keeffe hired a housekeeper to look after Stieglitz while she was away and to tend to guests who were occasionally asked to spend the night.

  “He is pleased with the change,” O’Keeffe said. “I am not so pleased but I don’t really care.”8

  After installing Stieglitz in their new apartment, O’Keeffe left for the Art Institute of Chicago to install her first retrospective, Georgia O’Keeffe. She became ill and spent most of the week confined to her room at the Blackstone Hotel. Chabot took the train to Chicago to attend the opening on January 21, 1943, and wrote to Stieglitz that O’Keeffe stuck faithfully to her belief that “beauty is enough.” Stieglitz could not manage the trip, but one of his final gestures as her dealer was to insist that the museum buy one of her pictures. Her old friend Daniel Catton Rich, director of the museum, had organized the show and was eager to comply. He arranged the purchase of the large black cross standing against searing red hills, a painting completed during O’Keeffe’s 1929 summer in Taos, where they had initially met. Rich’s catalogue essay was both scholarly and insightful. “Seen in the whole her art betrays a perfect consistency,” he wrote. “It has undergone no marked changes of style but has moved outward from its center.”9

  Upon her return to New York that February, O’Keeffe hung the paintings for Dove’s show at An American Place.

  O’Keeffe also visited Artists for Victory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It is so bad it embarrasses me,” she wrote Chabot.10

  O’Keeffe was busy in the spring of 1943 with a project suggested by her new friend the sculptor Mary Callery. Daughter of a Westinghouse president and the ex-wife of New York lawyer Frederic Coudert, Callery had moved to Paris in 1930 and studied with Aristide Maillol. She befriended Picasso, bought many of his paintings, and liked to say that Walter Chrysler had more but that hers were more important. The war had brought her back to the States. At her New York studio, O’Keeffe had met the African American painter Beauford Delaney. “[He] posed for others because he had no heat in his studio and needed to keep warm,” O’Keeffe said. “He seemed a very special sort of person so I began drawing him too.”11 She completed three detailed charcoal drawings and two pastels. O’Keeffe must have been exceedingly taken with Delaney’s pleasant, open expression because, though she barely knew him, her five portraits constitute a more complete study than she had attempted of anyone else.

  At Lake George in the early spring, longing for New Mexico, O’Keeffe painted a good-sized oil of conical, beige towers, The White Place—A Memory. In another version, the towers are chalky and frame a wedge of blue, The White Place in Sun.

  Meanwhile, Chabot sent dozens of letters to O’Keeffe urging her to buy property, which she promised to farm as it “seemed to me the only thing I could do and still maintain a part of my life near you.”12 When she found land in Abiquiu, she wrote O’Keeffe, “Do you remember the great curve of the Chama? That is the only place for our town house. . . .”13 More letters went into great detail about the costs of land and building, the profit possibilities of growing peaches, as well as the fact that she might be drafted into the WAACs.

  O’Keeffe could not deny that gas rationing and food rationing had increased the difficulty of living at the remote Ghost Ranch. “I thought the ranch would be good for me because nothing can grow here and I wouldn’t be able to use up my time gardening,” O’Keeffe later explained, “but I got tired of canned vegetables.”14

  For two years, Chabot had been scouting properties in the Abiquiu area. Nothing seemed as promising as the old hacienda owned by the local diocese. O’Keeffe urged Chabot to negotiate with the priest. O’Keeffe said to offer $2,000, but only if she could get a receipt saying that the money was a gift to the church. Chabot replied that the church would not accept even $4,000 cash, adding that “there is no dickering between a man and the representative of God.”15

  In late April, O’Keeffe took the train to New Mexico. Once she saw the Abiquiu property, her resolve was deepened to own the house with its valuable water rights and fertile soil. When O’Keeffe finally settled down to paint at Rancho de Los Burros, she completed two drawings and two paintings of the apricot and ocher rock formations near the rear of her home, calling one My Backyard. Further down the road from her house, she made a detailed drawing and a painting of a gray sliver worn away from the tawny stone by an ancient flow of water, Cliffs Beyond Abiquiu—Dry Waterfall.

  A channel of blooming cottonwood trees runs parallel to Abiquiu’s Chama River like a decorative border of changeable color. O’Keeffe completed three oil studies of the scene from a distance. She also made four portraits of the trees, a series that would continue for the next eleven years. Cottonwood Tree in Spring employs the structure of her arboreal canvases from Lake George. Silver limned branches whip about in arabesques supporting veils of chartreuse leaves. Another cottonwood is rendered earlier as a strong, swollen trunk with wispy leaves. She returned to the theme of the leafless trunk in Dead Cottonwood Tree, while leafless branches are curled like fingers in Dead Piñon Tree. The war and Stieglitz’s tentative condition made certain that notions of life, death, and renewal were more or less constant themes for O’Keeffe—themes that could scarcely help but become manifest in her paintings.

  After the tree paintings, she also completed a drawing and two paintings, White Flower on Red Earth I and II. The sienna tone of the background was used as well on a still life of coiled, ragged ram horns.

  In August, O’Keeffe and Chabot returned to the ink-dipped foothills, where she painted a silver oblong mountain indented with a few cracks, The Black Place. Her Black Place landscapes approached pure abstraction at a time of renewed interest in nonobjective painting in Manhattan. Around this time, her old friend Dove was composing the largest abstract paintings of his career with bold, free-floating forms of undiluted color.

  In the thirties, abstract painting had been under attack and Social Realism in vogue. But many of the European artists who had immigrated to New York since the advent of the war in Europe had brought with them their commitment to abstraction and Surrealism. Suddenly the regionalism and Social Realism popular during the Depression years appeared to many to be quaint and provincial. The Surrealists’ commitment to the unconscious and the irrational had been their response to the incomprehensible evils of war.

  Components of Surrealism could be seen in O’Keeffe’s most bizarre paintings of that summer. In October, after returning to New York, O’Keeffe asked Chabot to send her a pelvic bone.

  O’Keeffe placed the bleached white pelvic bone in space to frame the blue sky. One of the first paintings portrayed the pelvic bone splayed open to look like a butterfly. (It was given to Chabot in 1948. Chabot also received the only finished drawing of a pelvic shape, in charcoal and white chalk on tan paper.) Subsequent renditions present the pelvic bones from the side or contorted to deemphasize their relationship to a skeleton. O’Keeffe transformed them so completely that they read as airborne sculptures with the moon above or the Pedernal and horizon below. O’Keeffe was thinking of objects floating in space when, in October, she went to see the Alexander Calder exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and praised it as “amazingly ingenious.”

  O’Keeffe’s most complex composition of the year was Pelvis with Shadows and the Moon. On a canvas measuring 40 × 48 inches, the pelvic bone is torqued to cast sapphire and taupe shadows that echo the holes and spurs in the bones.

  “It is a kind of thing that I do that makes me feel I am going off into space—in a way that I like—and that frightens me a little because it is so unlike what anyone else is doing,” she wrote about these pictures. “I always feel that sometime I may fall off the edge. It is something I like so much to do that I don’t care if I do fall off the edge—No sense in it but it is my way.”16

  Hartley described the pelvic bone paintings as “the borderline between finity and infinity.” I
n her January 1944 exhibition at An American Place, the abstract paintings of the Black Place and White Place seemed tame by comparison.

  O’Keeffe never felt that there was any communicative difference between her abstract and her objective pictures. In her exhibition brochure, she explained her pelvic bone pictures as intuitive. “I was the sort of child that ate the raisin on the cookie and ate around the hole in the doughnut saving either the raisin or the hole for the last and best. So probably—not having changed much—when I started painting the pelvis bones I was most interested in the holes in the bones—what I saw through them—particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky as one is apt to do when one seems to have more sky than earth in one’s world. . . . They were most wonderful against the Blue—That Blue that will always be there after all man’s destruction is finished.”17

  Six months later, nearly two hundred thousand American and British troops landed on Normandy beaches. General Dwight D. Eisenhower encouraged the Allied Expeditionary Forces, crying, “The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!” The accounts of mounting death tolls, however, left many concerned that victory was hardly assured.

  The war had distracted Norman from An American Place and kept her busy editing and publishing Twice a Year, the copious anthology of essays and fiction supporting civil rights and political reform as well as the arts. As a spokesperson for tolerance, she could hardly be intolerant of O’Keeffe, and she published O’Keeffe’s art or photographs of her taken by Stieglitz in the magazine.