Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  While less political than Norman, O’Keeffe had her own moral code: she was for equal rights for women. When she read in the New York Times, on February 10, that Eleanor Roosevelt had come out against the Equal Rights Amendment, she shot off a scolding letter the same day. “I say to you that it is the women who have studied the idea of Equal Rights and worked for Equal Rights that make it possible for you today, to be the power that you are in our country, to work as you work and to have the kind of public life that you have. . . . Equal Rights . . . could very much change the girl child’s idea of her place in the world.”18

  Shortly thereafter, she told a reporter, “I believe in women making their own living. It will be nice when women have equal opportunities and status with men so that it is taken as a matter of course.”19

  Chabot had gone back to her parents’ home in San Antonio for the Christmas holidays, and her father was furious to discover that she now cooked for O’Keeffe. He insisted that she get a real job. A few months earlier, her cousin Mary Wheelwright had sent a friend to discourage Chabot from continuing to hang around O’Keeffe “like a puppy dog.” Finally, O’Keeffe herself had to clarify their relationship.

  They had an “intense conversation,” according to Chabot, in which O’Keeffe made it clear that their relationship was never going to be an intimate one.20 She valued Chabot both for her unusual character and for her extraordinary skills, but she recognized that Chabot had become infatuated with her and that it was necessary to establish certain parameters. Chabot’s feelings were hurt but she wrote to O’Keeffe, “You told me honestly that I was not the type you would have as a friend. . . . What I’ve been to you amounts to utility, and what you have been to me was and is enlightenment. You gave me back to myself, and you could not have given me more. . . . My love to you.”21

  O’Keeffe wrote back to say that she would take over Chabot’s duties in running the ranch but also asked Chabot to continue working for her. “I think I’ll try things my way this year—you are welcome to return if you wish.”22 As a result of this frank exchange, Chabot continued to work on a part-time basis for O’Keeffe for another five years.

  In March, Chabot came to New York to visit O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, to whom she had written a hyperbolic appreciation in honor of his eightieth birthday that year, saying that his accomplishments were more important than those of Lindbergh. In April, O’Keeffe returned to Rancho de los Burros, and Chabot prepared the house for her arrival. In the early summer they made trips together to the Black Place, which revivified her landscape painting and took it in the direction of the purely abstract. During the summer, she completed half a dozen drawings of the zigzag crack that ran between the two hills at the Black Place. In three oils of the scene, the crack grows increasingly pronounced. Black Place I is filled with curved mounds of rock. Black Place II and Black Place III treat the stratification of rock as planes and shapes of onyx, charcoal, and mauve, while an ocher crack splits the picture in two halves. Black Place No. IV is not black at all but entirely red and gold, molten with reflected light. O’Keeffe used the Black Place as a point of embarkation for paintings that were largely about color and surface and often as organically abstract as the contemporaneous works of Arshile Gorky or Willem de Kooning.

  O’Keeffe used the same approach for her surreal pelvic bone pictures, capitalizing on the momentum and excitement of the previous year’s discoveries. Incorporating the technique perfected for her oversized florals, she enlarged the scale of her canvases yet cropped the pelvic bone imagery and tightened the focus around the orifice. There was less emphasis on the delineation of the bone than on the oval of unsullied blue in Pelvis I, Pelvis III, and Pelvis IV, though the last reveals the faint outline of a daytime moon. Pelvis II pulls back to include more of the sculptural bone.

  O’Keeffe turned her attention to the sacrum of the spine in a series of three drawings and an oil painting, each rendered with great delicacy. The upturned ends of the bone reminded her of wings, so she portrayed the vertebrae as Flying Backbone, hovering like a jetplane over the ridges of distant mountains. O’Keeffe found it necessary to paint only one traditional painting that year—a tree rendered in ghostly shades, Cottonwood I.

  On July 1, 1944, Stieglitz was honored by the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition History of an American—Alfred Stieglitz: “291” and After: Selections from the Stieglitz Collection. Organized by his friend Carl Zigrosser, the former director of the Weyhe Gallery who had become the museum’s curator of prints and drawings, the show included some four hundred pieces. Zigrosser worked closely with O’Keeffe in borrowing the work. Yet Stieglitz’s spirits remained low. The previous year, Marsden Hartley had died; his retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art on October 24, 1944. Stieglitz told Dove, “What a lucky man is Hartley to have passed out in his zenith.”23

  In January 1945, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paintings, 1944 opened at An American Place. By May, she was ready to head west. Traveling by train to Chicago, she visited Daniel Rich, then continued on to New Mexico: she wanted to be in Abiquiu for the opening of the health clinic for which she had organized support and contributed funds.

  “The country is one of the poorest areas in the United States and the life of the people is difficult,” O’Keeffe observed.24 In addition to donating funds, she ennobled the humble scene in Cebolla Church, her painting of an elongated adobe building with a sharply pitched, rusty tin roof in a tiny town some thirty miles north of Abiquiu.

  Despite the bold embrace of a fresh direction in her paintings of the previous year, O’Keeffe retreated to the more predictable subject matter of her favorite landscape. She painted a small study of the yellow cliffs behind her adobe home and three drawings and two paintings of the nearby dust-colored mountains, both called Abiquiu Sand Hills and Mesa. A drawing and four oils of the cottonwoods were completed, including one with gray leaves called Dead Tree with Pink Hill. Looking out of her kitchen window, she saw the sky as a V shape. She made a drawing and then a painting. “The shapes . . . were so simple . . . just the arms of two red hills reaching out to the sky and holding it,” she explained.25 Red Hills and Sky captures the blue between a pair of tan wedges.

  She worked in pastel and graphite more than usual that summer: completing a fluffy pink camelia, a large pastel, Pedernal, and two large pastels of horns curled around on themselves. Goat’s Horn with Red is shaded in scarlet and wrapped around a cobalt circle, while Goat’s Horns with Blue is a natural brown around the aureole of ultramarine. She also completed two drawings of the coiled goat’s horns in graphite and in charcoal.

  The circular compositions of the horn paintings were reiterated in two oils of the pelvis bone. Pelvis Series, Red with Blue renders the bone in crimson against the sky. In the slightly larger picture of 36 × 48 inches, Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow, the inflamed bone circles a chromium center.

  As a group, the year’s pictures did not attain the preeminence of the previous year’s output, though fascination for the severe hillsides of the Black Place, continued—she painted it in the funerary hues of jasper and porphyry striated with crimson and cream. In her pastel The Black Place III, as in that of the Pedernal, she took great liberties. Her elimination of the horizon line meant the landscape could be read as undulating waves of blush and dove and coal gray. This freedom from exactitude continued in Black Place I, a canvas rolling with mounds of rose and flesh, mauve and charcoal.

  In effect, she was playing with the unfamiliar sensation of feeling uninhibited. Her renderings of circular pelvic bones and goat horns led to a most bizarre departure. A drawing of two voluptuous breasts emerges from a darkened oval, perhaps a womb. The effect is startling and she did not make it public; the drawing was never exhibited during O’Keeffe’s lifetime. Neutrally titled Abstraction, it harkens back to the two-sided still life of her breasts and avocados that O’Keeffe painted in homage to Stieglitz’s photograph of her nude chest. Here, one of the breasts is strangely elongated, so that it coul
d double as a plump penis. Perhaps she drew it as a humorous present for Stieglitz.

  After all that had come between them, Stieglitz longed for a reconciliation with his wife. On July 15, 1945, he sent O’Keeffe a copy of Shakespeare’s King Lear with a note: “This expression of Lear’s—this call, such a basic feeling of the gift of intimate living of one with another. From an ill, old king. But the longing, the dreaming, go with health.” Thirty years before, he had sent her a copy of Goethe’s Faust, the model for his own youthful development. Now an old man, he identified with the tragic king, and wanted O’Keeffe to read Lear’s words to Cordelia:

  We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:

  When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,

  And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,

  And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

  At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

  Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,—

  Who loses, and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;

  And take upon’s the mystery of things,

  As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,

  In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones

  That ebb and flow by the moon.

  At last, the stubborn, frail Stieglitz was asking his queen’s forgiveness.

  Stieglitz, who never admitted his wrongs, had surrendered. For a couple who communicated symbolically through their painting and photography, his inclusion of King Lear was a plea for absolution during his last year. O’Keeffe kept the note exactly where Stieglitz had pinned it. O’Keeffe’s feelings toward her husband softened after his apology, as she recognized how near death he must feel to have approached her to make amends.

  In August, Anita Pollitzer and her husband, Elie Edson, visited O’Keeffe. Later, she told Stieglitz, “I didn’t know nature could be so wild and yet in the midst of it all, living could be as comfortable as on 54th Street—given a lady like Georgia who plans the plumbing, provisions, and still judging from the looks of the big room is doing pretty well at the painting. . . . She is looking very well. I’ve never seen her hardier or browner.”26

  Despite Chabot’s attempts to modify her behavior, she had continued to have what she called her “tantrums,” brought on by jealousy over O’Keeffe’s friendships with others. She always apologized, but O’Keeffe told her not to come to Ghost Ranch for the summer of 1945. Once Mary Wheelwright heard that Chabot was no longer employed by O’Keeffe, she invited her to Los Luceros. Chabot was told to use the house and farm the 130 acres of land. Wheelwright promised her that she would inherit the entire property. Chabot wrote to O’Keeffe of this remarkable decision while adding her delight that she still could live near O’Keeffe. “I’m not out of your life, and I’m never going to be. . . . I’ve loved our life. Your western mesa is cut onto my heart. I can close my eyes and see the star that is your star, our star. Whatever hardships there have been—were a small price to pay for the fun we’ve had.” 27

  In September, sculptor Mary Callery came to the ranch and convinced O’Keeffe to pose for a bust. O’Keeffe had become great friends with Callery, calling her “a particularly kindly understanding human being . . . beautiful and blond with 12 years of Paris behind her.”28 They saw each other regularly in New York, and that year it was Callery, not Chabot, who traveled twice with O’Keeffe to the Black Place.

  She could not have known that in the peaceful terrain some thirty miles north of her Ghost Ranch home, J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists had developed the secret weapon that would end the war. The atomic bombs created at Los Alamos were used to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing one hundred thousand Japanese citizens. V-J Day was declared on September 2, 1945.

  In his last year at the gallery, Stieglitz gained a last devotee, Todd Webb.

  After the war, Webb moved to New York and photographed the people and architecture of the city. Twice a week, he would stop by The Place to have a chat with Stieglitz, occasionally showing him some of his prints. Soon he began recording these sessions in his diaries.

  One afternoon, actor Gary Cooper stopped by the gallery because his wife wanted to buy an O’Keeffe. Cooper had such a bad cold, Stieglitz instructed him to wait in the hall outside while his wife looked at pictures. After admiring several, she wrote a check for twelve thousand dollars and went home with Dead Cottonwood—a 1943 painting of a bulbous, naked trunk before a background of pink hills and green trees. After the Coopers had left with the picture, Stieglitz turned to Webb and asked, “Who was that young man who could afford to let his wife write a check for twelve thousand dollars?” Excitedly, Webb told him. Stieglitz was completely unimpressed.29

  In the fall of 1945, Steichen came back into Stieglitz’s life.

  More than three decades after they had co-founded the first gallery of modern art in America, Steichen and Stieglitz were on opposite sides of the aesthetic divide. By throwing himself without reserve into the field of commercial photography, Steichen had turned his back on what he considered elitist notions of fine art. During World War II, he was consumed with the potential of photography and filmmaking to document war and its terrible toll on the lives of innocent citizens. These ideas would ultimately manifest themselves as his populist MoMA photography exhibition, The Family of Man, with captions selected by Norman.

  Stieglitz frequently derided his former colleague’s success—Steichen photographed movie stars, came home a war hero, and made a sizable income. Stieglitz acknowledged that without Steichen he might never have started a gallery. “But a gallery is not ‘291,’” he told Norman. “The spirit of ‘291’ existed before Steichen was born. Steichen I fear never ‘saw’ me.”30

  By contrast, Steichen never expressed anything but admiration for his old mentor.31 In 1941, he praised Stieglitz’s pioneering efforts on behalf of pictorialist photography in a Vogue magazine article called “The Fighting Photo-Secession.” Slightly mollified, Stieglitz penned a thank-you note to Steichen for his “gloriously generous” account. He felt the gesture to be “Real Steichen” and their friendship was slightly warmed until the MoMA escapade.

  Since 1935, Steichen had been choosing the images for the annual supplement of U.S. Camera. In the fall of 1945, Thomas Maloney, advertising executive and publisher of the magazine promised to raise one hundred thousand dollars a year for MoMA’s photography department if Steichen were to replace the respected curator Beaumont Newhall as its head. The trustees accepted and offered Newhall the secondary post of deputy. Newhall despised Steichen’s taste and resigned that spring. (He became director of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, two years later.) Stieglitz was protective of Newhall, who he considered the perfect choice to carry the mantle for photography, and felt the trustees’ decision simply underscored his long-simmering distrust of the museum. Stieglitz told Adams, “I have nothing against the Museum of Modern Art except one thing & that is politics & the social set-up come before all else. . . . In short the Museum has really no standard whatever. No integrity of any kind.”32

  XVI

  In February 1946, the Museum of Modern Art offered O’Keeffe a retrospective. Initially she refused, but the museum’s urbane curator, James Johnson Sweeney, told her that he would write the essay for the catalogue and choose the paintings. “There isn’t anyone I would rather have do a catalog for me so I said yes,” she wrote.1 In preparation for the show, O’Keeffe sent him her press file with a note admonishing him not to “take the clippings very seriously.”

  O’Keeffe’s was MoMA’s first major show dedicated to a woman artist, and assistant curator Dorothy Miller took on much of the responsibility. O’Keeffe befriended Miller by inviting her to lunch and to her home at Ghost Ranch. By the end of April, O’Keeffe, fifty-nine, had pressed into service many of her younger friends: photographer Todd Webb, Nancy Newhall, the photography curator who had organized a retrospective for Strand at
MoMA the previous year, and critic Jerome Mellquist. All were asked to help document and package O’Keeffe’s paintings for the show. “It was fun until [Newhall] picked up one of the paintings wrong and Georgia blew up,” Webb recalled. “O’Keeffe is a pretty good slave driver, and you had better be careful how you handle her work.”2 Webb happily agreed to document the exhibition using Stieglitz’s old Century 8 × 10 camera. His two perfectionist clients were delighted with the prints.

  On May 2, the Newhalls threw a party and invited Webb along with such established photographers as Sheeler, Strand, Lisette Model, Helen Leavitt, Berenice Abbott, Andre Kertesz, and Minor White. O’Keeffe got as far as the door. Seeing that Norman was a guest, she turned on her heel, got on the elevator, and went home.

  The opening reception at MoMA on May 14 brought out an impressive roster of O’Keeffe’s admirers, including McAlpin, McBride, the architect Le Corbusier, and Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Architect Philip S. Goodwin, who designed the MoMA building on West Fifty-third Street with Edward Durell Stone, gave a small dinner for O’Keeffe, the Sweeneys, and her friends. Edward Steichen shook her hand and said, “You have put something on those walls that hasn’t happened here before.” The surprise visitor was Ted Reid, her beau from Canyon, Texas. She remarked that “he seemed the same as 30 years ago He made this town world seem pretty sorry—and everyone thought he was fine.”3 Stieglitz sat with Marin on a staircase as though surveying his subjects. Webb observed, “O’Keeffe was really queenly . . . I thought quite beautiful.” In a tone of surprise, he added, “And she was really nice to everybody.”4

  Before the opening, O’Keeffe had frankly confessed her doubts to Sweeney in a letter offering a rare insight into her insecurities:

  I must say to you again that I am very pleased and flattered that you wish to do the show for me. It makes me feel rather inadequate and wish that I were better. Stieglitz’s efforts for me have often made me feel that way too—The annoying thing about it is that I can not honestly say to myself that I could not have been better.