Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Although the two women had little contact after 1949, Chabot often complained that O’Keeffe had not given her enough credit for the work done on her Abiquiu house and had reneged on an earlier promise to leave it to Chabot in her will. O’Keeffe did give Chabot a painting and drawing, which she later sold, and paid her for her work on the Abiquiu house.

  Despite O’Keeffe’s treatment of her, Chabot remained loyal to O’Keeffe, and people around Santa Fe regularly insinuated that the two women were lovers. While Chabot was clearly infatuated with O’Keeffe, she explained later, “I would not say in any sense of the word was Georgia a lesbian. Her life was about work, not sex. She was not interested in human relationships.”21

  Rumors about O’Keeffe’s purported lesbian tendencies had begun in earnest around the early 1930s. When the cultural historian Steven Watson interviewed Virgil Thomson about his memories of Florine Stettheimer, Thomson said, “Florine had lots of queer painter friends. Carl [Van Vechten] though married was queer. . . . Georgia O’Keeffe, who was queer, and Henry McBride.”22

  When asked why O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, with their mutual interests and erotic magnetism, had grown unhappy with one another, Dorothy Norman speculated that O’Keeffe was a lesbian. There is no such evidence however, and from her correspondence it seems that O’Keeffe enjoyed a ready attraction to men.

  Certainly, as O’Keeffe rejected Stieglitz’s control over her, she retreated from what was once an active sex life. In seducing young Norman, Stieglitz may have resorted to the tired canard of many a married man by claiming that his wife, who refused to have sex with him, was therefore a lesbian. Norman subsequently circulated the rumor to accentuate the appearance of estrangement between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, and to alleviate her own feelings of shame about having an affair with a married man.

  O’Keeffe spent her last winter in New York in 1949 wrapping up the details of Stieglitz’s estate and putting Bry in charge of future dealings. Her final farewell was illustrated in her painting Brooklyn Bridge, which depicts the stately structure’s dark gothic arches framing a powder blue sky, its guywires webbed as a pattern of pastel diamonds recalling the windows of Chartres. On Sunday mornings, O’Keeffe often drove down to Wall Street and back and forth across the bridge, absorbing the effect of the passing overhead ogives. As the two preliminary drawings in charcoal on brown paper show, she was more interested in the structure of the bridge than the view of the river. Entire exhibitions have chronicled artists’ impressions of the Brooklyn Bridge, but O’Keeffe’s picture was also a symbolic farewell to the city that had been her home for most of her adult life.

  She moved away at a time when Harry Truman was president and the country was reveling in its prosperity and power. The populace was entranced by the advent of television, Christian Dior’s New Look in fashion, and the hopping sounds of the jukebox. The Abstract Expressionists were gaining favor with collectors and dealers. Harper’s magazine editor Russell Lynes opined that the nation could be categorized as high brow, middle brow, and low brow.

  O’Keeffe had little use for these popular trends. But she was quick to embrace modern developments, especially with regard to time-saving conveniences. She bought long-playing records for her hi-fi and an electric washing machine, though she dried her clothes on the line, just as she had in Sun Prairie.

  In June, she made the permanent move to New Mexico, where she habitually spent winter and spring in the Abiquiu house, and summer and fall at Rancho de los Burros. All the upheaval of the move took its toll on her productivity, resulting in just four pieces that year. In the studio, she completed two detailed drawings of the curling ram’s horns, and two entirely abstract paintings based on the Black Place. O’Keeffe relied on memory and earlier sketches to compose Black Place, Grey and Pink, an arrow of shadow floating across clouds of silver and mauve. Black Place Green features a transparent inky veil leaking from the center of the canvas onto fields of celadon and bands of copper.

  In August, O’Keeffe was elected to the prestigious National Institute of Arts and Letters, though Edward Hopper, John Sloan, and other painters from the mostly male association tried to intervene and were furious that she was admitted.23

  Although O’Keeffe had long complained about the frequency of visitors to Lake George, after her move to the remote village of Abiquiu she reveled in a steady stream of houseguests. (Of course, these were her friends and her domain.) Letters to friends and to her sisters often included the plaintive query, “When are you coming?” She seemed surprised by the warmth of companionship, telling William Howard Schubart, “It interests me to feel how very pleasant a warm real person makes the house feel.”24

  O’Keeffe regularly received visits from old friends from the East Coast, like Carl Van Vechten. In August, she was visited by Daniel Catton Rich and his wife, Bertha. In September, she had photographer Eliot Porter, and the writer Frances O’Brien, with whom she traveled to Scottsdale, Arizona, to see Wright’s architectural studio and home, Taliesin West, and to Nogales, Mexico.

  Others did not make the cut. Things had not worked out so well for Marjorie Content. She had grown tired of Jean Toomer’s difficult ways. Although he had little income of his own, he spent his wife’s money freely by dining and entertaining friends. Content decided to go away to see if the bills would decrease when she was not around but found instead that, in her absence, Toomer had held parties more than ever. He was drinking heavily and becoming abusive. Content wrote to O’Keeffe to ask if his daughter, Argy, could stay with her. O’Keeffe replied that she couldn’t accept that responsibility. Content finally put Toomer into an institution, where he died in 1967.

  Occasionally, spouses and children were invited, though O’Keeffe protested to one friend, “There are some forms of discomfort I do not give myself . . . they are children around the house . . . I can not have it.”25

  Bry came in September, beginning regular trips to Abiquiu that combined business with pleasure. She had sent the Stieglitz correspondence to Donald Gallup at Yale and Gallup had solicited the correspondence of Stieglitz’s friends, colleagues, artists, and family members to build an enormous archive.

  In November, she drove with O’Keeffe from Abiquiu to Nashville to check on the installation of the Stieglitz Collection in the Carl Van Vechten Gallery of Fisk University. Navigating unbroken stretches of highway in Texas, Georgia recalled “the cattle lowing at night, driving in the early morning toward the dawn and the rising sun—The plains are not like anything else and I always wonder why I go other places.”26

  After nearly a week of driving, the two women arrived to find the valuable canvases by Dove, Marin, and Hartley, and even Stettheimer’s esteemed portrait of Stieglitz, along with many of his photographs, hanging in a converted gymnasium. The ceiling had been lowered, painted black, and outfitted with an overabundance of crude track lighting. “It looked as if they wanted to sell lighting fixtures,” the artist said dryly.27

  In her polite but imperious manner, O’Keeffe let the workmen know that the entire gallery would have to be reconfigured and hung with appropriate lighting. They turned sour and resistant. “The inertia of the South seems like a mountain,” she said. Turning up at seven in the morning with Bry, she tried to set an example, and eventually, the workers arrived at the same time. In the end she said, “We won because we worked harder than anyone and we left a good job when it was finished.”28

  In Nashville, she found one encounter particularly disturbing. Southern segregationalists were struggling to maintain the racial divisions existing before the Civil War and tensions were on the rise. Despite her visits to jazz clubs with Van Vechten (a great advocate for the Harlem Renaissance), her love affair with Toomer, and her tender portraits of the black artist Beauford Delaney, O’Keeffe was slow to acknowledge prejudices learned growing up in the South. She referred to African Americans as “dark skins” and “colored.” O’Keeffe was confronted in Nashville by a girl who upset all of her preconceptions. A “very black gir
l” asked, “Why do you associate the idea of purity with white and not with black?” O’Keeffe was shocked that the girl found it “almost impossible . . . to accept the idea that she was black—She wanted only to be a person. That black girl had something that made me discount the color of her skin as I never have with any other colored person,” the artist told Rich.29

  Years later, O’Keeffe came to regret that the bequest of paintings to Fisk did not include an endowment for maintenance or restoration. The paintings suffered from lack of climate control in the humid South and she had many pieces restored at her own expense.

  As 1949 drew to a close, O’Keeffe was drained. “I still have so many tag ends of Alfred’s affairs to attend to. I sit here and push my pen day after day and it seems I will never be finished.”30 Yet such efforts ultimately led to a feeling of acceptance. O’Keeffe looked back on her twenty-two years of marriage with a fresh perspective. Around that time, she told a reporter, “Stieglitz was a funny man—he was pretty special though. He was one of those people who enjoyed his gloom, but you could make him laugh about it. He ate almost nothing and all the wrong things. He lived on energy, on interest. I’ve listened to him in intense debate with someone and wound up feeling as if I’d been beaten about the body with sandbags. (But) I’m not a regretter.”31

  O’Keeffe has been hard to understand in part because what she said and what she did were often contradictory. Chabot once explained, “You know, Georgia was the most paradoxical person in the world. She’d say one thing one day and change her mind the next.”32

  She told one writer of her move to Abiquiu, “I gave away everything of value before moving out here in 1949. The books too. All I kept were the Museum of Modern Art catalogs . . . for reference. I don’t want to own any new things.”33

  The truth is that she kept everything and maintained extensive records and correspondence from her years with Stieglitz. Many of her acquisitions from New York came to the West, including the modern furniture and some three thousand books. Her library in a locked room off of the courtyard of the Abiquiu house had meticulously organized shelves with volumes of books, including the copy of Goethe’s Faust that Stieglitz had given her in 1917, with a note penned in the flyleaf, “When I was 9, I discovered Faust. It gave me quiet then. I knew not why.” O’Keeffe kept books by Waldo Frank and Paul Rosenfeld as well as Eddy’s 1914 book on Cubism, which had been loaned to Stieglitz by Oscar Bluemner. Books by James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung, many of them first editions, were treasured. A well-thumbed book on color theory by Beatrice Irwin, from 1915, had been a source for O’Keeffe’s earliest abstract paintings.34

  By the end of 1949, when Mary Callery came to spend Christmas, the walled garden had produced a bountiful supply of vegetables and fruit for canning and preserves. O’Keeffe told friends that her outlook was more positive and hopeful. “It is as if I feel that my world is a rock—When a very prominent catholic priest . . . tried to convert me to the catholic church—I was amazed that he could only make the catholic church seem like a mound of jelly compared to my rock.”35

  O’Keeffe shared the perspective of Frank Lloyd Wright, who said, “I put a capital N on Nature and call it my church.” O’Keeffe worshiped at the literal rock of ages, the Pedernal. She embraced the rapture of the hallucinatory landscape around the Abiquiu region and found her solace in nature itself. As she told Schubart, “When I stand alone with the earth and sky a feeling of something in me going off in every direction into the unknown of infinity means more to me than any thing any organized religion gives me.”36

  II

  An American Place did not die with Stieglitz. For the next four years, O’Keeffe tried to run the gallery with the help of Marin. She wanted to act as her own dealer, to follow Stieglitz’s example. But she lacked his innate instinct for closing deals. When the Philadelphia collector Dr. Albert Barnes inquired about buying her 1932 picture White Canadian Barn, she wrote to him with a singular absence of tact. “If I sell it the price will not be low and I am not at all sure that you would be interested.”1 Nonetheless, O’Keeffe renewed the one-year lease on An American Place in July 1950 and began organizing an exhibition of her paintings for the fall.

  After going through Stieglitz’s papers, she realized that his records were largely in chaos. According to his accounts, her paintings were often given identical titles—the difference between one painting of red hills and another was maintained only in Stieglitz’s memory. Without him it was necessary to reorganize the artwork. In January and again in August of 1950, Bry came to Abiquiu and worked with the records that O’Keeffe had been compiling since 1944 with Rosalind Irvine, secretary of the Research Council of the Whitney Museum of American Art. These records comprised the “Abiquiu notebooks,” the first reliable inventory of the artist’s work. In February, Bry was put in charge of photographing the art stored in New York.

  Ghost Ranch regular Peggy Bok had divorced Rodakiewicz, citing his preference for male companions, and married William Kiskadden, a well-to-do Beverly Hills doctor. A collector of famous friends, Kiskadden was close to the British novelist and author of The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood. Together with Kiskadden’s three-year-old son, Bull, they drove from Los Angeles to northern New Mexico. When they arrived at O’Keeffe’s house on August 15, Isherwood was amazed by the unreal terrain. “The country is so empty that it makes you uneasy—it refuses all associations,” he observed.

  On August 19, O’Keeffe drove them to Taos. Isherwood reported:

  We saw Brett and shrill blonde-white witchlike Frieda [Lawrence,] who is very sympathetic. . . . We went up and spent the night sleeping out of doors at the Lawrence ranch. I really love [Brett] with her hearing aid and her enormous ass and absurd bandit’s jacket. I said how good I always feel in the mornings, and she said, “Yes—but by afternoon one has worried oneself into a fit. . . . [T]he older house seems strangely joyful. The dead bees on Lawrence’s bed, and the yellow santo, and the string mat Lawrence made to sit on by the fireplace. A reproduction or small copy of the awful Lawrence painting Frieda has down in her house—the great tortured German frau dragging a factory after her by a harness of ropes, and straining up towards a bearded Lawrence figure, who is rolling his eyes with horror and apparently fighting off another frau with a sword; maybe, or a radioactive rolling pin. All of these Lawrence paintings are surprisingly dirty. Brett says she and Lawrence did all the work, while Frieda lay on the bed smoking cigarettes. But you can’t believe a word these women disciples say of each other. . . .

  The trio also paid a visit to Mabel Dodge Luhan:

  A great disappointment, after all the stories about her witchlike fiendishness, jealousy and ruthless egotism. Such a dowdy little old woman—as Peggy said, “She’s reverted to Buffalo.” She looks like a landlady. And her house is full of the stupidest junk. It was very sad . . . this old frump stuck with her fat Indian man, building houses and drinking whiskey in the morning.2

  Isherwood’s diary entry offers a rare glimpse of O’Keeffe among the dissipated remains of the Taos circle. After he forgot his suitcase and O’Keeffe mailed it to him, Isherwood sent her a signed first edition of his 1948 book The Condor and the Cows: A South American Travel Diary, which inspired her to travel to Peru six years later.

  O’Keeffe played hostess in a style that was simultaneously simple and lavish: her furnishings were spare, but the sheets on the beds were dried on clotheslines in the sunlight and crisply ironed. She served tea in black Wedgewood cups and, sounding like a character from an Edith Wharton novel, she told one friend, “I never use things I buy until I’ve had them two years.”3

  When O’Keeffe lived with Stieglitz, she had spent months in bed with one illness or another. In August, she suffered an attack of shingles despite the fact that living on her own, she was obsessively conscientious about her health. With the help of local gardeners, she raised two acres of organic vegetables and fruit for her own househ
old.

  She taught her housekeepers to bake bread, can preserves without using sugar, and make candy from apricots. Dozens of people reminisce about their visits with O’Keeffe in Abiquiu, and most remember lengthy conversations about food and its preparation rather than discussion about O’Keeffe’s art. Her beside table was stacked with cookbooks. In the front of a book of recipes, she penned the warning: “There is a bit of bitch in every good cook.”4

  Her library held many books on diet, vitamins, and disease prevention as well as several texts by the nutritionist Adelle Davis, a friend. One of the many cookbooks in her library was Stella Standard’s 1951 Whole Grain Cooking: A Gourmet Guide to Glowing Health. On the front endpapers, O’Keeffe had penciled her own table of contents, her upstanding script highlighting favorite recipes like Sunflower and Rye Muffins, or Whole Wheat Waffles.

  Among the many young people from Abiquiu who worked for O’Keeffe, Floyd Trujillo proved especially versatile. Not only did he make the support bars and stretch the canvas for her paintings, he maintained the grounds and occasionally cooked according to her exacting standards. He drove ninety minutes round-trip to Nambe every other day to buy her fresh milk from a dairy. She taught him to prepare liver, kidneys, and tongue in wine sauce and scolded him not to judge anything until he had tried it first. During the six years that he worked for her, he was paid four dollars a day. After he served in the armed forces, he returned to Abiquiu and worked for the Presbyterian conference center. O’Keeffe asked him to work for her again, but he insisted that she pay the going rate: one dollar and twenty-five cents an hour. O’Keeffe, however, was accustomed to the lower wages of Abiquiu: “Oh no,” she replied. “I couldn’t afford that.”5

  O’Keeffe often told her young assistants that she hadn’t learned to eat properly until she was in her sixties but that was no reason for them to wait. Her passion for the topic was partly the result of watching Stieglitz’s inattention to food and his years of poor health. According to O’Keeffe, Stieglitz starved himself to death.